@ DICE 2012, Todd Howard spoke about this very thing. You should check that out because you know, me made Skyrim around this principle.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7awkYKbKHik

I had problem just like that recently. Mass Effect 2 hammerhead DLC doesn’t let to save during one of the missions and the vehicle is so fragile that it blows up if geth even look funny at it. I tried a few times, but then I thought, screw this I will search for fun elsewhere.

Personally I liked how Hitman games solved this problem. Depending on the difficulty level you get fixed amount of saves. So you can choose how much saving you need.

@ Mart: Yes!! Red Faction: Guerrilla is also great for free-form mayhem. Just park somewhere, pick fights with passing soldiers, lead them on chases, sometimes I just collect their APCs as they come along until I have a parking lot full of them. Oddly relaxing to gun down those rude soldiers. Not sure what it says about me…

Bethesda has a good mechanic for this.
The difficulty can be adapted on the fly.

Sometimes, I like to play a challenging game, so then I move the difficulty slider all the way to the right. But sometimes, I just like to roleplay a character that would never be able to make it on its own normally (hand-to-hand argonian monk for example).

Oh yeah, GTA…
I had my time with that and in the end I mastered the story. Why? I got rather good at finding snipe points to fend off the opposition while exposing myself as little as possible.
It was no way as funny as starting a gang war and then rushing head long into it, gun blazing out the side window…

I’m a … well, hardcore casual gamer? I play games to get my mind of the daily routine but when the game gets to hard I usually quit and look for another one.
Homeworld was great. It had an amazing story and a challenging difficulty without being way over the edge (for me, that is).

I’m the same, the main reason I play games is for the storyline, and interesting gameplay, almost as though its an interactive movie to be honest. So if I can’t pass an area, it’s as though someone is sitting next to me hitting rewind over and over, and I end up losing interest.

Also, here’s another good reason to put save state into games: http://www.oddworld.com/?p=394

The part of San Andreas that killed it for me is the start of the flying missions. I truly hate that!

But any GTA game is great to unwind too. Don’t do the missions. Start randomly killing people, pile on your stars and see how far you could take it without dying or getting captured. I find it’s a great way to de-stress, especially when the “FBI” and tanks start rolling out.

For me the killer was a Wii game – yup…seriously. Silent Hill:Shattered Memories. Brilliant, spooky, a lot of neat places to explore….and then, inexplicably, you have to run from these pale white ghouls or ghosts or something. So, with the Wii, I have to run, steer, and, when the ghouls grab me, I have to move my Wii (or the nunchuck) in a particular motion as indicated on the screen. I have about 1 nanosecond to get the correct motion. If not, they begin to pile on and I have to start the chase over. I got to the first chase sequence in the game, failed several times, chucked the remote, and promptly loaned the game to a friend who wanted to give it a try – and who also said “Fuck this”. Seriously – I just want to play a game, not become a hyperintensive game freak.

And for sheer frustration, play any FPS (like Halo, Call of Duty, whatever) on a console. Seriously – people have fun using the wrong controls to play a game? You could be the uber-est gamer out there and I, incompetent as I am, would smoke your ass if you played the console version and I was on the PC with a mouse and keyboard. You would never even get a kill unless you got lucky – and before you ask how I know that, I did it. Halo – one xBox with controllers, one with mouse and keyboard. Too easy.

Let me say that I know exactly what you’re talking about. I’m ancient by gaming standards and I just don’t care enough to ‘master’ some game on expert and for what? At my age that kind of time expenditure on a video game would be kind of embarrassing. I buy games for one reason, well, two, to blow shit up or drive fast. In other words, things I can’t do in the real world w/o risking incarceration. I put it on ‘easy’ or ‘rookie’ and just enjoy myself. I have a stack of games that I have played half way or up to the final boss fight where I lost interest.
On a related note, I worry about how many console games are emphasizing the online portion of the game and perhaps not paying enough attention to the single-player offline game. I’m not going online, I get my ass handed to me on the end of a spear immediately, I do only the offline portion or maybe some online if I can arrange it with fellow amateurs. If games are going in this direction, all online and mixing levels of expertise completely, it might be a deal breaker for me.

I’m the complete opposite. For example, when I played Metal Slug 2 in an emulator – where I could save anywhere – I still purposely set myself a 3 lives limit (1 coin) and restarted the whole game when they ran out.

But I agree they should add a quick save anywhere function. It’s not like it forces people like me to use it.