Welcome, welcome to the 5th installment of Blog Banter, the monthly blogging extravaganza headed by bs angel (hey, that’s me!). Blog Banter involves our cozy community of enthusiastic gaming bloggers, a common topic, and a week to post articles pertaining to said topic. The results are quite entertaining and can range from deep insight to ROFLMAO. Any questions about Blog Banter should be directed here. Check out other Blog Banter articles at the bottom of this post!
Do you remember when the last must have title in your forever expanding game library neared release? Do you recall how your excitement built exponentially as the date slowly inched closer? And how you couldn’t wait to explore every last hidden nook and cranny of that secret, fantasy universe? What about the lengths you went to in order to fight off all hints of potential spoilers in a valiant effort to preserve the sacred story line? Then you put that special game in your disc tray. And played. And stopped. All before reaching that elusive final achievement of the point of completion.
What makes you stop playing a game that you truly enjoy before you finish the campaign? What could possibly be so bad that you lose your passion for finding out how the story ends? For me, that answer is something as simple as a save system.
When the PC version of F.E.A.R. was released, I was determined to play my first computer game ever. I game on consoles for the simple reason that my computer is not powerful enough to support the games that I enjoy playing. I tried to play the F.E.A.R. demo but I didn’t have all the required components to make it run. I got a little bit of audio before the whole thing stopped working. As a horror and FPS junkie, that was enough to grab my attention. So when I later heard F.E.A.R. was going to be released on the Xbox 360, I felt my world was almost complete.
Of course I reserved it. Of course I got it the day it launched. After spending about three hours on it though, I shelved the game. The graphics were solid, although slightly glitchy. The mood was delightfully frightful. Alma was absolutely terrifying. The overall mood of the game was creepy enough to keep your bowel movements on a regular schedule. All of these things are pure win in my book, however the save system was frustrating enough that I couldn’t play it any longer.
The Xbox 360 version of F.E.A.R. has an auto checkpoint save system. You cannot manually save your progress. Instead the game decides when it is the appropriate time. Besides the obvious drawback of being warned when a big fight scene is coming, it is simply an inconvenient system. Their checkpoints are inconsistent, sometimes coming quickly, other times nowhere in sight. That wasn’t the deal breaker though. The deal breaker came when I realized that I couldn’t go back to a previous checkpoint in the game. The options were your current checkpoint or back to the very beginning of the entire game.
That didn’t become an issue until somewhere around the fourth level. The game decided to save me at a point where I had very little health (I believe it was in the paltry 20s somewhere) with zero health packs to boost it. That same point was right before a large scale fight against an entire horde of enemies. I tried numerous times to pass it with the very little health I had left but I couldn’t even come close. After attempting this too many times to count, becoming increasingly frustrated the entire time and feeling my blood pressure rise to dangerous levels, I finally shelved the game. I was upset I couldn’t simply go to the checkpoint before that in an effort to gather and save more health. But no, my options were continuing with 20 health at the beginning of a big battle or starting over all the way at the beginning. I chose to forget the entire game.
Why would a company develop a save system like that? In this day and age many gamers are adults with real world commitments. We all don’t have the luxury of gaming until the next checkpoint that is always elusively out of our reach. And why would you not give the option to choose a previous level to replay? Going back and playing your favorite levels, sometimes in an attempt to unlock a particular achievement, is something that adds to the overall replay value of a game. To make the only option continuing where the game saved you or starting over from the very beginning is puzzling to say the least.
I have had this game shelved for over a year. About two weeks ago I decided to pop it in again and give it another go. I am exactly one level before the point where I quit last time. I have already decided that if the same thing happens, the game will then be permanently shelved and never touched again. Will I reach that point and be faced with the same exact situation? Will I pass that point only to have the same thing happen again further into the campaign? Will I pass that point this time and play the game to its completion? Time will tell, but this is the last chance F.E.A.R. gets. Two strikes and it’s out.
Have you quit a particularly awesome game because of a single flaw it had? What game irked you so bad that you stopped playing before completing it?
Check out these other Blog Banter articles! Silvercublogger, Unfettered Blather, Triage Effect, Gamer Unit, Delayed Responsibility, Man Bytes Blog, CrazyKinux’s Musing, Zath!, Draining Souls.net, Game Couch, 8-Bit Brigade, thoughts and rants
I hate games like that! Very nice post
I remember Winback for Nintendo 64 had a similar checkpoint system like that…
I like F.E.A.R. but I agree about the save system. More disappointing to me was that F.E.A.R. wasn’t that scary. There are some good moments, but it’s basically a series of firefights.
While my opinion is only about the first four levels of the game, I very much agree with your sentiment. It has definitely had some absolutely terrifying moments, but that mood is not maintained consistently throughout the game. It comes and it goes. The last truly scary game I played was Doom 3 I think.
There is actually a noticeable absence of solid horror games overall right now for the 360.
Yeah, I don’t get it.
The X-Box was essentially just a very game specific computer right down to its hard drive. The 360 hardware is more of the same, except with a bigger hard drive that doesn’t even bother to obscure it’s storage size.
There were actually a couple of points in Halo 3 like this for me where I was about ready to throw the controller. Just on Normal mind you. On the whole though, they got it right in that you hit your save checkpoints on a fairly regular basis.
I still would have liked the save anywhere option. I don’t think I could have gotten through Half-Life 2 without it.
Speaking of which, you should try the Orange Box. Ravenhold in Half-Life 2 is about as scary as anything I’ve played and the end levels of Portal, while not horror, are very creepy.
I digress. Knowing this about FEAR, I doubt I’ll try it now.
HALO 2 CAMPAIGN: I didnt quit, i could never quit a Halo game, but i spent a lot of time in between playing other games. In my opinion the auto-saves in the game were too far apart considering that they were not small confrontations but massive battles covering a huge distance (about the last 3rd of the game), and that I was playing on Legendary. I got really sick of dying and starting over in a spot I had been in 40 minutes ago. I love the series but I think Ill stick with 3 and CE for campaign replays.
As for games I have shelved…believe it or not…Bioshock. The only reason I can come up with is that it didnt live up to the hype everyone gave it. The graphics were beautiful, i liked the Big Daddy’s and Little Sisters (i could do without the Splicers though). The humor in it cracked me up and it even had a decent story line. All in all though I haven’t had the urge to finish it. I have beat some of my favorite game campaigns multiple times, but I cant bring myself to beat this one. Maybe someday Ill get bored and try again…but we will see.
An automatic save system like that has got to be one of the most bone-headed things game developers can do to their game. I assume it’s done to save system resources or something like that.. but c’mon, give us a break. Quake had the save system down perfectly way back in 1996. I think the rest of the game-developing world has had ample time to work the kinks out.
Dead Rising
I loved the idea that you could fight zombies with literally everything in the mall, but the save system sucked and the aiming system was atrocious. I shelved it for about 3 months before playing through the main story. I have yet to complete (or even attempt) the Overtime story mode, and don’t plan on trying again. Maybe in another 3 months…
Bungie learned this lesson well with the first version of Halo. Please, oh god, please let us save when and where, and as many time as we want!
im gonna have to agree with Kurt on Dead Rising…it looked so fun…i dont think i put more than a few hours into it and I was bored. =/
I definitely agree with Dead Rising. I shelved that game earlier than I shelved F.E.A.R. due to never being near a restroom when I had to stop playing.
Dead Rising. Dammit, that would have fit this topic perfectly, but I already whined about it. That game is constructed around grinding and restarting. Awesome strategy guide for it here: http://www.somethingawful.com/d/video-game-article/dead-rising-strategy.php
Yay for the fact that my PC can play FEAR, and I can save anywhere to keep whatever insane situations I end up with.
I’m guessing I found it more enjoyable like that, by alot. Then again, I can put on cheats and love the fights more than the scary moments. The expansion pack has way more of them.
But if you do get through, you should know that the end section is rather… well, you’ll see.
As for anything I wanted and never finished, there’s nothing. Lucky me.
I liked F.E.A.R. a lot on the PC, and now I’m glad I played it there, sup-par graphics and all. That was definitely a game where you needed lots of saves, a quicksave, and patience.
Oh, and funny you all should be talking about Dead Rising, I’m really loving that game right now. It’s fun, and for me, the time limit and saves are manageable, if slightly taxing. Nothing as annoying as Halo 3’s method of saving (as Jason mentions above).
Dynasty warriors 6. Seriously, I dont know if they removed character customization in number5, but that killed it for me, I liked spending ages in #4 messing around with my character and trying out different weapons, but number6 restricts you to certain boring characters, also lack of saving on that game, all of the battles end up taking hours with numerous points onf death in between. I havn’t touched that since my Birthday.
Dead Rising, as mentioned before was one I rented for about a week, and took back on the 1st day. That’s how horrible it was.
Republic Commando
my freind said it was teh awesum, that it was like a starwars ghost recon (that would have been the greatest thing ever)
but no, it sucked all round in almost every aspect
i didn’t even finish the first planet before i returned it
YES! I am the type that loves to constantly save, it’s a great thing. When playing the Half-Life series, I save after every little fight, and when my health and suit are maxed. I’m also playing Lost Odyssey right now, and while it’s a great game, I hate how they throw you into these long and tiring dungeons with no save point in sight. It’s frustrating.
GTA: All those missions with the remote control cars, planes and helicoptors! That was always the end of me, and they were just tacked on stupidness.
Excellent topic angel! I totally forgot about this one and what a bother it is. One thing worse that this is when they give you the option the quicksave and quickload and you die and you’re still falling to the ground and you think you hit quickload except you hit quicksave and you keep reloading to you falling to your death.
…it’s happened a few times… T_T
Well, there’s really 2 fixes to the problem you had with FEAR. The first would be to fix the stupid checkpoint system. That wouldn’t be a bad thing in general, but the second would be the option to toss the existing PC FPS “Health Meter” and get friendly with the health system from CoD4 and Halo 3 and other games where you don’t have to go find a health pack so you can keep playing instead of dealing with cruddy hunts for healthpacks.
Heaven only knows the amount of time I had to head back a bit to find a health pack in FEAR on my 360, just so I could get past some big nasty thing that wanted to eat my face with a machinegun.
Uh oh. That’s not making me look forward to picking up where I left off.