Well first things first here. If your talking about loading in 16megs of data it''s not going to be fast. Your options consist of throwing up a loading screen until the data is fully available, or to stream the data in.

Now if you want to compress the data in a non-lossy way (such as Zip,rar, or ace) your going to be adding more load time. Why? Because you need to decompress the data before reading it in.

The reason shenmue had fast load times was because the majority of the data was pre-rendered. There were very few actual 3d models being loaded, and there was no real time terrain being generated. The world of consoles come with limitations, the 8x cd-rom being an example. The majority of the data for shenmue was probably streamed in off of the cd and held in ram until needed. This process was repeated over and over again. Game programming is a trade off based sort of thing. In order to have small file sizes you need to have longer load times, if you have shorter load times, your file sizes will most likely increase. On a game like Shenmue which has 650 megs of storage and no download time size is affordable. You could significantly save alot of load time by pre-generating your terrain but obviously this isn''t something you want to do...You can also reduce load time by not compressing the data, again something you most likely do not want to do. Which brings us back to streaming the data in.