Leo nodded. Then ignored him completely.
Marco, home from college, saw the scripts running. "You made a version control system for save states."
Because in-game saves meant finding save points. Save points meant backtracking. Backtracking meant fighting random encounters that made the Dell sound like a jet engine. Save states? F1 to save. F3 to load. Instant. No cathedral music, no crystals, no dialogue. Just snap —frozen time.
His older brother Marco had set up PCSX2 on their shared family PC, a clunky Dell with a Pentium and a passive-aggressive fan. "Don't mess with the settings," Marco warned. "And never use save states. They corrupt. Use the in-game memory card."
was darker. Rule of Rose . An obscure, expensive horror game that never released in the US properly. The combat was broken—janky hitboxes, infinite dog AI, a protagonist who swung a pipe like she was shooing a fly. Normal players gave up. Leo used save states to create checkpoints mid-battle , frame-perfect dodges into attacks he could see coming three reloads ahead. He wasn't playing the game anymore. He was debugging it.