I am not the brightest crayon in the box.
I’ve been playing Frogwares’ “Sherlock Holmes: Crimes & Punishments” on my Xbox 360 for about 2 weeks now, which is about a week longer than I wanted to be playing it. I put “Devil May Cry” on hiatus for this game!
“I’ll dedicate my entire day playing Holmes tomorrow! I promise!”
I’ve been pretty good at the Holmes games in the past. I have all the achievements in “The Testament of Sherlock Holmes” and “Sherlock Holmes vs. Jack the Ripper,” so why is this one any different?
The autosave.
I’m used to the autosave in games like “Assassin’s Creed” and “The Wolf Among Us.” There’s usually some kind of sign that shows up, which means, “This game is saved now. You can turn it off and not cry about it tomorrow.” “Crimes & Punishments” has a similar feature.
Except I turn the game off and the next day when I go to play it, I press CONTINUE on the menu screen and I’m back at the beginning of the level. A level that has taken me hours and seemingly endless puzzles to get to a certain point. This confused me, frustrated me and made me scream to no end.
Yesterday, I pressed CONTINUE again. To my frustration, Watson was, yet again, asking me to flag down a cabbie. After blankly staring at my miniscule, hard-to-read television screen for no less than 20 seconds, I went back to the main menu.
And that’s when I saw it. All the way at the bottom. LOAD.
And I was in the train station. Watson was marvelling at my quick wit and cigar knowledge (little to his knowing, it had taken me 2 weeks to figure out how to load a saved game, and I had played the beginning of the second level nearly 10 times), and everything was seemingly right where I left off.
To achieve full clarity here, let me elaborate: I received my first gaming platform (the lovely N64) in 1996, at the ripe age of 3 (yes, being the child of combatting parents gets me nice things). I’ve owned consoles ever since, cycling through the PlayStation and the GameCube until I finally got my Xbox 360.
I apparently still can’t load a save.
My review on the game should come sometime soon, but I’d thought I’d give everyone a rundown on the hold-up. I guess it’s a humorous filler to prove my bumbling incompetence.
It’s hard to live the life of the terribly unintelligent disguised as a man whose deductive reasoning and intelligence can only be described as a superpower.
Savannah Tanbusch is a senior journalism major and can be reached at savannah.tanbusch@gmail.com.
