How to handle the save bug in Pulse PS2
The porting of Wipeout Pulse to the PS2 was not completely successful, and this game has some serious issues. Still, the game has kept a lot of the intense racing that you got in the nicely executed PSP version. A lot of features are missing in the PS2 version for obvious reasons. Custom playlist and photo mode for example.
One feature is added though, and that is the sudden realisation that your save file is gone! This is quite annoying, since unlocking all ship skins requires great play time. In this version it is not enough to maximize loyalty points to 100.000 for one team, you have to reach 25.000 loyalty points for ALL tems to unlock their respective ship skin (probably also a bug, sigh...).
I have worked out a fairly easy solution to deal with this save corruption issue.
In Pulse there are 5 different save slots. The save failure can occur mainly in 2 different ways. The most common way is that a save slot gets corrupt when a save has been made to that slot. The game still displays "Save successful" and when you browse your memory card there are no currupt data displayed. In the game though, the slot is presented as an "Empty slot" and the save is gone... The second way the save failure can occur is a complete corruption of all 5 save slots. There are simply 5 "Empty slot" when trying to load a previous save. :(
The key solution is to realize that you can never trust the displayed message "Save successful", on the other hand you can always trust the message "Load successful". This means that a slot that successfully loads, will always successfully load! But, the loading of a slot is also bugged in the game (of course...). Loading a slot always requires 1 to 10 tries. The message "Load failed" is displayed several times in a row when trying to load a slot. This does NOT mean that your slot is corrupted! It is a bug that is separate from the save corruption issue.
The slots will sooner or later get corrupted one after another and when they do they can no longer be used with that memory card. Memory cards can not be formatted as far as I know, so when there are 5 corrupted slots, that card can not be used to saving Pulse games any more! The card can still be used to save other games than Pulse, of course. Pulse will consume a number of memory cards for you, they are fairly cheap on eBay fortunately. :)
This is how I practically work around the bug:
1. Place memory cards in both card slots in the PS2. Lets call these cards card 1 and card 2.
2. Pulse never cares about card 2, it only loads and saves to card 1.
3. Play the game. When finished playing, save your progress in at least 3 different slots!
4. Reset the PS2. Start the game again.
5. Try to load any of these 3 slots. If you, after several tries, receive a "Load successful" this means that the slot you loaded is not corrupted.
6. Reset the PS2 and browse memory card 1. Copy the slot to memory card 2. You should only copy a slot to memory card 2 if it has successfully loaded, not successfully saved. Important!
7. Card 2 is your backup card that keeps your successfully loaded slots at all times. If your card 1 suddenly has 5 "Empty slot" just copy your most recent slot from card 2 to card 1 and continue.
8. Repeat this process using a rolling scheme regarding the save slots so that you at all times have a few save slots of your recent progress on card 2. When card 1 is corrupted in all 5 slots replace it with a new card and copy your progress from card 2 to card 1. Continue playing!
Hope this helped!
/Fredrik
