Pause

[Hirocon]

And I am usually bothered by any game that has no pause function--but I can't think of any off the top of my head, and I never played much Mortal Kombat.

The Original Punch Out for NES had no pause to my knowledge.  The start button was used as a game button, letting you perform a super punch, and I don't believe the select button was used.

I couldn't really say what my longest pause was, though once I left SimCity 4 running unattended (NOT paused) overnight for about 7 hours while I slept.  I did it to get money... I had nothing but roads built yet and I was earning $100/month for legalizing gambling.  In the morning my city had ridiculous wealth.

[DeadAwake]

Of course!  I'm very familiar with Punch-Out!!'s lack of a pause function... I've gotta admit, though:  It does make the fight a lot more intense.  And with such quick rounds, I don't think I can hold that against it.

But that's what makes games WAY TOO EASY these days. There's no challenge if you can just get up and save whenever you feel like it.

It depends on the type of game, I'd say.

[Lizard Dude]

Games with savepoints but also a quicksave that auto-deletes when you resume it have it about right.

[The Chef]

^ Sounds like Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories, which I still havent beaten.

[bobman37]

Games with savepoints but also a quicksave that auto-deletes when you resume it have it about right.

Yeah, that's a good system. Anything like Final Fantasy Tactics Advance is good for me, where you can save during a battle and the data is lost when you pick it up again later.

[Lizard Dude]

WARNING: Language: http://pressstarttoplay.net/comic.php?cid=55

[bobman37]

Another good one on that site: http://pressstarttoplay.net/comic.php?cid=45

[Lizard Dude]

Oh yeah, I should have thought of that. :D

[TEM]

Both of those are great. My friend's little brother used to have a problem with SSBM as depicted in the first comic; we solved that problem as depicted in the end of that comic.

[The Chef]

That pause function should have been applied to camera mode. It's much easier to capture funny or interesting scenes that way.

[Pt_Peach]

That pause function should have been applied to camera mode. It's much easier to capture funny or interesting scenes that way.

But you CAN pause in camera mode.

[The Chef]

Yes, but you can only take the photos using the 4th controller while the game is unpaused.

[smfan1085]

But that's what makes games WAY TOO EASY these days. There's no challenge if you can just get up and save whenever you feel like it.

Some games certainly can have a good bit of challenge even when you can save any time. Take Donkey Kong 64, for instance. That game is quite difficult to get 101% completion in (though it's still enormously fun in my opinion), but you can save at any time you like, and I think it saves automatically every time you get a Golden Banana. What makes this game difficult is the puzzles, which sometimes take a lot of time to figure out, and in its case saving is basically just a way of preventing unnecessary loss of data. One time I was playing the game and the power went out for a moment; I was horrified because I thought I would have to do a big bunch of stuff over again. But to my great joy it turned out that I hadn't really lost anything (except maybe a few coins or something). The frequent saving saved me from a bunch of very unnecessary replaying.

In short, DK64 is an example of a game in which saving doesn't make the gameplay too easy.

[Hirocon]

You can save any time in Donkey Kong 64, but it only saves your play time, number of bannanas, etc., not your exact location and situation within the game.  Some games let you save anywhere, even in the middle of a boss battle, letting you come back as often as you like to that exact moment within the battle.  This sort of saving can easily be abused.

[Lizard Dude]

Console games pretty much never have that type of saving. PC games usually always do.