Apparently a brutally hard game and designed with the idea in mind that you will die. A lot. Again and again. But it's a shitty PC port, so if you're going to play it, make sure you get whatever mods you need to make it playable. I was so pissed off with the crappy port job when I first tried to play it that I haven't gotten around to going back to it. I may someday, but to me this game screamed of 'crappy port' that you often see people complaining about.

so you play games with suicidal characters and become suicidal yourself from that? :p

Enter The Matrix has been annoying me with this - stages are pretty short but when you get through a tough one only to die because you missed the surprise jump at the end (its not really a platform game) and have to do that entire part of the stage again... arrg!
Or if you go into 'Focus' bullet time mode to shoot a guy and you side step but because you're in bullet time you to a fancy sideways somersault instead... off the side of a ledge but its OK because Ghost or Niobe grabbed onto the side and is dangling from it except its not because the ledge has railings you just somersaulted over and the game will make you fall off when you try to pull yourself back up aaaaaand... back to the start of the stage section!

Level 17 of Crimson Skies is a bitch too - they put you in this flimsy little 'gyroscope' helicopter thing and put you up against an ace gyroscope and 6 heavily armoured attack planes... that fire backwards
except there are 4 locations that the ace can be at and if he's not at the first one you try you get attacked by 2 extra planes, a total of a possible 6 extra planes, just finding him at the first place you try and killing him and all his lackeys is incredibly hard, if he's not there and you have to fight even 2 extra planes - don't even bother, you have no hope
So not only do you have to keep trying the stage again and again from the start you only have a 1 in 4 chance of it even being doable!

Cave Story + (and, I guess, the original, non '+' version too) has 3 boss fights in a row at the end with no save point - that's a complete pain too but I'll stop now before James Rolfe's lawyers contact me...

Oh that'll work out swimmingly for you.

Hmmm, now I have a question. I've never used a mod before, so how do I go about choosing a proper mod ?

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=1442

Check the sticky section and especially the fix by Durante and the mouse fix threads. There should be instructions and readme's on how to do what in them. They basically fix the game.

I've never beaten SaGa Frontier because of a combination of it being easy to end up in a super-difficult location before any members of your party are ready, and not having enough save slots (one SF save uses a lot of memory blocks).

There's also a couple of save spots before a boss battle, but which you can not return to the world at large in case you're ill-equipped/ill-statted to battle said boss.

It's a shame, because I otherwise love that game to bits.

5 to 15 Minutes of gameplay between checkpoints is the sweet spot for me. Under certain circumstances, up to 30 minutes can be reasonable. For most genres, "save anywhere" sucks big time. Tends to take the fluidity, challenge and tension out of games.

Examples of games with great savegame systems: the Infinity Engine RPGs, Gears of War, sport games like FIFA. Worst offenders: the Final fucking Fantasies and other JRPGs. Some missions in the GTA games. Remember Vertical Bird in San Andreas?

I absolutely despise repeating myself in games.... Just the other day i was playing a great game of Alien Crossfire, one of those rare games where you just cannot quite get on top of the AI,, but most impressively, its happening mid game!!!! (not just the usual brief struggle in the early stages then the AI flops over dead) and my darling daughter (2 years old) managed to switch off my computer at the wall outlet. I had a save only about 3 turns back but after reloading, i just could not bear repeating myself that short period of time and i gave up!

Any game in my collection that does anything close to what people are mentioning above will be whisked off to the no play pile with never a passing thought or glance ever more, done finished.

Thanks for the link. There's a wealth of info there and I bookmarked it. I sure appreciate it. >_<

Yeah...It's a real downer !! :(

Yep, i wish i could give you a detailed explanation of how to do what but i haven't played for months and the mods may have been updated and i don't really remember the procedure to give a step by step guide. I stopped playing because of the DRM and wishfully wait for the GFWL tumor to be cut out but i dunno if that's gonna happen, but i HOPE! :o

In general i remember it was really easy to set up the mods (it was just copy-pasting and some .ini edits and option settings), just follow the instructions in the readme's and don't be discouraged! I know it sucks we PC gamers have to do this stuff in order to play our games and enjoy em but a bit time spent reading and tweaking the game sure is a good trade-off, especially for this game. ;)

Aaaand another thing - what about RTS games? Take Age of Empires, for example, that game lets you save literally ANY time you want to, every damn second it you like but that only lulls you into a false sense of security because there you'll be - quietly minding your own business, building your base up, saving up for those 'Age advancement' tech level upgrades for a good hour, hour and a half when BOOM out of no-where the enemy rocks up with a huge army of phalanx, chariots and catapults against your 5 axemen, 3 archers and assorted farmers and lumberjacks!
So it turns out that the first thing you should have done is make twice the amount of workers you actually did so you can gather resources twice as fast, your strategy has been off the WHOLE TIME, all the time you've been playing and all those save games are completely worthless!
Damn them!

This is interesting. I certainly welcome your thoughts and suggestions on the mods. It's a big help.
I've been reading a lot re GFWL and there are so many different opinions. Those who don't want it, have had serious problems with it. And it is called a cancer/tumor.