I Yearn To Quick Save

I Yearn To Quick Save

Quick saving is an important part of many PC games, it is a feature which I have come to rely on in many cases, I have lost track of the number of times I have quick saved in games like Half-Life and the early Call of Duty titles. For me, quick saving is almost something which I think should be found in every game.

Dead Rising 2 is one such game which would greatly benefit from employing a quick save feature. You see, the saving system in DR2 is, frankly, appalling. Some crazy individual decided that you can only save your game in toilets, one of the most bizarre choices I have ever come across in gaming, the problem lies in the fact that there really aren’t that many toilets around in the game, and when there are some you are too often battling a horde of zombies or running somewhere before your time limit runs out (more on that another time) to think about nipping into the loo to save your game.

This is where quick saving would come in oh so handy, no longer would you have to smack millions of zombies, get to where you wanted to go only to run out of food to nourish your battered body and get munched by the nearest walking dead. Instead you would be able to quick save halfway through your treck and instantly return to that point if you die no faffing around with reloading from where you last saved proper, say at the safe house, and having to go on that journey once more. Not that there is anything necessarily wrong with fighting the zombs in DR2, it is great fun, it would just help with the frustration of having to start all over again.

On the flip side I have had one particularly bad experience with quick saves, I’m going back in time a few years to the original Half-Life, where am I? I’m in the Blast Chamber section of the game. My last full save was back before I went through the blast doors leading to the first area of the Blast Chamber. I had trundled along the train tracks and jumped over poisonous gloop before getting into that cavernous area with the bridges leading to the Chamber proper. Of course I had quick saved along on my journey as was the norm. (My F5 button took some hammerings back in the day.) At some point in this land of the bridges I had shot at a Bullsquid or some such alien on a bridge in the far distance.

The result of such reckless shooting? The bridge blew up. Of course at the time I didn’t realise I was going to need to traverse the bridge so I carried on my quick saving ways when sneaking past that bloody three headed tentacle bastard. I then got to the missing bridge, and found that I was unable to get across. I looked at my saves, and any quick saves or auto saves left on there were from a time after I destroyed that infernal bridge. I really couldn’t be bothered to go back to last main save I had made and was unable to get across the gap any other way. I sadly left Half-Life alone for a time after that fateful incident.

Another fateful incident occurred at a time when I lent a friend my Half-Life disc (this was long before the dawn of Steam) knowing that I was able to play the game without it in my driver. So I thought. Cast your minds back folks to the early stages of meeting the marines, at one point you get in an elevator which takes you close to your first glimpse of the surface. What happened when I reached this point without the disc in my drive? The lift got stuck and glitched me to death. Time after time I died in exactly the same place.

If memory serves me correct, this was an innovative anti-piracy trick employed by Valve, but again it put my Half-Life experience on hold. To my eternal shame I still haven’t defeated the last boss on the PC version of the game, I somehow managed it on the PS2 version mind, but it isn’t the same.

Seven hundred words later I come to the point of this ramble, all PC games should have a quick save feature, but the lesson is, don’t rely on it too much. Real saves are just as good sometimes.

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