Tell us your greatest game save tragedy!
After a few hours of playing Bioshock: Infinite one evening, culminating in one of those arena-type battles involving riding around on skylines and dealing with mobs of enemies and Handymen, I looked blearily up from my screen and saw it was 2 a.m. I needed to get to bed.
It wasn't that simple, of course. For reasons I still can't comprehend, you can't manually save your game in Bioshock: Infinite (and plenty of other PC games), and I wasn't sure when the last time the game had autosaved. Not wanting to fight that battle a second time, there was only the option to press on until the game decided to save itself for me.
I spent a good five or ten minutes looting every last silver eagle and hot dog from every last corpse in the area. I had Elizabeth pick a lock to allow me into a new zone. I visited vending machines, hoping that acquiring a new items or upgrading my abilities would trigger a save. I searched buildings, looted garbage cans, killed a few more bad guys and relieved them of their birthday cakes and cigarettes. Still, no icon for autosave had appeared on my screen. By now it had been almost a half-hour since I'd decided I didn't want to play anymore, and here I still was, wearily playing and hating every minute of it. Finally, I just quit.
A few days later I booted the game up again and discovered when Bioshock Infinite had autosaved. It was just as I'd killed the very last enemy during that skyline fight. The tedious looting of bodies, the vending machine trips, the fights further down the road, all had to be done again. Adding insult to injury, I'd apparently killed the last enemy while in the process of falling from the skyline into the clouds, and that's where the saved game began, with me falling to my "death." I sat there reloading it again and again, watching myself fall into the abyss over and over. Then I turned the game off, uninstalled it, and have never played it again. A man chooses, after all.
Got a horrible or amusing save-game mishap, tragedy, or anecdote? Let us know in the comments and we'll publish our favorite ones.
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Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.