Manufacturer : Xploder

Distributor : Bluemouth Interactive

Working in I.T. support, I have a pretty rigorous backup system in place so I never lose my work at home or the office. But like most console owners, I rarely give any thought to what would happen if the hard drive on my Xbox died. It’s a serious concern: we all spend countless hours getting through all the latest games, unlocking goodies and earning high scores for upwards of 20 hours per game. What would you do if you lost all that hard earned progress?

Well the unthinkable happened to me a few months ago and my Xbox HDD packed it in, I had to send the unit in for repair. Word of advice: don’t assume there’ll be any effort made to preserve your saves! When my Xbox returned the hard drive was as empty as the day I bought it and to be honest, a few tears were almost shed. All my progress and downloaded maps for Halo 2, my 100% completed save game for Def Jam New York and everything else, over 2 years of Xbox gaming was all gone forever! Well if you don’t like importing and purchasing stuff from Hong Kong there is finally a solution available here in Australia for backing up your Xbox saves.

The Xploder Cheat Saver consists of a 8mb memory card, a USB cable that the memory card plugs into and a software CD that once installed onto your computer gives you a utility to let you manage all your save games. Unlike my Mega-X key the Xploder memory key plugs directly into your Xbox controller which negates the need to take the USB cable between the computer room and the lounge room.

Via the Xbox dashboard your saves can be backed up to the memory card and then through the Xploder software and cable, backed up to your P.C for safekeeping. What many people may like even more is that if you have friends with Xploders you can simply email them your save games, or if you’re stuck in a game, head to the Xploder website and download save games from there that you can copy to the memory card, and then to your Xbox!

It’s worth noting however that the Xploder system is not intended to work as a portable storage device for anything else, and though windows detects it as a USB device, it doesn’t show up. So obviously it only takes game saves and Xploder files, so those of you thinking to use it as a way to ‘softmod’ your console will need to look elsewhere.

As my Xbox hard drive was wiped, this was one of the first things that I did. From the Xploder website I was able to get save games for Midnight Club 3 (that gave me $100,000,00 dollars), a save game with a mission completed for Secret Weapons over Normandy that I was stuck on, a completed save for Mech Assault 2 as well as quite a lot more. You simply download the .gsx file to the Xploder folder, fire up the Xploder software and then copy it to the memory card. Then plug the memory card into your controller and in the dashboard copy it to your Xbox hard drive.

Those of you who routinely copy savegames to memory cards and such will know that there are certain games that just don’t allow you to move your saves- things like Knights of the Old Republic (XBW: 95%) and Ninja Gaiden (XBW: 91%) spring to mind as cultprits. Sadly, the Xploder can’t facilitate the transfering of these particular savegames either, however their website has managed to acquire saves for some of these pesky titles, and while you won’t be able to copy them off your HDD again once they’re there, it’s nifty to be finally able to get saves that allow you to beat the game in question.

The Xploder P.C software that comes included is straight forward to use and on Windows XP it installed without a hitch. The interface is split into two parts, the saves on your hard drive on the left hand side, the saves on the memory card on the right hand side and to move files back and forth you simply drag them across (much like your standard FTP type program). To save going to the Xploder website and downloading saves manually you can even open up a window inside the Xploder program that links directly to the internet and then when you download save games it’s all managed automatically. For some reason however, this part of the program doesn’t want to work for me and I haven’t received a reply from the Xploder support guys yet so hopefully that can be fixed up.

As mentioned though, you can head to the Xploder website where they have a large number of save games ready to download. There does appear to be more of a bias towards PS2 content available though with the latest Xbox save available being a GTA San Andreas save dating back to July. I was also after some save files from more recent releases such as Conker, Forza Motorsport and Fifa 2005 but unfortunately there aren’t any currently available from their website and it would be good to see that change.