GeekNights 070313 - Saving Your Game

Rym

Tonight on GeekNights, we discuss game saves, passwords, and all that business. In the news, we're still lacking Internet access at home, so we just go off on a few tangents instead.

wildance4gil

The tangent about bums reminded me of this

HMTKSteve

Save games did indeed change the gaming world.

I think it changed the gaming world for the better in that long games, such as the original Zelda, could not exist without a mechanism in place to stop the game while you live your life.

Password games were a pain though...

arbok

Would have been good if you could have talked about Diablo 2.

In D2 it was possible to have a normal character (where you were resurrected after you died) and a hardcore character (where the character would get eliminated permanently) and you'd have to start again.

RainbowRaven

I wrote a long post in the thread about parents playing video games. Before there was such a thing as saving games, I had to endure my brother and mother playing Super Mario and Super Mario 3 over and over and over until my mom beat both. It would be hours upon hours... even a whole day. I hadn't completely embraced video games to the extent that I was willing to give up TV time yet. LoL, when TV meant something... I tolerated Super Mario 3 more than Super Mario because it was a little different and the colors more vivid.

My brother (younger btw) would freak out when my mother put the game on pause and went to do something because he thought something horrible would happen. He used to be such a scaredy cat crybaby.

Speaking of codes, do you guys remember Game Genie?

This also reminds me of my brother's and my first experience with Playstation playing FFVII. We didn't know what memory cards were or that we would need them. Nintendo had always been handy about letting you save your game on the cartridge. So with FFVII we simply played it up until a certain point (after falling into the church, halfway trying to find our way back home, right before that sector where Cloud had to dress as a girl) and when it was time for bed or something, we had to turn it off. After getting fed up with doing that 5 or 10 times, we sought out a 2 red memory cards and actually progressed in the game.

J.Sharp

Wow. I thought I was the only person who remembered playing Mad Maze on Really Old Prodigy.

Frank

Following the Old Episode tweet for this episode, I decided to give it a listen; and so I'm performing some necromancy upon this three-year-old thread.

Like Mr. Sharp, I too was reminded of my youth on 2400-baud Prodigy, playing MadMaze, and mapping the whole thing out on graph paper. Alas, I never got all the way through; I reached the invisible wall maze, and then either the service changed form and it was no longer accessible, or we jumped to another garden (Compuserve, I believe). My completionist instinct was thus unsatisfied until about late 2007-early 2008, when I discovered that MadMaze had been recreated in globally-accessible-internet form (since 2001, apparently).
For your right-angle turning pleasure, it's at:
http://pages.prodigy.net/rdbrownmsb/MadMaze2/
Unfortunately, it requires IE 5 or better. I've attempted with user-agent spoofed Firefox, and had no luck there.

Apreche

For your right-angle turning pleasure, it's at:
http://pages.prodigy.net/rdbrownmsb/MadMaze2/
Unfortunately, it requires IE 5 or better. I've attempted with user-agent spoofed Firefox, and had no luck there.

Holee shit.