No Loading Time Problems For DS Sequel

If you’re the kind of person who didn’t think a DS game could even have loading time issues, then you’re a person who never played Puzzle Quest: Galactrix on Nintendo’s handheld. Its sequel won’t have the same problems.

Michael Cerven, public relations man for Puzzle Quest publisher D3 told Kotaku that the newly-announced Puzzle Quest 2 won’t have the loading issues. That’s good news for fans of D3’s hit series of puzzle-role-playing-game hybrids. The second in the series, the sci-fi-oriented Galactirx had many load times, 4-5 seconds of delays between map screen and inventory screen.

If you aren’t region-blocked from the following video — which I shot in March for my previous games reporting job — jump ahead to the two-minute mark and you can see how bad the Galactrix loads were.

MTV Shows

[UPDATE: I’m not sure why the embed isn’t working… but you can watch the video directly right here]

Don’t worry about this for Puzzle Quest 2, Cerven said, even though the same development studio that made Galactrix for multiple platforms is working on the DS and Xbox Live Arcade PQ2. “Infinite Interactive has rebuilt the DS engine from the ground up to be fast and perform smoothly with very quick load times as opposed to retrofitting the lead SKU code for the DS. [Note from Kotaku: A SKU in this case refers to a different platform’s version of the game]. This will ensure these technical issues will not be in Puzzle Quest 2.”

That’s great news, considering the appeal of the Puzzle Quest games is that they offer the short sessions of a gem-matching puzzle game within the context of a lengthy role-playing game.

While Kotaku had Cerven’s attention, I asked him about the new game coming to some of the platforms that the first Puzzle Quest came to, namely the PSP, PC and PlayStation 3’s PlayStation Network. No news there: “At the moment we have announced Puzzle Quest 2 will be on XBLA and DS. We are possibly looking at other platforms/skus but no decision has been made at this time.”

Puzzle Quest 2 will be out for DS and XBLA in spring 2010.

(Xbox Live Arcade version of Puzzle Quest 2 pictured above)