Buffering Brilliance: The Loading Screen Tips That Actually Changed How We Play

There's a particular kind of British patience that gets exercised between pressing 'Continue' and actually being allowed to play. You know the one. The kettle's already on, the biscuit tin's been raided, and you're stood there in your socks reading a tip about crouching in tall grass for the fourteenth time this session. Loading screens: gaming's most underrated classroom.

Before NVMe SSDs and near-instant load times turned the whole affair into a distant memory, those spinning icons were accompanied by tiny nuggets of wisdom — some genuinely transformative, others so spectacularly obvious they bordered on performance art. We've trawled through decades of digital waiting rooms to bring you the greatest loading screen tips in gaming history, ranked by a very scientific formula of usefulness, cultural impact, and sheer audacity.

The Gold Standard: Tips That Actually Made You Better

1. Dark Souls — "If in doubt, try jumping" FromSoftware's entire design philosophy in four words. Half the secrets in Lordran are gated behind a leap of faith, and this tip — deceptively simple, quietly profound — has sent thousands of players off cliffs in pursuit of treasure. It's the Miyazaki equivalent of a fortune cookie, and it works every single time.

2. Elden Ring — "Torrent can double-jump" Appearing mercifully early in your Lands Between adventure, this tip has saved more frustrated Tarnished than any Spirit Ash summon. The number of players who spent hours on foot before discovering their horse could leap twice is genuinely staggering. A tip so essential it should have been in the tutorial.

3. The Witcher 3 — "Axii can be used on people in conversation" CD Projekt Red slipped this one in quietly, and it genuinely rewired how experienced players approached quest dialogue. Suddenly Geralt wasn't just a grumpy swordsman — he was a silver-tongued manipulator with a very useful hand gesture. Tip of the year, frankly.

4. Skyrim — "You can pick up almost any object in the world" Nordic chaos, enabled by a loading screen. This single line of text has been responsible for more stolen wheels of cheese, more cabbage-filled inventories, and more accidentally-launched sweetrolls than any other tip in gaming history. Bethesda knew exactly what they were doing.

The Classics: Nostalgic Favourites From Gaming's Formative Years

5. Crash Bandicoot — Wumpa fruit reminders Back when platformers assumed you'd forgotten everything between levels, Crash's tips about collecting fruit and smashing crates felt like your nan reminding you to eat your greens. Patronising? Perhaps. Effective? Absolutely — especially for the six-year-old version of you who kept running straight past everything.

6. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater — combo multiplier tips The THPS series had an almost conspiratorial relationship with its loading tips, quietly teaching you that manual-to-grind combos were the path to genuine high scores. A generation of British kids learned the fundamentals of trick chaining while staring at a progress bar in their bedroom. Skate culture, delivered via a spinning wheel.

7. GTA: San Andreas — "You can swim now" Vice City players who drowned repeatedly at the edge of any body of water will remember this paradigm shift with reverence. It wasn't just a tip — it was a civilisational announcement. CJ could swim. Everything had changed.

The Philosophers: Tips That Went Deeper Than They Needed To

8. Halo 2 — tactical multiplayer positioning advice Bungie's loading tips occasionally read like Sun Tzu had been hired as a community manager. Controlling the high ground, managing sight lines, communicating with your team — genuinely useful in 2004 Xbox Live lobbies, and still applicable today.

9. Final Fantasy X — sphere grid guidance Square's attempt to explain one of gaming's most complex progression systems via a three-line loading tip was either deeply optimistic or mildly deranged. Still, it planted seeds that eventually bloomed into actual understanding, usually around hour forty.

10. Mass Effect 2 — "Loyalty missions improve survival chances" BioWare's quiet warning that skipping character missions could result in beloved squadmates dying in the finale is perhaps the most consequential loading tip ever written. Cruel. Effective. Unforgettable.

The Honourable Mentions: Useless, Baffling, and Beloved

Not every loading tip was destined for greatness. Some were so magnificently redundant they've achieved their own cult status:

• "Press X to jump" — Thank you, unnamed 2003 platformer. We were struggling.
• "Enemies will attack you if provoked" — The philosophical implications of this one keep us up at night.
• "Saving regularly prevents losing progress" — The loading screen equivalent of a seatbelt reminder on a rollercoaster.
• "You can pause the game at any time" — Can we? In this economy?

These tips exist in a beautiful category of their own: not useful, not harmful, just quietly, magnificently there. Like a motivational poster in a dentist's waiting room.

The Ones We Miss Most

With modern consoles loading games faster than you can locate the controller you've just sat on, the loading screen tip is functionally extinct. And there's something genuinely melancholy about that. Those brief pauses were gaming's version of the interval — a moment to breathe, recalibrate, and occasionally learn something useful before plunging back in.

Even the rubbish tips had a certain charm. They suggested a developer somewhere thought you might need reminding that fire is hot, or that falling from great heights causes damage. It was oddly wholesome.

Your Vote Counts (Unlike in Most Things)

We want to know which loading screen you'd willingly sit through again — purely for the tip. Was it Dark Souls' cryptic wisdom? Skyrim's anarchic object-theft encouragement? Or perhaps a deeply obscure gem from a game we haven't mentioned?

Head to our poll and let us know. The loading screen tip deserves its flowers, and we're determined to hand them over.

After all, this website is literally named after the bit of gaming everyone else skips. We take this seriously.