I remember years ago, reading Atari Age magazine, someone wrote that he left his Atari VCS on while Video Chess was plugged into the cassette slot, but everything else was disconnected. When they put the machine back in the RF adapter, they found that the CPU had moved the parts for both sides. The official answer from Atari was: Hey, if you were playing chess and your opponent would get up and leave you there for a day, would you not move the characters if there is no reason other than boredom?
For the really dedicated player, drastic, long-term breaks are nothing new. When I wrote for Kotaku a decade ago, we asked readers how much longer they left a game on standby. The winner on a country mile was someone who said he had left his PSOne for more than a year in a spinning drive break. As long as the LED burned a ring in the window. In the long history of video games, this story stands out forever.
We’re closing the last year of this generation of consoles, which has made many forward-looking promises about how we would play our favorite games. Many of these guarantees did not work out. Automatic Updates are as much a lie on my PlayStation 4 as they are on my MacOS desktop. “Play as you install it” is also garbage. In particular, for sports video games, the limited form of an installation game – required by the console manufacturers, as the studios would certainly throw this so-called feature in the shit – has led many to believe that their game was broken on the first try.
But suspended games that worked and still work as advertised. If you are racing a long distance race in NASCAR Heat 4 or F1 2019, if you are in the sixth inning of a franchise game in MLB The Show 19, and your partner says it’s time for dinner, you can turn off the console without to reach a safe point without losing anything. It’s helpful for all genres of video games, but for the real-time simulations that sport titles offer to hardcore fans, suspended games are by far the biggest innovation of this generation.
YOU San Diego Studio / Sony Interactive Entertainment
Here’s an example: A few weeks ago, I had an appointment with my financial advisor – yes, I have a financial advisor, I’m a 46-year-old white guy. We talked about buying a vineyard in New Zealand and opening a Tai Chi studio and all the other awesome crap you get at the halfway point of an NFL game. Anyway, I played Wreckfest 10 minutes before the visit, knee deep in a banger series of six races that I could not finish before my appointment. No problem, just take a break, head to the dashboard and head downtown like a well-adjusted person.
All the time I remembered all those games and years before, when I was called to dinner, was asked if I was ready to go out and beg a few more minutes to reach a breakpoint before shaving myself and for a cashier attracted raiser or some other obligatory crap. Sports titles are the longest and most contextual experiences among the most important genres of video games. And yet they have no memory points.
Seriously, think about it. You can not save a Madden NFL 20 game after the first quarter if you make it to the fourth of your own 30 after the start of the second round and need a rework if that stupid idea inevitably fails. If you have triple-double boiling in the third quarter of an NBA 2K20 game, you can not keep it there and return to that point to complete the trick later. You have the option to simulate or restart until the end of the game. With the locked storages that the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One have inaugurated, you can at least leave the game when real life begins, and resume it later when the house is quiet.
My best and recent example: On Thursday afternoon I was invited to a dinner party with friends and my family. I also had the Singapore Grand Prix in my F1 2019 career. No sweat, I drove 17 laps, broke off the game and went out. I have not made it to date (I finished fourth, thank you very much).
When 2020 starts, we will all be consumed by the rumors and speculation about the amazing possibilities the latest hardware will provide. However, I am challenged to envision an idealized feature that could be more helpful to my gaming experience than the “Exposed Game” status.
And although I have no idea about programming or development, I know IT experts who can tell me that maintaining the status of an application costs only one and a half sluts. As we end the Thanksgiving weekend, grab a glass of everything you have for the people who have made this a mainstream console game. It brings us punctually to the dentist, the doctor and the church.
Roster File is Polygon’s news and opinion column at the intersection of sports and video games.
