Nowadays pretty much all games have autosave, and way back in the day games didn't even have a save feature. But somewhere in between... and still with some titles, saves can be a difficult thing.
Take GTA III for example.
It doesn't have autosave.
Nor does it have quicksave. It requires you to drive to a special safe house (save house?) to save your progress, and usually that's fine and dandy. It even feels like a feature, since it adds a sense of realism to the game. Yet there are times, when you due to unforeseen circumstances fail to reach the safe house, you really wish you had visited that house a bit more often! Or there was a feature that saved the game automatically.
It can be a simple thing. A flipped car. A drop in the ocean. An error that causes the game to crash right after a particular mission has been successfully completed...
That last thing happened to me a while back, after I'd been playing for considerable time, far from the safety of a save house, and I left the computer feeling... not so happy.
I played One Piece: Romance Dawn right after and didn't care to save before a boss fight there either, and I lost. WHAT THE HELL. Up until then the fights had been simple, and I didn't think there'd be any risk in skipping that somewhat time-consuming precaution this one time... who knew it would've been an incredible time-saver instead.
It's the little things.
Today however I decided to resolve the issue! With the first game at least. With mods.
CLEO is the best innovation within the GTA world in decades, giving modders an easy to add random hooks and features into the game without actually modifying the source files.
If you know your thing there's no limit to what can be added and achieved here, though most focus on just particular small; missing features, like in this particular case a save feature. There's both Quicksave and Autosave (and a few others) in this one package.
Quicksave just wuldn't work. It crashed the game. I thought it might be a conflict with keys, so I managed to install Sanny Builder (the program you use to build CLEO scripts), load the source code for the mod, bind the commands to new keys aaaaand it crashed on load anyway. I gave up.
Autosave worked better, though the downside is saves only occur after a mission, so I really would like to get the quicksave working again... or better yet: I'd like an autosave script that saves regularly even outside story-based events, like after you've been dozing through the city with a firetruck for three (in-game) days straight trying to break a record.
At such times it's just impossible to get a break and crash for a night in the safe house before resuming your earlier firefighting duties! A checkpoint to which you can transport back in time at your leisure in case the mission goes to hell, or a power surge, or some other devastating game-crashing events occurs, however...
I made it back to the point I'd been at before the crash and called it a day anyway. The other game... I'll catch up with that one later.
Sometimes the best strategy is just not being overconfident, lazy, and stupid. If there's no autosave: save your games.
And while you're at it save your files too!
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