I’m what you can safely call a hardcore gamer. My stretch with gaming goes a long way, starting from a measly Atari computer dad bought me from abroad, migrating to PC gaming, and eventually shifting to the world of consoles leaving behind PC gaming forever. I have owned a little less than half a dozen gaming consoles, played on others at friends’ places. The most games I’ve ever played on a single console would have to be Sony’s PlayStation. It was the first PlayStation that came out. The sheer amount of games I played on it and clocked is just sheer. I couldn’t remember how many even if I forced myself to.
When younger brother sold our PlayStation 2 to buy an acoustic guitar to further his interest in music, my gaming world came to an abrupt halt. For a while after that, I didn’t really play games. It was well after I had started earning that I finally decided to revive my former, dormant self, and went out to buy the XBOX 360. To date, it is the console I have been happily playing games away. And I love it.
A week or so ago, I updated the firmware on the XBOX to the latest one available and got my hands to half a dozen games. Some that I’d care to name are: Batman Arkham City, Gears Of Wars 3, Skyrim, and Fifa 2012. Of particular interest to me was Batman Arkham City. It was one game I had been eagerly anticipating and looking forward to playing.
Half an hour into the game, I instantly fell in love with it. Everything about it. The gameplay in particular reminded me that of Assassin’s Creed 2, another game I thoroughly enjoyed playing. I was also very happy to learn that the game featured a very long story line. I saw myself having fun for a while with this game.
Until something hideous happened. It went on like this. I had the game installed on the hard-disk, so as to be able to preserve the lens on the XBOX. When I first ran the game, I decided to store saved game progress on the hard-disk as well. It all went fine. Until I had to take my XBOX over to a friend’s house for a game night. There we had to remove Batman from the hard-disk to make room for another game. I suspected deleting the game might also remove the saved progress on the disk, but on the assurances of friends, I took the bullet. The next day when I sat about playing Batman at home, I was taken aback to find that my saved progress on the game was gone. Zilch. Poof. There was nothing, as though there had never been anything. I felt incredibly sad. I blamed losing saved progress on the process on the deletion of the game from the disk–though, logically such a blame didn’t make sense.
Dejectedly, I sat about playing the game from the start, this time making sure to save progress on the memory card. I played over a couple of days, reached where I had left off, and moved ahed, happy with my progress.
This morning when I ran the game, I felt the exact same horror I did last week. The saved progress was gone again. It was nowhere to be found on the memory card. I searched everywhere, to no avail. I didn’t know what happened that could have caused it this time around. I yanked out the memory card and slid it into the second memory bay. Nothing. It was gone, without a trace. I felt betrayed. I let the game linger on the start screen, contemplating whether I should start over again. I couldn’t make up my mind.
And then on a whim, I ran a search on google to see if I could find any information on this erratic behaviour. Voila, I did. Many others on XBOX had reported similar issues as well as their resentment over them. This is the search I ran.
As far as I bothered to sift through piles of posts on forums and articles over the web, I couldn’t find any resolution for the problem. If anything it helped me come to a temporary decision: to hold off on playing the game again until a workable solution is found. Holding off isn’t something easy to do. It is such an awesome game, and I so much want to play it through the end. Oh well, off to play Skyrim!
Libel 