The way I see it, either:
* Checkpoints should be reusable, or
* The game should be designed in such a way that there would never be a reason to want to re-use a checkpoint. (One way to do this is to make the game only save which checkpoint you have reached, and derive the rest of the game state from there; this is how stage based action games tend to do this.)

Even a "save" that only worked as a checkpoint update would be sufficient. You are done with 10 minutes of exploring, you press save, it updates the checkpoint status (collected pickups, found secrets, your health, ammo etc.) and in case of death, you would still be put at the checkpoint but without having to repeat the 10 minute exploration part.

Also forgot to respond to:
I meant that as in you are prevented from backtracking for the duration of the plot part/story mission. Once you finish the segment, you can continue doing whatever you want. I was just responding to F4LOUT that there are means to make the player go through the story segment in the way you want.

I actually like this idea, an option that lets you save your stats without saving your position.

(You should still respawn at full health with decent ammo if you die, to prevent the situation where you can't continue due to low resources; perhaps there might be a cost to this, like losing that item you found in a secret area (and having to re-obtain it if you want it.)

Incidentally, this sort of feature smells a lot like what I call "early New Game +", where you can restart the game at any point, but keep your stats and experience. (For example, Dragon Wars lets you do this.)

That situation is actually what I don't like. Instead of preventing the player from backtracking during part of the plot, the plot should be changed so that such a limitation is not necessary. (Otherwise, you can end up in a situation where the PC is too weak to continue, but doesn't have any way to get strong enough to proceed. Breath of Fire 2 has a particularly bad case of this, which is made worse by the fact that you have to solo that part with a character who you could realistically have not used (and who would be underleveled as a result).)

I don't miss having to mess with sound card IRQ jumper settings, autoexec.bat files, and trying (and usually failing) to get the mouse to work in first person shooters.

Some people have already mentioned, but I might as well say it as well. Lack of decent fast-travel.

A lot of people seems to think that having to walk a lot, even when the trip itself isn't really dangerous at all, makes the game more hardcore and challenging. Perhaps it does, since it will test your patience more than anything else.

Now, I love a good challenge. Difficult enemies to overcome, a tricky boss, having to micromanage multiple things, cool puzzles to solve... etc. But gaming time is limited now, and honestly, even when it isn't and in the moments I have a lot of time available, I rather spend doing something else rather than just walking for several minutes, or even hours, to get to a location.

Sometimes it's nice to actually walk to the place when you are in the mood. You can appreciate the scenario of the game, maybe even find secrets and some other stuff along the way. When you just want to explore, it's fun, but most of the time, I just want to get from point X to Y asap.

It doesn't have to be a super streamlined fast-travel system, where it seems like you can just teleport anywhere, but it has to be at least convenient.

I played morrowind again couple of months ago, and my goodness. Not only the character moves at the speed of a limp turtle, our stamina takes huge a hit when you "run". I'm in a decent shape and can run for a whole hour with no trouble whatsoever, so why does the hero of the prophecies, nerevarine, can't do the same?! It doesn't help that to fast travel in the game, you have to find a boat or a silt strider.

One thing I find interesting is that reasonably convenient fast travel has existed for a very long time. In Dragon Quest 3 (and later), there is a spell you get that, when cast, willl open up a menu with the list of towns you have visited; choose a town from the list and you'll be warped there (as long as there isn't a ceiling where you are, and the spell isn't disabled in the area you're in).

In Morrowind, the issues you have with speed and stamina can be mitigated:
* For speed, having a high Speed stat helps, as well as playing a heavier character (male Orcs are the heaviest race/gender combination). Athletics also helps, but only if you're runnig.
* There are two ways to deal with stamina (actually what the game calls fatigue, but the stat is misnamed IMO). One is to get high Endurance, which also helps with health games at level up, as well as lung capacity. Another is to create a spell or a magic item with the "Restore Fatigue" effect; it's a really cheap effect, so if your Restoration is in the 30s or so, it shouldn't fail too often. (Of course, the spell will fail more often when you're tired, so be mindful of that when using such spells, but if you get your Restoration high enough, you will be able to cast a 1 Magicka cost Restore Fatigue spell reliably even when exhausted.)
* There's also, of course, the option to create a very powerful Jump spell. If your load isn't too heavy, and if you jump from a high spot, you can traverse huge distances very quickly. (There is, of course, the small problem of landing safely, but that will be left as an exercise to the user.) I consider this the most fun way to travel in Morrowind.

You are right, in a way, but the thing is, you still need to grind, which can take some time, and make certain compromises in your build to aliviate the speed problem. Well, first, Speed is an attribute. If you want high Speed, you need to level up certain skills in order to get a high value.

Then we also have races with low endurance and speed. If you want to play as them, they are even worse early on. Bretons are my favorite race in Elder Scrolls and in Morrowind they have the physic of a frail granny. It's a huge investment getting those Endurance and Speed points in your character. Points that you could be putting into something else just so you don't walk at the speed of a toddler when you decided to carry an extra peanut.

While it does get better when your character becomes stronger, I still feel that even with high Speed and low encumberance, you still don't run very fast, at least compared to the other entries of the series (I can't remember how fast you could run in Daggerfall and Arena).

I have to adimit that when I lost my patience, I found myself using the COC command every so often in the game.

Not having an option to save game (at least between levels), loooong loading times and of course anti-user-friendly UIs.

Hard to think of one since I don`t miss it, but I guess it`s crappy graphics. I like that that we can really see what we look at now wherer before, when I was a kid, graphics was tiny pixelated stuff that made you feel like you were blind. This made some games pretty bad as I liked my flight war sims, but flying an Apache and all you see are black dots and green triangles with a blue paint for sky didn`t really help for immersion.

Also, I like how in 1st person shooters you can now look at all angles to shoot, when with games like the original Doom, you just pointed level and still hit anything high even when you weren`t pointing high. Also the graphics, while considered good at the time, really wasn`t.

What I most hated about Civilization was the fact that you had to restart the game to load a save.

That just means you lacked imagination. Graphics are really just for the superficial people.

"Now"? It's been that way since 1996.

Let's see...

Dos memory management

PC speaker "sound effects" and "music"

Clunky control mechanics

Games padded with an insane difficulty curve

Games padded with insane puzzles that are not meant to be solved by mere mortals

Lack of automapping in RPG's

Lack of proper quest journals in RPG's

Padding of RPG's with random, meaningless combat.

Correct.
Incorrect. I love playing Text Adventures and I am also very interested in advancing graphical realism.

You'd hate Book of Eschalon. There's a challenge ingame to not fast travel, and worse still, you can only fast travel after reaching a location. The problem is, your PC also plods along.

Adventure games : Pixel hunting

RTS games - non-context sensitive clicks

NES games - flickering sprites

3D games - 3dfx/Monster3d passthrough cards for 3d gaming

APIs - Everything before DirectX/DirectSound was a steaming pile of garbage

Manual memory management - I'm not exactly thinking that trying to get EMM386 to work again today would be 'fun'