He's right, and it's a good thing for suspense in pretty much ANY game. I think it actually makes you CARE about what happens and thus appreciate the experience a whole lot more. Just look at what "Save-stating" does to playing old games on emulation, or "Quick-saving" in FPS's. I remember playing 16-bit era-games for days on end with the console on, trembling at the thought of something happening that might cut the power and ruin my progress... Being able to save your game anywhere-anytime, or too often, is probably a phenomenon risen from the paranoid ranks of publishers, fearing that their game will be too hard without it and sell less, when in fact it often lessens the experience and goes to show how little they understand it. So hurrah to Dead Rising for doing this right, and it couldn't suit the genre better.

The problem with this type of save system is that it results in redundancy. This is not a problem when it only means killing some zombies you have already decapitated/sliced in half/bludgeoned to death. However, dying after completing a particularly boring boss battle is very frustrating. It's this combination of not-so-fun boss battles and infrequent auto-saves that causes problems with this game.

When I'm replaying a good two hours of a game because I failed to anticipate a PRESS THE BUTTON OR DIE event in a game, I start filling in the information required to sell the game on ebay.

The next five owners of that game will do the punishing of the company. Goodbye, 5 sales.

No, it's just simply careless programming that extends all the way back through the company's history. They have this outmoded mindset that a difficultly setting for a game is to limit the player using cheap methods (see my examples). Instead of say, using modern methods for the [enemy] AI.
Examples; They limit where and/or when saving your game. (As you have already noted)
They limit the player's vantage point so that he/she will be attacked from off-screen enemies that they had no chance of seeing. (this one is Capcom's oldest and favourite trick). These limitations are not realistic (in a gaming sense) and thus, will instantly pull you out of the atmosphere of the game.

I believe game design wise that you should let people save whenever they want. People have a actual life to live. Forcing them to move to a save point is silly.

If you want a good game work on art and gameplay. Not annoying save systems.

Personally I think save points are a design that should die. They are like instant death and puzzles that are unsolvable because of a previous choice. Old ideas that just aren't fun.

What this article completly fails to mention is that the game is really designed around the restarting of the game. No matter what happens you keep all of you PP (if it were an RPG they would be exp). If you need to restart the game that is its way of saying that you probably should have planned better: here is another chance.

That said, there were very, very few situations in the game that I could not make it to a save point when I tried to. The game forces you to decide between restarting the game with all your PP or re-tring with your current level from where you saved last.

Also, nothing in this game is manditory _at all_. You could literally start the game standing on the heli-pad and not move at all and still beat it.

While I understand that many may not like this, take into consideration that it may be exactly what was intended of it. The game can be played through in about 4 hours or less, and all cutscenes are skippable, it's not like restarting is a huge odeal.