Monkey Island 4 - How do I disable "delete all saves"?

[john]

Archived from groups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.adventure (More info?)

I just picked up Monkey Island 4, "Escape from Monkey Island", on eBay
recently and my kids have been loving it. Problem - last night the
boys sat down to play and discovered all of their savegames are gone.
Apparently there is a "delete all saves" button and someone
accidentally clicked it. No one has yet confessed to the deed (they
may not have noticed when it happened), but I have three very sad kids
who are having to start the game all over again from scratch, having
lost all of the time and exploration already put into it.

Any idea how to disable this "delete all saves" thing?

I know I can make backup copies of the savegames from time to time,
but I'd still hate for someone to lose everything back to the last
backup, if the saves get deleted again.

Thanks for any advice you may have.

John

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.adventure (More info?)

On Wed, 02 Mar 2005 17:50:51 -0600
John <reply@newsgroup.please.com> wrote:

> I just picked up Monkey Island 4, "Escape from Monkey Island", on eBay
> recently and my kids have been loving it. Problem - last night the
> boys sat down to play and discovered all of their savegames are gone.
> Apparently there is a "delete all saves" button and someone
> accidentally clicked it. No one has yet confessed to the deed (they
> may not have noticed when it happened), but I have three very sad kids
> who are having to start the game all over again from scratch, having
> lost all of the time and exploration already put into it.
>
> Any idea how to disable this "delete all saves" thing?
>
> I know I can make backup copies of the savegames from time to time,
> but I'd still hate for someone to lose everything back to the last
> backup, if the saves get deleted again.
>
> Thanks for any advice you may have.
>
> John
>
>

I wouldn't worry about it - after this incident I'd be very surprised if it
happened again! An example springs to mind from Dale Carnegie, about a
pilot who discovered a technician had put the wrong kind of jet fuel into
his plane, which would almost certainly have caused a fatal crash had it
not been spotted. The pilot responded by appointing the technician to
always be the one who fueled his plane in the future, to show "how
confident he was that the man would never make the mistake again".

That said, there's no harm in keeping a few strategic save games. Monkey
Island games are quite helpful about this by being divided into neat acts
or chapters. I generally try to keep a saved game at the start of each
chapter for dipping into the game in the future - other people who replay
games will probably agree with me that when replaying you generally want to
skip the first 1/4 or so of the game, since you almost invariably played
that section to death while learning the game and getting into The Zone.

Tom

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.adventure (More info?)

On Wed, 02 Mar 2005 17:50:51 -0600, John <reply@newsgroup.please.com>
wrote:

>I just picked up Monkey Island 4, "Escape from Monkey Island", on eBay
>recently and my kids have been loving it. Problem - last night the
>boys sat down to play and discovered all of their savegames are gone.
>Apparently there is a "delete all saves" button and someone
>accidentally clicked it. No one has yet confessed to the deed (they
>may not have noticed when it happened), but I have three very sad kids
>who are having to start the game all over again from scratch, having
>lost all of the time and exploration already put into it.
>
>Any idea how to disable this "delete all saves" thing?
>
>I know I can make backup copies of the savegames from time to time,
>but I'd still hate for someone to lose everything back to the last
>backup, if the saves get deleted again.
>
>Thanks for any advice you may have.

I have a quite different problem with saved games on MI4, it won't let
me save any! My first pass through the game seemed to work OK until I
reached page 2 of the saved game pages, and the game hung. I couldn't
get it to restart from the last save, and in the end deleted and
reinstalled it. Now it will not allow me to save any games at all, and
just hangs if you access the save game screen. I can only assume the
delete/reinstall has still left some flag incorrectly set somewhere on
the PC, which is a Pentium 2 running Windows 98SE that I keep for
running old games. The game will not install on my Pentium 4 running
XP because it cannot recognise the system speed.

Alan

 

[john]

Archived from groups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.adventure (More info?)

On Thu, 3 Mar 2005 00:43:24 +0000, Thomas N McEwan
<captaininsanity@ONAYAMSPAY.uk2.net> wrote:

>That said, there's no harm in keeping a few strategic save games. Monkey
>Island games are quite helpful about this by being divided into neat acts
>or chapters. I generally try to keep a saved game at the start of each
>chapter for dipping into the game in the future - other people who replay
>games will probably agree with me that when replaying you generally want to
>skip the first 1/4 or so of the game, since you almost invariably played
>that section to death while learning the game and getting into The Zone.

True. I do back up all of their saves from time to time, since one
time a couple years ago when one child got angry at another and went
through methodically deleting all of that child's saved games - of
course, no one has ever done that again, but I still like to have the
backups.

John