Please excuse the profanity in the following quotes. #19 is about jumping in an FPS.

19. NO MORE JUMPING PUZZLES IN FPS GAMES

We’ll try to be calm and avoid the violent hyperbole that spoils so many gaming websites, but are you telling me that Congress can hold hearings about steroids in baseball, but they can’t do anything about jumping puzzles in first-person games? YOU CAN’T SEE YOUR MOTHERFUCKING FEET. IT DOESN’T WORK. I understand this occurring in games like Turok 3. That’s why they’re called bad games. But Half-Life 2? Are you serious? BOW YOUR HEAD IN SHAME.

Anyhow, #6 is exactly along the lines of your post:

6. All of the new consoles will have hard drives. Use them.

When we’re on our deathbeds, we’re going to wish we could reclaim the time we spent wandering around for save points long after we were done playing every night. Imagine if your word processing program did this, refusing to let you save your progress until you typed six more paragraphs. Or, made you retype your last paragraph six times while zombies tried to shoot your cursor…

The analogy sort of breaks down there, but the point is we shouldn’t ever see a “save point” in a game again. Limited saves were invented for consoles that didn’t have the memory to let you “quicksave” (where you can save at any time, any where, with one keystroke like on a PC). To keep that physical limitation and pretend it’s a gameplay element is like Superman 64 claiming its programmers’ inability to render any background scenery was “Kryptonite Fog.”

There is not one single reason in the known universe for even one more game where the save point is ten motherfucking minutes away from the boss, forcing me to fight my way down the same hallway each of the 62 attempts it takes me to beat the guy (I’m looking at you, Metroid Prime).

Back then, I was only 12 when I owned the game on my genesis console. You are given only 3 lives with 3 “continues”. There isn’t any sort of health bar; a hit from an enemy bullet, or even touching the enemy, will deplete one life. Sad to say, I never completed it back then. Patience was a virtue I didn’t have back then.

I’ve only managed to complete it when I discovered emulators-and-roms on the PC, utilising the very-much-grateful-for “save state” feature on the emulator!

Since you can’t move the camera around it’s often very hard to judge the angles, or your distance from the ledge. This is why the games that include hard acrobatics are 3rd person perspective - like Tomb Rider or Prince of Persia.

Btw, I have never finished a TR or PoP game - I don’t have enough eye-hand coordination to make perfect timed jumps for 20 minutes while being chased by enemies, while the floor is collapsing under my feet only to start all the way from the beginning when I die.