The humble save point is an endangered species in this day and age. Modern games, not wanting to interrupt or burden players with a need to remember to slide a digital bookmark into their progress, either save your game automatically or let you save whenever you please. The little glowing ports in a storm, where no enemy will attack you, where you can catch a breath before a boss, or you can make some badly needed progress are eternally memorable if done right. These ten are the best and strangest in PlayStation history.

Dead Rising 2

Even in zombie infest Las Vegas, the bathroom is a safe space to collect your thoughts, to mark a moment in time to return to again and again, to consider: how many times have I duct-taped a baseball bat and a weed-whacker together now? Dead Rising 2’s lavatory save points are not only more convenient than the lonely security office couch Frank West had to use in original, they’re also apparently magical, hiding secret shortcuts within. 

Alien: Isolation

Beeping sounds are not comforting in the world of Alien. If you hear an insistent electronic tone, it’s usually coming from a motion tracker indicating precisely close you are to having your face eaten by a hulking two-mouthed bug monster. In Alien: Isolation, though, beeping can also indicate the presence of a blessed save point, a taupe colored electrical panel that represents a few more minutes of survival. Only problem: it seems to take a billion years for for Isolation’s save stations to register Ripley’s key card. Not that there’s any hurry because of face eating bug monsters.

Metal Gear Solid

Snake’s Codec is not a comforting piece of technology. Is it convenient to have a communication device that interacts directly with your ear’s delicate bones? Sure but what if it malfunctions! That’s stressful. It’s also not particularly convenient to have to use it to call a separate person just to save your game. Sure, Mei Ling is a personable and intelligent individual always willing to cough up some philosophical bonmot to ease the pain of extreme espionage, but isn’t there a better way to mark your time at Shadow Moses? Apparently not, because that’s how you have to save there.

Resident Evil

The Umbrella corporation’s boundless capacity for horrifying technological advancement is matched only by its adoration of technological anachronism. If you can build massive, secret underground base’s for developing futuristic, biological military ordinance, why do you need typewriters to save everyone’s progress? They’re not even electric typewriters! You need old fashioned, messy ass ink ribbons to use them. There will be hell to pay if that ink gets all over the jewels and bizarre keys in this inventory full of stuff needed to get through Umbrellas various mansions. At least the music playing in every save room near the typewriters is beautiful.

God of War 3

Kratos is not the kind of guy you’d expect to regularly genuflect. Indeed Kratos’ whole thing is hating gods, killing gods, and yelling about how he’s going to kill all those gods he hates so much. And yet every time he wants to save his progress during some gluttonous revenge rampage, he steps into an altar, gifts from Zeus’ daughter Athena  in God Of War III. Zeus himself is the one who granted the Spartan his progress-stashing ability in the first game. I’m not calling you a sellout or anything Kratos, but if you were for real you wouldn’t need to save your game at all! Just kidding. Your new Viking beard frightens me.

GTA: Vice City

Over the past decade, saving your game in Grand Theft Auto has always been a homey experience. Returning to your base of operations is part of it, but it’s all about where you rest your head permanently. Niko Bellic’s apartments, Michael de Santa’s house of Hollywood strife, etc. Back in Grand Theft Auto Vice City, though,  Tommy Vercetti saved his progress in a seedier, more transient locale. The Ocean View Hotel, with its gaudily decorated bed and a floating cassette icon, is where he needed to save his game. It is simultaneously the least comfortable and the most in GTA history. No one likes to live in a hotel, but at least you can trash the place and someone else will clean it up.

No More Heroes: Heroes’ Paradise

Old Chuck Greene saves his game in the bathroom, but we don’t know that he’s actively relieving himself in there. Guy could just be washing his hands. Tucking his shirt back in. Wiping off a bloodstain or something. Travis Touchdown in No More Heroes? There are no illusions about what this assassin nerd is doing when he saves his game. He walks right into his WC, drops trou, and goes to town to mark down precisely where he is on his journey to becoming the number one hired killer with a lightsaber. It’s ridiculous but I have to admit that I admire his comfort level. You do you, Travis.

Dead Space

When you’ve been trundling through the darkened halls of a crumbling space station infested by monsters made up of the ripped up limbs of the terrible warped crew that used to live there, a little light goes a long way. The welcoming glow of a USG Ishimura save terminal goes the longest in Dead Space. Warm, reassuring and a temporary salvation from all that getting your brains sucked out through your eye socket by some gasping monstrosity. That said it doesn’t quite make sense that there are terminals everywhere for the crew to just randomly record their thoughts on. Is the Ishimura like a giant sci-fi episode of the Real World with confessionals everywhere? Weird, Dead Space. Weird.

Ico

So this creepy, vaguely medieval society is terrified of boys born with horns, right? So they lock them up in a rotting castle ruled over by some inky witch with blue electric magic powers and a legion of living shadows at her command. If everyone doesn’t want the boy to escape with the ghostly magical young girl he just met in the castle, why are there inexplicably comfortable couches all over the place for the two of them to take naps on, thus saving their game? One second, you’re in a crumbling hallway of death. The next, you’re on a windswept terrace with a couch ready for popcorn and binge watching John Hughes movies. This castle and its save points make no sense, Ico.

Tomb Raider (1996)

We’re not saying Lara Croft doesn’t run a high probability of finding precious jewels during her grave robbing adventures in the original Tomb Raider. In fact, it’s all but guaranteed that at some point after she’s shot a T-rex in the face and solved the instant death puzzles of an evil statue with the midas touch, Lara’s going to find some shiny, valuable rocks. But why do all the jewels in Tomb Raider let her save her game? And why are there only a few of them inexplicably scattered around the tombs all over the world? MAGIC JEWELS DON’T SAVE GAMES IN REAL LIFE, TOMB RAIDER!

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No More Heroes: Heroes’ Paradise is a port of the first No More Heroes game, with some bosses from the sequel, Desperate Struggle, thrown in for good measure, and of course Move support since the game was originally designed for the Wii remote. Does this mean you’ll be madly waggling for every swing of protagonist Travis Touchdown’s laser sword attacks? No, and thank the videogame gods for that. Instead we get something that somehow manages to be worse, but the problem stems from the Move controller, but we’ll get to that in a bit. We really lovedthe originalgame for what it was: unique in gameplay, unique in tone, and it was a hardcore gem in the Wii’s less-than-hardcore library. Transplanted over the years and landing on a system with plenty of great brawlers/action games available, it arrives not smelling nearly as fresh as it did three years ago. If you want our full impressions of the Wii version,check it out here, but we’re also going to pull some quotes from that review since it captures the flavor of the game well.

Here’s what we had to say about the aspects that we loved about the game:

Violence, sex, things to see, things to collect, spectacular graphics and even better sound, a sense of humor, a sense of purpose, an insane logic running through every fiber – and enough swearing to get your TV banned by the authorities.

Our hero, Travis Touchdown, is a motel-dwelling, action figure-collecting, anime-obsessing gamer who wins a lightsaber in an online auction and sets off on a mission to become the world’s number one hitman so he can get the girls.

When Travis saves, he saves on the toilet; when his batteries run low, he holds the handle at waist height and cranks on it until it fires back up; when love interest Sylvia bends over, he checks out her behind. He’s a simple man with a simple mission, and his world is infected with insanity -villains include British body-mod fetishist Death Metal; Virtual Boy-wearing Letz Shake; and Destroy Man, with his laser-firing crotch. They are, by far, gaming’s strangest bosses, and every one fights a very different fight.

If that all sounds dandy to you, you’ll probably be able to forgive the weaknesses of the PS3 port. These weaknesses are not insignificant, though, and they did affect our score for the game. The first, and least, of the problems is that the game has received essentially no noteworthy graphical improvement for PS3. On the Wii the low-res textures and empty worlds were a forgivable element that added to the game’s rough charm, but three years later and so much graphical power available, it’s disappointing that the only noticeable difference is slightly crisper edges and a better framerate. The game just does not look like a PS3 game in any shape or form, and as a full retail release we expect a bit more from our investment. We’re not saying we need super-duper graphics to enjoy a game, but when the opportunity to make the game HD-beautiful is completely passed up, it irks us and feels like a pre-cut corner.

The other main problem with the game stems from the Move controller itself, and we recommend not playing with the Move controller at all. It’s another case of the game being translated directly onto the PS3 without any improvement, and without consideration for the new platform. See, it seems that the Move controller’s accelerometer isn’t as sensitive as the Wii remote’s. This affects one specific aspect of gameplay, but it’s an infuriating one. Despite the game avoiding the repetitiveness of constant waggle, it makes a horrible misstep for the sake of goofiness while sacrificing the player’s comfort: as Travis fights dudes with his laser sword, the battery runs down, and in order to recharge the battery, you must shake the controller. The joke is that it makes you look like you’re jerking off – har har – which may amuse you for about a second the first time you realize it. But then you have to shake the goddamn controller during every fight. On the Wii this was already obnoxious, but the Move controller makes it literally painful: you have to shake that thing really, really hard, which means your arm is going to cramp up fast. It’s unbelievable that there’s no option to do it some other way, like mashing a button.

If you switch to the Sixaxis, you still have to shake the controller, but the accelerometer is much more sensitive, meaning you don’t have to act like you’re trying to murder the damn thing. Unfortunately, it also means that some of the special moves involved when you kill enemies are a bit more awkward on the Sixaxis, as they were clearly designedfor swinging a remote. So neither option is ideal, but we recommend going with the Sixaxis, which is annoying to have to recommend if you’ve invested in the Move and the game clearly supports it as a selling point.

It’s really too bad we had to give this version a lower score, but the game just doesn’t live up to the potential of being a superior version of a beloved game. Instead, it’s an inferior version due to the controls, and the graphical improvements are nearly nonexistent. The core game is still very good, but it’s not enough to just dump a three year old game onto the PS3, ignore theglaring problem presented by the Move controller,and call it a day.

Aug 16, 2011

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