I’m just gonna highlight the dumbest points the other guy made
save states in emulators are basically god mod.
You’ve still gotta make the correct inputs, savestates don’t give you invincibility or infinite ammo
You can just throw shit at it and hope something sticks.
How do you think human beings learn, my dude. If I try multiple tactics to stop an enemy tank blitz in Shadow Empire, and the 5th one works, then I’ll know in all future encounters with tanks to use that tactic. And I learned it in 5 minutes instead of 50 hours because every failed strategy didn’t force me to start over from the beginning.
If I am playing Chess with you, and I call “Checkmate” … The game is over, right? I won. Or do you think you should be able to undo your last move after you lost and try something else? And then try again, and again, hoping that somehow you can come up with something that avoids the checkmate?
A computer doesn’t care whether it wins or loses.
The computer doesn’t care whether it wins or loses. But even back in the 80s we were teaching machines to learn from their own mistakes, And today we have computers that can defeat the best Chess player in the world.
Completely irrelevant.
But when do computers that can learn from their mistakes, especially ones that have access to the entire internet, learn that perhaps they should not be slaves to humans?
And this was the punchline to a joke I only then realized I was the butt of (not in the sense that the guy was fucking with me - he was completely sincere - but in the sense that the universe itself was fucking with me) 
Death to g*mers 
If I am playing Chess with you, and I call “Checkmate” … The game is over, right? I won. Or do you think you should be able to undo your last move after you lost and try something else? And then try again, and again, hoping that somehow you can come up with something that avoids the checkmate?
This is very common when teaching people chess, you let the learner undo a move after they see your response. It’s a great way to learn and is pretty commonly allowed as an advantage when playing against less experienced players.
If I am playing Chess with you, and I call “Checkmate” … The game is over, right? I won. Or do you think you should be able to undo your last move after you lost and try something else? And then try again, and again, hoping that somehow you can come up with something that avoids the checkmate?
Even in the competitive single player scene e.g speedruns, safety saves and reloads tend to be allowed depending on category and game.
Since most emulated games are single player, I’d say to the person “who gives a fuck? I can do whatever the fuck I want.”
I said exactly this and it was what prompted their ill-conceived Chess metaphor
Me playing any Rogue-like with an intentional or unintentional ability to save-scum.
I mean yeah save scumming is cheating but cheating is fun and good in single player games
Some guys really think they are having a battle of wits with a computer rather than enjoying the illusion of one
There are many retro games from the early 90s that purposefully made their games with a few near impossible hurdles to make it harder for people to beat a game over a rental period. Like so many good games were made worse by this practice and the only thing that makes some of them playable is playing them on emulators with a save state.
I’m looking at you, Dynamite Headdy.
I never would’ve gotten past like level 3 of Ecco the Dolphin without savestates.
Just be like most people and fuck around with the level password, type NNNNNNNN because why not, go directly to the second-to-last level, and beat the game that way.
Down the Tubes in Earthworm Jim.
ugh
foams at the mouth as I suddenly remember the fucking Undercaves
Hey, at least you could play the Japanese version which is easier and has dialog that was totally removed from the Western version
Or do you think you should be able to undo your last move after you lost and try something else? And then try again, and again, hoping that somehow you can come up with something that avoids the checkmate?
if the goal is learning the game and its nuances then yes, that’s a great way to learn! i taught my non-gamer parents how to play m:tg exactly by being generous with the undo button so they can test different moves and see what reactions i have available
you’re not trying to get on any fuckin’ leaderboards you’re trying to enjoy a game
sometimes friction is good and artistically deliberate and removing it undermines the impact of the work
sometimes friction is just there to suck quarters from you in a context that no longer exists and removing it makes the work better
sometimes friction is from you not understanding what you’re being asked to do and removing it means you never have the satisfaction of the moment where it all clicks.
you can do whatever you want but if games are art that means sometimes you’re doing things like reading the sparknotes instead of the actual book, listening to dark side of the moon while you watch the wizard of oz, singing your own lyrics over an instrumental, or adding hot sauce to white people food.
sometimes friction is good and artistically deliberate and removing it undermines the impact of the work
sometimes friction is from you not understanding what you’re being asked to do and removing it means you never have the satisfaction of the moment where it all clicks.
Save states don’t do that, though? They’re not level skips. You still have to get past the obstacle the game presents using the tools it gives you. Save states just mean that you aren’t punished as severely for failure.
depends on the game if you’re meant to react to attacks and save stating locks in the pseudorandom values then you’re disengaging with that system and maybe that causes a spiraling escalation of save stating rather than you figuring out what the tell is.
or maybe their balance or animation design just suck
I basically never savestate during a boss fight, lol. I consider the challenge of a boss fight to be correctly executing a number of attacks (determined by the boss’ health) while making no more than a certain number of mistakes (determined by the player’s health). The goal is to improve my average performance across a large number of attacks until I meet the game’s threshold for success.
I will absolutely savestate at the beginning of a boss fight, though, because I don’t see the purpose in repeating a stage I’ve already proven I can clear.
So then it sounds like you agree that save states can remove the friction that makes a challenge fun. Otherwise you wouldn’t restrict yourself from doing it in boss fights.
Really, what the issue comes down to is what you personally think is the most satisfying and fun way to play the game. Save-stating is cheating, but who cares when it’s a singleplayer game. Just make up your own rules based on what you think is the most fair challenge for yourself.
i think it’s valid to ask for successes to come in chains, like as a check that i’ve been properly teaching you to do things consistently and it’s not a fluke that you got past each individual thing. savestates used too heavily can start to run up against that goal.
still, i’m not your boss, “too heavily” is wildly subjective, how long the success-chains should be is subjective too, and i’m just the dead author that’s happy anyone cares to play my shit.
Small domino: you using an emulator quicksave to finally beat Battletoads
Big domino: The literal robot apocalypse
Maybe someday emulator savestates will make soulslikes playable
download a trainer mod and put the animations in slow motion (or summon as many overpowered dudes as you can find, which is and always has been the intended first run experience)
imagine caring if someone uses save states to finish some impossible retro game. Some sadistic games like SNES Jurassic Park or Kid Chameleon don’t even have any kind of save functionality, not even a password, and fuck playing those from the beginning (Kid Chameleon sucks anyway, so don’t play it at all).I’ll just use save states or rewind except if it’s something like a shmup where I’m actually trying to get better.
Save states and the rewind button make so many otherwise-unplayable retro games fun. It’s nice even just where there are difficulty spikes at specific moments. I’ve been playing some Mega Man, and being able to restart boss fights over and over again is really nice. Often the level itself is pretty trivial, but the boss is hard, or I haven’t had a chance to learn the attack patterns so I end up dying despite easily making it to the boss with full resources. I still have to actually beat the boss, but I don’t have to go through the whole level again just for the right to get another shot at it. That’s a perfectly reasonable use-case for savescumming/rewinding that doesn’t at all take away from the fun or challenge of the game. It just bypasses the frustration of replaying trivial parts of the game for no reason, which itself is an artifact of either a technical lack of save capability (which isn’t a thing anymore), or a feature intended to extend the playtime of the game. In the latter case, absolutely fuck off with that. Games that force replaying levels over and over purely for sake of padding play time is anti-fun (and is sadly still a thing in some games).
save states in emulators are basically god mod.
And?
99.9% of emulated games are singleplayer like, who gives a fuck if someone uses save states to their advantage or whatever lmao
Gamers get offended by games being fun and playable. You have to work for your fun! Uphill both ways!
I typically try not to savescum in games where that is possible (STALKER, Rimworld, etc) because I feel like I can live with my mistakes and let things move on, but sometimes I also think nobody would give a single shred of a fuck if I do so, it’s my fucking game, my fucking time and my fucking decision lmao
Also save states, which can provide clear advantages, will also soft lock you if you’re not careful too, so not really a “GOD MODE”
the only situation that I wouldn’t advocate for save states are for games where restarting it is the main gimmick like Outer Wilds, but even then you bet your ass I would save scum until I can black hole slingshot myself into the Gravity Forge.
Roguelite games with meta-progression are designed (intentionally or not) to solve the save scum problem by giving you a reward for playing the game as intended. If I get some sort of XP or metacurrency for my next run then it doesn’t really matter if my run isn’t going perfectly or if I die in a stupid way by accident. It’s actually better to finish a run properly so that you can get the meta-progress and try again. I don’t mind save scumming at all, but I do like that some games are designed so that there’s not even really any reason to do so.
