About the saving anywhere, I'm not sure I feel as strongly about it. Checkpoints can add a bunch of tension you wouldn't have if you could save anytime.

Loved Farcry and purposefully avoided using it in Arma 2, it has a quit save option though like FTL. If you have to stop playing you don't lose anything. Hotline Miami if you quit you could lose a few levels, I loved that too.

Expeditions: Conquistador

When South America was conquered by the Spanish, at least 50% of the Conquistadores were apparently female including the soldiers, hunters and doctors. You can even make an all-girl party if you wish so.

Not always so. I don't really like action games much, but I saw that it worked wonderfully in Final Fantasy XII (which had the best ATB system in FF games with Queues and such). It allows for many interesting things to happen:
1. Special encounters feel more intimidating.... Speaking about Dustia and such.
2. If you don't really feel like killing stuff, and have good gear/high levels, you can just run through zone paying no attention to local wildlife.
3. It adds additional level of tactics. See this big floating fire entity? Cast any magic while it is near and you die (unless you have very good gear and high levels). See these mandragoras running around? Let them do that long enough and they will reach Lv.99 by buffing themselves.

The thing that tells me right away if a game is made in US, or Europe (excluding maybe UK): does it have the ability to enable subtitles, and are they enabled by default. In US games they never seem to be enabled by default (if there even is an option for subtitles), while in European games they usually seem to be enabled.

I always try to enable English subtitles, both in my games and movies. I think my hearing is fine, but sometimes in the middle of the night I want to keep the volume level quite low, in which case I might have issues telling what exactly the people are talking about. Especially in action/war movies this is an issue even in day time because if I keep the voice level up to hear what they are mumbling, then the action scenes, explosions etc. will be EXTRA LOUD!

With headphones this is less of an issue, but even there I might want to keep the volume at moderate levels, in order not to destroy my hearing over time (headphones don't have to be extra loud before they will start affecting your hearing, by the way...).

Also generally, since English is not my first language, it is easier for me to understand obscure words when I see them written down, than hearing them for the first time.

Normally it is fine if they are disabled by default and I have to enable them, but on some games this is made oddly cumbersome. I think was it in Telltale games like those new Sam & Max games and Back To The Future that your settings, including enabling subtitles, will not be saved until you save your game. IIRC.

Oh, and this coincides with yesterday's System Shock release. In the original CD version, I think you hear only audio logs by default. If you want to read the text and hear the audio, you need to enable both in the audio settings. And as with Telltale games, you need to save your game before this setting is saved.

However, in this new Enhanced edition, they are both enabled by default. Good job NDS! Then again, the issue in SS is that the audio logs and the written text are not identical. It is quite hard to concentrate on someone speaking differently to what you see on the screen, even if they meaning is the same, just with different words. I actually recall in System Shock Portable there was an option to enable fan-made written autio logs, which are identical to the voice audio logs?

This can all be done while keeping the game strictly turn-based. In particular, that thing with mandragoras sounds very much like something that happens in the Shiren series; if an enemy kills another enemy, the enemy levels up and becomes significantly stronger.

Yet, the Shiren games are strictly turn based.

The characteristic you are confusing it with is the trait of not having a separate encounter screen, which is a whole nother matter. Roguelikes (like Shiren) are turn based and don't have a separate encounter screen. Zelda 2 and Gargoyle's Quest are not turn based, but do have a separate encounter screen.

Regarding saving, I think it's shameful that games still have the simplest quicksave sytem in this time and age. It works by saving your game to always the same file when you press the quicksave key. What sometimes happens is that you accidentally save in an unwinnable state (e.g. an enemy behind your back just about to strike you when you're already at low health), and then you have to rever to the last hard save or autosave.

This could simply be avoided by programming the game to use multiple quicksave files, saving only to the oldest one each time you press the quicksave key. That way you always have another fairly recent quicksave to revert to in case of trouble. Some games have implemented it, but I can't remember which ones; they're so rare. Still, such a simple thing to program, yet almost entirely unused.

But that was always the idea of the quicksave. Think of it as the "I'm going to try something stupid" save, which you really shouldn't have more than one of.
On the other hand, The Witcher didn't have a true quicksave function, just a "press button to save" one, that skipped the "choose slot and select if you want to overwrite an older save" part. So since I was using the quicksave as I said before, I ended up with a ton of saves.

And it's easier (for Finns, at least) to see the words, as many of them are pronounced differently than written. It may be a Finnish thing.

Also some words are pronounced very similarly, or the character may have an accent. In any case, subtitles are great.

Alternatively, the game could include an emergency escape feature, accessible on the Load Game screen, that is guaranteed to put you back into a winnable state. Might and Magic 3-5 have the Mr. Wizard feature, which requires the game to be loaded, but given that these games are strictly turn based, that ends up not being an issue. At least one of the Golden Sun games had a button combo that would take you back to town when loading a save.

I learned the alt+F4 exit because of Assassin's Creed. True story, I didn't know about it until I had to crawl my way out of AC 2 years ago.

Bravely Default on the 3DS has both of these. You can get a skill with one of the classes which gives you a tally of chests in the current map (so useful, I hate searching every nook and cranny of a map only to find I've got everything ten minutes ago...)
And you can turn encounter rate (and difficulty I think, been a while since I played it now) up and down, so if you're grinding for experience you can play lots of really hard battles or if you're running through an area you've already beaten, half dead or looking for items you can turn them off entirely.

I also love the idea of suspend saves (self deleting when you load) anywhere. I know lots of games don't let you save at will so you can't save in the middle of a boss battle or something when you've beaten their first form and not have to go through the whole battle again (although, I don't see why not...) but if you could at least save and exit and come back to that point if you suddenly had to go do something else that would be great.

Also, I completely agree with the skipping cutscenes thing. Worst thing is they hardly ever tell you what the buttons do during a cutscene, so you have reason to pause and you start pressing random keys to see if you can and then you skip the whole cut scene... or it seems to stop and wait for a button press (as normal non cutscene conversations might) so you press a button and it just skips the whole thing.
I like being able to pause, but also when at the start of a cutscene it shows up what buttons do what (space to pause, escape to skip etc.) briefly so you know what you're doing.

Here's one feature I think should be more common: A mode that removes all cutscenes, allowing one to focus solely on the gameplay. One game that I know does this is VVVVVV, but that feature is only available on No Death Mode; It should be available for normal playthroughs. Sometimes, even skipping cutscenes takes too long, and I would rather not have them interrupt the action.

Personally, I think it would be ideal if cutscenes were avoided in the first place.

I remember you from the video games and stories -thread :D

Ideas from this Cracked article:
- on-demand saves
- branching replays (no retreading same old stuff to see new/variant content)
- replayable dialogues/cutscenes (if any)
- adjustable difficulty
- optional "mature" content filter