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The PC RPG is often separated from its console cousin by the ability to save almost anywhere at any time. Whether this adds or detracts from the experience or lessens the difficulty is debatable, but one struggles denying its utility. Need to stop playing because a parent, spouse, job or other gaming interrupter interrupts and on the console you have a few, broken choices. Turn everything off, sacrificing whatever progress you achieved. Leave the console on and return at a later date. Keep playing until you reach a save point. Or outright ignore the interruption. None of these are ideal and as gamers, they should not be accepted.
But this isn’t an editorial about saving anywhere on consoles or the great benefits of emulation. Rather, this is a discussion about how the consoles themselves work, and what they can gain from the smaller portable systems the PSP and DS.
Portable gaming has advantages and disadvantages to console gaming. Some of these arise from the screen size, power consumption or portability itself. However, one feature of portable gaming that I see no barrier to consoles taking on is a sleep mode. Sleep mode on the PSP and DS is a means of turning the system off without shutting it down. Similar to how standby on a computer turns the system off without requiring a cold boot, sleep mode on the portable systems is a low power mode in which the system is not completely off. To reactivate or wake the system, rather than waiting for the boot process, the PSP or DS simply resumes from where you left off, be it at the pause screen, or in the middle of combat, or in a cutscene.
Sleep mode in portable gaming may have arisen to ease power consumption or because portable gaming may lend itself to pick up and put down sessions. But while consoles have less reason to focus on power needs, the pick up and put down nature of gaming is just as relevant as on portable machines, if not more so. The beauty of instant-on is immediately getting back into the game or getting out in a moment. Television as entertainment hub had become more malleable to sudden repurposing, and the various unscheduled or scheduled activities that sneak up on us would be defanged if gamers could quickly put gaming on hold.
How games, and especially RPGs, play out prevent them from neatly fitting into a timetable or schedule as with other entertainment. In particular, lengthy cutscenes are a problem, with run times commonly approaching, or exceeding 30 minutes. Not all games offer an in game pause, or allow you to replay those missed/skipped cinematic sequences. Besides long movies, RPGs sometimes stretch out save points areas so that saving becomes a maddening race to save when pressed for time. Rogue Galaxy comes to mind as exhibiting what could be called a callous disregard for the gamer’s need to save.
Oftentimes there are no indicators to tell a player when a long cinema scene is about to occur. Needing large blocks of time to finish a game or watch the ending scenes is that much more exasperating when they arrive without warning. I welcome the RPG as a cinematic experience, but when I watch DVDs, I am able to pause or bookmark my progress so as to revisit the program at my convenience.
What I would like to see is for the Xbox 360, Wii, and PS3 to have a sleep mode switch on the console unit and/or accessible from the control pad. This would function similar to the portable systems. Activating sleep mode turns off the console, regardless of whether a game, movie, or menu is in progress. Turning the system back on would then immediately resume from whatever point you just were at. The unexpected demands of time often are at odds with gaming, especially role playing. I cannot always put my life on hold, and so a sleep mode does not seem too much to ask.
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