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Rant alert: game saves this gen suck!


SwordBreaker
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Remember the last two generations when the so-called "memory card" was the most innovative thing ever created? Just put your saves in there...and if you want to, you can go over to your friends and brag about your progression, play at his house, and even give him a copy of your save file in case he doesn't want to go through all the shit. Simple and effective.

Things are haywire this generation in my opinion, and quite frankly it's been pissing me off for quite sometime. For some stupid reason, all three competitors have made it extremely hard, if not impossible, for us to continue the memory card legacy.

So the first versions of the PS3 has all these shitty memory ports, not to mention the USB slots that we have now, which could've been the perfect continuation of the memory card. But no, Sony had to complicate shit up. I tried to bring my save file of Soul Calibur IV to a friend's house via USB so we can play with everything unlocked from the get-go...but the damn thing tells me that I'm not authorized to use copy this save file to his profile 'cause it's not his to begin with. Who gives a damn if it's not his? I just want to use the save file in peace. I'm assuming (big IF here) this can be fixed by tediously creating a profile that's identical to mine on his PS3...but the only way to do so is to connect the PS3 online, which is really bothersome if there's no internet connection around. Why can't I just copy my PS3 profile to my USB or something...just like Xbox Live?

Speaking of Xbox Live, they're also not immune to this problem. Slightly better than the PS3, but still has some major faults 'cause of the similar structure. I can't use my save in another 360 unless I move my XBL gamertag/profile to a memory unit along with my save. Additionally, you can't "give" friends your save, either...'cause of those achievements. I mean, it would be much simpler if I get a message like "achievements won't move over to the other profile because it's not your progress"...but no, moving saves between profiles is strictly prohibited for some weird reason. Only thing that I can give props to the 360 is that you can directly access your saves from your memory unit, unlike the PS3 (that is, if you can get your save file to work in another PS3 in the first place).

As for the Wii, I haven't really experimented in moving my saves to another system...but I'm assuming that there are no restrictions since there's no "profile system" to begin with. So in that regard, it's much better. However, the Wii has its own share of problems. First off, the system has one SD slot only with an extremely slow transfer progress. Also, there are a lot of game saves that cannot be backed-up or transferred to your SD card for no reason whatsoever...and some of them are the games that matter. Super Smash Bros. Brawl is a major example of this fault. It takes a ton of space off your Wii, but you can't back it up on your SD slot (aside from the in-game photos and custom stages, which is nice but not good enough). So in order to enjoy a fully-unlocked Smash Bros. Brawl over at a friends, you have to bring the Wii with you! SD slot is useless. Speaking of useless, you can't even access your saves directly from the SD in most games. You gotta copy it to the Wii memory first. Also, if your Wii breaks or your save becomes corrupt (God Forbid) then it's goodbye 100+ hours of Smash Bros. playtime.

I wonder if anyone here is as pissed off as me?

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It's pretty annoying, that's for sure. I honestly don't know how they screwed up so badly. It's especially been a pain for me as I didn't buy a next-gen console (the 360) until late in the game, and I had used my friends consoles up until then for save files -- save files that I can't transfer to my account.

As terrible as the memory card system is, it's not the worst of things. What's really terrible is the price gouging in the memory card market these days. Memory cards that are 8-64 mbs cost between $20 and $60, even for old consoles like the PS2. We know memory devices of that size cost almost nothing to produce, yet all the console manufacturers decided to force us to use their ridiculously expensive memory cards if we want to transfer much of our data. That right there is complete BS.

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I guess us PC gamers take for granted the ability to transfer, send, and even edit save games. o.o

Just open your game documents, locate the save game files, email them. That's how I got past the save and quit rule of Diablo II. I would make 10 copies of my save game and go imbue an item over and over again until I found one that I liked.

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Odd, the one time I've tried this with my PS3, it did precisely what you griped about. Took my Devil May Cry 4 save over to a friend's place, copied it over, and it flat out told me that my progress would be transferred, but that's it.

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The Super Smash Bros. problem is due to Wi-Fi data embedded into the save file, which is your 'profile' problem right there.

With the Wii, you can copy data after you've played the game on the system (so I beat Metroid Prime 3 on the Wii at my house, but I couldn't copy the data to my Wii in my apartment until I played the game once on it).

Believe me, I was pretty pissed when I beat all of the challenges in SSBB and found out I couldn't copy the data to the Wii I was taking to school...

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Never liked memory cards. When CD-based gaming established itself you could no longer store saves in the games themselves, since CDs are read-only. On most, if not all early CD consoles like the Mega CD and PC Engine you could store saves on internal RAM/hard drives. But when Sony entered the fray they probably figured they could squeeze extra money out of people with memory cards. I thought the space was pretty damn shit considering their cost.

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My problem doesn't lie with the games saves, but with the profile itself having to be recovered every time I want to play on Live at another one of my friends house. I don't know why you can't just recover it once and just require a password to login and be done with it.

Keep in mind that this a huge problem for me because it takes about 30 mins for a profile to download on this god forsaken rock the natives call Japan.

To top it off, I have to rerecover it when I get back to my house.

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Same here. I thought it was the name of a band or something. Since when did going down under mean turning to shit? Says a lot about us then doesn't it.

I REALLY didn't mean to relate this expression to Australians. Sorry if I caused any offense. I'll change the title.

To the one who said that he successfully copied his save on another PS3...that was before the trophy support. If you didn't download the latest firmware that's associated with Trophies, then you can still copy your saves to other PS3s. What's weird is...games like DMC4 and Soul Calibur IV do not have trophy support in the first place, yet you still can't copy them for some stupid reason.

I have no idea how to copy/save/move your profile onto a USB or other memory unit. I don't think there's a way to do that so far...unless you're doing a full back-up of everything of course.

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Sword, I somewhat relate to what you're saying. While I don't have a PS3 or a gaming quality PC, I've experienced Xbox and Wii memory problems. Although I've gotten used to toting my hard drive around with me to my friends' house, it still makes me nervous. What if I accidentally drop my xbox bag? What if it gets squished in the trunk of my car? I'm not saying that I'm not careful, (I definitely am), but its very stressful.

With the Wii, I got pretty ticked when I couldn't copy my Brawl profile. I go back and forth between my mom's house and my dad's house on a regular basis, and bringing the Wii itself wasn't an option. So having to run thru Sub-Space Emissary twice was an unnecessary pain in the neck! Quite aggravating. Memory cards were much easier to deal with...let me tell ya!

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The things that have been overlooked from the old generations was that while you could bring your old carts to your friends house, it didn't allow for data exchange, except in games like the first couple Pokemon games where you had to physically link the GameBoys together via wire.

I'm cool without memory cards for the most part, as long as I don't have to pay an extra 25 bucks on top of a console purchase I'm happy... although I guess the sheer price of consoles, and the higher prices for controllers makes up for that loss huh? ha.

I remember back in the day when you could take your N64 memory cards to a couple of different arcade machines to transfer your data. I think FZero GX/AX had that kind of functionality too for the Gamecube, if I'm not mistaken. In fact, I think I remember going to the arcade with memory card in hand.

Hard drives are the way to go, but USB and SD Cards sure are convenient. It'd be nice to see that kind functionality again, although I guess in this day and age they'd just upload your data online and let you log in to retrieve it.

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Eh, compared to losing THOUSANDS AND THOUSANDS of RPG data because the internal battery died out or because the dust settled in too long in the memory card or because the space is so small that some idiot friend/sibling deleted over it, I'd have the hard drive saves with all the little bugs and shit. And I'm genuinely sorry for PS3 owners in that regard, because I keep hearing epic save-data-deletes from a lot of buggy PS3 games. Seriously, is it really THAT hard to program for the PS3? It's like with every other PS3 game, there's graphical glitches, online problems and save-game-deletion.

I agree that the moving of sign-up-accounts for Xbox360 is still a bit problematic, though entire save spots don't habit of disappearing.

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And I'm genuinely sorry for PS3 owners in that regard, because I keep hearing epic save-data-deletes from a lot of buggy PS3 games. Seriously, is it really THAT hard to program for the PS3? It's like with every other PS3 game, there's graphical glitches, online problems and save-game-deletion.

This is honestly the first I've heard about people having save game deletion problems on the PS3. I've never lost a save file, and I haven't heard of this just happening let alone being a frequent problem for many users.

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The Dreamcast had the best memory card system.

instead of each game saving their fixed size data - holding, say, 3 savegames - in one fixed size block, each savegame had its own block on the card.

Unlimited saves per game, and they only took as much space as needed if you only had, say, one save per game.

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The Dreamcast had the best memory card system.

instead of each game saving their fixed size data - holding, say, 3 savegames - in one fixed size block, each savegame had its own block on the card.

Unlimited saves per game, and they only took as much space as needed if you only had, say, one save per game.

the original playstation had this sort of (varying amongst the games themselves) and the PS2 had a good amount of it too

I mean unless I'm misunderstanding something here

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the original playstation had this sort of (varying amongst the games themselves) and the PS2 had a good amount of it too

I mean unless I'm misunderstanding something here

Yeah, it wasn't unique to the Dreamcast, but that was my biggest exposure to that style of saving games.

I wish all of today's consoles did that.

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