Be careful using the "save anywhere" cheat

[donutbandit]

It seems like such a wonderful thing, but be careful where you use it!

In Chrono Cross, Fort Dragonia, I used it just before i went in to fight Great Gloop. I didn't like the outcome of that battle, so I reset.

Ooops. I wasn't saved where I thought I was. I was saved inside the chamber where you fight the Dragoon. When I went outside, the bridges weren't set properly for me to cross, and I was stuck. I had to go back to my last quicksave (a LONG way back!). Damn me for not saving more often.

[patrickp]

Gamesoul Master is the cheats expert round here, donutbandit.

However, why not try quick saving rather than a 'save anywhere' cheat?

[Gamesoul Master]

That is a problem more with game coding than anything else. It's not the cheat's fault, but rather the fact that some games use save points themselves as the reference point to start the game from. "Save anywhere" codes in some games work perfectly fine, and in others it depends on where you save. Basically, you're trusting the coding to be solid enough that you'll actually start where you left off, but many times the coding in the game isn't written to fully handle a game saved from the middle of nowhere. Keep in mind that programmers will many times take shortcuts if they're pressed for time, and in cases like these... those shortcuts are not always universal to the game (meaning, it could vary within the game itself).

If you think of it from a programmer's point of view... if you were programming a game and you had limited time (and you'd be trying to keep memory card space in mind), you'd be first of all giving all the save points their own variables. If you didn't, you'd have to set up functions to retrieve your exact coordinates at all times, and at such time that you arrived at any coordinates that a save point is at, you'd have to create a function to act on that. I'd imagine that most games have an event that is activated when you bring your character within a save point, which then activates a switch/variable. And each event having an identifier (or at least its own switch), it's much easier to record where you are by referencing the location of the event (save point). And because there may be shortcuts taken (or other references to the save point being made), it can be unpredictable what will actually get stored in the save. If the coding is sloppy, you may end up at the last save point you entered (lazy garbage collection), or you may end up with garbage values for some data (invalid/unexpected values usually... or extremely poor handling of variables).

The point is... you really don't know how well a "save anywhere" cheat will work. What I do is, because of this particular problem (which I had years ago in a game that I can't even remember anymore, but an RPG I'm sure), I always make sure to do a quicksave (save state) along with a normal save (when not made from a save point).