"Saving to Slot A"

[weresheep]

Why is it that most games seem incapable of using Slot B?

I have two Official 251 memcards for my PAL GameCube. That gives me a fair amount of total storage and should reduce the amount of memcard swapping between games. Any yet, so many games seem to be unaware of Slot B's existence. Even first party games are not immune to this problem (see Animal Crossing). I now have the situation where the memcard in Slot A is almost full and the one in Slot B is almost empty. It is going to get to the stage quite soon where I will be foced to swap cards over despite have plenty of free space. Damn it!

Is it really that hard to ask the user where they'd like to save their game to? And to be able to check both slots for saved data (grrr @ Animal Crossing)?! Seems to me this is pretty basic usability stuff. If you're not going to use it then just remove the second Slot from the front of the machine, at least that way you can reduce the manufacturing cost a tad.

Obviously the Xbox doesn't have this problem (I'm assuming no one uses memcards for the Xbox) , but are PS/PS2 games as bad as this? What about the Dreamcast (I only have 1 VMU so I don't know).

So, um, anyone else annoyed about this or is it just me?

-weresheep

[razu]

Most failed submissions are down to memory card type stuff. So the simpler you can make the system the less likely you'll fail.

[Alastair]

I've got 5 DC VMU's and I find most games pretty good at letting you choose where to save and also reading from all slots when loading.
However you need to have lots of controllers plugged in to access them all (espesh with rumble packs) so if you want to be tidy you're gonna have to swap lots still ft:

[Flabio]

Most failed submissions are down to memory card type stuff. So the simpler you can make the system the less likely you'll fail.

Bang on. Memory card stuff is a git to code, its not like writing to a disc.

Its not much of an excuse, but it is the reason.

[Kubrick]

Hopefully the new card that's coming soon (Memory Card 1091) will be big enough to solve the "problem" of having to swap memory cards.

I swap my cards all the time tbh - I've split my 251s alphabetically - One has the files for games A-P, and R-Z is on the other.

[weresheep]

I can understand it being harder to code for than say a HD, but I mean come on, we're talking basics here. I would have thought Nintendo would have supplied a library abstracting read/writes to memcards. If not, surely it would be worth it for a developer to write one for use with all their games? Ah well.

Kubrick:

I didn't know about the Memory Card 1091. Sounds good. Except for the games that wont allow you to copy/move save files (Animal Crossing, again ft: ).

Yeah, sorting alphabetically is a good idea, but I just wanted to have access to all my saves at all times. To be able to pop in any game disk and not worry about the memcard. Poo.

-weresheep

[superkully]

Why would you want to save Animal Crossing to another Memory Card? - The world exists on one card.

I prefer games not asking whether you want to save to A or B every time, it's annoying me in Ring of Red when I just want to save and bugger off but have to wait while it checks A and then B before asking me where to save.

[Kubrick]

Memory Card 1091

[Papercut]

Why would you want to save Animal Crossing to another Memory Card? - The world exists on one card.

Animal Crossing is a special case too, you can load two games at once and visit other people's villages.

Not being able to copy an Animal Crossing game file is deliberate, it stops you making a back up so you can't retry events.

If you have a bba, PSO and a PC you can copy files around however you like:

http://ntsc-uk.domino.org/viewtopic.php?t=20295

[Magnakai]

Animal Crossing DOES let you load your game off a card in the second memory card slot. Mind you, I don't have a town in the card in Slot A, so maybe that's the key.

[SharkAttack]

I know what you mean about Slot B. I hate the fact I have to waste 5 seconds swapping memory cards.

[weresheep]

Perhaps I am not explaining myself very well.

I do not want a game to continually pester me about where it should save to. However, I see no reason why the first time you save a game it doesn't ask you to select which memory card to use and then to use that memory card for the rest of the session. Then, next time you fire up the game and choose the load option, it presents you with a simple interface allowing you to navigate to where ever you saved to. Some games manage this no problem, Viewtiful Joe does if I remember correctly.

Basically, by having two 251 memory cards I was wanting to treat my GameCube the same as my Xbox. No matter what game I loaded the relavent data would already be there. Is that such a weird idea? Unfortunatly due to some games only supporting the first slot this seems problematic at best.

Magnakai:
Fair enough, all I know is when I first loaded it up it automatically saved to Slot A without asking me. I didn't have my AC card in Slot A.

SharkAttack:
Yes, it may only take a couple of seconds to swap a memory card around but why should I have to do it just becuase some games can't get a simple thing like loading and saving correct (in my view)?

Don't get me wrong, I know this is not that big a deal. It just ticks me off a little, especially when some games do work fine.

-weresheep

[Brats]

What cheeses me off more nowadays are games that don't have an auto-save feature on them that really should. I played about 2 hours on Sega GT Online and switched it off thinking it would have automatically saved my game. No chance.

And what about games where the auto save is defaulted to off? What's that all about then?

[JibberX]

Tell you what really really pisses me off and that's the grusome saving times on Winning Eleven 7 (i), God knows how transfering bits and bytes via a solid hardware connection can take so bloody long! It's not like its burning a DVD or anything, its only freaking a meg too, is it dialing to it via a 28.8k modem or something?

[Papercut]

memory card writing is relatively slow, and WE7 probably needs to compress it's save data too.