One of the things that has always puzzled me is why so few games seem to take advantage of the second memory card slot on consoles. If the manufacturer has gone to the trouble of putting two slots on there, then why not make the players life just a touch less irritating by allowing them to save to a memory card in the second slot?

How many times have you started playing a new game, passed the tutorial level and got to a save point only to be told something like “Memory Card in Slot 1 is full, please insert another Memory Card”. Aaaarrgh! Look you stupid game, there’s a perfectly good memory card sat in the second port, why not check whether there’s any room on that one? Instead, you have to get up, scrabble about under the TV to reach the console, swap the cards over, and try again.

At this point, one of two things can happen. Either the game saves successfully and you go back to gaming, or deja vu hits and up pops “Memory Card in Slot 1 is full, please insert another Memory Card”. Aaarrghhhh! That one’s full too, and you don’t have another spare memory card. If only you’d deleted those Gran Turismo race replays which you’d saved, knowing full well you wouldn’t come back and watch them ever again.

You realise that you’ll be able to make some space on the cards by swapping saves around a bit, so you reset the console to do so since the game won’t allow you to do this. As soon as you hit the reset button it suddenly dawns on you that you’re going to have to play through the entirety of the non-skippable tutorial level you just spent the best part of an hour playing and reading through reams of explanatory text. D’oh!

Now to be fair to games developers, this problem isn’t always their fault. Console owners have a strict set of rules to do with saving to memory cards which often prohibit things like providing an opportunity to delete game saves, but there’s generally no reason why my original moan of not using the second memory card slot can’t be achieved.

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