Quote:
Originally posted by aleph_null1:
I've thought about the same, but I've also run into "corrupted" save games, i.e. the save just sucked (for some reason beyond my ken) and was unusable.
This only happens at key cusp points in the story, of course [img]graemlins/hehe.gif[/img]
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I haven't had any problems with corrupted saves in W&W
yet (knock on wood...), but I have run into corrupted saves in other games. That's a separate problem from the initialization problem.
With a corrupt saved game, the problem is bad data in the saved game file on the hard drive. Unless you have some way to edit the save and fix the bad data, the only solution is to go back to an earlier save file and delete or overwrite the corrupted one.
With the initialization problem, the save game file on your hard drive is fine: the data only gets scrambled when you load the save game over top of a game in progress. Once you realize a particular game has this problem, the solution is to just exit to the desktop and reload the game before loading a saved game.
(If you load a good save game file and it doesn't initilize properly, then save it, that is one way to cause a corrupted save file on your hard drive. This is easy to do if the initilization problem doesn't show any symptoms right away.)
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The nasty thing about both problems is that they don't always show symptoms right away: if the game
seems to be working fine, you may save corrupted data into more save slots without realizing it,
, and wind up with all your save games corrupted before you notice a problems.
That's why I'm not too fond of games like W&W that give you a very limited number of save game slots: unless you backup your saves outside the game, it's easy to wind up in a mess that can only be solved by starting the game over from scratch.
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With W&W, the
very first time I loaded a saved game from inside the game after I'd been playing a while, the game crashed almost immediately.
That was all the warning I needed to form a habit of first going back to the desktop any time I want to reload a saved game; I don't want more problems down the line.