Game Save Files

[DirtyJosé]

There is a trend in modern gaming which is picking up popularity: Game Save Files. Essentially, games with this feature enable you to "save" game's progress before turning off the console and allowing you to load up the file the next time you play. Think of it like a pause button that makes it so you don't have to leave the console turned on all night to preserve whatever progress you've made in your game.

The apparent benefits of the feature are easy to see. Beyond the above mentioned comparison to just pausing the game and leaving it on all night while you sleep, "saving" allows you to, say, go to work or school or out on a date with a girl once in awhile and not interrupt your gaming experience. If Mom is nagging you to do the chores or your homework or to get a job and quit playing video games all day because you're 25 damnit and it's about time you acted like it and paid some of the bills around the house as well as learned to put the god damn toilet seat down you won't have to turn off the game and loose the last 27 hours of your life that you just poured into it.

But "game saves" aren't all upside. They kill the traditional feel of a video game. Back in my day, you played until you couldn't take it anymore or when you ran out of lives/quarters, and then that was that. If you were on a hot streak but running on fumes and needing a break, you paused that shit and fell asleep with the controller nearby Brodie-style. Saving a game is breaking the spirit of the game and is cheating your way to an accomplishment of sitting down and playing a game through the right way.

I personally feel that using game saves is cheap. It's for the lazy and for the folk who don't want to actually play a game properly but instead sneak it in on the side when others aren't looking the way one would also hide a Heroin or smoking habit. Some people may think they are hot shit for playing a game through and hitting every single nook and corner while at the same time maxing out the stats of everything and everyone they can get their hands on, but if you can't do it all in one sitting what's the fucking point?

What do you think about game saving? Do you think it's a needed evolution in gaming, or do you think it's a cop out for those non-hardcore gamer types that the modern generation has bred? Or should I play FF7 again using only my left hand?

Discuss!

 

[jmt225]

Did you purposely post this here or was it meant for the Video Games Section? If it's the latter I'll delete this post and move it there for you. If the former... then I'll just answer the question and say that game save files are fine and much better than the shitty password system, which some games made a real pain in the ass. And those without even the password system? Yeah, good luck with not having your console fry out after a year or so with the hours and days of pausing.

 

[Via Armbar]

Different games benefit from one or the other. I'm sure there are a few who could beat a long, older generation game like Link to the Past (Armbar and Lee unite) in one sitting but for the most part it isn't a game you would play without saving. Whereas a game from the same generation, Turtles in Time, could definitely be played all the way through with no save feature needed.

You have a point though. Many of today's games don't have the same charm, some of that could be attributed to their ''pick up and play'' ability and Lord of the Rings esque story arcs. If I'm playing on an emulator I never use save states and will only use the in-game save system. Seems kind of cheap otherwise.

 

[Pepe Silvia]

So what's the difference between Game Saves and passwords? The only difference is not needing to twrite out a 2950 alpha-numerical string to be able to pick up your progress later.

The real benefit to saving your game, back in the days of the SNES/Genesis, was the unfortunate occurence of your system shitting the bed and/or the game stopping without your control. Screen-fuck glitches when you're 80% of the game would make me rage like no other when I was fighting Motaro on hardest in MKT. Quick power surges would make me lose my progress on a no-warp-pipe game of Mario 1. In its best form, it's a fail-safe to make sure nothing else can shitstomp your fun with the power of inconvenience.

There are still plenty of games that don't let you save your progress other than when you've completed a run, notably fighters like Street Fighter/MVC/Fighters that are worse than Street Fighter. But maybe you're right; getting rid of willingful saves and putting a recovery system, like for word documents when your computer explodes, might be a good way to play games again. However, the lazy ***** would abuse the shit out of it like they did in the infancy of online gaming, and yank the cord when they'd had enough/were going to lose, and felt like doing something else. Hell, I did it playing NFL Gameday 2003, but it was like 99/14 and he started talking shit. ...What? I thought running plays were boring, I had no mix-up.

If we were to remove the save feature from a lot of the games, most wouldn't be able to have a long run-time, and the ones that are 20+ hours like Oblivion would be completely useless. In this economy, if you're going to spend $60 to $80 (lol CoD) on a video game, you're going to want to get some life out of it. When it all comes down to it, Lebron still traveled.

(Post count is for ***** lolol)

 

[Ferbian]

Ignoring the ability to save games would basically kill off a lot of the larger games even being remotely completable, much less make people want to play them because they know that they'd have to start all over.

Look at some of the big games that could technically take you days, unless you're an absolute sick gamer, and basically bursting your way through the entire thing in a matter of hours, cheats or not. Nobody would bother with it, Elder Scrolls would have become a failure of a gaming series, despite how amazingly epic it is, nobody would really ever get to see the end, unless they have a shit loads of caffeine, and a messed up sleeping pattern.

Saving games is something that doesn't necessarily even go into the aspect of pressing the "save" button. Looking at some of the MMORPG's which has an account storing your information about your characters, in theory that as well is something that is considered saving a game, because your progress, all the time you've spent with it, is saved and allows you to log back in once you're done with what real life requires of you.

A lot of people often goes around saying "Real life is important", and yes, that's completely true. If we're supposed to remember that, a lot of the casual gamers, or hardcore gamers for that sake wouldn't have much of a gaming history because, personally, I wouldn't have bothered at all with a lot of the games in the past, as well as today if I couldn't save it, because I'd get a "can't be bothered" attitude about continuing it from the start. Which is also why I rarely ever play the same RPG game twice, unless there's different happenings available (Mass Effect!).

No, saving games isn't a cop out, nor is it necessarily a needed evolution. However I would say that it has become an essential part for the casual gamers, as well as for the gaming industry as a whole.

 

[Dagger Dias]

Saving game data has become a gaming standard that cannot be ignored. Games have evolved so much in the past two decades. Gone are the days of titles such as Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Space Invaders, or even Tetris. It was a slow evolution, but saving game data is now an integral part of the gaming experience. Some games still follow the oldschool "play until you lose or leave" style, but it has more or less been replaced by the save and continue style. It is necessary now that games are capable of far more than their ancestors from the arcade era.

 

[Poop Master Flex]

What do you think about game saving? Do you think it's a needed evolution in gaming, or do you think it's a cop out for those non-hardcore gamer types that the modern generation has bred? Or should I play FF7 again using only my left hand?

Although I miss the old school games that didn't involve save features I feel they have become necessary over the years. For Example, if you tried to beat Twilight Princess in one sitting you would probably pass out.

I would love to see more games that don't require a save feature but for long epic titles save files are necessary, or if you are playing franchise mode in Madden or something, you can't complete 100 years of football in one sitting, you would die.

I think save files are necessary for the demand of games. Most of the popular games over the years have required save files in order to make the game bigger and more extravagant, even games like Mario, Donkey Kong and Sonic have all applied the save feature so they can make it more epic.

Personally I prefer the old school arcade games (like lets say Wrestlefest '91) where you had to finish the game in one sitting or you wouldn't complete it but the videogame industry has changed so much since the past, after Zelda came out passwords and save files became commonplace in the industry and are now pretty much a necessity.

The only thing I don't care for with save game files is I don't feel as accomplished as I do if I beat lets say Mike Tyson's Punchout without passwords because if you die in that you start again instead of in the middle of the game. It gives a bigger sense of accomplishment which I feel newer games don't give.