A demo disk, and a SATAN.

[A Black Falcon]

The more data the game records, the more devastating losing the save is. You can always replay a game that just saves which level you're in, but if it's saving all kinds of details it really, really stinks... the worst would be a long RPG that you haven't finished yet, but something like Rush 2049 (where it saves a huge array of statistics in your player file) would be almost as bad.

I can see how you could argue that a broken disk is worse than a broken memory card. It's easy to replace the disk as long as you have the cash to do so... for older cart games of course they are one and the same and the cart too might be hard to replace. What is my opinion? I'd rather lose the savedata, as at least I still have the game. But it definiely is horrible. For consoles I've never lost more than one or two files I cared about at once... something like that would just be really, really awful. And I think about it whenever I have to use my N64 memory cards... both the first-party one and the second-party one have in at least one instance messed up and partially lost their data.

On that note, if I get many more home console games I'll need more controller paks/memory cards... finding the controller paks would be harder. See, I got Bust-A-Move '99 during break ($10, and as a puzzle game it filled in the one hole in my N64/GC game lineup), and it has a 64-block save file... ouch... now I'm happy that almost all of my games before that that required memcard save had such small files (I managed to fit it into my first card with only the deletion of the useless 28-block Perfect Dark file) so now I have about 4 blocks free on card 1 and 30 on card 2. Not many. Still more blocks than I have free on my NGC memcards though, I think... :D I know my 59 has is completely full (59 blocks used!), but I'm not certain about the 251... it's under 10 free, however. Yeah, I think I need a new one soon. :)

Oh, back on the topic of deletions, there was one other incident a while back that I'm sure I've mentioned before -- when one of my N64s messed up and started failing to work with N64 games with battery saves (worked fine with memcard-save titles). It was really weird but it wouldn't recognize the saves and the games looked like there were no save files on them... very luckily my Majora's Mask file was not deleted despite my messing with it on that N64, but I lost my SSB savedata that way. Never bothered to play the game again to get it back, especially given that I have the much better SSB:M now...