Since geoDefense’s Xbox Live debut, we’ve heard the occasional complaint from gamers who lost their save data. geoDefense isn’t a tremendously long game, but nobody wants to lose their progress – especially if they’ve put some effort into improving their scores.
The developer, Critical Thought Games, has actually been aware of the problem for a while. In a blog post at his site, designer David Whatley explains the nature of the problem:
“Well the issue is in the file handling. Essentially your highscores (and other info) are saved to a file (duh)… if the data being written is smaller than the last time, then the resulting file will still be as long as it was before the save... with the data at the end being garbage.When I load the data, I get this trailing garbage and the whole block fails the checksum checks and thus it disregards the data as if it had been tampered with.”
So basically, sometimes when gamers replay levels, the new data ends up being smaller than the old data, corrupting the entire save file. This doesn’t affect Achievements already earned, but scores and all other in-game progress are lost.
Critical Thought has already submitted an update to Microsoft that fixes the problem. Hopefully it passes certification quickly, though we know that process can be a bumpy road sometimes. The current in-game version number is 1.5. When the next update hits, it’ll read 1.6 and your saves will be home free.
Until then, Whatley offers this advice:
“…If you play geoDefense WP7, just don't replay any levels you've already won and the bug won't happen. If it's already happened, uninstall and reinstall the game to clear the state. Once 1.6 update is out and you upgrade, then you can safely go back and replay already won levels to improve your score.”
Despite this save data trouble (which many of us have not encountered), geoDefense is one of the better tower defense games on Xbox Live. Read WPCentral’s full review for all the choice details.
Thanks, Marc G., for the heads up! The G is for geometry.
