With the Nintendo 3DS having been available in Japan for a few weeks now, there's been plenty of time to tinker with it, and one negative aspect has been unearthed; it loads original DS games markedly slower than a conventional DS Lite.

Clearly thanks to the emulation routines that the new handheld uses to be backwards compatible with former titles, normal DS games take between 5 to 6 seconds to load in the 3DS. And while you may not think that's particularly tardy, consider that it's almost double the original loading time.

If you play ten times in a day, that's an entire extra minute you've lost (on top of the conventional boot up times). If you play every day for a month, that's around half-an-hour. And an entire year of play would mean approximately six hours of your life wasted on extra loading times alone.

You could watch the first two movies of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy in that time instead... And still have time to make some toast.

Gamespot tested five games on its Japanese version of the device to come up with the results, Call of Duty Black Ops, Mario Kart DS, Plants vs. Zombies, Nine hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors, and Dementium II, and each took at least 5 seconds longer to spark up when compared to the same test on a DS Lite.

That said, once running, there were no other problems with the games. The site even reports that frame rates were identical.

So maybe it's a small price to pay for backwards compatibility, and a next generation concept. Maybe Nintendo will adapt the software for the UK release on 25 March? And who needs toast anyway?

What do you think? Are you happier with longer loading times? Or should Nintendo address the problem before the UK release? Let us know in the comments below...