I started to post this as a question, but I think it’s turning into a mini-rant
I bought my wife Harvest Moon: Tree of Tranquility for Valentines Day. She loves these kind of games (Animal Crossing, Rune Factory, etc.). She played it for a while today and then told our kids they could each create a file of their own (they love these kinds of games too).
So the first two kids start new games and play for a while, and then my youngest wants to start a game. Sorry, no can do. The game only has three save slots.
Huh? Three save slots? Are you kidding me? It’s not 1989 anymore. This is the whatever-generation video game console we’re talking about. We should be able to have 50 save files if we want.
This is a step backward, not a step forward. Hell, on our old Gamecube or Playstation, we could have as many saved games as we wanted, limited only by the number of memory cards we had. But the Wii doesn’t use memory cards – the games are saved right to the system. So you’re stuck with whatever number the game limits you to. Come on, Natsume, this is ridiculous.
I thought we could get around this somehow with an SD card, since the Wii helpfully includes a SD card slot. But no, that’s not how it works. You can copy a save file to the SD card. Big whoop. So what are we suppossed to do, delete the save data from the Wii and load from a different SD card each time my 9 year old daughter wants to play? And then delete that file from the Wii and re-load again when my wife plays? With three kids in the house, that’s a sure-fire way to get someone’s umpteen-hours of farming and mining deleted forever.
So I guess my question is: is there a way around this? Or do I just have to stew for a while about how stupid it is? (Cuz I’m pretty good at stewing about stupid things…)
Sounds like bad game design, not neccessarily the console’s fault. Not altogether that rare, unfortunately. Mortal Kombat: Armaggeddon, for example, had a pretty nice custom character creator, but then only let you save one character per profile at a time. Want to make a new one? Delete the old one. And the other profile couldn’t play that character in VS, either. Ridiculous (especially since Soul Calibur 3, which came out earlier, allowed you to save 10 characters per profile and let anyone use them).
For some reason, Nintendo has a habit of this kind of irritant. They, and their 3rd-party game makers, often put in random requirements to force people to buy more stuff or just stop you from doing things for no reason, or limit save slots or some nonsense. I have no idea why.
You realize this makes no sense whatsoever right? If it’s a third-party’s doing (and it is), Nintendo is not in the habit of doing anything. You find this crap in all sorts of different games on every platform. Need I even mentioned Dead Rising?
I mentioned Nintendo specifically, even though it not limited to them. Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles anyone? The multiplyer game that nobody can play on multiplayer?
This one doesn’t make sense any more. Back when they were still making games on cartridges, yeah. “Filled up your save slots? Delete them, or, maybe you could buy another game…” Buy a second game for the Wii? It’s a disc. It won’t add any more space. I really wanted to have a second Animal Crossing town to mess around with; populate it with bizarre characters, mess around with time-travel and whatnot. But, no. One town per console.
I do agree that Nintendo has a habit of making and attracting stupid decisions (and I say this as a life-long fan of the console). Check out this brilliant port of a Nintendo DS game onto the Wii: Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles. I mean, that’s just painful to watch.
I honestly don’t know what goes through developers’ minds, sometimes. I mean, I don’t make games, so I suppose I can’t judge, but still. You’d think they could put a bit more functionality into games for this system.
EDIT: Oh, and I see smiling bandit already mentioned Crystal Chronicles. That game seriously fails on so many levels.
FF Crystal Chronicles is made by Square Eenix; Harvest Moon games are made by Marvelous Interactive. Nintendo (as game developers) have nothing to do with the save schemes (or the alleged crappiness of the porting) in these respective games.
Limited saves are required for Wii & DS games because, despite the Wii’s expandability, the designers have to assume that the audience has the minimum space available to them and design their saves to fit within that (and with the understanding that they shouldn’t count on having the whole space to themselves, either.) Limited saves are a longstanding part of the console experience.
Beyond that, limited save spaces is often a deliberate design choice on the part of designers who prefer to limit a player’s ability to go back try different paths through the game in the interest of heightening the importance of immediate decisions. I’m not a fan of limited saves implemented for the this reason but many people like it and actively discourage many save slots.
The point of multiple save slots was never to allow everyone in the room their own game.
What to do when your octuplets all want to play the same game at once: The same thing you do when they all want to play some other game or read that one book or wear a special pair of shoes or ride the green trike or sit in the favorite chair or use the one vcr.
I actually disagree that this has nothing to do with Nintendo.
Nintendo designed the console with only 512meg, of which 256MB can be used for saves (the other being reserved for downloaded stuff, like new channels, VC games, etc). One would assume*, then, that given their limited memory pool, Nintendo has implemented some sort of limited save memory alloted per game. A game like Animal Crossing or Harvest Moon would take a lot more memory per save then a game like mario, as there are many more variables in play.
*and I stress that this is an assumption
Nintendo is reknowned for making bad decisions when it comes to consoles. And, to be honest, the wii has scared me off Nintendo for awhile. They just don’t really focus on people like me any more (you know, the people who’ve supported them since back in the NES days).
Oh, and don’t even get me started on the shit that is SquareEnix these days
I don’t have a 360 or a PS3. Do either of these consoles provide unlimited game slots? I don’t believe so (although I could be wrong.) In fact, the xbox 360 includes a basic model that also makes do with 256mb internal video just like the Wii.
I do have a PS2 and the assortment of PS2 memory cards. That console doesn’t have built in memory at all. All of the games I’ve played on it have limited save options even though, theoretically, one could use multiple memory cards.
Nintendo didn’t invent limited console save slots and the Wii is not the first console with limited save slots. It’s a little silly to blame them for something that’s been SOP for the last fifteen years.
As for the idea that the Wii is symptomatic of Nintendo’s bad design habits - I think we all know the sounds of someone eating sour grapes.
as far as I know, most x360 games do not have a limited number of save slots, and if they do it’s well above 10. The only game I can think of that limits your saves is Fable 2, and this was a design choice (albeit one that has come under heavy criticism)
the xbox memory card (what you need if you don’t have a hard drive and you want to save games) is 512 megs, which is twice the memory Nintendo provides for saves.
The Wii is most certainly symptomatic of some bad design choices. They’ve come under fire for not allowing you to use SD cards as memory cards, an issue they’re supposedly addressing by allowing you to save to and load from SD cards, which they should have done in the first place. Sour grapes or no, it was a dumb decision. SO whereas in a mem card system one can have multiple saves on multiple memory cards to get around the issue, you can’t do that on the Wii
Now just because something was SOP fifteen years ago due to memory limitations doesn’t mean it should be SOP now that such limitations are no longer there. The other consoles have moved on, so should nintendo. In fact when they went to disc-based medium and the use of mem cards (instead of saving directly onto a cartridge) you could get around the issue as I mentioned above. The Gamecube allowed fo rthis, the Wii does not.
I believe Nintendo’s decision to go with a solid state flash rom instead of a standard hard drive (which the x360 and ps3 both use) was a bad decision because they limited their memory capacity with a drive that is more expensive (or perhaps comparably priced) to the much larger capacity drives of the other systems, which has crippled the downloadable content abilities of many of their games. Perfect example of this being games like Rock Band/Guitar Hero, which have vastly greater libraries of songs on the other systems. The fact that it also limits saves is just another reason.
I like my wii, don’t get me wrong, I just never play the thing any more (mostly due to the sheer amounts of shovelware produced by third party companies) and when I do it’s exclusively smash bros. Nintendo still makes great games, for the most part, they just can’t run the console by themselves. They were nailed pretty hard by this back in the n64 days when they refused to change their licensing strategy and still charged a lot of money for third party devs to release a game on a Nintendo console, whereas Sony charged very little for the rights to release on the psx. Most third party companies jumped ship. They remedied a lot of that with the gamecube, but the limited space on their discs (2.8 or so gigs as opposed to the standard DVDs used by the ps2/x360 of 4.4 gig capacity) annoyed many devs and Nintendo got stuck with the weakest versions of multi-platform games. Now it’s not a game memory issue so much as it’s a combination of lack of console memory combined with generally weaker power. When cross-platform games come out now, wii games are closer to the ps2 versions than x360/ps3 versions. Star Wars Force Unleashed is a prime example of this
The thing is, though – the Wii is marketed as this great fun-for-the-whole-family piece of hardware. As long as your family only has three people in it, then Harvest Moon is great. More than three people and someone is going to get left out. And its completely different than having kids have to take turns with the TV or a bike or whatever. You can’t take turns with this game beyond the third save slot, unless a turn is defined as “Don’t worry, Little Susie, you can have a turn when your brother is done with his save slot – you know, maybe sometime next year.”
I guess what I’m ticked about is that limited saves slots were all fine and dandy on the Gamecube when you could just grab another memory card. Heck on the PS2, my son and I had so many save files for Baldurs Gate Dark Alliance and Champions or Norrath that we probably had 5 or 6 different memory cards in rotation at any one time. Now, a whole console generation later, we’re back where we were in the cartridge days. It’s stupid.
I have an SD card and the machine has an SD slot. The fact that I can’t use it in a way that makes sense is a giant leap backward in flexibility.
I like the Wii just fine, and I’m not really mad at Nintendo here. That’s why I called out Natsume in my OP. I just think limiting the number of saves in 2009 is a joke.
Ok, I take it back…I’m a little ticked at Nintendo as well. Here’s what I want the Wii to do, and I assume this falls on both Nintendo designers and the game designers:
When saving a game, in any game for the Wii, an option should pop up that asks “Do you want to save to the Wii or to the SD card?”
Every game I ever played on the Gamecube, the PS2, and and the PS1 asked a similar question: “Save to memory card in slot 1 or slot 2?”
The fact that Wii doesn’t allow this option is absurd.
The 360 has a login system similar to what Windows uses, and while there may be limited saves under a certain user, they are limited to that user–use another profile and you don’t even have access to those saves, let alone be limited by them.
And while the base model 360 has very little drive space, the next model up has 10GB. And you aren’t limited to onboard memory either–every game I’ve played asks you to what device you want to save to.
The Wii…I can kinda understand the limited save thing, though they really shouldn’t have limited the drive space like that. The Gamecube is where I get really confused, since while you can juggle memory cards, you’re limited to so many saves per card for each game, and not based on available space either. There’s no reason I should be limited to 4 Paper Mario saves on an otherwise blank card.
20gb - unless there’s a secret 10gb harddrive I’ve not seen.
For the PS3, all models have had an internal memory hard drive, the lowest of which is 20gb. The lowest current model in production is 80gb. The largest is 160gb in case you need to…well, I have no idea what you’d use all that space for. I’ve heard the harddrive is easily pulled out and switched with ginormous internal HDs if you need to. I guess if you were using it as a media hub and had something like TVersity time shifting for you. Dunno - I’m not that good with that stuff.