Re: What Have You Been Playing... IN NOVEMBER 2024?

On Mon, 2 Dec 2024 14:17:37 -0800, Justisaur <justisaur@gmail.com>
wrote:

On 12/1/2024 9:40 AM, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:

* Baldurs Gate: Dark Alliance 2 (PS2)
https://www.mobygames.com/game/12011/baldurs-gate-dark-alliance-ii/
In fact, the most annoying part of "Dark Alliance 2" wasn't the fault
of the game itself, but of the underlying architecture; saving on the
PS2 was such a burdensome chore; slow and clunky, I eventually stopped
bothering entirely and instead relied on the emulator's save-state
functionality. It's amazing PS2 users didn't throw their consoles out
the window from it being so frustratingly slow.

>
Ugh.  I don't remember that specifically.  I do remember Crash Bandicoot
(might have been on the nintendo though?) where the load times took
longer than the play time.

It wasn't so much the actual read/write time but the steps to get
there. Open menu. Select save. Select the memory card. Select the
slot. Pick (or confirm) save name. Do you want to save? Then back out
of each step to return to the game. Individually, each step didn't
take a lot of time but combined? It got annoying fast.

(It didn't help that everytime you made a configuration change you had
to go through that rigamarole too. Or whenever the game started up.
And all controlled by a clumsy gamepad)

Or I could just jab the hot-key in the emulator to 'save state' and it
got done almost instantly.

Like I said, it's not really fair for me to blame the game... or even
the console itself. All that was fairly standard for the day and only
now, spoiled by twenty years of advancement, does it seem amazingly
clunky. But even if it was acceptable practice back in 2004, it did
mar what was otherwise a fun experience playing the game.