TURKEYDAWG'S PROFILE

I've probably said these things in other threads already, and they'll probably still be somewhat off-base or useless given my not really being a frequent RPG player, but w/e:

Game over with periodic save points
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The big downside here is that the player can get sent back 30-45 minutes, which can be extremely discouraging. Losing the better part of an hour to a game over feels like bullshit in cases where the player only made one mistake near the end, but has to redo all of it. If the player didn't just make one mistake, but actually is having trouble with managing their pacing and with the challenge as a whole, they're likely to lose several times before finishing, which means that they'll be stuck in the same dungeon for hours and hours.

Yeah, when you force the player to potentially replay longer segments of your game, your design really has to be immaculate and consistent to hold up to repeated play. I play a fair amount of arcade games in MAME, and a common thing that I don't care for is how the first stage or 2 can become boringly trivial after a few plays, but then the final stretch might present this ridiculous wall that requires so much trial and error or downright luck to overcome that, if I were to start over from the beginning every time, I would completely burn out on the early game before ever beating the end-game. And of course, different people have wildly different amounts of patience.

And then of course there's the shitty thing some games do where you have to rewatch the cutscenes every time

I've seen this used as a way of disguising the wild difficulty swings in games that have bad balance, since players can go through a very easy dungeon without realizing how easy it was until after they beat it. Don't do that. Just fix your damn difficulty.

I'm a bit confused by this statement. It seems that, if you wanted to hide erratic difficulty swings, then using a more frequent saving system would be better, since you'd then be able to rapidly retry and brute force a hard part and completely forget about easier parts before it. Or, do you mean more like that people try to say that their dungeon is "hard" purely because of some ridiculous boss they throw at the end of it, without putting much though or effort into the dungeon design leading up to it?

Delete saved game on death
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If you can justify the use of this in games longer than an hour, I'd love to hear your point of view.

Well, you know how the typical system of making players get through ~30 minute chunks can create a feeling of tension/stakes, and force the player to achieve some level of game mastery to progress? Well, this is like that, but just many orders of magnitude more extreme. That's pretty much what I remember seeing people say they liked about games like, say, Tekki/Steel Battalion, which had lives, but would still delete your save if you ran out, and the game went on for like, 60 hours or some shit. Which is of course what a larger proportion of people disliked about it.
There's not a huge market for this level of intensity, but there is some market for it.

What are your favorites? Why? What are the biggest problems do you have with the others?

My preference is doing 10~30 minute chunks of game in one go, reverting fully back to a previous save upon failure, nothing holding over. I just prefer to take games as they are designed, without too much "brute forcing" or any opportunity for grinding a challenge away. I say 10~30, and while I enjoy ~30 minute arcade-like games, I actually prefer games more like Silent Bomber or Ginga Force where the game saves after every stage, but the stages are pretty meaty (5~15). I just don't like super-frequent saving like Meat Boy or what people usually use emulator save-states for, because that feels like brute-forcing sections rather than really understanding the design of the game. Of course, that only applies if the design of the game is actually good...

What I really want to delve into is a) why are punishments for failure necessary, b) why are they problematic, and c) how can you maximize the player's feeling of accomplishment while minimizing frustration?

This is going to vary a huge amount between people, but for my money:
a) I believe a game is as much about being able to lose as it is being able to win, so if nothing happens when you lose, than, as far as I'm concerned, there's no game. Of course, "losing" could just mean losing points and not actually "dying" (see: gallery shooters), but yeah, there's gotta be something to lose other than just prolonging the inevitable.
b) and c) seem like they're almost the same subject, so, I'll say that it the obvious statement of not having cheap shots and wild difficulty swings, and generally not forcing players to repeat the exact same shit too many times. Like, you mention roguelikes deleting your save file, but they usually feature a heavy amount of randomness, so starting over may not be as repetitive as it would in other kinds of games. Likewise, it's for that reason that I'd say for a puzzle game, "save after every puzzle" is the only system that really makes any sense, unless the puzzles are randomly generated.

Yeah, N64 probably has the smallest library.

In addition to what you said (including Paper Mario & Majora's Mask), my picks would be:
Mario Golf
Cruis'n World
F-Zero X
Diddy Kong Racing
Mischief Makers
Kirby 64
One of the Rare platformers

And maybe some other contenders could be:
Wipeout 64, if you just wanna slam every racer on there. I mean, it's a good console for racing games lol
Puzzle Bobble/Bust-a-Move '99
maybe Tetris 64 or Pokemon Puzzle League?
One of the Tony Hawk games
uhh... Rakuga Kids?
Pokemon Snap

and the previously unreleased beta of Earthbound 64 :v

ahaha holy shit I went diving into my backup drive and found my Klik n Play platformer project from fucking 2004, in addition to my stash of ancient music shit I did back then

Oh man, that's tempting, but I never figured out how to get the program to do much, and wasn't smart enough to make design documents back then, so there honestly isn't much to go on + I should probably stick to a project that doesn't have "hot garbage" as its base

That being said, there should totally be a variation of this event sometime where we try to dredge up the oldest shit possible

e: though, since we have an extra month now, I am somewhat considering switching to my RMN 10th game or this one old shmup project I posted about several years ago, rather than the current project

Oh boy, more time for me to procrastinate!

LockeZ runs a company that makes all the bosses in the game.

Liberty should break... something.

Have the game end with "Thank you for playing this demo! The full version should be available by 2019! No really, it will!"

e: Maybe work in the "Drama Core" somehow