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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Don’t worry, Wattam is still delightfully odd. It follows a little cuboid mayor and his efforts to repopulate a town in the aftermath of a surreal cataclysm. You’ll frolic and clamber about, experimenting with each new resident’s abilities to create ever-larger people explosions (not a metaphor: characters soar into the air and go bang), which bring joy to potential residents and Funomena’s curious sandbox to life. It sounds, and looks, bizarre, but it’s an instantly arresting and entirely charming proposition once you get your hands on the controller. And Takahashi’s right: it really does feel like a happy mix of the best elements of his best-known games.

“You have that really structured time-based gameplay with Katamari, which I think Keita felt was a bit too [constrained]; then there’s the open-ended playspace of Noby Noby Boy, which is kind of Keita’s dream, but for me felt a little unstructured,” Funomena CEO Robin Hunicke explains. “You can play Wattam in the way you would play Noby Noby Boy, or if you want to play it as you would play something more directed, you can. Then in the middle of those two styles is a game where you sometimes play the story, and then sometimes take a break and experiment with the characters… It’s a conscious decision.”

Ironically, that conscious decision has resulted in something that feels dreamlike, though surreal, disparate elements somehow fuse into a whole that makes sense within the context of play. For example, explosions are triggered by a bomb stored under the mayor’s bowler hat, but first you must stack a certain number of characters on top of each other, switching control between those you’d like in the detonation until the swaying tower reaches the requisite number of bodies. Hold down the bomb button at this point and the group will take off in a swirling formation, leaving trails behind them as the skies light up, which encourages yet more residents to move into your town. It’s a manifestation of unrestrained joy – the satisfying culmination of each delightful experiment that preceded it. It feels apt for a game with only a passing interest in traditional design principles.

“I think at the very beginning, we bit off more than we could chew,” Hunicke says. “We tried to write a physical solver that would allow us to have stretchy, bendy attachments between characters, so all the stacks could be really wobbly, because we wanted to get that sensation of Jenga-esque teeter-totting. Then as we iterated on it, and we realised we didn’t need all that power. We just needed to make the characters appealing and childlike. So instead of spending a significant period of time developing that physics system, we invested more time in AI behaviour and animation that allows us to put a lot of character into each person that’s in Wattam.”

They’re a memorable lot. Take the coffee bean: he can run really fast, but also wake up dozing characters who succumb to the Midas-like curse of a lonely pillow who puts to sleep those he touches. The cloud can float around and rain on grass to grow flowers, a bunch of which can be plucked and added to your character list. Then there’s the piece of sushi with the jetpack and the turntable who can start a party anywhere. Mucking about and seeing how each person’s abilities affect those around them is an amusing, open-ended distraction, and some add a puzzle element to creating stacks once you choose to press on with the game’s loose objectives.

There’s still plenty to firm up, but while Funomena is allowing the game the space it needs to evolve naturally, the ideas at the centre of it have remained core to Takahashi’s vision, inspired by watching his children play. “[It’s been] two years, and it’s not finished yet,” he says, “but my concept, my idea, hasn’t changed. It’s very clear, I guess. Maybe [it’s because] it’s so crazy…”

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“The lock screen on my phone right now is Keita and his son playing the game!” says Hunicke. “When he was two years old, they were stacking stuff and playing with wooden blocks, and Keita started doing stuff that was pretty crazy with them, and the kid was laughing and responding really positively. Now he’s four, and he can play this game! So when we finish, he’ll be five, and Keita can say, ‘Hey, I made this for you!’ I think that’s the best thing a parent can give to a child – something that’s really inspired by them.”

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The cool blue glassy curves are pure Sony before you even get to the character artwork, but the latter hammers the point home with the force of a dinosaur-killing space rock. Uncharted, Killzone, God of War, LittleBigPlanet and Infamous all make an appearance in various areas of the site, alongside Metal Gear Rising: Revengance and what looks like it could be Call of Duty.

No word on exactly what form the Gaikai/Sony co-developments will take, but the site’s statement that “Gaikai will help SCE grow their ecosystem, empower developers with new capabilities, dramatically improve the reach of various content and bring breathtaking new entertainment experiences to end-users around the world” definitely adds fuel to the idea (opens in new tab) that Sony games might be heading to non-traditional formats not too far into the future.

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The games will retail for around €19.99, while titles in the list marked with an* will be available to download from PlayStation Store from around €14.99.

The full list is as follows:

1st Party Titles:

Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune*

Resistance Fall of Man

inFAMOUS*

Motorstorm

Heavenly Sword

MAG*

God of War III

LittleBig Planet*

Ratchet & Clank: Tools of Destruction

ModNation Racers*

Sports Champions*

EyePet & Friends

Start The Party!

DanceStar Party!

Medieval Moves*

Move Fitness*

The Fight*

.

3rd Party Titles:

Assassin’s Creed II*

Assassin’s Creed*

Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood*

Far Cry 2*

Prince of Persia*

Driver San Francisco*

Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Vegas 2*

James Cameron’s Avatar: The Game*

Prince of Persia – The Forgotten Sands*

Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood*

Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter 2*

Brothers In Arms: Hell’s Highway

Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X

Deus Ex: Human Revolution*

Tomb Raider: Underworld*

Just Cause 2*

Sniper: Ghost Warrior

Tekken 6

SEGA Mega Drive: Ultimate Collection

Sonic Unleashed

Virtua Fighter 5

Darksiders: Wrath Of War*

Homefront: Ultimate Edition*

Anything in that little lot take your fancy?

Source: PlayStation blog

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