I have Dungeon Siege... 2? 3? Whatever one was on the PS3. Pretty good...

Dungeon Siege was a game that nearly played itself, so the gamer didn`t have to do anything. That`s what I call a casual game!

thats 3
1 and 2 were never released on a console
1 was released on windows and mac os X ( have them both )

i tend to stall in the swamp of 1 and then trail off ...i really do need to finish that damn game

Both are legit save systems, of course. If combined fine - I can't remember ever played a game with having only autosave - except the whole F2P/Browser crap. ("Fallen London" is the BIG exception! I recommend it heavily if you're not allergic on reading)
Before I start a game I check the options and usually turn auto-saving off or at least tune down the time intervall.

Maybe some of the developers nowadays are stupid too or even more. A gamer can only that smart how a developer let him/her be.

Ah, Dungeon Siege. For all of the flack that it got on release, I loved the hell out of that game. I played that game to death on my old 400 Mhz Power Mac G4. I think one of the only complaints I had about that game was that it was far, far too easy (and this is coming from someone who usually resorts to cheats/walkthroughs to finish RPGs). To this day, one of my biggest regrets was not buying the Mac port of the Legends of Aranna expansion when it was available.

i like it too
and i have the mac port i played it on an ibook 600 mhz in 2006 but i never finished the damn thing
one of these days

+1 to the OP for And choose wisely lest you bone yourself with that one save you're given. Generally I enjoyed it - you got the option to save, but it added tension to the game.

I admit I've sometimes wished some RTS or FPS games I've played had had some kind of automatic save game system, on top of being able to save manually as well. This is when I've played failing mission for an hour and being so immersed that I simply forgot to save...

Anyways, can you even die in Grim Fandango? If not, the only automatic save it would really need was to save the game when you exit the game.

The problem was a crash that resulted in lost progress.

Having a way to reduce the time loss from crashes is a good thing, and auto-saving is one solution for that. Certainly it's better than just having manual saves, but I'd say that not having manual saves and just having automatic saves is worse. Still, no reason not to have both.

Anyway, boggles my mind how some people tend to think that a flawed implementation is the right one, and people who don't want to accept it are stupid. Reminds me of a friend of mine who told me that if I wanted more than 8.3 character for file names I was obviously not using a good enough naming scheme. My fault obviously; no need for more than 8.3.

36 ^ 11 = 131,621,703,842,267,136

In terms of raw combinations he is right... However i really don't want to look at the filename and see aeJZZv12.ZVi... I'd rather see 'Daily Reports dd-mm-yy.csv'. God forbid i leave my computer for 6 months and come back to seeing a whole directory that looks like it's been encrypted!

REPORTS\DD-MM-YY.CSV is what you need to do. See, it's easy. You don't need more than 8.3.

Perhaps... Simply adding things into directories to extend the name, i wonder how many extra directories you're willing to use in order to do this.

Naturally Unix/Linux systems have long since dropped the 8.3 limit since a long long time ago. Quite a few utilities utilize having multiple periods, so if you have say your report of DD-MM-YY.txt, you use gzip, and it becomes DD-MM-YY.txt.gz . the extensions are for our use.

But seriously, 8.3 is too short. You can do it, but having half a directory with music1.mid, music2.mid, music3.mid is shortened to such generic content. Not every game or system uses multiple directories, actually i can't think of that many from the early days...

If I remember right, in the old days it wasn`t allowed to create infinite subdirectories on your hd. I dont`t know exactly, but there was a limit of directories you could have. Iirc, Win 98 (or was it Win XP?) was the first OS that used a naming scheme that allowed you to use more than only 8 charactars for the name of a file, but programms still used the 8.3 scheme to be compatible to older operating systems.

Yeah, I know. As an Amiga user I was used to long names (the Amiga supported 30 characters). It's my PC buddy who argued that you didn't need them. From my point of view claiming that players need to save games manually all the time to prevent lost progress is akin to saying that users need to partition files into directories to keep their 8.3 file names readable. Sure it's a manual solution to the problem, but it's much better to remove the problem, or, if that's not easy to do (and making sure a game never crashes isn't trivial), take the burden to solve it away from the user (like Windows 95 did with the filenames).

I think the max length you could have was 256 characters, based on the OS's limitations? Or based on the commandline's i'm not sure.

If you go back further to 8-bit systems, quite often they didn't have directories. Yeah they were added later but i always thought it was a pain to navigate, so i never used them. Seeing as the disks were usually limited to 128k (1000 128byte sectors) you really don't want to expand too much and use your limited space.