The trouble with “save early, save often” is that it becomes just an automatic thing, and so does clicking “load game” when you die, that if you mix them up… well, more than once I have been sent spinning towards a fiery death, and have exited and clicked “Load game” before actually dying… only to realise I’ve accidentally SAVED instead, and now I have a totally useless save file which simply dumps me into a dead-for-sure situation.
Save points can work well if they put them just before the difficult parts.
Usually, however, they put one at the very beginning of the level, and one at the half-way point. This is far, far worse than save-on-demand, since it forces you to replay the same boring parts to get to the exciting part that you’re having trouble with.
I think that the point is that you should, in principle at least, be able to learn those things without dying to them. Yeah, you, the player, in your nice safe den in front of your nice safe keyboard, remember all the previous times you died to that crushing ceiling. But the space marine exiled to Phobos for punching an officer, and who got left behind to guard the entrance to the secret base, doesn’t remember. As far as he’s concerned, he’s never seen that crushing ceiling before in his life, and he has no reason to know that he’s supposed to step around the corner to hit an unmarked button before venturing onto that platform.
To put it another way, I very highly doubt that you know anyone who made it through Doom II without dying. What you really mean is that they made it through without dying that time. There’s a huge difference.
And an implementation of this idea need not uninstall the game every time you failed. A randomized map generator would be a good start, as would a “hardcore” mode where saving a game exited and restoring a game deleted the save, and where if you died you had to start over (Diablo II has this mode, and apparently a lot of folks play it. But the challenges are still predictable).
Hmm. I’ve always had enough clues and health in survival horror games. Of course, the first time through I usually play on easy or normal, when such settings are available.
Y’all are making me glad that I decided to take a pass on Medal of Honor.
The Craft of Adventure by Graham Nelson. This is a series of five articles on designing text adventures (aka ‘interactive fiction’), but it contains one specific section that should be apropo to this discussion.
(Note: Some browsers choke on FTP links. You might need to do something system-specific to make it work for you.)
To wit: The “Bill of Player’s Rights”
I’ll summarize by listing his bullet points here. The article goes into more detail.
[ul]
[li]Not to be killed without warning.[/li][li]Not to be given horribly unclear hints.[/li][li]To be able to win without experience of past lives.[/li][li]To be able to win without knowledge of future events.[/li][li]Not to have the game closed off without warning.[/li][li]Not to need to do unlikely things.[/li][li]Not to need to do boring things for the sake of doing boring things.[/li][li][ed: A few text-adventure-specific sections.][/li][li]To have reasonable freedom of action.[/li][li]Not to depend much on luck.[/li][li]To be able to understand a problem once it has been solved.[/li][li]Not to be given too many red herrings.[/li][li]To have a good reason why something is impossible.[/li][li]Not to need to be American. [ed: How many American-specific references to games make these days?][/li][li]To know how the game is progressing.[/li][/ul]I elided some sections (as noted) having to do with reasonable verb selection, a good parser, and so on that are intimately tied to the text environment. I suppose people more into graphical games can supply a few amendments relating to graphical environments.
The point of all this isn’t that games still have the same problems after n decades (where n goes from 2 to 4, depending on how old you are). The point is to perhaps give some direction to the angst people feel when they are killed over and over again, or killed for no good reason, or (horrors) killed because the game is buggy. Maybe you all can use the amendments as a starting point for a debate about the philosophy of game design, instead of simply ragging on specific games.
But, hell, this is Cafe Society. What am I thinking? 
Here you’re basically describing roguelike games (which Diablo II took a lot of inspiration from.) Nethack and ADOM are classic roguelikes that do that.
The problem with that is either you end up starting a new game - from the beginning - so many times that it gets really old, or the game has to be so easy that there’s no real challenge.
Or you can be like me and cheat.
The problem I have with random map generators is that the maps they generate always feel so random. There’s no logical layout, most rooms serve no purpose, you get a lot of corridors that don’t lead any where, and most dungeon (or whatever) feels alot like the last dungeon, because it’s all the same recycled textures and objects.