Your gaming sob story?

[Shmanta Claus]

Soo... as I try to collect myself and calm down I think now's a good time to make my first topic. But, I should start with the story to how I got this inspiration

See, I was just chillin', relaxin' and overall just having a wonderful time playing my newly bought Fire Emblem Awakening on my 3DS. I was actually really enjoying the game, hell, I'd even say it's one of the best games I've played. However, once I arrived to what I think was the final battle (I'm not sure, I haven't beaten the game yet) little ol' me noticed that I didn't pick the right squad for the battle as there were no good match-ups. So, I reset my 3DS and arrived at the main menu. Now, being the picky bastard that I am, I like to play with the Japanese voices as they complement the art alot better than the English voices, but there's a glitch which makes me have to set the voices to English and back to Japanese at each start up in order for it to work. Having done that a thousand times I went and changed it to English, but, I seemed to have some strange stroke of absolute retardation and moved the cursor over to the button next to it...

...the button that erases all of your data.

And suddenly, poof, all those hours, all the relationships I built, all the items and gold I had saved up to that point and everything else FUCKING DESTROYED. This is why I sit here, next to a bucket of my freshly laid tears and cracked walls wondering if anyone has had a moment in gaming similar to mine just now.

So how about it Escapists? What's your gaming sob story?

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(TLDR? - I deleted my Fire Emblem Awakening data by accident.)

 

[tippy2k2]

Oh God...I'm so sorry for your loss. At least the death was quick.

(Welcome to the Escapist. Stay out of the basement and you'll be fine. Remember the "Low Content" rule for it trips the most newbies up but you also get eight chances so you'll be just fine )

As to gaming sob stories, I have been a very lucky person in that I haven't really lost anything. I can recall a handful of times where the saves corrupted but for me, it has always been early (like two hours max) so while inconvenient, it wasn't gut-punching sickening).

I did have myself a panicky moment when someone hacked my Xbox Live account. Luckily, there was only about $10 on it and because I'm a paranoid sum'bithc, I don't have my credit card info saved on my system (I'm not paranoid everyone is out to get me when it's true!). It still sucked and was kind of scary since I've had my actual credit card stolen once before.

I've had three 360's red ring but like WWII, no one got through this generation without at least knowing someone who lost a friend.

 

[Racecarlock]

You ever have autosave corrupt a game even though it's supposed to be done when the symbol fucking dissappears. I had this driver san francisco game with the story complete and HOURS poured into getting a police corvette, a fire truck for rampages, the most expensive lamborghini in the game, and a shelby cobra. Then what happens? AUTOSAVE FUCKS IT. I have since learned to back up my saves.

It also happened with need for speed most wanted, except there it's even more retarded because then it was caused BY IT'S OWN UPDATE. Jesus.

 

[Tuesday Night Fever]

Back in the N64 days I had a memory card that somehow lost all of its stored data. Unfortunately, it was the memory card that I used for a lot of my favorite games. I was simultaneously devastated and pissed. Ever since then I've been a big fan of redundancy. Even now, after I've mostly switched to PC gaming, I'll keep all of my save files backed up on my PC's second hard drive as well as two external hard drives, and I make it a point to update the files at the end of every month.

Other than that... I too lost an X-Box 360 to the red ring of death. I lost it to a software update back in 2008. In fact, both me and my college roommate lost our X-Box 360s to that update on the same day. He ended up sending his in for repairs, whereas I didn't. I still have its corpse in my closet.

 

[The Wykydtron]

Yesterday I accidentally deleted some of my progress in my replay of Ace Attorney: Dual Destinies because the power button on the 3DS is EXACTLY where the Start button was on the old DS. Didn't lose that much but damn was it annoying.

Also pretty sure Fallout: New Vegas crashed on me and lost a few hours of data before but really, who hasn't had an Obsidian game crash and burn on them before?

 

[Elfgore]

I lost all of my progress in multiple VNs and everygame I had on steam when my hard drive broke. I know have to replay the entire Witcher Series, three routes in Katawa Shoujo, one route in My Girlfriend is the President, a good majority of Metro 2033, and all but the last mission of Saints Row IV. Not really happy about that.

I also lost one Xbox to the red ring of death twice. When it broke the first time I send it back and got it "repaired", a week later it broke again.

 

[Prime_Hunter_H01]

The minor one was not understanding how NG+ worked in Metal Gear Rising Revengeance, so I accidentally deleted my save picking new game to try and start fresh because I wanted to replay the main game but my save was on Sam's DLC.

The worst one is why even though I love it I find it hard to replay Final Fantasy VII. A power outage fried the memiry card that I had its save on, and I was in the crater about to go to the end game. Oh I was so pissed, denied the end game, now I have had to restart a lot of games because of bad decision making it super difficult to go on but this one was going well for me. I had gotten all character ultimate weapons, all Level 4 limit Breaks, many other side quests, not a 100% game far from it, and lost, to a power outage that happened while I was saving. And it was one of those random ones not the, oh there is a storm out there may be an outage.

 

[Auron225]

Woah - that is damn unfortunate 0.0 I do remember when I was much younger playing Pokemon Red and being a fair bit through the game. I'm pretty sure it wasn't my first playthrough or anything but I had at least gotten far.

We had a babysitter over since my parents were out one evening and at one point I thought to continue with it. I load it up, hit Continue and find myself all of a sudden back in Pallet town... at my house... without even one Pokemon...

Turns out our monster of a babysitter decided to pick up my gameboy that had been lying around, start a new game, SAVE IT and turn it off again! Until the day I die I will never know what in the hell possessed her to commit such an atrocity. Needless to say I was broken up about it I'm pretty sure I let my parents know and she didn't come back...

Oh, and welcome to the Escapist. Press every red button you find

 

[Angelous Wang]

I don't really remember very many but I'm sure I've had a ton of these moments over the years. A few recent ones I can remember.

I got hit by the Hitman Absolution bug that erases all your save data after I was only like 99% completion.

Both my modded KoTOR and KoTOR 2 have had issues late in the game resulting in me having to give up on around 80% complete breakthroughs (my fault for modding but you can't test for these bug until you get to them).

My first ever playthough of AC1 a single flag literately somehow disappeared from the game (and I still know exactly which one) preventing 100%, had to restart to get 100%.

Dues Ex HR, my stun gun or tranq gun always ends up killing someone and ruining any chances of having a pacifist playthrough.

I had two RRoD's during my 360 years. First one was still under warranty so go a new replacement free, second one was not, so I ended up buying a new arcade and just using my old stuff.

 

[Moloch Sacrifice]

Back in ol' 3rd gen of pokemon, I was in the process of repeatedly trying and failing to capture Groudon. It was also around this time that my younger brother had started to take an interest in pokemon. As the kind, generous elder sibling that I am, I allowed him to play on my copy of pokemon Ruby, on the condition that he play a new game so as to not cause unintentional damage to my own save. Unfortunately, I took it back from him one time and found that, in place of my 60+ hour save file, there was in fact a 3 hour save file with 5 pokemon in the pokedex, in my brother's name. Needless to say, I was furious.

However, there is a silver lining to this story. with the knowledge I had gleaned from the schoolyard in the intervening time, I was able to obtain the Masterball before confronting Groudon (as the Ruby/Sapphire versions prevented re-entry to the place where the Masterball could be found), as well as correcting some of the other decisions I made (choosing Anorith instead of Lileep, deepsea tooth instead of deepsea scale, etc, etc).

 

[Godhead]

I changed computers mid challenge with a friend to see if I could hit max level in Mass Effect in only two play throughs. I had completely forgotten to copy the save files, and just like that 50 hours of doing Every. Single. Side quest. Going to. Every. Single. Planet. It was all gone, and that challenge is still up in the air to be completed.

 

[FPLOON]

Uh... I would use the "Welcome to the Escapist" trope, but after reading your post... I'll just say OT right now...

OT: I can only think of two big ones:

Back when I was bringing my GBA SP to school and showing that off alongside my Game Shark, I ended up loosing them both while going from my advanced math class to my regular science class... Turns out, it was later found by a kid I knew who was notorious for stealing anything he could get his hands on... (i.e. He tried to steal the school janitor's mop and bucket and ended up fighting him "fisticuffs" style, which lead to a couple of cafeteria windows breaking in the process...) The dude even tried to taught me by basically telling him I had to fight him in order to get them back... The worse part about all this is that, despite his later explosion and the principle getting back my SP and Game Shark, the principle basically gave the SP and Game Shark to her son RIGHT IN FRONT OF ME as he lied about how they both belonged to him to begin with... (Overall, that particular school year was the worse and I was so glad I only went to that particular school for only one year... A lot of assholes that school year, both student and faculty alike... But, I digress...)

My first PS3 I bought, after a year in good condition, broke down and I had to get a new one... At the time, I had about 20 completed game saves on it and, since I wasn't part of Playstation Plus, I basically lost it all without warning... The only other worse thing that came alongside it was that once I traded it in for a purchase of a newer PS3 model (since they were not selling the model I had beforehand), my old PS3 was still working just fine and it was too late to get it back after the trade was made... Granted, this was nothing compared to the SP/Game Stark incident, since I still had the trophies to prove "some" of completed games at least...

There might have been some smaller one, like how I had to get a new GBA copy of Chain of Memories as well as another Pokemon Emerald game cartridge because one had severe water damage on it and the other was stolen by a teen drug addict, but those two moments I mentioned earlier stand out the most for me, in terms of details...

 

[The_Lost_King]

I don't have any video-game sob stories, but I had the worst experience with D&D with my druid. The first 3 sessions went ok for me, but the fourth session is where things went bad. We came up against some marauders and tried to save the village and I get locked into single combat with one of the bandits and gett critted, die, get raised back up and slapped right back down again. End of session. Next session sneak attacked by a bastard sword wielding thief(really bastard sword -_-) and am knocked unconsious. Party kills him end of session. Next session I get imprisoned(because of I crime I had to do) and turned to stone, my friends save me, but I'm still stone at the end of the session. next session my friend kills me.

 

[Exhuminator]

Years ago I lost a lot of time on a Vagrant Story save file due to a corrupted memory card. After that, I vowed to always have multiple saves whenever possible. On systems that support multiple memory cards, I always save my game on both cards at the end of every gaming session. If I can't save on multiple cards, I at least make two separate save files at the end of each session. That way at worst (i.e. I accidentally delete a save) I only lose a few hours, not a few dozen hours. I understand there are a handful of games out there that only allow you to have a single save file. Those games were made by sadistic demons and I don't appreciate it.

 

[DaWaffledude]

At the end of Knights of the Old Republic, there's a boss fight where each time the boss gets low on health, he runs over to one of 8 or so comatose prisoners and drain them for health. The only way to stop him doing this was to kill the prisoners yourself, using Force Drain, Lightning or Saber Throw.

On my first playthrough, I had none of these. Nor did I have any save files for this character before I hit the level cap...

So I had to restart the entire game. From the beginning. Yeah.

 

[Zetatrain]

On Skyrim I had mage character that I put 70 hrs into and one day i decided take a break and play on my warrior. However since Skyrim doesn't utilize character profiles and bunches all the saves files of different characters together, I ended saving over all of my mage saves and lost all that hard earned progress. It was was so depressing that I still haven't been able to bring myself to play Skyrim for an extended period of time since then.

The same thing also happened with Morrowind, and my brother ended up saving over my save files though luckily I didn't have nearly as much time invested in Morrowind as I did in Skyrim.

I really hope in the next Elder Scrolls game, Bethesda rectifies this flaw in their save system.

 

[Granfaloon]

My closest thing to sob story like that would be with the PC version of Grand Theft Auto San Andreas. I really enjoyed that game, played it over the course of a few months. When I play a game I am very much a completionist type of gamer, so I had put every effort into 100%ing the game. I was playing through the games final mission, kickin ass and taking names, looking forward to finishing a months long endeavor, when suddenly graphical artifacts started popping up all over my screen. And then nothing, it had frozen. Restarted my PC, and the damn thing wouldn't stay on longer than a minute or so before crashing or blue screening or resetting itself. My graphics card was fried. I did buy a replacement GPU but San Andreas always crashed on startup with it. I never finished San Andreas, and still don't know how the game ends. This was probably about 6 years ago, I recently picked up San Andreas again on a recent sale on Amazon, but don't know if I'll ever get around to finishing with my current backlog being as large as it is.

 

[Guitarmasterx7]

The first kingdom hearts I probably got about 90% of the way through. I was in hollow bastion and it was the point right before the end where shit gets real. My friend came over, so to show him the game i started it over. I save a LOT, so when I walked over a save point I saved by quickly tapping x down x as a reflex, which overwrites file 1.

I save a copy of my game on "file 99" every so often out of paranoia now whenever i see a similar save system in a game

 

[WWWLUCIFERCOM]

I ran into a wild shiny Metang and hit flee instead of bag never encountered a wild shiny before that and havent since