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Hi, Capcom. Glad you could make it. Please have a seat.
We need to talk.
Last night I went over to my friend's house to play the "Lost in Nightmares" downloadable content for Resident Evil 5. We had played about 45 minutes of it the other week, but after reaching a checkpoint, we decided to call it a night and finish the game another day.
Except when we went back to it last night, we couldn't find the save file. We dug into every menu option we could find — nothing. A bit of online research revealed that you can't save your game. Those checkpoints? They're only used when you die. We had to play the entire first half of the DLC over again — only this time, we knew exactly where to go and what to do. The suspense that you worked so hard to build vanished. All because we couldn't save.
Sadly, this isn't an isolated incident when it comes to your games. For example, I recently played Lost Planet 2. In that game, you conveniently broke down chapters into bite-sized missions. But the game doesn't autosave between those missions, only between chapters — chapters that can last 40 minutes or more. I found that one out the hard way, too.
And don't even get me started on Dead Rising.
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Look, I understand you've got design philosophies behind your save decisions. I know you came of age back during the NES years, when computer hard drives were measured in kilobytes and using up three continues meant your game was over.
But here's the thing: Those days are long gone. Hard drives come standard in game systems now. And those kids who feverishly played Ghosts 'N Goblins over and over again to get good enough to make it — barely — to the final stage? We're older now. We have lives. We have girlfriends and wives we want to see, friends we want to spend time with, kids we need to take to practice, and jobs we need to attend to. We have a hundred different things competing for our attention at any given moment. We can't guarantee 45 minutes of our time to a video game.
So do us a favor, Capcom, and space the autosaves in future games no more than 5 minutes apart. Or better yet, let us save from the pause menu whenever we want.
While most of us lead busy lives these days, we still love video games. Don't make it harder for us to enjoy them.