Monday Tip-Off: Keep Those Old Saves
We’re at midcourt, and the ball is about to go up…it’s Monday Tip-Off! Join me as I begin the week here at the NLSC with my opinions and commentary on basketball gaming topics, as well as tales of the fun I’ve been having on the virtual hardwood. This week, I’m tipping things off with a PSA to hold on to your old saves whenever possible.
I’ve made no secret of the fact that more recently, I’ve preferred to stick with an old favourite – or new favourite old release, as is the case with NBA 2K14 for PS4 – rather than play the latest NBA 2K. It’s not just a matter of liking the gameplay better in older games, though admittedly that is a key factor. To be blunt, I’m tired of grinding and starting over from scratch every year, knowing that I won’t be able to enjoy the fruits of my labour when the servers are shut down. And yes, the use of the word “labour” is deliberate here, because it does end up feeling more like work than play.
And so, I’ve gravitated towards games that hold up well, and I can continue to dust off and play for years to come. Reaching my sixth year in NBA 2K14 MyCAREER is far more rewarding than anything I could achieve in NBA 2K23’s mode, which will one day be inaccessible. Retaining access to my Chicago Bulls Dynasty in NBA Live 06 PC holds far more appeal than any cards that I could collect in NBA 2K23 MyTEAM. With care, I can preserve those experiences and revisit them whenever the mood strikes, which isn’t the case when live service content is involved. However, thanks to a lack of foresight, there are long-lost saves that I’ll never be able to revisit.
If you’re a gamer, you’re familiar with the horrifying tale of lost saves; especially that one “definitive” file that represents your best playthrough. They’re the saves that you sunk countless hours into, unlocking all the cool stuff and getting the best ending. It’s your fastest speedrun, or best time while achieving 100% completion. Maybe it was the file where you finally nailed the character build. In basketball video games, it’s the franchise and career mode saves that ran for multiple seasons. They’re special, and we want to keep them for posterity, particularly if we can continue playing them. Sadly, they’re long gone. Though the memories remain, we can’t create new ones with them.
In some of those tales of lost saves, our heartbreak is caused by technical issues, such as glitches that soft lock the game so that we cannot win or advance, or completely corrupt a file so that it can’t be loaded at all. Problems with storage devices might also damage or wipe files at random, and everything will be lost if they fail unexpectedly. And then, there are losses that are self-inflicted. Accidentally and carelessly saving over, or deleting a file. Messing around and not realising that autosave was enabled. Intentionally deleting a file because you believed you were done with it, and needed the save slot. And yes, failing to keep any backups, just in case of these mishaps.
It’s tough to say which is worse: losing saves due to circumstances beyond your control, or because of your own carelessness. Technical issues aren’t your fault, but you may have been able to take precautions to avoid them. Careless deletion is all on you, but it’s a mistake that you can own rather than the software and hardware letting you down. Having experienced both scenarios, I’d have to say that neither is a lot of fun! I might have to give the nod to causing the loss myself though, as it’s been the more common cause of my lost saves. It’s not a serious enough matter to truly call it a deep regret – let’s keep things in perspective here – but as a gamer, it’s still a bummer.
Looking back, when it comes to basketball video games, I’ve probably lost more saves than I’ve preserved; at least up until NBA Live 06. Of course, not all of them were particularly important or consequential. There are season and franchise games that I abandoned fairly early on for one reason or another, and probably wouldn’t want to revisit now. Even if I did, it wouldn’t take much effort to re-create the scenario and start over. We want to keep the old saves that are important to us, and quite frankly, not all of them are. However, I can think of a number of old saves that I do wish I still had, even if I was more or less done with them, and unlikely to pick them up again.
I’m going to go right back to the 90s for my first example. I was playing through a Season in NBA Live 96 PC using my own 1998 roster update. As is my preference, I was playing every single game on twelve minute quarters. I was backing up that file religiously to a floppy disk, and even took it and my NBA Live 96 CD-ROM on vacation, where I was able to continue playing my Season using my former sister-in-law’s parents’ PC! I reached the Playoffs, but before I could complete my version of The Last Dance, we encountered a hard drive crash. Somewhere between getting that PC fixed and the family buying a new one, that disk and the Season file were lost.
That one can be chalked up to a mixture of technical woes and carelessness. It’s the same story with my co-op season with my cousin Clinton in NBA Live 95, in which we replayed the 1995 campaign with the Houston Rockets a few years after the fact. It was lost in the same hard drive crash, and while I probably did back it up to floppy disk at some point, that copy was also misplaced. I do have mementos of both of those Seasons thanks to recaps and stats that I posted on my old website – the NBA Live Domain – but it’d be great to still have the saves, too. It’d be awesome if I could fire them up to continue the fun, and possibly create content based around them as well.
Speaking of saves that I played with my cousin, we had a memorable NBA Live 2000 PC Franchise with the Portland Trail Blazers. Before he came down for the holidays, I called him up and we planned it out, me in front of the PC making the trades that we discussed. It meant that we hit the ground running when he arrived, and since we’d opted for a 28-game season with a single elimination format for the Playoffs, we went the distance and won the championship before school started back. The early morning celebration with microwave popcorn is a treasured memory, and we don’t need the file to reminisce about that. Of course, there’s still a sense of loss in no longer having it.
I don’t recall exactly how that one disappeared, or our NBA Live 2001 Franchise that we managed to play through to the All-Star Weekend. As with some of my other saves that I lost around that time, I’m assuming it was the result of reinstalling the game, accidentally overwriting the save folder with a roster mod, or simply believing I was done with a file that I was no longer playing. That last reason is certainly what nuked most of my saves over the next few years. My NBA Live 2002 Franchise with the Sacramento Kings is a great example. I was hooked on that during my last year of high school, but when NBA Live 2003 came out, it ended up on the backburner.
As I’ve discussed before, I was in the final stretch of the regular season in that Kings Franchise, so it’s a real shame I didn’t have the foresight to consider I might one day decide to finish it. There’s extremely finite space on an 8 MB PlayStation 2 memory card though, and as my collection grew, tough decisions had to be made. I would later get some semblance of closure by re-creating that Franchise, but while that exercise was fun, it wasn’t truly the same as being able to load up the original save. The same goes for my NBA Live 2004 Bulls Dynasty. That’s another one that was lost when I had to purge the saves I was no longer playing from my rapidly filling memory card.
It was a slightly different scenario with that file, though. I did trade in my original copy of NBA Live 2004 PS2, figuring that I would just keep playing the PC version; I’d only started my Dynasty on PS2 because that version came out first and I got hooked. I didn’t envision that I would become a retro gamer, or a collector, or that I’d be creating content beyond roster mods on PC. At the time, turning a game that I was no longer playing into a bit of extra money was the higher priority. I’d already found satisfaction and closure in that Dynasty game, and maintained a story topic for it. I couldn’t know that I’d have any interest in playing it again over a decade later.
Those are the saves that I’m most disappointed to have lost, that I could’ve feasibly kept. Obviously, it’s a shame that online requirements have locked me out of some MyCAREER files, and made it impossible to convert them to offline saves at this juncture. I’ve also lost my original save data for games such as NBA Jam Tournament Edition PC, and the first NBA Street on PS2, though titles like that are always fun to play through again; it’s just the inconvenience of not having everything unlocked for an exhibition game. With NBA Street, much like NBA Live 2004, I wiped that data after trading in my original copy back when I was short on cash and done with it.
There are a couple of other saves I wish I kept, though not as keenly as the ones that I’ve mentioned so far. I started a Bulls Dynasty in NBA Live 2005 that didn’t get too far, for reasons that I can’t remember. Indeed, it seems very odd, as I’m both a big fan of NBA Live 2005 and came to love that 2005 Bulls squad. I also played about half of the first season of a Minnesota Timberwolves Franchise in NBA Live 2003 that I gave up on when I grew weary of the gameplay. I don’t blame myself for that one, but now that I can better appreciate NBA Live 2003 for what it is, it’d be fun to have that Franchise save to play whenever I feel like revisiting it for an extended session.
While I obviously wouldn’t put them in the same category as photos and heirlooms – again, let’s keep this in perspective – as far as video games are concerned, saves are irreplaceable mementos. They can be backed up and copied in a way that makes them easier to preserve than physical possessions, but they can also be lost in a snap. When data storage solutions were smaller, or our collections less permanent, we were more likely to wipe files we believed we didn’t need. As I mentioned, hardware could also be volatile, and software bugs could catch us off guard. It’s ultimately the saves that we erase ourselves that hurt the most though, as it’s a decision we’ve come to regret.
It’s hardly a profound observation to state that so often, we don’t truly appreciate what we had until it’s gone. As I discussed back in March, that can apply to entire games, let alone old saves. From a societal standpoint, there are many things that we cast aside in favour of the new without giving a thought to preservation, from video games to recordings of early TV broadcasts. I’d like to think that we’re getting better about that, converting physical media to digital libraries, making games playable on modern hardware through remakes and emulation, and keeping accurate records of important matters. As a society, we’ve felt the sting of significant things being lost to time.
On a personal level, it’s something that we probably have to learn through mistakes. Maybe it’s that favourite toy we discarded because we were too old for it, or because a shiny new one came along; then again, my generation had Toy Story, so the lesson was right there in front of us! It could be that treasured possession or memento that you wish you could still hold, if only one last time. You might wish you could thumb through old magazines that you used to collect, but threw out or gave away to clear out the clutter. And yes, sometimes its old video game saves that would be fun to play again, or just fire up occasionally to reflect upon your handiwork and achievements.
The advantage that video games have here is that you can replay them, finishing them and creating new memories and saves that you’re more careful with this time around. It may not be quite the same though, and you’ll have still lost a tangible reminder of fun times and accomplishment. Let it be a lesson, though. Invest in additional memory cards and other storage devices, and make those backups. Save a second copy of a file whenever possible, and back it up, too. Think hard before you delete any data, even if you’re not sure you’ll ever play a game again. Hours of fun, and the potential for even more fun, can be gone forever in an instant. Take it from me: keep those old saves!
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