[…] in 2007 I asked my readers what save mechanic they prefered and the overwhelming number of respondents chose classic “save anywhere” system […]

[…] have to complain about the save system. You already know how I feel about checkpoints. I think most of us here agree that save anywhere mechanic is far superior. Unfortunately Shadowrun […]

I agree with the Author. All games should use a hybrid system of saving. If you gotta leave for any reason it’s nice to be able to save right then. But it is also helpful when a game auto-saves right before a spot where you are probably going to die a few times before passing it. I don’t care what gamer dorks say about subtracting challenge from a video game. I play to have fun and don’t want to waste my time repeating the same part over and over cause the is no save point between the easy part right before a big boss battle. Crappy save systems have definitely kept me from finishing more then a few games. i.e.. Mega Man, Metroid Prime, and the worst ever… Zelda 2!!!

I have no real problem with checkpoint save systems. What I do have a problem with is when devs abuse checkpoints and force you to play the game their way.

One of the most frustrating experiences of my gaming career is in Halo: Combat Evolved (for the PC) duuring the second mission where you are on a big building and you have to survive wave after wave of dropships. Since the checkpoint save system only saves the game at the very beginning of the sequence (and not between waves) if you died on wave 5, you had to play waves 1-4 again just to get that far.

As I got increasingly frustrated with the repeats, my gaming skills degenerated until I was dying on wave one, cursing all the way down to the ground. Whatever console n00bs try to say, that is not fun. There is no “challenge” in fighting the exact same enemies, or watching the exact same cut-scene over and over and over again until you either 1) cheat or 2) destroy your computer in anger.

If you like a checkpoint save system, fine, don’t use a quick-save and “challenge” yourself by clicking through that cut-scene for the fourty-second time. But there is no reason why games should not have a quick-save for you, the player, to decide when you want to save.

This page is probably the greatest gaming rant I’ve ever read. It was written before the 360, Wii, or PS3 were released and it is king of geared towards them, but the console makers didn’t seem to read or listen to this rant. It is 20 things console/game makers should do.

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).

The “most mind numbingly frustrating game I have ever played in my life” is without a doubt Contra on the Sega Genesis.

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. :P

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!

Platform jumping in FPS games is another one of my pet peeves! This is the worst genre to do jumping puzzles because… Well, in most games you can’t see your fucking legs.

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.

Not a specific game, but I hate FPS games that have the DIAS platform-jumping acrobatics. I guess one specific example was Turok on N64. I had great fun with this, and was only mildly annoyed at the occasional need for precision jumping. Then I reached a point where you had to make a long series of jumps, and if you messed up you died and IIRC they also had the damned “falling apart behind you so you better hurry up or you die” thing going on, too. I never got past it, so I never finished the game. Bastards! That’s why I pretty much stick to more realistic FPS games, be it WWII or modern. (BTW, wouldn’t an American Civil War or WWI FPS be cool?) My self-kills are much lower in those. :)