didnt they do that in Prey?
also sentry guns in a multiplayer games. they bother me in two ways 1 its kinda cheap to just camp behind them like a motherF**Ker 2 usually they are overpowered
Team fortress 2 Sentry gun is Really overpowered when 7 engineers have all of their level 3 SG's in a place where they protect 3-4 of them at the place I am supposed to capture it becomes the gayest match in the world. mean while on the flip side ... no cant think of anything that redeems those little bastards

Speaking of Hideo Kojima, in one interview he said he dreamed of making a game that would physically break if you lost. Now that's an incentive to stay alive. :3

Eve Online, by the way, has a sweet ass-death system. To start with you lose your ship, which is basically your player avatar, your best friend and your livelihood rolled into one. You get to bob back to the closest base in a tiny defenseless pea of a pod and hope you've got enough money in the bank to get a good replacement. And if you've got a mean player on your tracks, you don't make it that far before your pod gets blown up too. At which point you hopefully have an up-to-date clone to be activated so you don't lose several hours, days or months worth of skill training.

If you grief a player thoroughly, you can theoretically empty their resources and set their skills back to beginner level. o_O

Meh, maybe it's just me, but I don't agree with that being fun at all, more stupid than anything else. I mean, having a game absolutely shit on you like that for making a mistake just seems kind of dumb. Challenge is good, but too much and you get games that are as hard as the old SNES games that people rant about on Youtube. The difficulty isn't what makes enjoy a game, it's the experience going through the gameplay that makes it fun.

EDIT: Also, in certain situations, save points are alright. Like in Prince of Persia, I think Quick Saves would suck because it would make it so unbelievably easy that it wouldn't be fun. I know I just said that difficulty doesn't make a game, it would just seem boring having to save, go do a little bit of platforming, and then save again. I actually don't like Quick Saves completely though. In KOTOR 2, I accidently quick saved when I was deep inside a temple with next to no health fighting 5 enemies. I retried over 3 times before I realized that no matter what I wouldn't be able to survive so I screwed myself over. Luckily, there's an autosave in KOTOR which saves when you first enter a new planet which is a good feature, but I still lost around an hour of gameplay.

EDIT2: But in general, I think Hideo Kojima needs to calm down and stop thinking of new ways to fuck his customers over for not being perfect at his games.

There's no argument why it's bad you can't quicksave? What? Not having quicksave is stupidly and artificially limiting and there's no reason not to have it in. I should be able to save wherever and whenever I want, fuck the developer who tells me I can't because they're a lazy hack job. I like auto-save points, yeah, because I forget to save a lot of the time because I'm busy enjoying the game. That doesn't mean it's still going to be fun when I have to redo an entire mission because golly gee batman, I hadn't reached a checkpoint yet.

The absense of a quicksave is almost always a weakness and a black mark against fun, and against the game itself.

(You could argue that a properly implimented checkpoint system would eliminate the need for quicksaves, but even with a good checkpoint system it's silly to leave out quicksaving and I have no idea why any developer would do it)

I do know of a mech fighter that will delete your save if your mech blows up before you can eject.

It isn't really feasible to grief someone that way, though. Leaving dock is at their leisure, and if there's a ton of bad guys on local, that's just something you don't do. The advent of jump clones made that even less of a problem.

Death in that game sure has a pretty profound impact on a casual player, though. It took my friends months to convince me to so much as visit 0.0. After a tour, I thought "this isn't so bad", and was left alone to hunt some pirates. Of course, that was apparently the day that an enemy of our alliance decided to hire some mercenaries to make passes... there went the ship I'd spent months buying sweet components for. The profanities that were heard were not pleasant. :P

I don't think he wanted to make it fun. Survival is never fun.

The fact that his biggest prank ever has been Raiden makes me think you shouldn't worry too much. The man may have crazy ideas, but he can constrain himself. Let him have his dreams; he deserves it.

SPeaking of fucked up saving systems, I'm going to highlight NetHack. ANybody remember that? Not only is it insanely hard, but it autosaves with every move you make, good or bad, and when you die, it saves immediately. Thats right-- your player is gone. On the bright side, its as advanced as text based games ever got, to the point of extreme realism via control.

Having something that will make your character unsuck, but you have a limited use of it and each time you use it the game itself gets harder, forcing you into using it more and screwing the story. Who does this? Breath of Fire V: Dragon Quarter. Each time you turn into a dragon, you get screwed. You get crappier items, enemies become a bit harder and stuff. Also, save tokens. I hate them. Oh sure, it's good in RE, but not for a RPG.

Well, I never noticed any obligatory romance in Final Fantasy Tactics (Unless Alma and Ramza got together...). Also, I like the Princess Bride reference.