40 Days #34: Let the dashboard suspend and resume any game in progress

Look, games are getting longer these days. Some games let you save at any time, some do not. Some have frequent checkpoints that you can use to resume the game when you come back to it, some handle this much less gracefully. Even Arcade games like Commanders: Attack of the Genos now have levels that can last 30-45 minutes.

On the other side of the coin, gamers have less and less time these days. They have jobs, families, responsibilities. The casual folks are looking for bite-sized game experiences, and even the hardcore sometimes just have to go do something else. You know, to an event with the spouse, to feed the kids, to run out when somebody calls. Life sometimes cuts in, and in a lot of cases the next save location or checkpoint is just too far away.

As a result, we need a system to suspend games in progress. The Wii actually already does this for its Virtual Console titles. Also, the DS and PSP can suspend the whole handheld and thus also the game being played.

The Xbox 360 dashboard should take the best elements from all these competing systems, and improve upon them. The game suspend system should be capable of at least the following:

• Save any game - disc-based or downloadable - at any point during the gameplay. Just like hibernating a Windows laptop, where the software doesn't know what is going on, and isn't written specifically to support this feature.
• One save slot per game, so it doesn't become an unlimited save system, leading to cheating. Once the game is resumed, the suspended save is deleted. Allow the console to store at least one, but preferably more, even unlimited numbers of suspended games.
• Allow suspending from the guide menu: bring it up, suspend game, return to dashboard.
• Also allow suspending by turning off the console. Add a settings screen that would let you to auto-discard, auto-suspend, or prompt every time.
• Let gamers resume from the dashboard, as well as giving them the option of deleting the suspend save, starting the game without it, with the understanding that any progress not actually saved in-game would be lost.
• Add an option to the startup setting that would have the console boot up and auto-resume the most recently suspended game.
• Possibly add some screen that would list all your currently suspended games, in case you forget which all games you started and later suspended.

With all that in place, the console could potentially become a simple appliance, just like the DS: play a game, need to run out, turn off the console, it auto-suspends the game, come back, turn it on, it auto-resumes exactly where you left, even if it was in a long stretch where the game itself offers no saving or checkpoints.

This would be yet another feature that would make the somewhat daunting console less frightening to casual gamers, by eliminating many games' needs for a certain time commitment. In fact, it might even get casual gamers to try more "complicated" games, since they would know they can always easily walk away at any time, and come back whenever they can.