I’m sure this subject is definitely one you can answer and maybe answer with a lot of emotion.
Have you ever gotten to the end of Boss fight and you manage to get the Health Bar down to just an inch left of life, only then to be defeated?! Then you select “Resume from Last Checkpoint”, the game loads you all the way back at the beginning… You realised you forgot to save your progress!!!
This isn’t so common in today’s video games as most games have an auto-save feature built in to it. Non-the-less though, we have all done is it and reaped the consequences and then found out the hard way…
How many times have lost your progress in a game because you forgot to save? Can you describe a specific time that this happened?
My answer;- I was very young at the time this first happened to me. It was when “Pokemon Red” was released on the GameBoy Colour. I had spent a good 3 hours on the game only to then DROP the device! The game cartridge flew out as it hit the floor and the device went to a blank screen. My eyes watered (literally) and I wasn’t to pleased
I’ve had this and similar mishaps in gaming happen many times over the years, it a real bummer.
Just recently, a few days ago in fact, I was playing this fan made Metroid game called Metroid: Zero on my laptop. It’s pretty much a remake of the original 1986 Metroid that works on a password system, no save stations or save points. If or when you die you’re given a password or continue option. So I was doing real good as I’m a well seasoned Metroid player, probably about half way through the game. I get to the 3rd boss battle and defeat it fairly easily. When you defeat a boss in Metroid games they drop tons of energy and missile pickups. So I jump into the pile of pickups and BOOM… game freezes and the “This program has encountered an error and needs to close” message pops up. I’ve thought about trying again from the beginning but it really wasn’t that challenging of a game and I don’t want to get further and have that same thing happen.
Nice thread topic, Troy!
And btw, I swear you told that same story about dropping your gameboy in an older thread about gaming mishaps lol.
Now that you really got me thinking, I remember when I was a kid I had Zelda 2 for the NES. A friend from school bugged me for a month or so to borrow it, I finally gave in when he said I could borrow his Kid Niki cart. Well after about a week I was done with his game and wanted mine back, he kept telling me at school he’d bring it in the next day. The weekend came and I decided to walk to his house to swap back. We swapped back. I got home and popped it in my NES to find that all my saves had been deleted, the exact thing I told him not to do, I said use save slot 3 and only save slot 3. Of course he blamed it on his brother. After that I never let anyone borrow games with a battery save in them lol.
I’ve had plenty of experiences like the one you describe, but something that’s a bit different but that makes me want to kick myself in the ass every time is when I’m playing Dark Souls and I could go save but I choose not to, and then I ****ing die and I have to ****ing do it all again…
Bending the question a little as it was more forgot to make space to save rather than forgot to save. When I was around 7 or 8 I was stuck on a level on one of the old crash bandicoot games for the PS1 for weeks and after hours of trying I finally did it one time. The only problem was my memory card was full and I couldn’t save my progress, so rather than quitting I just left my PS1 on secretly until I thought of a solution. A few weeks later and I’ve pretty much completed the game, just a few things left to do and all done while my PS1 had been on constantly. I come home from school one time to finally finish the game only to find my PS1 had overheated and broke, wouldn’t turn on properly and when I eventually got a new one it was right back before the level I was stuck on weeks ago. Devastated isn’t enough.
Thanks for the replies people, and sorry for your losses!
Anyone here remember trying to make space on the Memory Cards the PS1 & PS2 used? Well I was making space once and I was supposed to choose the “Copy” option after selecting a GameSave (Gran Turismo 2 I think it was)… Only I didn’t… I had hit “Delete All” instead and also said “Yes” when it asked me if I was sure I wanted to do this!!! At the time I was rushing it as I had done it plenty of times and just wanted to free up space to play the game. Shows what can happen if you do rush things
My mum likes to tell the story of how I was playing GTA when I was younger. Was playing for a few hours when the electricity went out. Apparently I was crying like a baby saying I hadn’t saved it. She said she was going to take the console off me if that’s how I behaved.
Going back in time a bit, back to when the Playstation 2 was the newest system, when getting gaming magazines were actually cool and informative, and when companies actually released things for free to thank their supporters. I was lucky enough to be subscribed to a club that would gift demo discs with a number of games on them that were either already released or soon-to-be released. My brother and I didn’t have many games when we first got our PS2 so this club was perfect for us to try other games. With sharing a console and not owning many games that also meant we didn’t need a lot of space, thus we shared a memory card.
Fast-forward a bit, around 2004, we some how we able to add GTA: Vice City to our collection of games and had been progressing through the game like mad men! Come that holiday season that same subscription had been sending out and extra demo disc for members to enjoy during the holiday season. I don’t recollect all the games that were on the disc but I do remember which game I demo’ed the most; Viewtiful Joe 2. After enjoying the demo disc for a period of time, my brother and I load up Vice City only to see that it was showing us the initial opening scene(s). Immediately confused and puzzled, we go into our memory card to see that everything had been wiped and gone forever!
Weeks had passed, my brother and I just sucked up the sadness and started over; thinking we could easily get back to our previous point in the game since we had already done it once. At some point the next issue of the club magazine showed up to reward us with information as to why our memory card was wiped. Apparently the holiday demo disc had a glitch within it that would wipe memory cards if there was anything saved on them. Long story short, we were pretty skeptical of future demo discs doing the same and so we canceled our subscription and just enjoyed the games we had.
