Saving games at predefined positions (consoles)

The rationale behind this is - besides game design issues - simplicity. Saving a game at certain point is much easier and requires, as you already suspected, less memory.

Game states can become quite complex during play and saving all of it might just take to much resources (time and card memory). Keep in mind that not only the player's data has to be stored, but also the current state of most (e.g. at least all visible) enemies and dynamic portions of the environment. Save points are often found in places where no enemies are and no interaction with the environment is possible.

Because I am generally just curious (still) :) I have to wonder if there is a better way to approach it. On a PC game, memory and time is of little importance, thus games usually just dump everything to disk. Since I am not familiar with the system resources held by a console such as the PS2 (I only really know that it must limit its savegame sizes to several kilobytes if possible)

I guess what really made me think of this "game design" problem was the article "Designing games for the wage slave" - was a gamedev.net featured article a while back. When I read it, I almost felt that it was a little silly - and after playing Jak II, I feel that the guy who wrote it was absolutely correct.

I dunno - I know for sure that I had time to waste when I was in highschool and college, and now that I graduated and am working full time things have changed.

Oh well, an interesting topic to throw some thought to. Thanks for your reply, darookie.

It's a game design choice, and that's all.

I doubt people consider how much space a save file will take up when they're designing the game, and the size difference is not significant anyway.