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Post by anayo on Nov 19, 2018 17:49:23 GMT -5
This might seem like a dumb topic, but I think part of the inexorable homogenization of modern games has been the way we save progress in our games. While I'm reluctant to wax nostalgic about yesterday's inconveniences, that was part of what made old games the way they were, so I think it's worth discussing.
Since the first thing I ever played was my Dad's 386 PC, I was accustomed to saving my progress on the hard drive. Even games that didn't let me do that, such as Lemmings, let me jot down a password. So when I got an NES and later a Sega Genesis I wasn't thrilled with the inability to save my game. I also recall resenting long games without so much as a password, like Super Mario 3. While I never got any NES games with backup batteries in them (such as Zelda), I did receive Sonic 3 and Knuckles, and the fact that I could save my progress made the game feel so much more modern, convenient, and huge. This wasn't a game you could beat in one sitting! I'd imagine if I had any NES games with save capabilities I'd have felt the same way. It's taken for granted now, but it was a huge deal back then.
For the N64, most high budget, first party games came with on-board lithium batteries. But lower-budget third party games would offload the expense of saving your progress on a memory card. This resulted in awkward situations like never progressing past a certain level in Army Men, which I rented from Blockbuster. Or leaving my N64 powered on for weeks on end to try to beat Tonic Trouble without any means of saving my progress. I think finally I caved in because me or one of my siblings wanted to play something else, so we lost 20 some odd hours of progress.
Even though everyone's pretty critical of the way the Sega Saturn uses CR2032 batteries to save, which die after a year or so, I always considered this to be a novel approach. The memory was usually adequate for a half dozen arcade and platforming games, or one RPG. You only needed a memory card if you wanted enough wiggle room to play multiple RPG's or something. But if all you had was a Sega Saturn and either didn't want to or couldn't afford to spend more money, you weren't forced to do so.
I also thought the VMU for the Sega Dreamcast was really neat. Most of the games I had did little more than display a blocky monochrome logo of the game I was playing, but the "cool factor" was off the charts at the time. It felt kinda like how the Wii later had a microphone with tinny sound effects coming out of it.
My last memory card reminiscence was from the Gamecube era. That machine got a lot of use between myself, my Dad, my brother, and even my sister once she got Harvest Moon: a New Life. So the default memory card got pretty crowded after a while. When they came out with the 256 block card I bought one of those and filled it with crappily drawn F-Zero GX skins, which the game let you paint yourself. And what's up with "blocks"? Was there some aversion to using "bytes" back then, like it would confuse the public? I never could make sense of that.
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Post by toei on Nov 19, 2018 21:36:34 GMT -5
I didn't know save batteries were a thing early on; I figured RPGs let you save cause you needed to, and action games didn't cause you didn't. Some games had passwords, but even in the early '90s, that seemed incredibly archaic to me (when you're 7, "incredibly archaic" is probably anything from more than 5 years ago). I was probably around 11 or 12 when I learned of their existence; I had a copy of D&D: Eternal Sun on the Genesis whose save function didn't work, and I learned it was because the battery had died.
Later on I had a Saturn, so I was surprised that other then-modern consoles didn't let you save on the console itself, but memory cards were easy to come by, so it wasn't a big deal.
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Post by Sarge on Nov 19, 2018 23:01:11 GMT -5
I was a little older (probably around 12) when I learned about how NES carts saved. I bought a copy of Maniac Mansion, but it had something rattling around inside of it. I figured out some way to get the thing open (pretty sure I used a fish dehooker from some cheap Skoal-branded Swiss Army knife), and it was the CR2032 rolling around. I taped it back in place and it worked great. I'm pretty sure I didn't even know what a soldering iron was at that point.
The Saturn approach is both decent enough and obnoxious at the same time. I'm sure if I were playing the system a lot more, it wouldn't be an issue. As it is, I swap the battery out, then it sits dormant for a lot longer than I think and poof! No saves. That's why I back things up to an Action Replay now, though.
As far as N64 games go, most games didn't actually use SRAM. They used EEPROM or Flash, so you really don't have to worry about them conking out unless you're just saving to them constantly. According to a list I found, here are the 12 N64 games that used SRAM+battery saves:
- 1080 Snowboarding - F-Zero X - Harvest Moon 64 - The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time - Major League Baseball featuring Ken Griffey Jr. - Mario Golf - The New Tetris - Ogre Battle 64: Person of Lordly Caliber - Resident Evil 2 - Super Smash Bros. - WCW/NWO Revenge - WWF: Wrestlemania 2000
Speaking of memory cards and "blocks", the original PlayStation does the same thing. That was the first time that I'd had a system where I had to buy a means to save my game. I got Final Fantasy VII for Christmas one year, but couldn't do much with it because I didn't have a card. My Dad got one, and that thing is still kicking to this day, despite being a third-party one. It was a Performance-branded one, single-sided. I've also got a couple of double-sided ones still chugging along. I used one of them for playing Koudelka back in September, actually.
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Post by bonesnapdeez on Nov 20, 2018 7:26:03 GMT -5
I knew what save batteries were very early on, as I was an ardent Nintendo Power reader.
I remember being ticked about the whole PSX memory card business when the console launched. Thought Sony was trying to nickel and dime us. Nintendo didn't need memory cards, so why did the PlayStation? I figured it was possible to just save to a disc and that memory cards were created to extract more money from customers. lol.
I can't even remember the last time I played a game that required a memory card. For fifth gen I gravitate to the Saturn, and when was the last time I talked about playing something 6th+ gen?
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Post by anayo on Nov 20, 2018 8:15:06 GMT -5
I knew what save batteries were very early on, as I was an ardent Nintendo Power reader. I remember being ticked about the whole PSX memory card business when the console launched. Thought Sony was trying to nickel and dime us. Nintendo didn't need memory cards, so why did the PlayStation? I figured it was possible to just save to a disc and that memory cards were created to extract more money from customers. lol. I can't even remember the last time I played a game that required a memory card. For fifth gen I gravitate to the Saturn, and when was the last time I talked about playing something 6th+ gen? I think I was tech savvy enough to understand that optical discs weren't re-writable. However I did resent that PS1 memory cards didn't work on PS2 games. Sony's official reason was that PS2 memory cards had faster data transfer speeds or something, but I thought that was silly. Back then it wasn't like today where you install the game on the hard drive to speed up load times. You'd just load your save file at the title screen and periodically save your progress when necessary. So what if that took a little, longer? I guess with backward compatibility of games and controllers it planted the expectation that older memory cards should be supported too.
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Post by bonesnapdeez on Nov 20, 2018 9:20:24 GMT -5
Anyone else have the Neo Geo memory card? Very handy as it allows you to continue in those AES games that limit credits.
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Post by Ex on Nov 20, 2018 11:03:20 GMT -5
when was the last time I talked about playing something 6th+ gen? You seem to be fond of the Dreamcast. what's up with "blocks"? Was there some aversion to using "bytes" Most people, especially kids, would have been confused about free megabytes versus bytes versus bits, etc. Far simpler to just homogenate the whole concept into "blocks" for the general public. - I can't remember exactly when I learned about save batteries in cartridges, but I know I was very young. Probably nine years old or so. I learned about them while reading a game manual for either a SMS or NES game. I always thought it was amusing that the PS2 game cases come with that memory card holding slot. I don't know if Sony did that because if a player wanted to bring their game over to a friend's house, they could pack the save files in the case too. Or perhaps Sony hoped players would buy memory cards and keep them in each of their games' respective cases to retain the relevant save files, thus selling many more memory cards. Perhaps both. I've never once put a memory card in one of those PS2 case slots. I have never had an issue with managing space on memory cards, or needed a lot of cards. The reason is once I beat a game, I will erase its save blocks. It is extremely rare for me to replay a game that is long enough to need save files, and if I did, I'd start from scratch anyway. I absolutely refuse to use non-OEM memory cards. I learned a hard lesson back in 2000 about that while playing Vagrant Story. I was about halfway through the game, and the third party memory card I was using corrupted my save file. I was a bit upset. Since then I only use OEM memory cards. And when I'm playing a console RPG on a system that uses memory cards, I save my game in separate save slots across two separate memory cards for redundancy.
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Post by Sarge on Nov 20, 2018 11:48:19 GMT -5
I take it back on the NES carts. I knew batteries were in there, I just didn't know what kind. I mean, the label on the back explicitly says so. My first NES game was Zelda II, so I knew from the start I suppose. I'd always thought that maybe it was some sort of rechargeable before I opened a cart, though.
I also made sure to hold reset before powering off. Remember having to do that? (Well, I guess some of us still do that, ha!)
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Post by anayo on Nov 21, 2018 6:47:43 GMT -5
what's up with "blocks"? Was there some aversion to using "bytes" Most people, especially kids, would have been confused about free megabytes versus bytes versus bits, etc. Far simpler to just homogenate the whole concept into "blocks" for the general public. Do you think the iPod had anything to do with raising public awareness of megabytes vs. gigabytes and so forth? I had a PC by age 14, so I knew my hard drive was 120 GB, a DVD held about 4 GB, etc. But I seem to remember "blocks" disappearing after the Apple iPod was marketed as having different models with various gigabyte capacities. I think mine was Pokemon Blue version. I had a copy of that game lose its ability to save and it devastated me. My Dad tried to fix it for me by soldering another battery inside, but it didn't work. He ended up buying me another copy of the game. Did you ever try sharing a small memory card with multiple family members? It would fill up pretty quick. I remember having my own card felt like a big deal and we'd even ask for them for Christmas and Birthday presents.
There was an article the Video Game Critic wrote on his site on the early 2000's complaining about this. In particular he objected to how EA sports games on the PS2 were programmed inefficiently and took up way too much memory card space. He also posed a conspiracy theory that the memory card slots inside the game cases were to coax people into buying a new card for each game. Yeah I'd always get third party ones. The 1st party Gamecube memory cards cost way more and as far as I could tell the only benefit was that they were sleeker and smaller. I wanted to make my teenage income stretch as far as it could though, so I'd buy the bulkier off-brand ones. They still have decade-old files on them.
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Post by bonesnapdeez on Nov 21, 2018 10:40:11 GMT -5
Remember the PSX port of the original Diablo? That beast required 10 memory card blocks.
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