I cannot stand the use of checkpoints which are 20 minutes apart. It just makes games more frustrating then they should be.

Does this bother anyone else?

I hate it as well. I've seen the reasoning behind it and while I understand some of it, I still hate it. My stage of life makes it so that sometimes I need to quit a game right now, and losing progress because of that is extremely annoying.

Assassins creed is a great game for its save system. I bring this up because I was just playing the latest Splinter Cell and having to rely on checkpoints has done nothing but piss me off. It's a shame because I know I personally don't have patience to play that game the way I played the rest (getting old I think). It's not a bad game by design, just no manual saves. Gah!

Hedwards, I'm wracking my brains and know it's not going to come to me. What is RtCW?

Depends on what type of game it is, but if anything I think limited save points is sometimes a good thing.

Survival horror, creates tension... the good kind. Im still trying to work it out myself...

Edit: Return to castle wolfenstein? it had a Quick Save!

Hmm, I must have forgotten about that, I don't think that it really gave much opportunity to use it during that stealth area. That's the thing, I think that developers sometimes use it as a crutch to artificially increase the difficulty rather than fixing the game mechanics.

Depends on the game.

With many modern games, the game-world is quite large, and it can have many objects in it, each's state needs to be saved. So for quick saving to work, you will either need a simpler world, or maybe do some trickery with the game world (such as not being able to go back when reached certain thresholds) or just make a game with a simple game-world which is fast to save and load.

Not sure if I should feel old or not, but when I started gaming the only way to save was to pause the game and leave it running 24/7. Then came the games with checkpoints.

But yeah, I still agree. I don't know how many times I've walked up to someone and....

Me: Which button do I press to talk to this guy? Was it W or E?
*Presses W. Guy falls over dead*
NPC: Murderer! Get him!
Me: Damn it. Now I've got to start over. Where was my last save?

I suck at game BTW.

Edit: And I apparently can't spell. That should be "games."

I remember those days too, I hated it then and I hate it now haha. I don't think it would be half as frustrating if A. Modern games were not so buggy and B. Our older minds would stop pushing the wrong buttons. :P

A lot of people say the limited save system in the Hitman games add tension and excitement. I say the only thing it adds is the number of times I jump up and start screaming obscenities while violently bashing my head against the wall.

But were these games with hundreds of gameplay hours? I can't imagine if they were!

Depends. They were prone to randomly crashing and making you have to start over.

Not even quicksave - just the ability to save wherever I want would be welcome. Perfect example is Doom. Save anywhere I want, jump straight back into the action.

Admittedly some games take that too far. Gothic 2's quicksave let me save a game just AFTER I had been killed when I hit quicksave instead of quickload by accident :/ I guess that is why those buttons are deactivated by default!