Benoit: saving to a file won’t solve the problem though. I might let you load p an old save if you were silly enough to save yourself stuck – but that only works if you saved iterations in the first place, and even then you still lose an amount of gameplay time. it also has the potential to over-complicate what should really be a simple system (though I admit there are times where I would like multiple save iterations as well).

To the “untenable position” thing, simply allow the user to save to a file. Then you can save as many savegames as fit on your storage media. If you want to be fancy, it wouldn’t be *that* hard to provide unlimited undo (but it would start to cost enough memory to maybe, perhaps, start worrying about space usage).

Occoco less creepy than Tingle…? Well, I was about to agree, but then the idea fell into my head of the two creatures breeding together. *shudder*. I feel queasy now.

Have fun!

I’d like to add though I’ve never had any serious problems with the save system. Being aware that I would restart at the entry if i quite mid dungeon, I have always endeavored to complete a dungeon in one sitting. This usually means leaving the game as I enter the dungeon, and dedicating my next play session to the dungeon. The save system only becomes annoying if I have to leave it for some reason, or if the dungeon is so long I want to take a break.

Unfortunately this is still just a work around. Myself adjusting my play sessions to compensate for the games problem. I shouldn’t have to do this, but none-the-less it has resulted in very few save irritations. So despite the broken save system, I can’t say I have anything to really complain about.

We can all agree, at least, that Oocoo is not even half as creepy as Tingle.

It didn’t even occur to me for quite some time that I could use chicken lady in the manner you describe – I was using her to go and explore the overworld in my spare time when my wife and I were working through a dungeon together. I even used her in the Temple of Time to find an alternative solution to a problem I was stuck on, which was a nice piece of lateral thinking on my part, but still a bit bizarre.

However, I can at least explain why the game does not save position in the dungeon… I strongly suspect it is because it is hypothetically possible that the player can save in a dungeon in an untenable position – one that results in death or entrapment every time you reload. (Note that the problem here is that it is impossible to test in QA all of the possibilities; the risk is actually very low that this might actually happen, but since it cannot be eliminated as a possibility…) The fix for this is that you must save dungeon position out of the dungeon, so that when you reload you always have a second option – to re-enter the dungeon. Now that said, just because chicken lady fixes this problem doesn’t mean that this was the best solution. I think we can all agree that there were better ways around this problem. Still, at least we all get to be freaked out by her blue nipples.

Best wishes!

There’s also an interesting limitation that when you revisit a dungeon to, say, pick up missing heart pieces, warping is no longer an option, so after finding the right chest, you have to retrace your steps to the beginning. I suppose in this case, it would work to save, quit, and reload, but that tends to ruin the experience of a nice gaming session for me.