Man I'm sorry but this one is just... wrong. I get your sense of humor most of time but there really needs to be some limits. This is insulting and offensive. I can't for the life of me figure out what any 12 year old kid could possibly have done to you to deserve this.

Sure, but that still doesn't change the fact that manual saves are vastly superior to anything else and should be a basic feature of any game (at least on PC). Saving into a softlock is entirely on you and the only one you can hold accountable is you. And that is why you keep multiple saves and don't save in stupid situations. Checkpoints are garbage because once you trigger them, you can not save again until the next checkpoint. And having to replay things because of dying right before a checkpoint sucks hard. It is also a major annoyance that I can't keep a save in the middle of a level in the new Doom for example if I want to go back to some fun part or something like that.

Autosaves are actually good in combination with manual saving at either key moments or set time interval and are a great fallback for when you forget to save yourself.

Of course games which are built around dying, repeating and such are exempt from this.

Yes, walking dead, meaning you are unable to beat the game even though you are still playing, not zombies. Adventures have done it, but they are far from the only ones. RPGs have their fair share too.

Win & End is when you beat the game and your reward is maybe a screen that says 'You Win!' and when you push a button it dumps you back to the DOS prompt. It's just a sucky thing that I am happy is not common anymore.

PC games designed with their difficulty around the concept of save scumming all through the 90's. It's not skilful saving every 5 steps and reloading until you get lucky. How can you ever have a sense of dread and tension in a game, if you can just reload from 5 seconds ago without consequence? Losing progress is a way to make the player better and punish them for playing badly. Being able to save anywhere is the bane of video gaming. The original Hitman was the game that taught me how restrictive saving is better- I never felt such tension in a game up until Hitman, and I've never looked back.

Should I have marked that as snark in some way??? lol I thought it was obvious but when I came back and read it wondered if I over did it and sent the wrong message.

Oh yeah, that's one I forgot about. And despite what people today think, games back then were every bit as unfinished and broken as games today- but at least today the patch is just an internet connection away. I remember having to quit Planescape Torment and wait for a patch on a magazine disc a few months later just to be able to overcome a known bug that stopped you finishing the game.

Were they? The only game where I encountered one serious bug was Warlords Battlecry 3 but apart from that one, the other games were fine. Heck, even SpellForce which supposedly had some game-breaking ones I had no issues with. Most of the time I played them in 1.0, unless there was a patch on a PC magazine's CD or something. A decent number of games did get a patch or two, rarely three but it was nothing in comparison to today where you are basically just playing betas or there are some serious glitches going on.

Fixed hardware limitations for C64. It has 64 KBytes of RAM and that's it. It's still awe inspiring how many devs managed to produce epic-level games with such limitations (Lords of Midnight, Pirates!, Defender of the Crown, Supremacy, Jet Set Willy 2 and many more) but more often I had a feeling that the game could have been so much better, it's just that they didn't have enough resources to make it right.

Well, there are ways around the RAM limitation. You could store data on disk or cartridge; cartridge has the advantage in that data on it can be accessed without having to copy it to RAM first. You could even put RAM on the cartridge and have the game use it.

Of course, the game still needs to use tricks like bank switching to deal with the 64KB address space limitation.

(Many console game cartridges actually have save RAM (SRAM), which is like RAM, but there's a battery allowing it to maintain its contents while powered down. Some games would actually use it as regular RAM due to the fact that the console itself had very little ram.)

Yeah but it was not a common solution in case of C64 and even if it were it would not change the fact that a strict limitation existed and many game developers simply couldn't implement all of their ideas because of it. We can even argue that Turbo Chameleon 64 was released in 2013, it has some megabytes of memory but that's still not my point ;) You obviously know more than me about hardware-related tricks but back in 80s I just wanted to play some games and some of them felt underdeveloped. Nowadays I don't miss these limitations even though I still like to play C64 games on a working C64 machine (emulation is not the same).

Yes they were, I even have the magazines from the period with articles complaining about it as proof. Along with articles about the rise of cheap expansion pack cash ins. Articles about the dumbing down and loss of difficulty in games. Articles about consoles making games mainstream (PS1)...all this in 1996 magazines. People just remember what they want to remember and love getting online and having a whinge. I haven't played a modern game that has had any major problems for as about 10 years. Not even Bethesda games.

I disagree, as having to replay the same part 50 times wasting 15 minutes each time is not my idea of a good time...

But, OTOH, I must say that I did indeed complete Hitman with no difficulties. In fact, for fun I even played a couple of more difficult missions, like the hotel and the jungle "kill 'em all" style, and managed to do that without any save options available. So in the case of Hitman, it at least can reasonably be done.

But imagine some sudden death games, like Sierra adventures, with no save options...

I didn't really mean games having no saving, just not save anytime. Of course most games require some sort of saving because they are too large to complete in one sitting. Even Hitmans sequels had limited saving due to the larger levels.
For me nothing kills immersion or tension more than an obtrusive save anywhere save system. And you cannot just ignore it and not save in a save anywhere game, because a games difficulty is built around its save system.
A more modern example of perfection in progression saving are the Souls games. The system punishes you for being lazy, careless and inept and rewards for being careful, diligent and playing well and employing risk assesment- the reward being the game feels easy. That's how saving and difficulty should work imho.

Free / quick saving
I never really was a fan of it, I always preferred checkpoints. I remember how many PC gamers initially had big issues when checkpoints became pretty much a standard in genres that had traditionally always had quick saves on PC, in particular shooters. But both as a gamer and designer I consider checkpoints a much more elegant solution. I don't think that portioning challenges is something that should be the player's responsibility. It's just not a valid gameplay decision and if you have the ability to save at any point, the thought of when to save just keeps muddling the gameplay experience which should be focused on how to survive, how to kill etc.. That or you keep hitting the save key as often as the jump key. And quick saves have the ability to trivialise any challenge by giving the player the option to break it down into tons of micro challenges. Additionally checkpoints have very much improved balancing. With quick saves developers often had a tendency to create sections that can barely be beaten at once - quick saves would make them beatable. With checkpoints designers HAVE to make sure that a section (any sequence between two checkpoints) is perfectly beatable. Of course the downside is that if a section becomes too hard or long, players just have to deal with it.

That said, it depends on the game. I don't generally feel bad about the ability to save freely in strategy games or in more sandboxy games like Stalker (although I would prefer if, say, saving in Stalker were not possible during combat). It's primarily linear action games where I have a really big issue with it and in my opinion one of the main reasons old shooters have aged badly (while mechanically they were often as good as modern shooters).


Maze levels
A thing that's pretty infuriating about old action games is that levels would often be too convoluted. Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, Jedi Knight, you name it. The biggest challenge would often be finding the right way or button to press etc., it's what would usually make you get stuck rather than tough combat challenges. Some environmental puzzles or sections where navigation is meant to be challenging, that's okay, but it's not okay if you're playing a fast-paced shooter and what's giving you a hard time is something entirely detached from the (alleged) core gameplay. It's most infuriating, though, when this shit happens in a game that does not even have "maze" design, like Soldier of Fortune II, which is basically a tunnel shooter but will once in a while give you a pretty wide area where you have to find a tiny ventilation shaft or suddenly have to execute a risky jump between two obscure spots.

That said, having played the original Doom again recently I do appreciate the relative openness of the levels which adds a surprisingly high amount of tactical freedom. In Doom you always remember the rooms you just passed and will often use that knowledge to get into a better position. You will remember where you had corridors, where you had wide areas, where you had pits and you're able to quickly maneuver to an already visited nearby location to even the odds. But luckily I feel like more recent shooters have often been able to add some degree of this freedom without making navigation a major challenge.