Having been programming computers for over two decades now I can't express enough just how frustrating it is to be playing a game for five hours and have it crash on me. Now the game crashing is not what pisses me off. The fact that the game does not have autosave functionality does.

The game I am talking about is Spore. My brother bought a copy and I decided to install it and give it a try. It is not really the type of game I am interested in but I thought I would check it out and see what the big deal was.

So here I was playing the game. I got to the space stage with a level 3 warp drive and was almost to the center of the galaxy when the game crashes. I threw my hands in the air and with a sense of dread and dispair realised that I may have just spent the last five hours building up my race for nothing. I carfully started up the game again and sure enough the game did not autosave my progress, and I sat there staring at the screen in utter disgust.

How in the fuck, in this day and age does a game like this, as vast and as big as a game like this, not have an autosave feature.  It is at that point I started shaking my head in the realization that I would no longer be playing Spore. Can you hear me EA? Any chance of me buying my own copy of this game just went from a possibility to no fucking chance in hell. It also reminds me of another game that does not have an autosave feature. Doom3. Right there in the game manual for doom 3 it states "Save and save often" WTF? Have these people never heard of autosave checkpoints before? Christ! even Super Mario World for the SNES has mid-level checkpoints!

I just don't know what else to say about it, other then it's just flabergasting to me that AAA titles like Spore don't have autosave functionality. So now that I have finished venting I am going to uninstall Spore and free up a few gigs of space on my harddrive.

And for those who are wondering, yes that is all it takes for me to dismiss a game as crap, no matter how much fun I may have had playing it up to that point. Maybe I just have a higher level of expectation, because of my programming background but if there is one thing I absolutely hate more than anything is having to go back and repeat myself. Heck I have Visual Studio setup to auto save every 60 seconds. Yeah that's how much I hate having to repeat my self.