Sony Memory Card reviewed on www.vidgames.com

Sony Memory Card
Reviewed by Nils Jacobsen

Initial Impressions

Great! A wonderful built in Memory Management system! These cards are must haves. Of course, saving highscores, is a plus. But saving game progress is what I bought these puppies for. In NBA JAM or NFL GameDay, it saves which games you have played, your stats etc. Thus you can continue at a later time, and not leave your machine on for weeks in order to complete the season.

Playing the Games

Unfortunately, many games don't have support for the memory card. Some games have no saving what so ever, some games only have password, and some only save to the card. Why can't all games both have passwords and save to the card? (Why would you need both? Read on.) Anyways, it works great for those games that support it. In Wipeout, once you have beaten the game and saved, you don't have to do it again to gain access to Firestar and the Rapier class. A must have for any serious gamer!

Quality/Durability

The card is rated at around 100,000 writes before it goes bad. (Which means you can't save to it anymore, the old data is still there. There is no battery in there.) Thus, it should last a few years before you have to start worrying. I do, however, have a concern. I have on several occasions lost data using the card. In ESPN Extreme games I had two more runs in the season to do, when suddenly there was no record on the card of my season. Hours down the drain. Same in Rayman, several times. 33% gone! I've left the card in the machine while turning it on and off, so the fault is probably mine. Irritating, nevertheless.

And why does some game use the whole card? I mean, a game like Agile Warrior... 15 blocks... How can a flight sim. require 15 blocks to save? 128K is a lot of memory! Hopefully, in the future, programmers will be a bit more efficient. Oh, BTW, there will be NO UMK3 on a memory card!!!

Conclusion
Get it. Get them. Have at least two handy. Keep backups! The PlayStation has the best Memory Management scheme out there, don't waste it. Highly recommended. But the random glitches keeps it from getting a full score. 4 out of 5 stars.

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