Leaving Liberty City

OK, call me a wimp, call me a sucky game player, call me Ishmael, whatever. I've decided I'm going to probably give up on finishing Grand Theft Auto IV. I'd really like to finish it, but I just can't spend the time to do so given how its save system works.

Basically, the game auto-saves after you finish a mission, and you can drive to a safehouse and save the game. That's it for saving.

The problem is with missions like the one that killed it for me, "Deconstruction for Beginners." Since I've saved at the safehouse after finishing the previous mission, I have to do the following:

• Get a car
• Drive from Queens to Manhattan (takes a while)
• Talk to Playboy X (at least you can skip cut scenes)
• Get into a car
• Drive a long way to somewhere else in Manhattan (takes a long while)
  
• Ride an elevator to the top of a tall building (takes a while)
• Snipe three guards (hard to locate)
• Ride back down to ground level (takes a while)
• Shoot many people at a construction site (takes a while if you're being careful)
• Kill the boss before he escapes

So, if you fail anywhere along the way (like you get shot, or you fall, or the boss escapes), you get to start all over from the beginning. If I could skip the driving it would be fine. Maybe there's a way to skip the driving. Anyhow, I need something that I can save at any point and drop out of the game, due to sleep or running out of time or whatever. And it doesn't look like GTA is that game, unfortunately.