This article is dedicated to the ‘way things were’ as compared to the standards of today. Things are usually forgotten because better things come along, but there are also those that never even knew about them in the first place. For instance, my son who is 6, plays with Lego’s religiously. Some of them were mine when I was younger and due to the glory of Lego, they are fully compatible with the brand new stuff released today. Gaming isn’t so fortunate. The ways of the past are usually forgotten by the technology of today.
The first stop on our trip is the mystical world of game saves. Now when I was a lad, saving your game meant not letting your little brother get his filthy hands on it so you would have a chance to play again at some point….In other words, saves were not possible on consoles and even on computer required a lot more hassle and hardware than most people were willing to shell out. Compared to the alternatives of the day, the Atari 2600 was a glorious and for most kids, a glamorous item to use as a bargaining chip for whose house was to be played at. As a ‘farm kid’ my ventures to the ‘uppity’ kids houses were few and far between so when it happened I took full advantage of the situation and hogged it from them. In those days we didn’t think twice about turning the system on and restarting the game from the beginning each time. It was the way things were done and we ate it up as fast as we could get our hands on the next small black cartridges.
Oh Nintendo, you sly minx you. It was all I could do to keep myself from drooling on the pages of the “JC Penny” Christmas catalog where you so cleverly adorned the pages. I remember pulling out all stops to try to acquire one. I was a new age and technology starved version of Ralphie and I wasn’t about to let Santa boot my tail down the chute on this one. I think more than one Christmas came and went without the elusive grey box magically appearing, but I was undeterred. I remember working to mow grass and change irrigation pipe lines to earn money to buy my way into the cutting edge of gaming glory. When I finally purchased the little minx It had just dropped in price and I had enough saved for a couple games, one of which was Metroid. Now those that remember the original Metroid also remember having to purchase the non-standard accessory in order to write down the password. Yes folks, Nintendo had implemented save points in the form of a 726 (slight exaggeration) character password, and you could share this with all your friends to brag about how far you had gotten. We didn’t care though, we could start with morph ball and bombs right from the start! Some NES games had build in batteries where it would save your progress at certain triggers, most commonly by running out of lives. This was progress my friends.
The way of the battery save file continued through our Genesis and SNES days and even carried over to the last gasps of the cartridges, the Jaguar and N64. Problem is, carts were dying and with them the battery save was dying as well. What’s this? A memory card!? Oh my goodness what glorious evolution, or was it? I remember more than once forgetting to manually save some games and being more than a little ticked in those early days of the Saturn and Playstation, not to mention having to purchase them separately and having to keep track of them. Games such as Final Fantasy 7 combined checkpoint saves into the game and other games didn’t even remind you! Other games kept the auto-save feature but just transitioned it to the memory card, a handy feature indeed, if you owned a memory card. With memory cards came the invention of the Dex Drive (anyone remember those?) I still have the Playstation and N64 dex drive units and I remember e-mailing my save files to different members of an online dex-drive user group and also receiving a few save files in return to try out. The advent of the internet allowed for such unthinkable transactions between gamers!
The memory card is still a staple of gaming (as well as tech products) today, but is less common than in years past. The current generation consoles almost all have a built in memory of some sort for game saving (amongst other things) and you don’t really have to think about game saves in today’s world, unless you are paranoid. Auto-saves combined with a built in location is handy, unless you experience hardware problems! I just happened to be unlucky enough to experience the pitfalls of today’s saving trends. My launch PS3 experienced a ‘warmth' problem and it just so happens that my power supply motherboard melted itself. No problem right, just have Sony fix it! Oh ho! Not so fast Mr. Frisky. Apparently the PS3’s hardware is ‘serial number’ specific. I was informed by Sony that I would lose all data on my HDD due to them having to change hardware or send me a replacement unit if necessary. If I had backed up my games, this would be mostly moot. I say mostly because some game saves can’t be backed up. What? (I heard you say this out loud) Yes it’s true; some games are both tied to your hardware serial and to your online ID so they can’t be shared or backed up. I guess it’s a way to protect trophy seekers from cheating to get trophies. So I lost a few game saves, I lived and it’s not a problem most people will have to deal with. My replacement PS3 has been fine for years and I’m no worse for wear. I do regularly back up the games I can now though.
So in the big scheme of things, we’ve come a long ways in the ways of saving games. Most gamers today will inevitably take for granted the auto-save feature and the ease of having the massive HDD right there to save to, but those of us who lived through the early days really know the score. S.O.S. (save often stupid)
-caddad
No comments:
Post a Comment