Saving in Video Games

I think I mentioned this a long time ago. It took me a long time to figure out why my saved game in Grand Theft Auto would always start at erratic points. I eventually figured it out: the Xbox 360 has no clock. When you turn it on, it seems to default to 11/22/05 at 7am, or at least, mine does. If you’re connected to the Internet, it will retrieve the time via SNTP. But since I never play online, I didn’t bother running network cable across the room.

It loads the “newest” file, which, in my case, is the save file from whenever I had the Xbox on for the longest. I once played for 43 minutes, so the 7:43am slot comes up first every time.

It occurs to me that this could be fixed pretty easily. Rather than using the time as the key, simply save an integer, and increment it with every save. And then select whatever has the highest integer. Using the clock seems foolish when there is no persistent clock. Rockstar, when will you learn? GTA4 and it’s still a problem?

2 thoughts on “Saving in Video Games

  1. I’d plug in once if you haven’t hooed in to the network for awhile; there have been a few substantial game and Xbox Dashboard updates since 2007. 😛

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *