After loosing about a hours worth of progress in Bioshock 2 today due to a system lock-up, I have to point out what is the true problem: manual saves (or poor autosaving).
The idea of the save file is nearly timeless in gaming, dating back to early computing. At that time initiating a save state manually was a requirement due to primitive storage technology. Take out the game disk, insert a disk to hold your save, now swap back to continue playing. At the time it met the needs of the gamer well, but games have evolved significantly. Unfortunately, the save mechanic has often remained archaic.
Let's take my situation. I'm playing a game that does have an autosave feature, but it only bothers to take a snapshot every stage. Any other save state requires me to initiate it myself. I'm not advocating removing the possibility to save when desired, but what prevents the developer to at least give the option of a continuous save state. Power goes out, game locks up... no problem just pick up and play. I certainly don't plan for my game to lock up, so why should I be forced to initiate a series of time consuming saves to make up for the shortcoming? Companies need to innovate, and this is long past due.
It reminds me of why I liked Space Giraffe on the 360 so much. The game itself was ok at times and a trippy mess at others, but it did one thing I have been waiting for in shooters for an eternity... auto fire. Unless I am playing a game that requires technique or limited shots, why would I ever not want to shoot? There is absolutely no reason that an auto fire button ever needs to exist on a controller. Developers are wise enough to figure out when it is needed, and to do anything else is just to test my patience and make my thumb sore.
So I think it is time for the save to evolve. Agree or disagree, what do you think?
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Halo series had a decent autosave.
Borderlands has a usually good autosave feature.
I am sure there are other games out there too that have acceptable autosave features.
The trouble with autosave is what happens when the game decides to autosave right at the point where you are swarmed by enemies, driving into a dead end/cliff, low on ammo and/or health.
I have had autosave cause me more grief in games than anything else sometimes.
I didn't finish Halo for years because my brother played it and guess what it autosaved. I had 10 shotgun rounds and 2 pistol mags. I did finally manage to beat the horde of grunts/jackals/elites/ and 4 ghosts/wraith tanks. But it took some serious training/luck and a little skill.
Just remember autosave is a blessing and a curse.
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I agree Izret, autosave isn't perfect and I don't advocate the loss of the traditional save. I just don't want to have to backtrack forever due to an issue beyond my control, nor do I want to waste my time performing saves every 10 minutes. IMHO games should be fun, not work 
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I like when games have autosave but give the option to turn it off and have a manual save option as well. Like Izret said, there are times when the autosave saves at a really bad time, and makes the game really hard to start back up. And I hate games that only have autosave, if something comes up and you have to quit playing there is no way to save other than getting to the next save point, which could be an hour away.
I've been playing a lot of Battlefield Bad Company lately and I really like its autosave. It saves at the beginning of every sub-mission and during certain points of the mission. So if something happens, you only lose a few minutes of time. And the save happens very quickly and its hardly noticeable that its even happening. But it does not have the manual save option, so sometimes you're not sure when the last autosave was, so you have to keep going until you come to another save point.
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There is a such thing as autosaving TOO often, as pointed out. Especially if you get a power failure or game crash at one of the autosaving points, which corrupts your save file that contains DAYS worth of work in half a second.
I've only really lost one save file. It was due to a crash as Wipeout Fusion saved at the end of a track run. But it was enough to make me nervous.
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So how about this thought: a system wide save prefernce setting. Allow each person to select autosave on/off, time between autosaves, number of autosaves to retain, etc. This way everyone can play the games the way they like.
Can you think of any genre where this would cause problems?
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I much prefer manual to automatic, though it's nice when a game makes a separate autosave at certain intervals.
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I've played Bioshock only for a few minutes, but I was already annoyed by the autosave. I'm in this room, just killed an enemy. There's two small rooms, I believe they are toilets. It all looks very pretty, so I want to see it all, and there's items everywhere. I walk into one of the toilets, then go past an invisible point and all of a sudden I can't go back and explore the other toilet anymore! I really hate that.
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@Sirgin: "I walk into one of the toilets, then go past an invisible point and all of a sudden I can't go back and explore the other toilet anymore! I really hate that."
LOL! Off topic a bit, and I know what you are saying, but I read that statement and if taken out of the conversation and just read aloud its hilarious 
I love/hate how, when we talk about video games, unless someone else is a gamer, most things we say can sound funny/disturbing/outright-crazy. We don't even have to use technical terms when discussing our gaming- just the situations we describe can't rationally be understood by those who don't play games. That's one of the reasons I'm kinda glad gaming is now so mainstream. I can talk about a game and not always feel like if the wrong person hears, they think I belong in a straight-jacket.
Sorry for the derail but I had to share
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I do like the ability to manually save, but autosaving can be pretty handy. Auto-overwriting-saves, however, are just pure evil.
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