Hello everyone.
I played this last night, and got all the way to the rooftop where you get the sniper rifle.

Went to play today, and tried Continue, and started all the way back at the beginning of the game, at the waters edge !!

I kept seeing 'Checkpoint Reached' throughout the game, so I dont know why this has happened?

I also went to the Load Game menu, and sure enough, only the waters edge is there.
:(

Do I need to run this as admin?
Or give special rights?
Or XP mode?

Thanks.

Eh.
Did both.
Also doing F5 saves and Manual saves, just in case.

Learned this the hard way when my PC froze and I lost three levels of progress. F5 early and often, it will save you from mild annoyance.

In a related question, does this game have an actual save system, or is it just checkpoint saves? Does F5 save from where you're at, or the last checkpoint?

Saves the last checkpoint.

I'm manually saving the game and even then it loads at the last checkpoint instead of where I actually saved it. Is the game really incapable of saving properly?

Manually saving is only there for saving if you take a break and want to play later, otherwise it's unnessecary.

The game was built for a console-style checkpoint/chapter system.

I always thought they were aping GoldenEye 007 and Perfect Dark (and the EA 007 FPS, namely Nightfire and Agent Under Fire), which means you either complete a chapter of have to start again from the beginning.

Console logic, and I suppose also to make sure the challenge can't be diluted by savescumming (which probably would not have been smooth on the consoles of the time, namely XBox, PS2 and GameCube).