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Save Everywhere
Aug 19th, 2008 by Ice Cream Jonsey

When it comes to computer and console games, there is one sure-fire way to make me despise the game, the developers, its publisher and all the testers (I started off my career as a printer driver tester, so that hate is just a lingering, autobiographical hate): a lack of Save Anywhere!

Let’s define both Save Anywhere and the arguments of those that oppose it. “Save Anywhere” in a video games means … (meant?) … that you can click on the “Escape” button, and save the game. Instantly, the game state is saved to the drive, and you can pick it up from exactly that moment. This is how things should be.

A lot of games use the “checkpoint” system. Let’s say you’re killing Nazis in a video game. You are a little low on health and maybe distracted by a hot, gorgeous, leather-claden female Nazi. At some point in our lives, it’s happened to all of us. Sometimes its in Cosplay, sometimes it was at the camps, and sometimes its in the murder simulator.

Because you’re distracted, the female Nazi shoots you and kills you. You couldn’t save, in this example, because there is no Save Anywhere. Instead, you get to re-start your game from the last “checkpoint.” Or, the last place the designer bothered to LET you save.

This is horrible, this is nonsense, this is for children with wide-open summer vacations. Save Anywhere is critical! Designers don’t always design a game without Save Anywhere because many of them are incompetent and weak and won’t fight for it: as a result, they are constantly putting long, unskippable cut-scenes before the the checkpoint, they are constantly “stacking” missions before the checkpoints, they are, quite simply, ruining their video game.

There are very few people I hate on the Internet, but I really do hope that the people who argue against Save Anywhere die. Just to stop you all from posting, you see: if you could shut the fuck up with your horrible take on this issue, adding to a chorus of SHIT, we’d all be cool. But you people won’t. You say that Save Anywhere is bad. My Save Anywhere. Your words are retarded, and they hurt. You like to say that you can’t stop yourself from saving every two seconds and ruining the tension. Oh, yes, tension – that is a good one. If you want tension in your home, get a pet snake. But it’s alllllll about tension with you people. I hope, when your lives are all snuffed out by the dark hangman of gaming, that he has plenty of slack in the rope, you worthless, miserable fuckers. I hope you all die, but I hope you have that split-second of thinking that the rope will extend to the ground and that maybe you’ll survive after all, but then you don’t.

So on this note, I would like to announce the first couple instances of Save Everywhere that I can recall. They are within the games Space Giraffe and Braid, on the Xbox 360.

When you complete a level in Space Giraffe with three or more lives… the game simply saves. That’s it, you’re done, you’re good, it’s automatic. I don’t have to do anything. Likewise, Braid: you complete a screen, and the goddamn thing quietly saves your progress.

Computer Space was the first game I care about, as it was the first arcade game. According to the Killer List of Video Games, it was released in 1971… which, unfortunately with how inaccurate KLOV is, means that it was released at some point between 1942 and 212 (we reset what year it is in three hundred years, just trying to future-proof this article). From 1971 to 2008! It took forever, but game developers and designers are finally figuring out how to let people seamlessly save their 1) goddamn games 2) time.

 

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