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Over at Wired News, there's a pretty accurate encapsulation of all the forum whinging that has gone on over the past few years about save games, specifically within the context of Dead Rising's draconian and merciless save system.
You should read it, but it concludes with this ludicrous analogy:
This is why gamers have such heated debates about save mechanisms: They're metaphoric stand-ins for the way life works. Playing a game with frequent save points is kind of like being the child of a billionaire: You can soar through life without worrying about financial problems because if you fail, there's a "restore" point waiting for you. Games with few save points force you to live like a scrappy, coming-from-nothing immigrant: You embrace scary amounts of risk to get ahead because you've got no safety net.
Um. No. Paris Hilton isn't like instant save at all. Nor is it like being a hopped-up, meth addicted trailer park monkey.
For me, the debate really ends with the convenience issue. There is no CD I can't turn off mid-way through the album, only to pick it up again later on, when my attention isn't divided. Books do not become unread when you stop in the middle of a chapter. A DVD has chapter breaks specifically to allow you to come back to it. Entertainment media is about your convenience, not about the pompous, uninterruptable infliction of art upon a squirming audience.
If you don't want to save anywhere, you really don't have to, as long as the designers don't cave to the instinct to degrade their game to make saving every five seconds a necessity. Ultimately, though, it's less about the saving mechanism than the loading mechanism. You ought to be able to save anywhere, in any game, so you can put it down when you want to. However, if a designer wants to limit my ability to load my save games, preventing me from save-hopping my way through their game, that's okay. Okay with me, that is. But maybe not with you.
Thoughts, oh commenters?
Saved by the Bell [Wired]
