QUOTE(mcgovern671 @ Jan 30 2006, 04:34 PM)

I'm playing off memory card only and it can take 5++ secs for the charachters to appear.
Hasnt crashed on me yet but I haven't played it online.
that's because the select screen shows the full fledged character model. They're not going to load all the characters + all the possible costumes into memory just for the select screen (it would take longer to load that then the level if they did). Typically the game does cache all of them, however since you don't have a hard drive it can cache them so it loads from disc... hence 5sec + to load the character in the select screen.
When you don't have a hard drive, that sort of think comes with the territory. with the hard drive it's still not instant but it's ~1sec. complete levels take <4sec between select screen and battle begin.