Adventure Gamers - Forums

diego - 02 January 2013 02:58 PM

Bastich, can you tell which game/s left the strongest impression on you and why? Thanks!

Ignoring the obvious classics I replayed (Tex Murphy, Gabriel Knight, etc) as I don’t think anyone needs me to retread such ground, there were definitely some games that left some strong impressions on me. Eternal Darkness is a game I will remember until the day I die for instance.

I’ve always been a PC gamer and have never really followed console games at all so I’m pretty ignorant about them. Only relatively recently have I started playing all the exclusive classics I have missed from neglecting those platforms. It’s for that reason that the following events occurred the way they did as I was utterly clueless about this game.

I had been playing this game for about 15, maybe even 16 hours and knew I had to be getting near the end of the game and pulled up the menu to save my game, something I had done many many times without thinking. When I selected the option to save, a message popped up that said “Delete saved games?” I simply thought I had mistakenly hit a wrong button or something and pressed NO.

A progress bar popped up on my screen that said “Deleting saved games” and started counting down to zero. I stared at the screen, frozen in sheer terror for about half a second, and then I FREAKED!!! I was sitting in a bean bag chair with my feet up so I was utterly unable to move quickly, but I leapt up as quickly as I could and literally dived for my keyboard to try and kill the emulator before all my saves were gone. By the time I got there the progress bar had finished its countdown to 0% and my saves were gone.

I was completely devastated. The last time I felt like that was the day I bought my first new car and got in an accident on the way home from the dealership. Honestly, I can’t even describe how I felt. I was in complete shock. All those hours of effort… GONE!. I felt utterly drained. I could barely even comprehend what had happened. I began wondering if it was even worth it to start over from the beginning. Maybe I should just watch the ending on youtube and call it a day?

Then the screen flickered or something, the delete message disappeared and the game LITERALLY laughed at me. At first I was just confused. Then I saw that my saved games were still there and I realized that I had just been the victim of one of the most epic pranks ever. Those evil BASTARDS!!!

I was so strongly affected by this that I shut off my computer and went for a 45 minute walk outside to get over what had been done to me. It wasn’t possible for me to continue playing at that point. I must of looked rather interesting though, walking down the street shaking my head and giggling out loud.

Even though this was a joke, I’ve taken the threat so seriously that I actually back up my saved games every couple hours while I play games now just in case a hard drive dies or something.

I could face zombies, vampires, demons, or even Cthulhu himself risen from R’lyeh once again, but I cannot come to grips with the inimitable horror of losing my saved games.