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Raining On My Parade
Jason Trent, Associate Writer
March 8, 2010
I'm not sure I believe in a video game god, but if he's out there, there's a commandment that is broken far too often: thou shalt not hide the option to continue your game. When I start up a game, I want to keep hitting A or X or start, and I want to get to the point I left off at. I don't want to wade through intro videos and developer logos only to have to find the continue option to move forward. When I get to the main menu, I should have the continue option right there as the first thing on the menu. This brings me to my latest gripe. Due to a small (ok, I admit it was pretty big) oversight and a little bit of preoccupation, I managed to overwrite my Heavy Rain game save while trying to continue my game.
So what happened you ask? My wife was talking and talking and talking: something she likes to do when I come home from work. I know. It's silly. Anyways, I was a little distracted trying to come up with ideas for this week's dinner menu, so, as I often do, I booted up my game and mashed the start and X buttons trying to get to my last save point. Rather than a continue option, I landed on the new game option, and, in my food induced craze, hit that rather than realizing that it was not the continue option. The game then asked me to select which game save I'd like to load from (or so I thought), and finally asked me if I really wanted to load that save (there may have been a warning somewhere in there about overwriting my game... it all happened so fast). Just like that, my game save was gone, and I had the pleasure of starting Heavy Rain from scratch. It all seems so senseless. If only it could have been prevented with a little more thought on the developer's part.
Thanks to my error, I wound up losing several hours of time spent on Heavy Rain. Those of you who have played a bit know that these beginning sections are exceptionally more mundane than those found later in the game. They were moments that I would have preferred to not have to re-live. Here I was wanting ever so much to pick up where I left off in this deep and involving story, and instead of moving on with that story, I had to go through this game's version of a beginning game tutorial. Let's face it. Brushing your teeth, setting the table, and staring at nude man's butt isn't nearly as awesome as tracking down a killer.
I don't actually blame Quantic Dream for my loss, but still, I think that there could have been a bit more care put into designing this game's menu. I know I'm a moron, but still, there are conventions about this kind of thing. There's an unwritten rule (and if there's not there certainly should be) that you, as a developer, should never ever ever put a new game option above the continue option on a menu. Never! If you wanted to be real progressive about the game continuing process, you'd have an option to allow the game to auto continue your last save anytime the game is started: an option I first recall being used in Silent Hill 2. It's not a new idea; it's just a great one that isn't used nearly enough.
They say that when it rains, it pours. I guess that's true. I would have been preferred to be on the trail of the Origami Killer than the game save killer. Isn't it fitting that Heavy Rain was the game that rained on my parade? Alright, enough with the puns. I've since completed the game, and loved it a great deal, but this little bump in the road was enough to frustrate me quite a bit. If someone out there is listening, I'm pleading with you, the developers, please place the continue option in the right place. After all, there are stupid people out there who rely on you to make smart choices for us.
