Earlier today I played Batman Arkham Asylum for a while and quit at some point. I’m about 80% through and just started the game to finish it tonight. No can do: corrupt save and that was that as there is only one save slot per “game”. The reason apparently is that I shut my Xbox 360 while the game was autosaving. So essentially the game uses a flawed autosave mechanism.
It’s pretty horrible user experience that shutting down the console at wrong moment you can destroy hours of work accidentally. The correct way would be to have at least one backup autosave slot for the same gaming continuum to make sure that shutdown doesn’t completely wipe out player’s progress in the game. It isn’t end of the world the player is thrown back to the checkpoint before last.
Compare this to for example Fallout 3, which autosaves every time you change between game areas. It always does a fresh save. Even if the last save gets corrupted you can load the previous one. Of course Fallout 3 also has manual save option, which is even better for security(and user control).
In general autosave is a very nice idea from user experience point of view even if it takes away some control from the user. From game developer perspective it is pretty good option to make your game to be played in a certain way. However, it does mean you need to be very careful that in no checkpoint the player can be in so dire straits that continuing would be extremely difficult.