Imagine playing through hours of a role playing game. You spent the entire weekend inside the house making progress, suddenly you realize it's Sunday night and it's getting late, "Damn better stop playing, got work tomorrow". You save your game on your trusty memory card and go to sleep; resting assure that you will be able to comeback tomorrow and pick up where you left off. It's Monday evening, you get off work and rush straight home to finally finish that RPG that you spent the whole weekend playing. You turn on your favorite system, eager to kick some ass. You go to load your game, but something is wrong. It takes a while and it still hasn't loaded. An error message comes up, load error! All that precious time has been wasted because your memory card has become corrupted. That's right most third party memory cards for both Playstation and Saturn are extremely unreliable.

Most third party products try to lure you in with great promises. The most notorious for this is the Datel line of products. Datel is a UK based company that has been around for years. Back in the 16 bit days they debuted the Pro Action Replay (PAR for short), a game cheating device. The PAR was only released overseas but many imported it finding it preferable to its competitor the Game Genie. On the 32 bit platforms, Datel has released everything from memory cards to PAR's ( known as GameSharks here in the states) to anything in between. Gamers are attracted to the claims of Datel's products: Memory Card and Game Cheater in one! Ten times the saving space! Unfortunately if it's too good to be true, it usually is.

You ask yourself, how can Datel release a product that's cheaper than Sega's or Sony's version but offers more? Well they cut corners. For example the PAR for Saturn, is great for doing codes and maybe even for playing import's, but the memory card features leave a lot to desire. In fact all of Datel’s memory devices leave a lot to desire! They all share the common problem with their memory storage. Datel claims eight megs of storage capacity for their line of products. But the fact is, the Datel products can only contain four megs of storage. To get around this the carts compress save files, this can upset the required timings in the Sega Saturn and result in corrupted or destroyed data. The Playstation Datel memory cards all work sort of the same. The compression techniques often results in corrupted or lost files. In other words the Datel devices are time bombs waiting to go off, sooner or later they will explode and when it happens you will be one pissed of gamer.

The problem with Datel's devices goes even deeper than this. Due to the fact that Sega and Sony want the peripheral market to themselves and they do not like the import converters that Datel makes; they did not give Datel any assistance in the making of their products. This resulted in two things: None of the Datel products have Sega's or Sony's seals of approval, and most importantly Datel had to reverse engineer to develop their products. On Saturn this resulted in compatibility problems. You see there are about ten or more revision of the BIOS on the Datel products, and there are about 5 revisions of the Sega Saturn BIOS. This means that finding a match is near impossible, and even finding a match does not guarantee a problem free Memory Card. You can see how Datel faced the same problem with their Sony products.

Now that you know the problem, and know why it happens, you need some solutions. The first step sounds simple, buy Sega or Sony brand products. Sure for the Sony memory cards you can find them just about anywhere, but when you come to the Sega's carts all you can find are the Datel ones. I have no idea why Sega does not have their own brand name carts in circulation but they are nearly impossible to find in retail stores. Guess they weren't selling. Anyways just because the store (be it EB, Babbages or whatever) doesn't have the product in stock doesn't mean they can't order it for you. I am sure they will be more than happy to order a Sega Memory Cart direct from Sega themselves for you. In fact this is what I them do, and I am one happy customer. Then again if your store is full of assholes, and won't order the memory cart for you; then you should stop shopping there. You can still order the cart direct from Sega themselves ( www.sega.com) or buy it from any of the decent mail order stores on the net ( Tronix and TheRage come to mind).