I should have put this disclaimer at the start of the video. For anyone about to comment, "You're just bad." Please actually watch the video. Also, two good arguments in favor of lives have cropped up in the comments. And I'd like to touch on them here. First is that lives can add tension and satisfaction to a game. Beating the final boss of a game with no lives feels much better because of the stakes. When losing means restarting the whole game in some cases, the payoff is greater. This I can understand. But I personally do not experience this feeling of tension in games. And the tension itself is created from a desire to not lose your progress, AKA not having your time wasted. Which I still don't think is a good thing. But the tension and satisfaction itself can definitely be of value to many. That's part of why BRs are so popular. Second is that game overs can force a minimum level of skill to be achieved to complete a game. Simply beating a level might not be enough. To finish the game, you're going to have to get good enough to not die too much throughout the whole thing. This is true, and can make a game more fun. Developing your skills in a game can be an enjoyable thing that players would miss out on if they were not forced to do it. But again, there are other ways to get this kind of effect in a game. The game Dustforce is a great example. That game ranks you at the end of every level, and higher ranks unlock more levels. Just playing through, you will eventually run out of new levels to play. You have to go back to old ones and do better to get better ranks to continue on. To even get to the hard levels, a certain level of mastery must be reached. And to get the final level, you have to get the best rank on every level. This forces you to get better at the game, but at your own pace and by your own choice.
NiGHTS (both Saturn and Wii games) has a good system like this, to unlock the last level for the Saturn Game you must get at least C-Rank in every level, and in the Wii game you unlock the real ending and true final boss when meeting the same requirements, both games will stop the player from progressing if it isn't skilled enough and incentives replaying levels with better performance to really beat the game, that by itself is a much better way of making the player get more skill, by only replaying what needs to be improved.
The thing I'm most uncomfortable with is the concept that lives are a settled issue in game development. There's such a rich history of the mechanic being interpreted in so many different ways to varying success that I feel that rejecting them as ''archaic'' when they have evolved so much in their time comes across as dismissive.
@@xdfeverdream8122 the guy posted a discussion topic and never antagonized dissenting opinions. If you interpret this as ego driven then that's a self report as far as I know
A game that did this well, surprisingly enough, is Ghosts N Goblins. It's a very difficult and frustrating game, but when you pass a level, you actually make progress and pass the hump. You don't have to go back and do the level again if you fail another too many times. It's a great example of a game being extremely difficult without being tedious and wasting your time To quote AVGN: "Remember in high school? If you failed senior year, you just started senior year all over again; you don't go all the way back to freshman year!"
Ironically, after you beat the game once you get booted back to level 1 and are expected to run thru it again in order to truly win. In this case you pass Senior year and are then told to retake it to prove you can REALLY do it, lol
also at least in super ghosts and goblins you can get a shit ton of continues if you just keep grabbing money so you can have potentially infinite tries on one level
A little anecdote on a recent experience with video game lives: My little sister really loves the Sonic movies and asked me if she could try playing the games. I agreed and introduced her to the classic games via Origins. So far, she’s been playing in anniversary mode. This is her first video game ever, so she wasn’t very good starting out. Luckily, because anniversary mode just lets her respawn at the recent checkpoint, she was able to try sections of the acts over and over and get better and better. She’s been improving a lot since she started. She can now clear most of Sonic 2 on her own, whereas before she struggled to finish even green hill act 1 without dying. One time she wanted to try to play Sonic 1 in classic mode. She kept dying in Marble zone and got game over after game over. Eventually she got really frustrated and switched back to anniversary mode. That kinda made me realize that if Origins didn’t have anniversary mode, my little sister may have never given Sonic a shot. Heck, I almost gave up trying to beat Sonic 1 my first time because of the constant game overs. People improve at their own pace, and there’s really no point in punishing newbies for not “getting good” fast enough. It seems to only discourage in my experience.
I didn't beat the original sonic 1 until like 2 months ago on my phone. Sonic really should have never had lives because it totally destroys the way the game let's players of so many different skill ranges play.
Years ago on the ps3 mega drive collection, I only then beat the classics due to save states and I wouldn't even have bothered otherwise. Same with Advance 1. Save states made it a lot better.
@@chopperbrosadvance9760 But not having lives destorys Sonic in another way, you never attempt speedruns And before you mention 3K saves, that partially fucks with what classic Sonic is about too, but 3K's extra long stages makes replaying in general less fun (still fun, do *not* mix up words)
In that case the anniversary mode really served as an easy mode of sorts. It's a good example of how you can actually get someone hooked by allowing the game to go easy on them if they so desire. I sometimes encounter stories like this and I think they are a good counter argument to respond to the people that say that difficulty options are bad.
There should always at least be an option for Unlimited lives. Lives style gameplay isn't fun for me, losing progress and having to restart is just the biggest fun killer to me personally.
Limited lives are much more exciting to me because I have actual stakes. The setback of a gameover feels like an actual journey. When I am finishing a game or level or something and I'm on my last life the amount of adrenaline is higher than anything else. Because you know it's your last chance and there will be real consequences
I guess that's something they can add. People say the same thing about Battle Royales when you're one of the last left. Personally, I don't experience this feeling of tension. But I can see that being enjoyable.
You know, you can get even higher. I can stand near you with a hammer - and everytime you die, I will smash your gaming device with a hammer, so you have to not only start over the game, but also spend money on new pc, and reinstall windows. I bet your adrenaline on last attempt will be insane!
I agree with this. An Ultra Nightmare run in Doom Eternal or playing without saves in the classic games is far more exciting to me than a regular run where I have infinite retries on every fight. I'm not against people wanting to play the latter way, but I find it more fun when there are limited retries available. It's a single-player game, after all. People should be able to do what they want.
I don’t think agree. What if there’s just a level with bad level design? I don’t think you should have to start the entire game over. You should just have to start the level over again. At the very least, you should be able to have the option to toggle it on or off.
Lives discouraging experimentation feels like a limp point, considering that advanced techniques are by definition for advanced players. Nobody jumps into a game like Super Monkey Ball trying to pull off insane tricks without first knowing how to beat the stage conventionally. Advanced tricks like skips, shortcuts and exploits are something that you build on top of a foundation of pre-requisite skill. Lives demand that you meet that pre-requisite to at least a modest extent. A great example of a thoughtful lives system is Sonic 1. The game only has like an hour’s worth of content, but emphasises skill and replayability by being so demanding. Sonic showers the player with extra lives and continues for actions like exploring the stages, holding onto rings, entering special stages, i.e. playing the game optimally. If a player reaches Stage 4 with only 2 lives, the odds are they aren’t playing optimally, either because their grasp on the game’s fundamentals is weak or because they were having trouble with certain hazards. Eventually they’re gonna get sent back to Green Hill Zone, a stage designed to be a safe playground that teaches you the play mechanics. By your 40th run through Green Hill Zone, you’re gonna be a substantially more robust and competent player than your 1st, and you can apply that skill to every challenge in the game. You’ll naturally start building up a bigger cache of lives through playing optimally, which in turn gives you a *safety net* to perform more experimental and reckless stunts. The incentive to push the game beyond its limits is still there, you just have to earn it. In Sonic 1, a player with a tenuous grasp of how the game works will simply never see the later stages. Whether this is a flaw comes back to the different ways we view video games over time. In 1991, the goal of video games wasn’t necessarily to see new things or even just reach the credits. The goal was to play it over and over and over and over until you mastered its challenges. Nowadays video games are mostly about scope and variety; the idea of being stuck in the first two levels of a brand new game is unthinkable. In 1991, simply reaching Labyrinth Zone doesn’t necessarily mean the player is ready to move on to the next stage, because playing Labyrinth Zone is a very different thing from actually mastering and understanding Labyrinth Zone. In this sense, I think it’s fair to refer to this kind of lives system as “dated”, as it was designed to compliment a kind of play experience that is much less common today than it was in the 90s. Applying this kind of system to more modern game design, like Mario 64 or Banjo, is rightfully considered superfluous. In fact, Sonic 1 was considered a disappointingly easy game in its time, since the standard skill level of players was so much higher than it is today, undoubtedly as a consequence of how demanding games tended to be. (It’s also worth noting that way fewer people played games back then, likely as a consequence of the exact same thing.) I’ve watched in real-time how Sonic Origins upending the lives system has transformed the play experience. Armies of players trying Sonic 1 for the very first time were now beating it in a single sitting, and not getting much out of it. Now the challenge of the game isn’t mastering each stage’s design and play mechanics under a strict penalty, but simply making it to the next checkpoint. This lowers the game’s skill requirement to an unrecognisable state. An 8-year-old could pick the game up for the first time and comfortably beat it in a handful of hours, as long as they keep beating their head against whichever 1-minute stretch is giving them trouble. The unavoidable consequence of this is that the people beating Sonic 1 in 2022 possess substantially less skill than the people that beat it in 1991. They’ve put less hours into the game, are less familiar with the game and likely have much less of an attachment to the game. I guess you can make an argument that if the game is any good, players will choose to stick around even after the credits roll, because the act of getting better is just that much fun. But that doesn’t change the fact that the original game’s life system was implemented with care and attention to compliment the intended experience.
Maybe it's just me, but I totally try advanced stuff as soon as I pick up a new game lol. Your point is very well made, and I agree. I've already had this discussion in another comment thread. Lives can force a minimum level of skill required to beat the game. Which can make a game more enjoyable for players that would otherwise not develop the skills. But there are other ways to do this as well. Dustforce is one of my favorite examples. That game has a ranking system, and you unlock levels by getting ranks. Lower ranks unlock less levels. Just playing through the game, you will eventually run out of new levels to play. Many will still be locked, and you're forced to go back to earlier levels and get better ranks to unlock more. To unlock the final level, you need to get the best rank on every level. This works so well as it forces you to get better, but at your own pace. And the harder levels that require much better mastery are only unlocked once you've gone back and gotten much better.
@@Pariah6950 It's kinda funny that you like the Dustforce example more than a lives system, especially considering that your main gripe with lives is that they waste your time. Lives systems will ultimately always waste less of your time than a ranking system, because to make progress with ranks you need to complete a full run of an entire level, and if you messed up you have to redo the entire level again. Lives typically come with checkpoints, and generally only NES/Genesis games tend to boot you back to the title/first level when you game over.
@@chrismdb5686 Fair point. Maybe that's just my own bias kicking in lol. I love going for S ranks and stuff. But I think the fact that I'm choosing to do it makes a big difference in how the player feels about it.
@@Pariah6950 Choice is a huge part of whether it can be enjoyable, I agree. Relics in Crash 1/2 for example are more enjoyable than in Warped (in my opinion) because they're completely optional. Similarly, S Ranks in Sonic are enjoyable because they're completely optional. However, replace any of those titles' lives systems with a requirement where you must earn at least an A Rank or Gold Relic time to unlock the next level rather than simply finishing it with no requirements (just as an example), and it becomes unimaginably awful to try and beat.
@@chrismdb5686 True. But that's a bit extreme. What's nice about Dustforce is that you get to just play level after level for a while. You don't hit a wall until later. And you wouldn't be ready for the levels beyond that point without more practice anyway. And each rank gives you more progress. Not just S. So you can go from Cs to Bs and unlock a bunch more levels. Then you run out again and have to turn some Bs into As, and so on.
I like lives in Sonic games because I want to see how many I can stack in one playthrough by holding rings, finding secret monitors and getting a high score in zones. In Mania I can get ~40 and it’s satisfying to see the number increase because it reflects your skill, it’s a goal beyond just beating the game. If you had infinite lives in Sonic games then collecting rings past 32 would’ve been pointless. But I do agree there should be an infinite lives option to introduce the game nicely to new players.
the best live system that I've ever seen is the one in the sonic unleashed wii/ps2 port, you start the act with a fix number of lives per act and you can't get more in the level itself but as a collectable in side content that increases permanently that fixed number, just like obtaining hearth pieces in zelda.
I used to think lives were an archaic design choice, but I feel like I've become much more open to older design sensibilities because of how streamlined games have become recently. I'd think a lot of older designs can have value and shouldn't be dismissed because they seem bad most of the time. I think being afraid in a game can be fun and overcoming something with limited lives could be more cathartic than if you just had an infinite number of tries. some popular games and genres of games would not exist if limited lives was not a thing. For example the whole rogue-like genre is based on having limited lives. Often time you have only one, but in some cases in the games you can get additional lives or even recover lives you lost. So lives as a reward are still valuable in these kind of games. I also feel like almost every arcade game doesnt really work unless you have some limit on lives as well. I definitely enjoyed metal slug more when I had limited lives, which forced me to play better than when I had infinite and dying would reward me with more bombs and a machine gun.
For me it depends on the game. Sometimes they can encourage you to play skillfully and stay alive instead of mindlessly ploughing through a game without thinking, sometimes they are just a nuisance and make the game way more tedious than it needs to be. They don't really bother me if the levels are short, but if the levels are long and you have to start over from the beginning, it's a pain in the ass.
@@ivan7604 I love that game, it looks gorgeous and the stages are absolutely thrilling. Only stage I think suffered from limited lives was EggmanLand due to it's absurd length and large difficulty spike. Though, I feel Sonic games in general are hard to implement lives into because of how trial and error based they are. Sonic games encourage you to play the stages over and over and experiment with more difficult paths. Though, the ring system helps a lot so you're not likely to die as much.
@@TheFoxFromSplashMountain Completely Agree with everything you said. I think a good compromise would be allowing the player to have infinity lives when using the level selector, but if you replay, say the heroe campaign in SA2 you do have live ls and you can die. It is definetely a conflicting choice tho
@@TheFoxFromSplashMountain Eggmanland is ok on PS360, but on the WiiS2 version it suffers greatly from only giving you 5 chances to retry each time you die.
15:21 this depends on the games length, and it depends on the player, different players have a different mindset to how they approach these things, some people are more willing to experiment in a game at the risk of having to restart the game depending on how long it will take them to get back to where they are, it's not that outrageous. Also, I mentioned my experience with metal slug in the other comment, I want to add to this, I can assure you, I would not have been as perceptive of what killed me every time I died, if death wasn't as punishing as it was, because it goes both ways, not being punished enough for dying will make you not care about dying, which doesn't encourage you to learn how to avoid it, it doesn't discourage you from it, but there's no reason to care about avoiding death if dying doesn't penalize you.
I suppose. But many players will be afraid to attempt the riskier stuff. And I personally believe you should encourage players as much as possible to get better, not scare them away from it. This isn't limited to lives. You look at Souls and its high damage, and it's no wonder so many players never even attempt to learn parrying until long after beating their first playthrough.
That's my opinion as well, it simply depends. Recently I watched a video talking about how people have been saying double jumping is a useless mechanic along with a defense of it, was pretty good and kind of reminds me of this situation. People see game overs and lives as a general widespread mechanic when in reality, it just depends on the context surrounding the mechanic's implementation in the game.
@@Cheesehead302 See, I'm going to bet I saw that same video and it's more about how double jumps lower the skill floor and raise the skill ceiling or work as progression for a game like in metroidvanias or an incremental upgrade like in rogue likes and how it comes down to implementation in the game. Lives don't do any of that, there's no way to use lives more skillfully or less skillfully in 99.99% of games, I'm sure there's some but I really can't think of them and that's why theres that .01% in there. Purely gameplay speaking they just serve as gating for the lower skill floors and not even a speed bump to the players who are actually good at them who can clear levels without even dying. I genuinely don't think there's anything a lives counter could do that a deaths counter couldn't.
I thought games were supposed to give you the feeling or experiences of something you can't actually do. Having a life system in game allows some of us (like me) to finally have lives, something we wouldn't have otherwise! :D
I feel like hard games with infinite lives (like Celeste) are a good way of showing why games with no lives can be good. You will die A LOT but you learn from your deaths. You start doing better and better at sections and then after beating a level, you get shown how much you died. You then aim to get better on repeated playthroughs since you have gotten better at the game. Deaths aim to improve you at a game, not to punish you.
My problenm with limited lives is that, most of the time, they are either obnoxious because you get very few and the game becomes very punishing, or you get so many or die so little that they become pointless.
Big thing is that different games offer different challanges. Something like Celeste/Super Meat Boy is about insanely difficult individual challanges, while a Castlevania or Mega Man game is about endurance. The individual jumps and enemies in these games are easy, the challange comes from having to do lots of them in sucession while accumulating the least amount of mistakes you can. If you remove lives from them, than you have to make the individual jumps and such super hard to compensate, and all games will inevitabily just become Celeste/Meat Boy style affairs, which I personally just find a lot less appealing.
That's why I don't like when people use Celeste/Meat Boy as examples on why all games should get rid of lives, just because they personally enjoy high precision platformers, doesn't mean every game should become one.
Good point. As I said, some games can make them work. Games where you have to go through the whole thing all in one go like Castlevania or old beat 'em ups are good examples. But I'd still argue you could get the same type of design out of something like an endgame rank based on how many deaths you had throughout your whole playthrough. There are other ways than lives to string all the game's small challenges into one large one. But to be fair, what lives can do is force a minimum level of skill to be needed to beat a game. With optional things like ranks, players are able to complete a game with much less mastery developed. And there can be a fun in developing your skills that can be missed out on by many if it is not forced. That's exactly why Souls games don't have difficulty options. If it let people play on easy, many would be robbing themselves of the fun of the normal difficulty. And when I played my first Castlevania (Adventure Rebirth), I admit I had a blast playing the game. And I think the lives helped. Game overs weren't too disheartening, as I felt invigorated to not make the mistakes I did on my first run through a level. That feeling of improving is very satisfying. But I do think that full game resets are a bit much. I think restarting a level is a good balance of not being too punishing, but still forcing player growth. That's why I like Streets of Rage 4's system. And that also has an arcade mode where you do the whole game on 1 set of lives if you want that sort of experience. It's perfect.
@@Pariah6950 It's also interesting when games make their own tailor-made lives system, like Furi, a boss fight game where not only you but your enemies have lives, and you can't b*llshit your way because losing one resets the bosse's health for that particular one. I think it shows that we can always think outside the box for even the most mundane mechanichs, instead of simply going for an established archetype. Tangentially, I really want to play SoR4, can't wait until it goes a little cheaper in my region. Arcade beat'em ups really suffer on emulators, since the lack of money being involved means you can truly just brute force everything, and when playing with friends we inevilabily get bored due to that.
@@limabarreto911 Oh, I know Furi. One of my favorite action games ever. Lives there are certainly interesting. They function almost like rounds, as if it's a fighting game. And you're totally right about arcade games. They can still be enjoyable just on the fun of the gameplay. But with no consequences, it does feel pretty weak. There having your score reset is supposed to be the deterrent, but we know nowadays people don't care much for high scores. Those are the types of situations where a ranking system would be good. As otherwise you just have to choose not to use continues.
@@Pariah6950 This whole video and comment thread are really interesting from the point of view as someone who grew up on Mega Man. When watching, I completely agreed with you on the idea that starting a game from the beginning is just frustrating and annoying, when you're playing perfectly on the parts you've gotten past but there's a tricky "fourth level". But I despite that, I felt like the lives system in Mega Man that has levels and checkpoints instead add to the difficulty of the game, making it more rewarding to finally get past levels but without the frustration of beginning the game from scratch. After seeing the system that Streets of Rage 4 implemented though, I found myself agreeing with you a lot more. I imagined what Mega Man X would feel like if when you died or fell onto a spike, you respawned with a new second health bar, and it honestly sounded really nice. And it's actually not hard to imagine it either because I've gotten into speed running the X series lately. Something I did to practice without the fear of dying and replaying levels from the beginning, was to use save-states to take the most difficult and rewarding paths, and even if I failed many times, it still felt really fun because there wasn't a single moment I had to replay a section without it being my own decision, whether it was because I wanted to do it faster or more optimally. Still, like the earlier comment said I definitely agree with the idea that games with lives can make the game a challenge of endurance. I think that it makes a ton of sense of people do enjoy the lives system despite it's flaws. Sure it sucks to replay the level from the beginning, but it makes it all the more satisfying when you finally beat it because you get a feeling of progression that's very different from getting past something locked behind execution.
This was a very good video. All I'll say is that there still needs to be a reward in Sonic games for getting 100 coins, cuz' otherwise there's really no point in collecting more than a handful. I liked what origins did in giving you rings to buy things with. It's just there really weren't that many interesting things to buy at the Museum.
I actually tried to play origins with the mindset of "get as many collectables as possible and see how much I can unlock" only to find it really disapointing cause if you try to collect EVERYTHING in story mode then you still don't really have much to unlock (think I got something like 200+ coins) but then you start doing the missions and your coins will very quickly skyrocket to like 700! Thus allowing you to unlock everything with so little effort! It's like...what's even the point of coins if it doesn't matter how many I collect at the end of the day?!
In my experience a lot of game overs just make you replay parts of a game that you've already beaten which makes learning the part you struggle at way harder
Only reason why those games have limited lives is to punish the player for their bad skills. Makes you more willing to not die and try your best for next time which when you complete a stage or the game overall you feel proud and happy that you achieved it after the challenge. It can be off putting, loosing progress and resetting the stages / levels. Frustrating and off putting to keep playing. Me getting stuck on chemical plant on sonic annoyed me alittle and stopped playing, i dont have the skills or knowing the layout off by heart so it makes it harder for new players.
That depends on the game's design in my opinion - open-world sandboxes focused purely on slower-paced exploration like Super Mario Odyssey or precision platformers like Celeste, Super Meat Boy or Crash 4 work with infinite lives/tries because they are focused on individual moment-to-moment challenges (that's why those no-damage/perfect run gems in Crash 4 don't really work all that well) or, in case of SMO, the fun of exploration and experimentation. However, infinite lives can also lead to an almost save state-like approach of brute-forcing games instead of learning and appreciating their design. The recent Rayman games suffer from this, in my opinion. I'm not some kind of "git gud" kind of gamer, but I think there's a benefit to both approaches, and in an ideal world there would be a toggle of some kind to satisfy both kinds of players.
Same. I think everyone should be able to enjoy games. I really love what Xbox is doing for the gaming community. They’re making gaming more accessible for people with disabilities. People, who in the pass, who were not able to play video games.
"infinite lives can also lead to an almost save state-like approach of brute-forcing games instead of learning and appreciating their design." Ironically, the games that I brute-forced through save-states in order to finish were games that had limited lives (i.e. Lion King and Super Ghouls and Ghosts, for the SNES).
this is the main reason why i don't like levelling up in most games. it's just there to waste your time, and i think most designers seem to put them in (much like lives) - just because they can, and because other games they like are good in SPITE of having levelling. i think levelling up is either entirely arbitrary, grindy, and annoying. like lives. adding new abilities wouldn't be tedious, but just boosting the players' stats and then boosting enemies' stats... it all balances out to be meaningless because they all level up so evenly that it just forces the player to either grind which is OPTIMAL BUT BORING, or be underlevelled and make the game more punishing (i guess this is kind of irrelivant, but this video reminded me of that).
About two years ago, I beat Sonic the Hedgehog 2 for the first time and had died right at the final boss one hit from winning. I did play through the game the next day and beat it with around two lives remaining and it felt pretty satisfying. However, I get people who don't want to deal with a game-over and I love the option for switching between the two modes. I feel like the best way to have lives is to link them to the level itself, rather than the entire game. For example, if you lose all of your lives, you have to restart that level, not the entire game. Along with this, getting extra lives won't add to your total life count everywhere, just that stage. Let's say you start with three lives initially, you get two extra lives and beat the level and move on to the next, now your lives are reset back to three. This would solve the issue of finding a way to get a high amount of lives, keeping the challenge of not dying while allowing the player to move on at their own pace.
Hold on... Lives punishing bad/new players is now a bad thing? If they aren't good enough to cleanly beat the level, they aren't ready for later levels and need to remain in their current position until they get better. This is 100% a you need to get good moment if the lives are what gatekeeps your (using your as a euphemism here, not specifically you, the guy who wrote this video-essay) progress in a game. The problem here is that this video exclusively looks at this topic with a modern mindset, trying to best the game and that's the only goal. No care for leaning the game, let alone mastering it, or even replaying it at all. Lives came about in a time where replaying the game you spent $60 (or more) on was not only normal, but something everyone did. Games weren't the worthless toys they are today that were consumed to completion once and then discarded for eternity after.
If a player isn't ready for a later level, then why are they even given access to it? And how exactly does that work? Why is a player not ready for the next level when they beat the previous one? Because they haven't developed the skills they need for it? Then let them develop those skills as they take on this new level. Why force them to replay a previous part of the game to improve when they can do it where they already are? And please do not pretend that lives are the only way to make a player get better. As I said in the video, there are other ways to encourage players to master a game and replay it. I just played Crash 4 without lives. Took me about 6 hours to play the game. Then I went on to do 2 additional playthroughs, beat every level with 3 deaths or less, did a lot of extra stuff, and unlocked and beat all the extra hard secret levels. My total playtime was over 20 hours. No lives necessary.
@@Pariah6950I'm not sure what you're really trying to get at with those (possibly rhetorical) questions you posed, but that entire first paragraph essential boils down to the point I was making. Not all games with lives systems play like Battletoads (as you already know). Keep in mind I'm in no way advocating for NES style lives systems where you go back to the main menu after a game over, I'm advocating for a lives system that sets you back to the previous checkpoint/start of last level until the player is good enough to continue. If the player cannot be precise enough with their jumps to beat "Road to Nowhere" they should be stuck there until they get good enough to beat it. The game shouldn't reward them with progress when they've demonstrated they can't beat the challenge presented. There are alternatives to lives, yes you did touch on a few in the video but another that I don't believe you mentioned is the Super Mario Odyssey approach where you lose currency (which could be used for any number of things) on death. Lives are a good way to gate off content that players simply are not yet good enough to deal with, there are alternatives of course and everyone is entitled to a preference, but there's nothing inherently wrong with a (well designed) lives system, just as there's nothing inherently wrong with a well designed ranking system, or again the system from Odyssey. They all accomplish the same thing in different ways, with the reward for getting better being more content.
@@chrismdb5686 But you get to the 2nd checkpoint of Road to Nowhere, you've proven you're good enough to get there. What I don't understand is why the player should have to re-prove their worth if they fail too much on the part after that checkpoint. I will agree that a well designed lives system can work just fine. One of the main things I wanted to convey with this video is that most games have bad live systems.
@@Pariah6950 More practice with the same kind of challenge will only help the player to learn faster, will it not? Just because a player can accomplish a feat once doesn't mean they've permanently cleared a skill bar. There are plenty of games where it's possible to overcome a large obstacle through sheer luck, and then fail on the next attempt because they didn't really have the ability to overcome the challenge. Setting them back to level start ensures that by the time the player finishes the level, they should be more than good enough to give the next one a good attempt. The alternative to sticking at that second checkpoint is retrying that until they eventually get it. Either way they'll likely spend the same amount of time finishing the level, the method that involves them restarting the level on game over generally comes with the caveat that they've definitely improved enough to move on, whereas restarting repeatedly at the check point can be overcome through brute force. At the end of the day, I really don't care how people play these games (with/without save states, with/without lives, etc.), I just don't feel there needs to be unwarranted criticism of perfectly fine game mechanics. If lives aren't for you, that's fine, but if any of the alternatives are cranked out to crazy specifications they can be just as annoying as lives are to you, and even more so. Improperly tuning any of these can make a game a cakewalk, or completely unplayable.
@@chrismdb5686 I'd argue you would learn faster by repeatedly attempting the actual thing that's giving you trouble. But you make a good point that you could just end up getting lucky in some cases. And I do agree that level resets are pretty acceptable. Full game is pretty extreme. But both can work in the right system, even if I still have some inherent issues with that kind of system. Thanks for such good comments. I enjoyed the discussion.
Personally I would argue that the unlimited lives in Crash 4 are what allows it to be as difficult as it is. Because they don't have to accommodate for players having to go back to the start of the level they can ensure people won't get demoralised and frustrated about a bunch of stuff they have already done because they are having trouble with a certain challenge, that way they don't have to tone down the challenge to avoid turning too many people away from the game. Add to that what you mentioned about unlimited lives allowing for more experimentation and risk taking and it allows the developers to ask more of the player. You can tell that this is the intention with Crash 4 because they advise playing with unlimited lives and major challenges in the levels are bookended by checkpoints.
True. Even in retro mode the game gives you a lot of live crates, and the hardest sections have tons of wumpa fruit too. Heck, the last section of the last level (which is supposed to be the hardest challenge in the game) has 4 golden wumpas pretty early in the section, so you can constantly get lives and repeat the same section until you master it
I like lives because they discourage you from playing recklessly, but I think many games just need to be restructured for them to mean something again. A bad example of lives are most 3D Mario Games and the "New Super" Games because a Game Over only sends you back to the beginning of the level you're in and you can save at any time. A good example would be Sonic Unleashed on Wii which doesn't give you any lives in the levels, so you need to play cautiously. And I'd argue Mario Galaxy 1 actually uses the lives system pretty well, because they force you to strategize or lose all your progress in that level and if you DO lose them all, the game boots the player from the level which may encourage them to come back to that stage later. Overall I think lives are a necessary evil to give games more tension or else beating it becomes more of an inevitability than a challenge.
You are correct about arcade games which were the foundation for many games in the 80’s and 90’s. What you didn’t mention is the option of purchasing additional lives, or that scores accomplished using more than one coin were generally not recorded on the high score table. Essentially you can have as many lives as you like provided you have the cash, but your accomplishment doesn’t mean anything until you can do it on one coin. So basically the arcades nailed it decades ago
@@Pariah6950 I have no idea what makes you say that. Gaming accomplishments have been competed, recorded, and tracked from the early days of twin galaxy through to the modern era of GDQ.
@@theycallmejpj Pretty much everyone uses speedrunning as a measure of skill now instead of score. It works great for old games like crash, endlessly fun.
@@tappy8741But it is precisely that, A measure of skill. Not the only measure of the only set of skills. Score chasing should have it's place in modern game culture too.
Seeing the crash bandicoot footage makes the game look so cool and fun... I didn't watch the crash review video cuz I didn't care about the games but I think I might pick it up
Limited lives in Crash 4 has never been an issue for me. Im basically perma stuck at 99 lives because each level has so many wumpas you get ~7 of em for every level you complete. An extra life crate has an extra life AND a big wumpa ~1.3 extra lives. You'd have to be DSP or some shit to get a game over in C4 IMO
10:20 let me tell you about my experience with a series called metal slug. Metal slug anthology version allows you to play through the game with unlimited lives, as opposed to the original versions of the games which gave you only 12 lives for the 5 stages of the game, I had beaten some of them as a kid with unlimited lives, and while I loved the art style and the comedy of the game, combat with unlimited lives was boring, because the game doesn't take any progress away from you when you lose, you continue from the exact point you died in, the thing that makes a challenge exciting is the penalty for failure, and in videogames the penalty is generally a loss of progress. Important to note, metal slug games can be beaten in less than an hour if you don't game over, which is the biggest reason why limited lives work in a game like this. Just a few months ago, I decided to try and beat all the main entries in the series with limited lives for the first time, I started with the original version of the first game, so 12 lives for the five levels, the thing I learned very quickly was that every time I died, I made a mental note of what killed me, and I would make sure to remember it and be ready for it next time, and with this, over the course of a few days I continuously died, learned, adapted and persevered, and the further I got into the game, the more hyper focused I would get, the more my heart rate would rise, and I felt awesome for how skilled I was at the game, and after 5 days of starting the game from scratch, I beat the final boss on my last life, despite having gotten to him with a whole 10 of the 12 that I started with, damn near had a heart attack, it was awesome, i would never have gotten that feeling if the game didn't have limited lives, or even if the game gave me a checkpoint at the start of each level, because the more severe the penalty for losing, the more pressure you feel to not lose. The second game didn't go so glorious for me, I tried for like a week before I gave up and switched to anthology version, I managed to get to the final boss, but I was dying so fast to him, that I would lose all my lives before I could learn how to avoid any attacks, and it being the final boss meant I would have to fight through the whole game again which is already an intense task, so no matter how many times I tried, the original version was hopeless, so I switched to anthology which gives you 60 lives instead of 12, and it was barely enough, when I beat the final boss I had 12 left, I left the game feeling defeated, but I still went on to play the rest of the anthology, and for the rest of it, I was not as disappointed, cause they showed me that going forward with just 12 lives would never have worked because of how hard they all were, and I finished every single one of them, and it's currently my proudest gaming achievement, I'm very confident in saying that metal slug games are the hardest games I have ever played, and they are the only games I consider hard.
I've not actually played Metal Slug so correct me if I'm wrong, but don't those games kill you in 1 hit? So really, if they don't bring you back to a checkpoint on death, those aren't even lives. Those are hit points. You have 1 health bar of 12 hits to beat the whole game. That's similar to my Streets of Rage 4 example.
@@Pariah6950 yeah, pretty much, but since losing all lives sends you to the start of the game, I feel it does apply here, since it's the same punishment as losing all lives.
I disagree. Getting a game over takes away progress. In a game like that, there is no progress. At a macro level, you either beat the game or you don't.
Personally I disagree. I think the setback of running out of lives gives me the opportunity to go back and master the earlier sections so I can be better and more set for the next part of the game. That being said there should always be an option in the menu for those who want infinite lives.
The dumbest thing about lives in gaming is in some Sonic games, if you simply restart the stage in the pause menu, you will lose a life. That is the stupidest decision in connection with lives I have seen in any game ever. Especially because getting a Game over and clicking on ,,Continue >Yes
For me I feel more happy with myself overcoming a game like Crash 1 because it will make a fluke impermanent to the playthrough. If I accidentally damage boost after losing a mask and exploit the invincibility frames to progress, it doesn't cheapen the experience because I'm likely going to be made to do it properly later on. And it's not like damage boosting like a scrub doesn't have value because I get to learn what's in store later in the level. I agree with everything you said about the system being exploitable. Grinding for lives is just an oversight. I think if I made a Crash game I'd replace lives with checkpoints that break after 1 use, and a game over would occur when you either run out of these checkpoints or don't get far enough to reach the first. Overall I think there are games like Crash 1 which operate best with a ''push factor'' (lives) because the focus is on surviving clean, completionist runs. Classic Sonic having lives is incongruent with that quote from Yuji Naka(?) where he said the incentive for playing well is learning to speedrun through repeated playthroughs - a ''pull factor''. Sonic 1 already has the big rings as a less important push factor which encourages clean runs, making lives redundant basically in the designers' own words. The worst thing about lives is being unsure if 1 or 0 indicates your last life.
Mmmm, I'm not so sure that lives are as redundant in the first Sonic the Hedgehog game as you think they are. First off, we have to understand that some, if not most players will just not want to engage with the special stages. And, considering what collecting all the Chaos Emeralds does (an alternative ending with minor differences) So the implementation of lives force players to be better at the game, knowing the best routes, maintaining momentum, and keeping enough lives to beat the game. The incentive of not losing all your lives and having to restart the stage, or worse, losing all of your continues, is enough to push players to actually interact with the first Sonic the Hedgehog's systems properly. The optional, ignorable special stages just further push players to succeed.
Just thought of how to implement lives correctly...pull a "meta/undertale" on the player. Every time you game over something changes and if you explore enough you can progress differently...essentially you never lose progress even when the game tells you you lost progress...
So eloquently put. As someone who usually likes lives systems, this definitely convinced me otherwise in the majority of circumstances. I guess I had never really thought about it too deeply before beyond just liking the idea of the tension they can exert on the player in certain situations. Amazing video as always.
I think roguelikes are fundamentally different! A single life in a game that changes per run makes a lot of sense. A single life in a game that the levels and enemy placement are always the same just makes it unnecessarily punishing. That's why I personally love roguelikes and will play them time and time again, but I really dislike some old games (like a lot of NES platformers) because it's very tiresome to hit a wall and being forced to play the exact same first levels over and over again just to get another chance at the challenging level I got stuck at!
@@AllurinGirl31 Very reasonable counterpoint, I can see where you are coming from. However, I still disagree. There is the randomization difference you mention, but I don't see it as different in any meaningful way from hard designed levels. Of the three Roguelikes I have beaten - Dungeon Crawl, NetHack and ADOM - large chunks of the game, which are clustered in the earliest levels don't end up feeling notably different after enough subsequent replays. You employ the same basic tactics, irrespective of the fact it has procedural generation. In ADOM especially, my first victory was a Gray Elf Wizard, where every single attempt involved rushing right to the Bug Temple to grind some easy levels and then farming the endless dungeon to stock up on spellbooks. The level of difference in this early procedure was minimal at best. Dungeon Crawl and NetHack were not all too different in terms of early game being a by rote, almost mindless set-up phase. If anything, I would have preferred it be hard coded so I could just blast through the busy work without having to pay attention.
I never said they were always bad. Just most of the time because of bad implementation. I think lives definitely fit with the roguelike design. I didn't mention it because most roguelikes don't have lives. They're usually a one life kinda deal.
@@Pariah6950 Three that were just in my notes I scrawled down while listening originally: 1:16: "Something I've said on my channel multiple times is that I just think limited lives are stupid and they're bad" 10:22: "For one thing, forcing players to replay stuff when they game-over sucks. It's just not fun" 19:33: "Lives do not offer genuine challenge, they just make the process of getting better at a game more tedious" Maybe I'm being unfair because today was long, it's late and I've got a fair bit of grog in me but... Leaving out Roguelikes in this discussion doesn't seem complete to me. Roguelikes, in their purest form do have lives, it's just you only have one. I don't see a good way to argue that "one life" is somehow different to "a game with lives" without engaging in a lot of semantics. Even the title of this video is "Limited Lives are Bad". I actually agree with your points when it comes to life system in certain games. Super Meat Boy would be actively worse with an old school life system for example. I dunno, your argument just struck me as incomplete I guess. Thanks for the reply though, it's appreciated. You've earned a sub even if I disagree.
@@4asgard5 I see what you mean. I feel roguelikes are different though because a single run of the game isn't the game, you know? Starting over isn't really starting over, if that makes sense.
I want to ask, how do you feel about the implementation of lives in a game like Doom Eternal or the use of quicksaves as a resource in Wrath Aeon of Ruin? Also, if you haven't played Doom Eternal I'd really like to see your thoughts on it!
Haven't played Eternal yet so I don't know how that works. Never heard of Wrath Aeon of Ruin either. But the idea of quicksaves as a resource sounds interesting.
Yah it's an old concept, sure. So are risk vs. reward, score and any other basic game mechanic imaginable. So what? Also, the fact something was used to make money doesn't mean it can't have other purposes, such as incentivizing skill and limiting your ability to bruteforce a game.
Playing Sonic Adventure 2 on Steam and trying to clear all the bonus missions is the first time I realized the lives system is broken. There's a "restart level" option should you screw up, but it costs a life. And when you reach 0 (your last life), the option to restart disappears. You have to exit the level and go back in, restarting from 4. It was annoyingly tedious.
11:37 OK is this whole video there because of Labyrinth Zone? "4th level" and "13 lives" are very specific amounts :P One example that often gets skipped over is in the first Actraiser on SNES. You'll get "lives" as one of the RPG portion's reward, and the action stages have like one checkpoint in the middle, then one before the boss. You always start with the full amount of lives on your stat sheet, and get booted if you lose all of them
There is a game that i think did lives pretty well : Sonic 3 & Knuckles. In this game you must complete a zone which has two acts and a boss at the end of each. If you lose all your lives and get a game over, you can restart from act 1 of the zone and since this is a sonic game, you can try to look for secrets or ways to finish the act faster or safer. the game is not too hard so you're not really punished and you can learn pretty fast by sometimes just slowing down, the game reminds you that it's dangerous, speed and success aren't granted. going back on the subject of exploration, there's a lot of helpful things that you can discover like shields, lives and even special stages which even if you fail, can grant you a continue by collecting enough rings. (which is very useful because not only it gives you three lives after a game over but it can also reset the clock so you don't have to worry about a time over) There's also Sonic Rush that i think did a pretty good job by letting you do two acts of the zone and then you can just fight the boss in a separate act and that progress is not lost, you just have to complete two acts before the progress is saved.
There's two types of players: the ones that want a challenge -above all else, and the one who just play the game without any further intentions (they don't care about getting the best ranks, mastering the mechanics, etc.). Everything we talk about has to acknowledge that fact. The argument of removing lives because it makes people have to replay sections is one that appeals to the players who don't care too much (which isn't necessarily wrong), but neglects the players that want a challenge. I, personally, like a challenge. If I can literally die 50 times to a boss and there's no consequences to it, it trivializes the challenge. It isn't necessarily bad itself, but it makes it feel like just a random task and not an encounter. It would only really be enjoyable for those players who don't really give a fuck about the difficulty, the mechanics, etc. There's also games that WANT to provide a challenge deliberately; In such cases the type of players who don't like having a hard time won't be pleased to begin with, anyway. Again, lives cannot be isolated from the fact that different players look for different things. I do agree that having a lives counter while being able to play any level that you want through the level selector (because you've already finished the game) is pointless. I also think that there should be some reward for those players who have mastered the game to a point where they can mass stack lives (because having the counter at 99 isn't enough IMO). Most of this can be reduced to allowing lives to be toggleable and not putting them in pointless parts of the game or games where lives would slow the game down significantly. Like most things when it comes to games is very subjective what option is best for we play videogames for enjoyment and although there are ALWAYS objective aspects, enjoyment is subjective in and of itself. In general, Lives can be good or bad depending on the demographic you try to appeal to.
Exactly I was watching a casual Streamer on twitch for Crash 4.....she was mindlessly dying because she didn't know how to use the infinite spin mask. Like she was normal jumping one time and then switched to the mask when she needed to do 2 mask jumps.🤦♂️ She literally died 10-15 times mindlessly which easily shows Infinite lives for crash 4 is just for casuals*** at least when doing story levels*. I wanna say 20 times because she just kept falling to her death and in less then 2- 3 mins It was so disgusting how casual it was. Limited lives literally makes you pay attention. It depends on the game. Even the flashback Tapes give you unlimited lives which had to be done otherwise they couldn't have made em as difficult as they wanted to. Which the flashback Tapes......Casuals won't even touch those at all. The flashback tapes require immense skill and more then the story missions period . They will not even 100% just Crash's tapes either. Crash 4 literally showed when to correctly apply limited lives and when not to. It's just like Nioh.....unlimited lives but you go back to the checkpoint
@@spiritualsoul2711 Exactly. Ive heard some people say that difficulty levels are a signed of lazyness and/or poor design. I disagree. I think it's only smart for a team of developers to allow flexibility on how much the game punishes the player. If you allow the player to choose it will feel like 1000x more fair and you gain waaaay nore fans and players than you could have forcing a difficulty level.
I agree with pretty much everything you said. One example that shows how limited lives can make a game easier are the old Mega Man games. I really like trying to defeat all the robot masters with just the buster, which requires actually learning the fight and avoiding their attacks consistently enough. However, the game actively punishes you for trying that with the threat of having to play the entire level all over again, so it's much better to try and use their weakness or spam E-tanks to get past them. This way, the game steers you towards defeating all the bosses by essentially just mashing buttons, even if you would actually enjoy the process of losing the fight a few dozen times while you're learning all the patterns and eventually having a more rewarding victory. In Sonic Origin's case, people are probably so burned out by the amount of remasters and remakes that are significantly easier than the original, without even giving more experienced players the option to enjoy the original balancing, that it really is just a matter of principle for them.
As someone who has a rapidly shrinking amount of free time to "Git Gud" at video games AND a rapidly growing backlog of games to play, THANK YOU. I'll happily choose to play a game with infinite lives. I play games to have fun, and I can't be bothered to restart whole levels over when i'm supposed to be learning *as I go*. As you said in your video, there are WAY better ways to incentivize players. The people mocking you in the comments just need to feel superior because they "Play Games Better", which is honestly very shallow while also ignoring the things you bring up in the first place.
For the most part I would agree that lives shouldn't exist in games anymore. However I do think there are some specific genres that really benefit from having them. Shoot em ups, bullet hells and stuff in that specific genre would not really work without a life system IMO. If I could beat a Touhou game by not even trying to learn the game properly and barely paying attention, they wouldn't be nearly as satisfying to beat. There's a reason why it feels so good to get a 1CC in a Touhou game (for those that don't know, which I'm assuming is 90% of the people reading this, 1CC stands for 1 Credit Clear. It means you beat the game without using a continue.), and it also benefits you by unlocking the Extra Stage and super boss, which tend to be ludicrously difficult. If you could gain access to that without putting in tons of effort, I don't think it would be anywhere near as satisfying. It helps that a run of these games is maybe about 30 minutes tops, so a run never takes *that* long. It also helps you think about items and resources a lot more. You have a certain amount of bombs (screen clearing moves that give you I frames) for every life, which makes you think about your split second decision making. Should I use a bomb to try and bypass a bunch of bullets, or should I save them for later and risk losing a life? The game also rewards you a big deal by picking up collectibles that drop from defeated enemies for stronger shots, getting extra lives by grabbing enough point items (I don't know what else to call them), as well as other game specific things that do things depending on which Touhou you're playing. I will say that this is admittedly a rare case overall though. Most of the time a life system isn't used like this, and instead just feels very tacked on. Mario Odyssey axed lives completely and it really didn't affect much of anything. I do like it when games like the Crash trilogy, or say like Mario Galaxy 1 and 2 drown you in lives, because then you very rarely if ever have to worry about game overs. Having lives be more plentiful doesn't make a game easier, it just removes the tedium of having to redo stuff as much. But at that point you may as well just cut lives entirely. It's still possible to make a difficult game without having to resort to lives. Rayman Origins/Legends, Celeste, Hollow Knight, etc prove that. I guess the point is, ONLY include lives in your game if it actually benefits the game design and makes sense. If all it does is make you waste your time, just remove it from the game and rethink the design of said game. That's my two cents anyway.
But can't you just achieve the equivalent of a 1CC by beating the game with less than how ever many deaths? Like what Crash 4 does with the 3 deaths or less gem, but for the whole game.
Not really since the amount of lives you get depend on how aggressively you play, different types players will get different amounts a resources. A very aggressive but error prone player might get tons of lives but lose a lot in the process of getting said lives but still get the clear, while a more conservative player might be able to use all the resources well enough that he won't need to get that many extends. Some games make things more complex due to scoring systems that encourage suicides or a rank system. So removing lives from certain arcade style genres/games is not only completely impossible without ruining the experience for scoring or survival players but would also make the games worse.
@@Pariah6950 Penis guy said a lot of things that I agree with regarding this. (God that felt weird to say) The main point is just that removing lives would just make the games way less fun. If you didn't get lives from getting points, you would have no insentive to grab those items anymore, which would eliminate the risk vs reward factor. The other thing as well, is that they tend to let you set your life count in these games to a specific amount (I think the most any game lets you start with is 7 or 8?) which can let you give you an added boost if you need it, or you can handicap yourself if you really want to push yourself. Say if we did the Crash 4 approach where everybody can only die a specific number of times to get a 1CC, that player choice is completely gone. The continue system is also directly tied to some game mechanics as well. For example, for Touhou 8 there is a time limit system. I won't go into all the minor details of how this works, but what you need to know is that after every stage, the clock moves forward by 1 hour. If the clock reaches 5AM it's a game over. However if you get enough time points at the end of a stage, it only progresses by 30 minutes instead which gives you a lot more leeway to beat the game. I also mention this because using a continue ALSO progresses the clock by 30 minutes. So with the lives/continues being so integral to the game's design, you really can't axe lives from the game without completely redesigning how a Touhou game works, and I really don't think they would really work or be anywhere near as fun, satisfying and rewarding like that.
Watching this video and your take on limited lives alongside your extensive coverage of Sonic games I can tell that you'd love Freedom Planet 2. This platformer has limited lives to every stage which you can increase by finding extra lives in the levels so it's actually worthwhile to collect the extra lives. ESPECIALLY since there's also a Streets of Rage style revival mechanic where you’d pay a set fee of gems alongside a life to instantly revive with 1HP, turning the life system into a resource you can use to keep going on that particular attempt.
I like how in streets of rage 4 and shredders revenge they changed the main game up so you dont run out of continues but kept the outdated life system for an arcade mode for the option
Furi has an interesting "lives" system. It's a bossrush game, so this won't apply to most games, but it's a very interesting solution nontheless. Both you and the boss have multiple healthbars. Depleting the enemy healthbar moves the battle on to the next boss phase, heals your current healthbar to full and gives you 1 extra if you lost one (you always start with the max of 3 full bars). If you lose a healthbar the boss heals their current one, basically restarting the phase. So on the surface it's just a classic "get the enemy healthbar down before he gets mine down", but not really. The immediate challenge is always limited to the current healthbar, not total healthbar. If you lose all health you have to restart the fight from scratch which adds a extra challenge and connects everything together. The best idea though is regenerating 1 healthbar after a success. That means you'll always go into a new boss phase with a minimum of 2 tries left in the bank, so if you die cause it's your first time and you took more hits cause you didn't know the enemy pattern yet you get a second shot.
As others have said: depends on the game. For instance, playing arcade games with unlimited lives feels like you take the challenge out completely, just mash buttons to win. In some games, limited lives can encourage you to up your skills, like old school shooters and run & guns. On the flip side, I've never beaten Sonic 1 because limited lives and no save / PW system, which can be frustrating.
Another insightful video. The reason I like your channel is that you talk about game design in terms of how the different elements work together to create a specific effect on the player. So it was strange to me when you said you don’t believe game design can be “outdated” only “good or bad.” You do a good job of explaining how you yourself approach games and how game design impacts you, but people in a different era had a different context and so different game design principles affected them differently. Players interact with game designers differently if they have to spend money at an arcade after every game over vs. us buying a video game once and playing it whenever we want.
Thing is, arcades still exist. Mainly in Japan. And modern arcade games are still designed with the pay to play focus. It's not about the time. It's the context of how you play the game.
@@Pariah6950 i forget that pay to play arcades are still around and some places and that does invalidate the “outdated” argument. Thanks for the reminder. Beyond that, I agree with you.
I think the point of lives originally was to stop less skilled players from getting to harder areas and make them build more skill from playing earlier levels multiple times, but clearly lives are flawed
I think they are made from those arcade machines. You died? Well pay more! The gaming industry was always all about profit maximization, the means only changed the mindset was always the same. That's why many singleplayer games offer nowadays power and level up boosts, you suck or don't want to grind? Just pay 10€! I bet if ea would make a game with limited life's, they would charge money to restart right at your body.
I don't agree. Death is the risk. And that can be a lot depending on how far apart the checkpoints are. That's why finding bonfires in Souls games is such a huge relief.
In arcades, lives were not really for padding the game out; that was just a bonus. The real purpose of lives was that if you ran out, you HAD to put in another quarter to continue the game where you left off. In a home console game, this would be slammed so hard, the game wouldn't even release before they revert it, but in arcades where the point of the game machines is to make money for the business, its a lot more understandable. Also a game I find does the lives system well is the Prinny series. You get 1000 lives right off the bat. You have absolutely no way to get any more ever. Your task is to go through this ridiculously hard game with your 1000 lives and try to complete it. If you lose all your lives, the challenge is a failure and you have to try again from the very beginning, but with how many lives you have, you have ample for experimenting with harder segments to better yourself. You CAN take the safer and easier route to preserve lives, but unless you are already extremely good at the game, this is short-sighted at best as later levels' "safe" routes are often more dangerous and risky than earlier levels' risky routes. The game has a host of other problems, but the whole thing was specifically designed with your many, many limited lives in mind, making it a challenge of get through this gauntlet of stages before it kills you 1,000 times. Oh one last thing: People absolutely did get a game over in Banjo-Kazooie... though an overwhelming percentage of them would be in Rusty Bucket Bay. I know I did a few times before I learned how to proceed THAT room.
To me there's a rush yoy get when you find a secret live hidden in the stage (for sonic anyway) and not having that feels off and unrewards you for exploring
Thanks for this food for thought. I’m on the fence on whether a 3D platformer I’m designing should have lives. If it does, it should avoid these pitfalls. What I have so far is: - You always start a level with the same amount of lives. Farming them is impossible. - If you die before reaching a checkpoint, you don’t lose any lives. It’s treated like a full level reset. Never a reason to kill yourself or induce a game over. - When you beat a level, your score gets a multiplier for each remaining life, which affects your rank for the level. This incentivizes even pros to go for them. - The game is designed around exploring the levels and having a high skill ceiling. Replaying a section isn’t just "going through it again" because you can try a different way through and/or get the satisfaction of improvement. Like others have said, lives can add a good sense of stakes and tension, and I think that fits the tone of this game. But for those who don’t want it, there could be a mode where you get unlimited lives but lose the score multiplier.
That sounds like a good implementation. And I think resetting a level for a game over can be alright. It forces the player to reach a certain level of skill, but it's not too crazy punishing like a full game reset. Less related to lives but something I think about death in platformers, for most games I think dying for falling in a pit is overly punishing. Pits aren't necessarily harder obstacles to avoid than enemies or traps, so why do they punish the player so much more? I think taking a chunk of health and putting them back on the last solid ground they touched works better for most games.
@@Pariah6950 I think it’s a matter of "realism". These pits are so deep that we call them bottomless. Most characters would die if they fell down, or they wouldn’t get back up anytime soon, if at all. So falling down a pit is a definite failure. Also, respawning at the last solid ground can be more complicated than it sounds. You have to design all the platforms and obstacles to where the level can still be completed when you respawn. In certain setpieces, that may require resetting so much that you might as well be restarting from a checkpoint. You see that in the Lego games sometimes.
@@MasterDisaster64 Sucker Punch was able to do the "respawning" on solid platform thing in the Sly Cooper games pretty well. When you fall, you end up on the last solid non-moving platform.
You made me think of a way to amend the lives system. If a player can clear a world/zone/whatever-else without dying once, a game over would only have to start the game from the world/zone/whatever-else you didn't not die on, meaning players can avoid needing to replay sections they've already mastered. This will leave them only to replay content they perhaps haven't bested; They will have only to climb what they have not mastered.
Fantastic video, I kept trying to write a comment during the video, but backspacing it every time you said exactly what I was going to. I think everything "limited lives" are trying to do can only really be done well in roguelikes. Barring the game you mentioned at the end, as that is much closer to (as you said) just having multiple health bars, instead of the limited lives we're talking about. I've also gotta say, limited lives in games where lives are placed cleverly make me sad, because if they were just a collectible and their progress was tracked, I'd actually find all the little platforming challenges these lives are hidden behind! Like Sonic Mania!
it punishes you beyond whatever checkpoint you've reached and also allows designers to add extra things like side paths that reward you with more lives or lil coins to collect
One of your criticisms is that grinding for lives is boring, and that you believe having the option to do something optimal that is boring is bad game design, so what do you think about grinding for levels, money, skills, etc in RPGs?
Not a fan of that either. Grinding sucks, universally. And I generally not much of an RPG guy. I remember for Nier Automata I heard someone say that grinding to level 99 to take on the secret boss wasn't so bad. It only takes 4 hours. Which to me is insane. 4 hours is not bad? I could watch 2 movies in that time, or play a whole video game, or do anything else that is actually enjoyable. I loathe grinding, and almost never do it in any game.
@@Pariah6950 I suppose you said you're not a huge fan of RPGs but I'm still kinda curious, do you think the *option* of grinding is inherently bad? RPGs are generally built in a way where you give yourself permanent checkpoints, and I think of it as a challenge to do something (either grinding or doing a dungeon) in between each "checkpoint". Though you can game over and that generally causes you to lose items, money, or even levels, I don't think of it as an issue since the worst situation you have is that you go back to exactly what you started with, and beyond that, generally you have fairly or even entirely free rein over when you save your progress, so it's a matter of whether or not you risk overextending your resources and dying, or segmenting your game by more checkpoints by going to the area you're allowed to save in. And again, a lot of RPGs are pretty lax about this, I think of Dragon Quest 11, where as early as meeting the 3rd party member, you can warp to whatever location you wish, and that location always has a save point. Even then, the enemies don't actually fight you unless you touch or choose to interact with them. I generally think of grinding as a way to make the game easier, you get better stuff faster, you get stronger party members earlier, but as you said, this is only a thing less experienced players would do, as typically an experienced player would know what level to be at and what strategies to use, so that's mostly the part I'm curious about, levels do have the potential to be punishing towards worse players, but they also doesn't completely cap out (at least, until obscene levels that are generally not necessary), and it also puts the potential to be less punishing in the players hands, as saving is generally a choice that they can make at almost any time
Personally as someone who absolutely hates grinding, I do find grinding inherently bad in game design. I would always strive to making grinding near impossible if I made a game. It's one of the things I like about the Zelda games. They play like action RPGs, but besides money everything is earned for doing specific tangible things. Strength and growth is based on the items and upgrades you acquire, so if you want to "grind", instead of fighting enemies for hours, you just play more of the game. Explore, do side quests, etc. Things that are actually fun.
@@Pariah6950 I see, you'd rather find upgrades as encouragement for pushing through the game, rather than bottleneck your playthrough with upgrades before moving on?
@@igirjei3717 Pretty much. That's one of the great things about Breath of the Wild. Technically, the whole game is grinding until you are strong enough to beat Ganon.
If the punishment for playing your game poorly is to have to replay the early game more, then you're saying that playing your game is a punishment. That doesn't sound like good advertising to me.
14:58 For me, as someone who mostly played the Classic Sonic games with unlimited lives. Limited lives can be treated as a test of knowledge of the game. Is that a defense for lives? I guess. I still hate lives tho.
For a game like Sonic, lives are important to introduce the game to new players, the whole game was structured behind the concept of always improving your gameplay to get go the end as fast and as optimal as possible. Without lives you will just continue from last checkpoint or act, without ever seeing the other routes and paths that were made for players to always look out for in a way to conserve their lives. With infinite lives you are basically removing content from the game without ever the incentive of actually exploring different paths of the level design each time you get a game over. Lives some times aren't just a sort of artificial punishment, they did design their games with that system for a purpose.
That is similar to Streets of Rage 4, where you just keep going. That use of lives is totally fine to me. Same goes for things like shmups and Metal Slug. Though I do think full game resets are a bit much. That's why I like that SoR4 has an Arcade mode if you want that, or story mode for level continues.
@@Pariah6950 I see it both ways, but your video was incredibly detailed that I can't necessarily argue against any of your points. I was rusty at games in general since I took a few years away from games, so naturally I was terrible. I'm more in a proper mindset and can actually excel in difficult games again, though I'm not the best. I'm playing Sonic Mania again, the lives shouldn't be in the game. I'm using Tails to farm goal posts and get medals, so naturally I will have 30 lives.
I only game over in Banjo Kazooie once in my entire life, Rusty Bucket Bay; then again I was a toddler and didn't have real game skills yet. My dad had to help with the last level of Mario 64 when I was 4.
The souls games don't rely on lives to present players with a clear and present challenge. Lives feel like artificial difficulty and a time wasting feature in the modern day. Super Meat Boy is one of the hardest platformers I've ever played, next to Celeste, neither of which have lives or game overs, yet there's a clear sense of achievement and victory when completing their respective levels.
I mean in those 2 games you also die at a significantly higher rate than games with lives (like 100 deaths per level) so the time loss is still present
I do feel you're a tiny bit over kill on giving limited lives a negative place in design. You talk about stringing together a game into one long challenge, but something like Mario is often made up of levels with checkpoints. You progress, get a checkpoint, and if you game over you go back to the title screen and resume where you left off. When you die in this kind of scenario you go back to the start of the level, and giving more weight and merit to check points. If you fail too much you essentially lose that check point and step backwards, in this case it does sort of encourage mastery of the previous and not relying on luck to have gotten that far... otherwise you'll be able to brute force the entire game. However, I understand that liking or disliking that sort of thing is subjective. Implementation is everything from a design perspective, limited lives by default aren't bad. The way the devs implement it is key, its just that its harder to justify their inclusion. Take a SHUMP game, and remove their limited lives, something like Touhou would lose a lot of its core identity. (Just in case you dont know) You get rewarded for grazing bullets, aka getting as close to bullets without dying, the risk of dying is losing a life and getting closer to a game over. The game is designed around being hard, but fair, where you can memorize and practice patterns to perfection. Likewise, dying constantly until you get through the fight would really deprive you of the experience itself. This is the kind of game that benefits from multiple level difficulties. The more modern ones also allow you to continue despite gaming over, at the loss of score. It also helps to point out that dying also rewards you with extra bombs (aka the ability to become invincible and clear the screen of bullets' while doing massive damage). In this kind of scenario lives can also be strategic, or a means of ensuring the player may clear the stage isntead of dying literally every second. My point is that limited lives, by its nature, isn't bad. It has its place and a role, but its very easy to misuse as a means of artificially punishing players for performing poorly. If a game has limited lives, it kind of needs to be designed around it to enhance the experience, but rarely do you ever.
I feel like this a case by case basis. I would prefer lives in a game like crash or sonic where the levels for the most part are short and sweet but there isn't as much of a reason to have lives in a more open game like banjo kazzoie or jak and daxter. In my personal opinion the best thing to do is making limited lives optional like what was done for crash 4 because giving people the choice for limited lives or unlimited lives isn't hurting anyone.
lives are actually dated tho. they only exist because of arcade machines. they function as a way to get people to pay more to keep playing or let the other person in line play next. that's why it exists. now it is just a remnant of that design left over that no longer serves any purpose. it only fufills it's original function in some pay to win mobile games. it is a bad design because it only exists because of the time period it was in and the context. thus making it dated. also you could never go back to play previous levels in arcade games anyway
I think the first time the dilemma popped in my head was when I was playing Super Mario 3D Land, when they added power ups that add invincibility to enemies or level skips. I initially saw it as bad because it made things too easy, but thinking back, I think it might as well be helpful in seeing how the level would had worked overall. You keep failing and losing lives but you are not punished. You are helped. Sure, one might argue lives in this game became useless. I personally loss the meaning of lives when I started using save states and the like. The only time I saw game overs affecting me was in Hotel Dusk, where you lack lives, but if you press Retry in a game over, you will be at the last position you were without save files, but you will miss an extra key detail in the ending of the game. Shoot em ups are probably the only thing where I felt lives were actually impactul when I wanted to do a 1 Continue run (1CC) to battle the True final boss. Yes, you need to go on hard or extreme and those require a massive grind and pattern recognition, but I chose to be challenged. And despite it all, I had joy in "proving myself". The issue here is that despite the easy difficulty option, one might still argue that barring the true boss for beginners is kinda gatekeeping, I guess. But shoot em ups were... built different.
I'd make the case that in the classic sonic games in particular, lives are actually beneficial. Especially in Sonic 2, finishing levels with a score of 10,000 points gives you a continue at the end of each stage. This encourages players to learn how to route stages so their time bonus and score bonus overlap to reach this threshold in each stage, somewhat similarly to the ranking system in later sonic games. You are encouraged to learn how to play these games better because of the lives system, and restarting the game each time you run out gives you more chances to utilize your abilities to maximize your lives/continue count each level. This is how I beat sonic 2 as a kid back in the day, I needed a lot of chances to learn the final boss overtime, and it made me into a sonic freak. I understand the reasoning a lot of people despise lives systems, and I do think they should at least be optional, but in a lot of games the system increases tension and encourages replays that are NOT the same, as you state in the video, but are supposed to be growing and learning experiences where you get better and better at each game. I also think that by taking away the lives system from sonic 2, it gives new players a fundamentally different experience in which they may not feel obligated to learn the intricacies of the physics engine and what is possible, or even to replay each level multiple times to get better. I believe this is part of the reason you see so many people saying sonic games are flawed, they play a level once, feel filtered by hard segments, and just complain the game is bad instead of learning how to play them well. A lives system probably would not fix that today, but back in the contemporary time of these games, when kids maybe got 2 games a year at maximum, it was a boon for replayability, and one I still get enjoyment out of to this day in games I have not played before.
New Sonic player here, bought generations and mania the day origins came out. Both had a lives system that exactly reflect what you said in the video: it discourages exploration, the count is easily exploitable via killing yourself etc. Sonic levels are (usually) fairly short and are meant to be replayed over many times so why am I punished to restart in generations by losing a life? Sonic levels also have a fair risk-reward outside of lives - you achieve faster times if you take the risk to go on the top path, and there's no reason to shoehorn in lives to add on frustration for no reason. I enjoy playing through life-less challenges in generations and it's more convenient for me to grind for an S rank as well, as opposed to normal levels where I need to restart after failing a jump to get a red star ring (and lose a life, while being circumvented if I quit the stage and restart instead). While hardcore players enjoy limited lives it's more important to know that there are different demographics to a game, including casuals. I bought the Sonic games with an open mind that I'm gonna replay it over even after I've finished the game, but now I can't even finish Mania it because of a skill issue. Sure I'm still committed to play through the game because I like Sonic, but some casual players might've dropped by now. And don't even try to defend it as some 'natural selection' or 'skill issue' bullshit, that's just gatekeeping and elitism at its finest. Asking the player for a minimum skill level is fine, but even if lives are removed checkpoints exist to fulfil that purpose; so it really sounds like they're complaining about the game not being difficult enough. In the end I still believe how Crash 4 and Sonic Origins handled it was a nice compromise: veteran players can still opt in for lives and relive the classic experience while newer players could have an easier time in learning the base game and even challenging themselves with limited lives later on. IMO Lives is just a bad and redundant game mechanic that is added for pure symbolism for the most part and detracts players from immersing in the game. It can be added as a challenge mechanic but in no way it should exist in the base game of any modern platformer. And idk, maybe if the game is well designed people will just naturally replay it instead of relying on lives to stretch out playtime?
Weird game to bring up and I don't know if you played it but Binding of Isaac has a really weird/interesting lives system that affects the gameplay so much more than the game just saying "try again". Lives in BoI are pretty strategic, I think my favourite example is the 9 lives one called Dead Cat. Where if you take Dead Cat all of your health immediately goes away and you're set on 1 heart but you get 9 lives. Although lives are rare and not really a main focus but you can use lives strategically a lot in this game like getting "free" devil deals.
Also, if you like hard games I do recommend checking this game out. Aside from a few characters I despise and 1 final boss the game will twist your balls fairly lol.
its different strokes for different fokes. its all the stakes at play.... take ff7 for example which was restricted by the save spots... knowing that the last save was 2 hours ago makes the fights so much more at play. its like flipping a coin.. if there's nothing at stake its boring but make the stakes you have a million quid if you win then you're very much more interested.
One thing I feel like I should mention is that Doom Eternal does have lives. Though how 1ups work is that if you die, you continue to fight so it's basically like another layer of health. Otherwise, what's the point of 1up in the game where there is no game over. Unless you are playing Extra Life mode and Ultra-Nightmare. Also falling pits will not result in instadeath like in Doom 2016. Speaking of Extra Life mode, this mode does what you would expect, a mode where you have limited lives. Then again extra lives function as additional layers of health and if in Extra Life mode you run out of extra lives and die, you will start over. Extra Life mode is basically a softer version of Ultra-Nightmare. If you have problems with the perma death, then I am sure you have some bad things to say about Ultra-Nightmare. In a mode where you die at least once, you will have to start over. (and have to listen to King Novic again) And in Ultra-Nightmare, all 1ups have been replaced with mega armor. Doom Eternal also has a Horde Mode and in that mode, you can rack up a lot of lives. If you played well, got all lives you could possibly get, and without dying, you could have roughly 38 lives. There is also a neat scoring system. You could get a score bonus for not using BFG at all, a bonus score depending on how many extra lives you have by the end of the Horde Mode, and other bonuses. I do like the fact that Doom Eternal gives you the option to either play it normally or with limited lives.
In that case, those aren't really lives. Just extra health bars, similar to what I mention about Streets of Rage 4. Personally, I'm not in to permadeath modes in games. But I have no issue with them, as they are optional challenges that players can choose to take on if they want.
With unlimited lives you would probably die less than you would with limited lives for the main fact you wouldn't be stressing out on certain sections of the game with unlimited lives
6:30 at first I was gonna agree, but after thinking some more, I think that having the player make decision between doing what's fun and playing it safe is not necessarily terrible design, I wouldn't say it's good design, but I don't think it's bad.
@@Pariah6950 the boredom of the grind by itself can discourage the player from doing it, but the option is there if they don't want to take risks by going to do what is fun with what they have, which depending on the players skill may be enough, this encourages the players to get better at the game to avoid the grind, at least in theory.
Sure. But then players who do make that choice have to go through a shitty grind. Why would you intentionally put something boring in your game at all?
@@Pariah6950 to have it as an option, but make it the less appealing option, as to say that it's not the intended way to play, but you can play that way.
Then this is just a principal thing. I would personally never want the design of my game to allow for players to bore themselves. I would only want to enable having a good time.
Exactly. Not being able to progress is already a punishment. By not taking the game seriously and learning how to play, you force yourself to stagnate in the same point until you do. Eventually the player must take it seriously or there is no point in playing.
I feel like lives could be interesting if people put more thought into them, rather than defaulting to the standard lives system. Like giving the player a set number of lives to beat a stage that resets for the next stage, or giving the player a reward if they beat it without dying too many times, while giving them the option to die as many times as they like. For example, in a New Super Mario bros. Wii, you could give each player a set of 5 lives in multiplayer, to stop them playing recklessly, as dying in those games just brings you back in a bubble without losing progress. You could also give everyone a shared lives (say 5x no. of players?) Pehaps you could approach lives like an extension of a health system.
Most of the old games did not have saves. Playing the old turtle Nes games, you had to beat it with 3 lives and 1 shot or try other day. Sonic did not have a save state until the 3rd game.
I think it depends on the game. If you have the freedom to chose which level to play like Mario 64, then limited lives prevent the player from getting stuck on a level, getting annoyed, and quitting. Even if you have the option to just leave the level people are way to stubborn for their own good.
As someone who doesn't like lives, I think one genre of game that they could be good in would be roguelikes, akin to an easy mode. Since roguelikes are built on the premise that you lose your character if you die, adding a lives system to such a game can be a method at making it less extreme and therefore more accessible to casual players. However, big asterisk here because I haven't actually played a roguelike with limited lives, this is just me theorising.
I always felt there was something wrong with lives so this video really helped flesh out my thoughts. I'm just gonna add something here, depending on how the game is structured, not having lifes might make the game more boring, since you're always spawning easily and infinitely you end up just mindlessly charging forward without a damn worry because there is no big punishment for that, in that case lives do help in giving more value to the level and encourages the player to be more focused, the cases you mentioned of people being too cautious could be said that the game does not give enough lifes so a new player can keep up with the challenge. I could say that lives system feels more like a safety net for difficulty, as if the developers aren't so sure if the challenge they created is gonna make the player bored or not so there is a life system for the player to be at least a bit cautious, I think it do work but for games that has actual good design it ends up not really having any reason to be there. And like you mentioned, I do agree that the vast majority of games do not need extra lives.
I think the only time lives REALLY excel is if you have a really hard game, and you have 2 modes, a beginner mode for players that just got the game, and an unlockable limited lives mode for players who already completed the game once. Kinda like hardcore modes in games except for really hard games where it's hard to not die.
i recently got sonic mania and was enjoying it and all my enjoyment stopped as soon as a got a game over. the bosses are the worst part of the game and theyre so confusing so if i fail too much i have to play the 2 acts again. i might be ok with 1 act but 2 is way too much. plus getting lives is way harder than it should be, 100 rings is too much since you lose every single one if you get hit and theres no way you could pick up even half.
sonic unleashed wii/ps2 has a set amount of lives you can have when you start a stage and you can't get more lives than what the game gives you at the start of a stage. You can't grind for more (but you can kinda unlock more lives by completing small challenge rooms in the temples that need a set amount of emblems to access)
I really agree with this video, lives have always felt like a way to incorporate permadeath (something I really like in games) into games that aren't designed for it. Of course lives systems aren't the same as permadeath, but they feel like a weird, barely thought mix of permadeath and permanent progress.
After hearing this I think that games should make lives optional. Furthermore they should make individual levels available after they have been completed. This will give more options to the player and make the gaming experience overall more enjoyable,
i feel like you can answer all these early questions, by putting yourself into a mind of a child, who played crash 1,2 on the ps1 in the 90s the first time. or any other classic, like ocarina of time. we didnt know mechanics exist. we just played :D those lives we had in sm64, or crash. those were all neccessary. it made you learn to take only a certain amount of hits until a level was done. if you died too many times, you´d game over, and had to redo the level. that was the challenge back then for crash. even bomberman on ps1, many other games i grinded ahhha. the trick to walk on the bridges handle rope for example waas found out later, we had to suffer through those levels for days xD and when you say you dont understand why people want that, and in the same breath you say stuff cant be outdated. people wanna play it that way to feel nostalgic again about the game they once picked up, but with the added aspect ratio, graphics. i made my comment before watching the content of this video, to not be biased. i stopped after 2 min, and now will continue!
I should have put this disclaimer at the start of the video. For anyone about to comment, "You're just bad." Please actually watch the video.
Also, two good arguments in favor of lives have cropped up in the comments. And I'd like to touch on them here.
First is that lives can add tension and satisfaction to a game. Beating the final boss of a game with no lives feels much better because of the stakes. When losing means restarting the whole game in some cases, the payoff is greater. This I can understand. But I personally do not experience this feeling of tension in games. And the tension itself is created from a desire to not lose your progress, AKA not having your time wasted. Which I still don't think is a good thing. But the tension and satisfaction itself can definitely be of value to many. That's part of why BRs are so popular.
Second is that game overs can force a minimum level of skill to be achieved to complete a game. Simply beating a level might not be enough. To finish the game, you're going to have to get good enough to not die too much throughout the whole thing. This is true, and can make a game more fun. Developing your skills in a game can be an enjoyable thing that players would miss out on if they were not forced to do it. But again, there are other ways to get this kind of effect in a game. The game Dustforce is a great example. That game ranks you at the end of every level, and higher ranks unlock more levels. Just playing through, you will eventually run out of new levels to play. You have to go back to old ones and do better to get better ranks to continue on. To even get to the hard levels, a certain level of mastery must be reached. And to get the final level, you have to get the best rank on every level. This forces you to get better at the game, but at your own pace and by your own choice.
NiGHTS (both Saturn and Wii games) has a good system like this, to unlock the last level for the Saturn Game you must get at least C-Rank in every level, and in the Wii game you unlock the real ending and true final boss when meeting the same requirements, both games will stop the player from progressing if it isn't skilled enough and incentives replaying levels with better performance to really beat the game, that by itself is a much better way of making the player get more skill, by only replaying what needs to be improved.
The thing I'm most uncomfortable with is the concept that lives are a settled issue in game development. There's such a rich history of the mechanic being interpreted in so many different ways to varying success that I feel that rejecting them as ''archaic'' when they have evolved so much in their time comes across as dismissive.
Something tells me you are VERY glad RUclips blanket hides the dislikes on a video now.
You're just bad.
@@xdfeverdream8122 the guy posted a discussion topic and never antagonized dissenting opinions. If you interpret this as ego driven then that's a self report as far as I know
A game that did this well, surprisingly enough, is Ghosts N Goblins.
It's a very difficult and frustrating game, but when you pass a level, you actually make progress and pass the hump. You don't have to go back and do the level again if you fail another too many times. It's a great example of a game being extremely difficult without being tedious and wasting your time
To quote AVGN: "Remember in high school? If you failed senior year, you just started senior year all over again; you don't go all the way back to freshman year!"
Ironically, after you beat the game once you get booted back to level 1 and are expected to run thru it again in order to truly win.
In this case you pass Senior year and are then told to retake it to prove you can REALLY do it, lol
Limited lives aren't the same thing as no save states at all. I don't get your analogy here.
also at least in super ghosts and goblins you can get a shit ton of continues if you just keep grabbing money so you can have potentially infinite tries on one level
A little anecdote on a recent experience with video game lives:
My little sister really loves the Sonic movies and asked me if she could try playing the games. I agreed and introduced her to the classic games via Origins. So far, she’s been playing in anniversary mode. This is her first video game ever, so she wasn’t very good starting out. Luckily, because anniversary mode just lets her respawn at the recent checkpoint, she was able to try sections of the acts over and over and get better and better. She’s been improving a lot since she started. She can now clear most of Sonic 2 on her own, whereas before she struggled to finish even green hill act 1 without dying.
One time she wanted to try to play Sonic 1 in classic mode. She kept dying in Marble zone and got game over after game over. Eventually she got really frustrated and switched back to anniversary mode.
That kinda made me realize that if Origins didn’t have anniversary mode, my little sister may have never given Sonic a shot. Heck, I almost gave up trying to beat Sonic 1 my first time because of the constant game overs. People improve at their own pace, and there’s really no point in punishing newbies for not “getting good” fast enough. It seems to only discourage in my experience.
I didn't beat the original sonic 1 until like 2 months ago on my phone. Sonic really should have never had lives because it totally destroys the way the game let's players of so many different skill ranges play.
@@chopperbrosadvance9760 well you couldn't have infinite lives, back in the day it wasn't a thing yet
Years ago on the ps3 mega drive collection, I only then beat the classics due to save states and I wouldn't even have bothered otherwise. Same with Advance 1. Save states made it a lot better.
@@chopperbrosadvance9760 But not having lives destorys Sonic in another way, you never attempt speedruns
And before you mention 3K saves, that partially fucks with what classic Sonic is about too, but 3K's extra long stages makes replaying in general less fun (still fun, do *not* mix up words)
In that case the anniversary mode really served as an easy mode of sorts. It's a good example of how you can actually get someone hooked by allowing the game to go easy on them if they so desire.
I sometimes encounter stories like this and I think they are a good counter argument to respond to the people that say that difficulty options are bad.
There should always at least be an option for Unlimited lives. Lives style gameplay isn't fun for me, losing progress and having to restart is just the biggest fun killer to me personally.
Limited lives are much more exciting to me because I have actual stakes. The setback of a gameover feels like an actual journey. When I am finishing a game or level or something and I'm on my last life the amount of adrenaline is higher than anything else. Because you know it's your last chance and there will be real consequences
I guess that's something they can add. People say the same thing about Battle Royales when you're one of the last left. Personally, I don't experience this feeling of tension. But I can see that being enjoyable.
You know, you can get even higher. I can stand near you with a hammer - and everytime you die, I will smash your gaming device with a hammer, so you have to not only start over the game, but also spend money on new pc, and reinstall windows. I bet your adrenaline on last attempt will be insane!
I agree with this. An Ultra Nightmare run in Doom Eternal or playing without saves in the classic games is far more exciting to me than a regular run where I have infinite retries on every fight. I'm not against people wanting to play the latter way, but I find it more fun when there are limited retries available.
It's a single-player game, after all. People should be able to do what they want.
@@Sea_Tree yeah of course. I'm not against games having an infinite lives option, but I'm definitely against game overs being removed completely.
I don’t think agree. What if there’s just a level with bad level design? I don’t think you should have to start the entire game over. You should just have to start the level over again. At the very least, you should be able to have the option to toggle it on or off.
Lives discouraging experimentation feels like a limp point, considering that advanced techniques are by definition for advanced players. Nobody jumps into a game like Super Monkey Ball trying to pull off insane tricks without first knowing how to beat the stage conventionally. Advanced tricks like skips, shortcuts and exploits are something that you build on top of a foundation of pre-requisite skill. Lives demand that you meet that pre-requisite to at least a modest extent.
A great example of a thoughtful lives system is Sonic 1. The game only has like an hour’s worth of content, but emphasises skill and replayability by being so demanding. Sonic showers the player with extra lives and continues for actions like exploring the stages, holding onto rings, entering special stages, i.e. playing the game optimally. If a player reaches Stage 4 with only 2 lives, the odds are they aren’t playing optimally, either because their grasp on the game’s fundamentals is weak or because they were having trouble with certain hazards. Eventually they’re gonna get sent back to Green Hill Zone, a stage designed to be a safe playground that teaches you the play mechanics. By your 40th run through Green Hill Zone, you’re gonna be a substantially more robust and competent player than your 1st, and you can apply that skill to every challenge in the game. You’ll naturally start building up a bigger cache of lives through playing optimally, which in turn gives you a *safety net* to perform more experimental and reckless stunts. The incentive to push the game beyond its limits is still there, you just have to earn it.
In Sonic 1, a player with a tenuous grasp of how the game works will simply never see the later stages. Whether this is a flaw comes back to the different ways we view video games over time. In 1991, the goal of video games wasn’t necessarily to see new things or even just reach the credits. The goal was to play it over and over and over and over until you mastered its challenges. Nowadays video games are mostly about scope and variety; the idea of being stuck in the first two levels of a brand new game is unthinkable. In 1991, simply reaching Labyrinth Zone doesn’t necessarily mean the player is ready to move on to the next stage, because playing Labyrinth Zone is a very different thing from actually mastering and understanding Labyrinth Zone. In this sense, I think it’s fair to refer to this kind of lives system as “dated”, as it was designed to compliment a kind of play experience that is much less common today than it was in the 90s. Applying this kind of system to more modern game design, like Mario 64 or Banjo, is rightfully considered superfluous. In fact, Sonic 1 was considered a disappointingly easy game in its time, since the standard skill level of players was so much higher than it is today, undoubtedly as a consequence of how demanding games tended to be. (It’s also worth noting that way fewer people played games back then, likely as a consequence of the exact same thing.)
I’ve watched in real-time how Sonic Origins upending the lives system has transformed the play experience. Armies of players trying Sonic 1 for the very first time were now beating it in a single sitting, and not getting much out of it. Now the challenge of the game isn’t mastering each stage’s design and play mechanics under a strict penalty, but simply making it to the next checkpoint. This lowers the game’s skill requirement to an unrecognisable state. An 8-year-old could pick the game up for the first time and comfortably beat it in a handful of hours, as long as they keep beating their head against whichever 1-minute stretch is giving them trouble. The unavoidable consequence of this is that the people beating Sonic 1 in 2022 possess substantially less skill than the people that beat it in 1991. They’ve put less hours into the game, are less familiar with the game and likely have much less of an attachment to the game. I guess you can make an argument that if the game is any good, players will choose to stick around even after the credits roll, because the act of getting better is just that much fun. But that doesn’t change the fact that the original game’s life system was implemented with care and attention to compliment the intended experience.
Maybe it's just me, but I totally try advanced stuff as soon as I pick up a new game lol.
Your point is very well made, and I agree. I've already had this discussion in another comment thread. Lives can force a minimum level of skill required to beat the game. Which can make a game more enjoyable for players that would otherwise not develop the skills.
But there are other ways to do this as well. Dustforce is one of my favorite examples. That game has a ranking system, and you unlock levels by getting ranks. Lower ranks unlock less levels. Just playing through the game, you will eventually run out of new levels to play. Many will still be locked, and you're forced to go back to earlier levels and get better ranks to unlock more. To unlock the final level, you need to get the best rank on every level. This works so well as it forces you to get better, but at your own pace. And the harder levels that require much better mastery are only unlocked once you've gone back and gotten much better.
@@Pariah6950 It's kinda funny that you like the Dustforce example more than a lives system, especially considering that your main gripe with lives is that they waste your time. Lives systems will ultimately always waste less of your time than a ranking system, because to make progress with ranks you need to complete a full run of an entire level, and if you messed up you have to redo the entire level again. Lives typically come with checkpoints, and generally only NES/Genesis games tend to boot you back to the title/first level when you game over.
@@chrismdb5686 Fair point. Maybe that's just my own bias kicking in lol. I love going for S ranks and stuff. But I think the fact that I'm choosing to do it makes a big difference in how the player feels about it.
@@Pariah6950 Choice is a huge part of whether it can be enjoyable, I agree. Relics in Crash 1/2 for example are more enjoyable than in Warped (in my opinion) because they're completely optional. Similarly, S Ranks in Sonic are enjoyable because they're completely optional.
However, replace any of those titles' lives systems with a requirement where you must earn at least an A Rank or Gold Relic time to unlock the next level rather than simply finishing it with no requirements (just as an example), and it becomes unimaginably awful to try and beat.
@@chrismdb5686 True. But that's a bit extreme.
What's nice about Dustforce is that you get to just play level after level for a while. You don't hit a wall until later. And you wouldn't be ready for the levels beyond that point without more practice anyway. And each rank gives you more progress. Not just S. So you can go from Cs to Bs and unlock a bunch more levels. Then you run out again and have to turn some Bs into As, and so on.
I like lives in Sonic games because I want to see how many I can stack in one playthrough by holding rings, finding secret monitors and getting a high score in zones. In Mania I can get ~40 and it’s satisfying to see the number increase because it reflects your skill, it’s a goal beyond just beating the game. If you had infinite lives in Sonic games then collecting rings past 32 would’ve been pointless. But I do agree there should be an infinite lives option to introduce the game nicely to new players.
the best live system that I've ever seen is the one in the sonic unleashed wii/ps2 port, you start the act with a fix number of lives per act and you can't get more in the level itself but as a collectable in side content that increases permanently that fixed number, just like obtaining hearth pieces in zelda.
I used to think lives were an archaic design choice, but I feel like I've become much more open to older design sensibilities because of how streamlined games have become recently. I'd think a lot of older designs can have value and shouldn't be dismissed because they seem bad most of the time.
I think being afraid in a game can be fun and overcoming something with limited lives could be more cathartic than if you just had an infinite number of tries.
some popular games and genres of games would not exist if limited lives was not a thing. For example the whole rogue-like genre is based on having limited lives. Often time you have only one, but in some cases in the games you can get additional lives or even recover lives you lost. So lives as a reward are still valuable in these kind of games.
I also feel like almost every arcade game doesnt really work unless you have some limit on lives as well. I definitely enjoyed metal slug more when I had limited lives, which forced me to play better than when I had infinite and dying would reward me with more bombs and a machine gun.
For me it depends on the game. Sometimes they can encourage you to play skillfully and stay alive instead of mindlessly ploughing through a game without thinking, sometimes they are just a nuisance and make the game way more tedious than it needs to be. They don't really bother me if the levels are short, but if the levels are long and you have to start over from the beginning, it's a pain in the ass.
I'm assuming you are a sonic fan since you watch this channel. Have you played unleashed? what's your opinion of it?
@@ivan7604 I love that game, it looks gorgeous and the stages are absolutely thrilling. Only stage I think suffered from limited lives was EggmanLand due to it's absurd length and large difficulty spike. Though, I feel Sonic games in general are hard to implement lives into because of how trial and error based they are. Sonic games encourage you to play the stages over and over and experiment with more difficult paths. Though, the ring system helps a lot so you're not likely to die as much.
@@TheFoxFromSplashMountain Completely Agree with everything you said. I think a good compromise would be allowing the player to have infinity lives when using the level selector, but if you replay, say the heroe campaign in SA2 you do have live ls and you can die. It is definetely a conflicting choice tho
@@TheFoxFromSplashMountain Eggmanland is ok on PS360, but on the WiiS2 version it suffers greatly from only giving you 5 chances to retry each time you die.
15:21 this depends on the games length, and it depends on the player, different players have a different mindset to how they approach these things, some people are more willing to experiment in a game at the risk of having to restart the game depending on how long it will take them to get back to where they are, it's not that outrageous.
Also, I mentioned my experience with metal slug in the other comment, I want to add to this, I can assure you, I would not have been as perceptive of what killed me every time I died, if death wasn't as punishing as it was, because it goes both ways, not being punished enough for dying will make you not care about dying, which doesn't encourage you to learn how to avoid it, it doesn't discourage you from it, but there's no reason to care about avoiding death if dying doesn't penalize you.
I suppose. But many players will be afraid to attempt the riskier stuff. And I personally believe you should encourage players as much as possible to get better, not scare them away from it. This isn't limited to lives. You look at Souls and its high damage, and it's no wonder so many players never even attempt to learn parrying until long after beating their first playthrough.
I think it depends on the game, sometimes limited lives work and sometimes they don’t
Its as dated as Nintendo’s story philosophy
Thanks for that incredibly insightful comment.
That's my opinion as well, it simply depends. Recently I watched a video talking about how people have been saying double jumping is a useless mechanic along with a defense of it, was pretty good and kind of reminds me of this situation. People see game overs and lives as a general widespread mechanic when in reality, it just depends on the context surrounding the mechanic's implementation in the game.
@@Cheesehead302 See, I'm going to bet I saw that same video and it's more about how double jumps lower the skill floor and raise the skill ceiling or work as progression for a game like in metroidvanias or an incremental upgrade like in rogue likes and how it comes down to implementation in the game. Lives don't do any of that, there's no way to use lives more skillfully or less skillfully in 99.99% of games, I'm sure there's some but I really can't think of them and that's why theres that .01% in there. Purely gameplay speaking they just serve as gating for the lower skill floors and not even a speed bump to the players who are actually good at them who can clear levels without even dying. I genuinely don't think there's anything a lives counter could do that a deaths counter couldn't.
@PhantomLee I appreciate your three week late response!
I thought games were supposed to give you the feeling or experiences of something you can't actually do. Having a life system in game allows some of us (like me) to finally have lives, something we wouldn't have otherwise! :D
I feel like hard games with infinite lives (like Celeste) are a good way of showing why games with no lives can be good.
You will die A LOT but you learn from your deaths. You start doing better and better at sections and then after beating a level, you get shown how much you died. You then aim to get better on repeated playthroughs since you have gotten better at the game.
Deaths aim to improve you at a game, not to punish you.
My problenm with limited lives is that, most of the time, they are either obnoxious because you get very few and the game becomes very punishing, or you get so many or die so little that they become pointless.
Big thing is that different games offer different challanges.
Something like Celeste/Super Meat Boy is about insanely difficult individual challanges, while a Castlevania or Mega Man game is about endurance. The individual jumps and enemies in these games are easy, the challange comes from having to do lots of them in sucession while accumulating the least amount of mistakes you can.
If you remove lives from them, than you have to make the individual jumps and such super hard to compensate, and all games will inevitabily just become Celeste/Meat Boy style affairs, which I personally just find a lot less appealing.
That's why I don't like when people use Celeste/Meat Boy as examples on why all games should get rid of lives, just because they personally enjoy high precision platformers, doesn't mean every game should become one.
Good point. As I said, some games can make them work. Games where you have to go through the whole thing all in one go like Castlevania or old beat 'em ups are good examples.
But I'd still argue you could get the same type of design out of something like an endgame rank based on how many deaths you had throughout your whole playthrough. There are other ways than lives to string all the game's small challenges into one large one.
But to be fair, what lives can do is force a minimum level of skill to be needed to beat a game. With optional things like ranks, players are able to complete a game with much less mastery developed. And there can be a fun in developing your skills that can be missed out on by many if it is not forced. That's exactly why Souls games don't have difficulty options. If it let people play on easy, many would be robbing themselves of the fun of the normal difficulty.
And when I played my first Castlevania (Adventure Rebirth), I admit I had a blast playing the game. And I think the lives helped. Game overs weren't too disheartening, as I felt invigorated to not make the mistakes I did on my first run through a level. That feeling of improving is very satisfying. But I do think that full game resets are a bit much. I think restarting a level is a good balance of not being too punishing, but still forcing player growth. That's why I like Streets of Rage 4's system. And that also has an arcade mode where you do the whole game on 1 set of lives if you want that sort of experience. It's perfect.
@@Pariah6950 It's also interesting when games make their own tailor-made lives system, like Furi, a boss fight game where not only you but your enemies have lives, and you can't b*llshit your way because losing one resets the bosse's health for that particular one.
I think it shows that we can always think outside the box for even the most mundane mechanichs, instead of simply going for an established archetype.
Tangentially, I really want to play SoR4, can't wait until it goes a little cheaper in my region. Arcade beat'em ups really suffer on emulators, since the lack of money being involved means you can truly just brute force everything, and when playing with friends we inevilabily get bored due to that.
@@limabarreto911 Oh, I know Furi. One of my favorite action games ever. Lives there are certainly interesting. They function almost like rounds, as if it's a fighting game.
And you're totally right about arcade games. They can still be enjoyable just on the fun of the gameplay. But with no consequences, it does feel pretty weak. There having your score reset is supposed to be the deterrent, but we know nowadays people don't care much for high scores. Those are the types of situations where a ranking system would be good. As otherwise you just have to choose not to use continues.
@@Pariah6950
This whole video and comment thread are really interesting from the point of view as someone who grew up on Mega Man. When watching, I completely agreed with you on the idea that starting a game from the beginning is just frustrating and annoying, when you're playing perfectly on the parts you've gotten past but there's a tricky "fourth level".
But I despite that, I felt like the lives system in Mega Man that has levels and checkpoints instead add to the difficulty of the game, making it more rewarding to finally get past levels but without the frustration of beginning the game from scratch. After seeing the system that Streets of Rage 4 implemented though, I found myself agreeing with you a lot more. I imagined what Mega Man X would feel like if when you died or fell onto a spike, you respawned with a new second health bar, and it honestly sounded really nice. And it's actually not hard to imagine it either because I've gotten into speed running the X series lately. Something I did to practice without the fear of dying and replaying levels from the beginning, was to use save-states to take the most difficult and rewarding paths, and even if I failed many times, it still felt really fun because there wasn't a single moment I had to replay a section without it being my own decision, whether it was because I wanted to do it faster or more optimally.
Still, like the earlier comment said I definitely agree with the idea that games with lives can make the game a challenge of endurance. I think that it makes a ton of sense of people do enjoy the lives system despite it's flaws. Sure it sucks to replay the level from the beginning, but it makes it all the more satisfying when you finally beat it because you get a feeling of progression that's very different from getting past something locked behind execution.
This was a very good video. All I'll say is that there still needs to be a reward in Sonic games for getting 100 coins, cuz' otherwise there's really no point in collecting more than a handful. I liked what origins did in giving you rings to buy things with. It's just there really weren't that many interesting things to buy at the Museum.
Tbf you can also use them to replay the special stages, so in some sense there is more of a reason to
I actually tried to play origins with the mindset of "get as many collectables as possible and see how much I can unlock" only to find it really disapointing cause if you try to collect EVERYTHING in story mode then you still don't really have much to unlock (think I got something like 200+ coins) but then you start doing the missions and your coins will very quickly skyrocket to like 700! Thus allowing you to unlock everything with so little effort! It's like...what's even the point of coins if it doesn't matter how many I collect at the end of the day?!
The best way to me would be to make rings a currency.
advance 2 managed to make them useful
In my experience a lot of game overs just make you replay parts of a game that you've already beaten which makes learning the part you struggle at way harder
Only reason why those games have limited lives is to punish the player for their bad skills. Makes you more willing to not die and try your best for next time which when you complete a stage or the game overall you feel proud and happy that you achieved it after the challenge.
It can be off putting, loosing progress and resetting the stages / levels. Frustrating and off putting to keep playing.
Me getting stuck on chemical plant on sonic annoyed me alittle and stopped playing, i dont have the skills or knowing the layout off by heart so it makes it harder for new players.
I remember beating Wild Guns after many game overs. Very satisfying!
I feel that dying IS the punishment
That depends on the game's design in my opinion - open-world sandboxes focused purely on slower-paced exploration like Super Mario Odyssey or precision platformers like Celeste, Super Meat Boy or Crash 4 work with infinite lives/tries because they are focused on individual moment-to-moment challenges (that's why those no-damage/perfect run gems in Crash 4 don't really work all that well) or, in case of SMO, the fun of exploration and experimentation.
However, infinite lives can also lead to an almost save state-like approach of brute-forcing games instead of learning and appreciating their design. The recent Rayman games suffer from this, in my opinion. I'm not some kind of "git gud" kind of gamer, but I think there's a benefit to both approaches, and in an ideal world there would be a toggle of some kind to satisfy both kinds of players.
Same. I think everyone should be able to enjoy games. I really love what Xbox is doing for the gaming community. They’re making gaming more accessible for people with disabilities. People, who in the pass, who were not able to play video games.
"infinite lives can also lead to an almost save state-like approach of brute-forcing games instead of learning and appreciating their design."
Ironically, the games that I brute-forced through save-states in order to finish were games that had limited lives (i.e. Lion King and Super Ghouls and Ghosts, for the SNES).
@@AllurinGirl31 I mean if you had infinite lives wouldn't you do the same brute force anyways
this is the main reason why i don't like levelling up in most games. it's just there to waste your time, and i think most designers seem to put them in (much like lives) - just because they can, and because other games they like are good in SPITE of having levelling. i think levelling up is either entirely arbitrary, grindy, and annoying. like lives. adding new abilities wouldn't be tedious, but just boosting the players' stats and then boosting enemies' stats... it all balances out to be meaningless because they all level up so evenly that it just forces the player to either grind which is OPTIMAL BUT BORING, or be underlevelled and make the game more punishing (i guess this is kind of irrelivant, but this video reminded me of that).
Fully agree. And something I've been meaning to make a video on.
About two years ago, I beat Sonic the Hedgehog 2 for the first time and had died right at the final boss one hit from winning. I did play through the game the next day and beat it with around two lives remaining and it felt pretty satisfying. However, I get people who don't want to deal with a game-over and I love the option for switching between the two modes. I feel like the best way to have lives is to link them to the level itself, rather than the entire game. For example, if you lose all of your lives, you have to restart that level, not the entire game. Along with this, getting extra lives won't add to your total life count everywhere, just that stage. Let's say you start with three lives initially, you get two extra lives and beat the level and move on to the next, now your lives are reset back to three. This would solve the issue of finding a way to get a high amount of lives, keeping the challenge of not dying while allowing the player to move on at their own pace.
Hold on... Lives punishing bad/new players is now a bad thing? If they aren't good enough to cleanly beat the level, they aren't ready for later levels and need to remain in their current position until they get better. This is 100% a you need to get good moment if the lives are what gatekeeps your (using your as a euphemism here, not specifically you, the guy who wrote this video-essay) progress in a game.
The problem here is that this video exclusively looks at this topic with a modern mindset, trying to best the game and that's the only goal. No care for leaning the game, let alone mastering it, or even replaying it at all. Lives came about in a time where replaying the game you spent $60 (or more) on was not only normal, but something everyone did. Games weren't the worthless toys they are today that were consumed to completion once and then discarded for eternity after.
If a player isn't ready for a later level, then why are they even given access to it? And how exactly does that work? Why is a player not ready for the next level when they beat the previous one? Because they haven't developed the skills they need for it? Then let them develop those skills as they take on this new level. Why force them to replay a previous part of the game to improve when they can do it where they already are?
And please do not pretend that lives are the only way to make a player get better. As I said in the video, there are other ways to encourage players to master a game and replay it. I just played Crash 4 without lives. Took me about 6 hours to play the game. Then I went on to do 2 additional playthroughs, beat every level with 3 deaths or less, did a lot of extra stuff, and unlocked and beat all the extra hard secret levels. My total playtime was over 20 hours. No lives necessary.
@@Pariah6950I'm not sure what you're really trying to get at with those (possibly rhetorical) questions you posed, but that entire first paragraph essential boils down to the point I was making. Not all games with lives systems play like Battletoads (as you already know).
Keep in mind I'm in no way advocating for NES style lives systems where you go back to the main menu after a game over, I'm advocating for a lives system that sets you back to the previous checkpoint/start of last level until the player is good enough to continue.
If the player cannot be precise enough with their jumps to beat "Road to Nowhere" they should be stuck there until they get good enough to beat it. The game shouldn't reward them with progress when they've demonstrated they can't beat the challenge presented.
There are alternatives to lives, yes you did touch on a few in the video but another that I don't believe you mentioned is the Super Mario Odyssey approach where you lose currency (which could be used for any number of things) on death.
Lives are a good way to gate off content that players simply are not yet good enough to deal with, there are alternatives of course and everyone is entitled to a preference, but there's nothing inherently wrong with a (well designed) lives system, just as there's nothing inherently wrong with a well designed ranking system, or again the system from Odyssey. They all accomplish the same thing in different ways, with the reward for getting better being more content.
@@chrismdb5686 But you get to the 2nd checkpoint of Road to Nowhere, you've proven you're good enough to get there. What I don't understand is why the player should have to re-prove their worth if they fail too much on the part after that checkpoint.
I will agree that a well designed lives system can work just fine. One of the main things I wanted to convey with this video is that most games have bad live systems.
@@Pariah6950 More practice with the same kind of challenge will only help the player to learn faster, will it not? Just because a player can accomplish a feat once doesn't mean they've permanently cleared a skill bar. There are plenty of games where it's possible to overcome a large obstacle through sheer luck, and then fail on the next attempt because they didn't really have the ability to overcome the challenge. Setting them back to level start ensures that by the time the player finishes the level, they should be more than good enough to give the next one a good attempt.
The alternative to sticking at that second checkpoint is retrying that until they eventually get it. Either way they'll likely spend the same amount of time finishing the level, the method that involves them restarting the level on game over generally comes with the caveat that they've definitely improved enough to move on, whereas restarting repeatedly at the check point can be overcome through brute force.
At the end of the day, I really don't care how people play these games (with/without save states, with/without lives, etc.), I just don't feel there needs to be unwarranted criticism of perfectly fine game mechanics. If lives aren't for you, that's fine, but if any of the alternatives are cranked out to crazy specifications they can be just as annoying as lives are to you, and even more so. Improperly tuning any of these can make a game a cakewalk, or completely unplayable.
@@chrismdb5686 I'd argue you would learn faster by repeatedly attempting the actual thing that's giving you trouble. But you make a good point that you could just end up getting lucky in some cases.
And I do agree that level resets are pretty acceptable. Full game is pretty extreme. But both can work in the right system, even if I still have some inherent issues with that kind of system.
Thanks for such good comments. I enjoyed the discussion.
Personally I would argue that the unlimited lives in Crash 4 are what allows it to be as difficult as it is.
Because they don't have to accommodate for players having to go back to the start of the level they can ensure people won't get demoralised and frustrated about a bunch of stuff they have already done because they are having trouble with a certain challenge, that way they don't have to tone down the challenge to avoid turning too many people away from the game. Add to that what you mentioned about unlimited lives allowing for more experimentation and risk taking and it allows the developers to ask more of the player.
You can tell that this is the intention with Crash 4 because they advise playing with unlimited lives and major challenges in the levels are bookended by checkpoints.
True. Even in retro mode the game gives you a lot of live crates, and the hardest sections have tons of wumpa fruit too.
Heck, the last section of the last level (which is supposed to be the hardest challenge in the game) has 4 golden wumpas pretty early in the section, so you can constantly get lives and repeat the same section until you master it
I like lives because they discourage you from playing recklessly, but I think many games just need to be restructured for them to mean something again. A bad example of lives are most 3D Mario Games and the "New Super" Games because a Game Over only sends you back to the beginning of the level you're in and you can save at any time. A good example would be Sonic Unleashed on Wii which doesn't give you any lives in the levels, so you need to play cautiously. And I'd argue Mario Galaxy 1 actually uses the lives system pretty well, because they force you to strategize or lose all your progress in that level and if you DO lose them all, the game boots the player from the level which may encourage them to come back to that stage later.
Overall I think lives are a necessary evil to give games more tension or else beating it becomes more of an inevitability than a challenge.
Its 2:00 am and a new Pariah695 video dropped, this is nice
You are correct about arcade games which were the foundation for many games in the 80’s and 90’s. What you didn’t mention is the option of purchasing additional lives, or that scores accomplished using more than one coin were generally not recorded on the high score table. Essentially you can have as many lives as you like provided you have the cash, but your accomplishment doesn’t mean anything until you can do it on one coin. So basically the arcades nailed it decades ago
Sort of. That issue there is most people really don't care about high scores.
@@Pariah6950 I have no idea what makes you say that. Gaming accomplishments have been competed, recorded, and tracked from the early days of twin galaxy through to the modern era of GDQ.
@@theycallmejpj Pretty much everyone uses speedrunning as a measure of skill now instead of score. It works great for old games like crash, endlessly fun.
@@tappy8741But it is precisely that, A measure of skill. Not the only measure of the only set of skills. Score chasing should have it's place in modern game culture too.
Seeing the crash bandicoot footage makes the game look so cool and fun... I didn't watch the crash review video cuz I didn't care about the games but I think I might pick it up
Glad to hear that. One of my goals with this channel is to show off cool gameplay that shows how much fun games can be.
If you have a PlayStation.....it's on ps plus just an fyi. Do get it tho as it's worth whatever price it's going for
Limited lives in Crash 4 has never been an issue for me. Im basically perma stuck at 99 lives because each level has so many wumpas you get ~7 of em for every level you complete.
An extra life crate has an extra life AND a big wumpa ~1.3 extra lives.
You'd have to be DSP or some shit to get a game over in C4 IMO
10:20 let me tell you about my experience with a series called metal slug. Metal slug anthology version allows you to play through the game with unlimited lives, as opposed to the original versions of the games which gave you only 12 lives for the 5 stages of the game, I had beaten some of them as a kid with unlimited lives, and while I loved the art style and the comedy of the game, combat with unlimited lives was boring, because the game doesn't take any progress away from you when you lose, you continue from the exact point you died in, the thing that makes a challenge exciting is the penalty for failure, and in videogames the penalty is generally a loss of progress.
Important to note, metal slug games can be beaten in less than an hour if you don't game over, which is the biggest reason why limited lives work in a game like this.
Just a few months ago, I decided to try and beat all the main entries in the series with limited lives for the first time, I started with the original version of the first game, so 12 lives for the five levels, the thing I learned very quickly was that every time I died, I made a mental note of what killed me, and I would make sure to remember it and be ready for it next time, and with this, over the course of a few days I continuously died, learned, adapted and persevered, and the further I got into the game, the more hyper focused I would get, the more my heart rate would rise, and I felt awesome for how skilled I was at the game, and after 5 days of starting the game from scratch, I beat the final boss on my last life, despite having gotten to him with a whole 10 of the 12 that I started with, damn near had a heart attack, it was awesome, i would never have gotten that feeling if the game didn't have limited lives, or even if the game gave me a checkpoint at the start of each level, because the more severe the penalty for losing, the more pressure you feel to not lose.
The second game didn't go so glorious for me, I tried for like a week before I gave up and switched to anthology version, I managed to get to the final boss, but I was dying so fast to him, that I would lose all my lives before I could learn how to avoid any attacks, and it being the final boss meant I would have to fight through the whole game again which is already an intense task, so no matter how many times I tried, the original version was hopeless, so I switched to anthology which gives you 60 lives instead of 12, and it was barely enough, when I beat the final boss I had 12 left, I left the game feeling defeated, but I still went on to play the rest of the anthology, and for the rest of it, I was not as disappointed, cause they showed me that going forward with just 12 lives would never have worked because of how hard they all were, and I finished every single one of them, and it's currently my proudest gaming achievement, I'm very confident in saying that metal slug games are the hardest games I have ever played, and they are the only games I consider hard.
I've not actually played Metal Slug so correct me if I'm wrong, but don't those games kill you in 1 hit? So really, if they don't bring you back to a checkpoint on death, those aren't even lives. Those are hit points. You have 1 health bar of 12 hits to beat the whole game. That's similar to my Streets of Rage 4 example.
@@Pariah6950 yeah, pretty much, but since losing all lives sends you to the start of the game, I feel it does apply here, since it's the same punishment as losing all lives.
I disagree. Getting a game over takes away progress. In a game like that, there is no progress. At a macro level, you either beat the game or you don't.
Personally I disagree. I think the setback of running out of lives gives me the opportunity to go back and master the earlier sections so I can be better and more set for the next part of the game. That being said there should always be an option in the menu for those who want infinite lives.
The dumbest thing about lives in gaming is in some Sonic games, if you simply restart the stage in the pause menu, you will lose a life.
That is the stupidest decision in connection with lives I have seen in any game ever.
Especially because getting a Game over and clicking on ,,Continue >Yes
Definitely agree about the way some lives were used in those Sonic games
For me I feel more happy with myself overcoming a game like Crash 1 because it will make a fluke impermanent to the playthrough. If I accidentally damage boost after losing a mask and exploit the invincibility frames to progress, it doesn't cheapen the experience because I'm likely going to be made to do it properly later on. And it's not like damage boosting like a scrub doesn't have value because I get to learn what's in store later in the level.
I agree with everything you said about the system being exploitable. Grinding for lives is just an oversight.
I think if I made a Crash game I'd replace lives with checkpoints that break after 1 use, and a game over would occur when you either run out of these checkpoints or don't get far enough to reach the first.
Overall I think there are games like Crash 1 which operate best with a ''push factor'' (lives) because the focus is on surviving clean, completionist runs. Classic Sonic having lives is incongruent with that quote from Yuji Naka(?) where he said the incentive for playing well is learning to speedrun through repeated playthroughs - a ''pull factor''. Sonic 1 already has the big rings as a less important push factor which encourages clean runs, making lives redundant basically in the designers' own words.
The worst thing about lives is being unsure if 1 or 0 indicates your last life.
Mmmm, I'm not so sure that lives are as redundant in the first Sonic the Hedgehog game as you think they are. First off, we have to understand that some, if not most players will just not want to engage with the special stages. And, considering what collecting all the Chaos Emeralds does (an alternative ending with minor differences) So the implementation of lives force players to be better at the game, knowing the best routes, maintaining momentum, and keeping enough lives to beat the game.
The incentive of not losing all your lives and having to restart the stage, or worse, losing all of your continues, is enough to push players to actually interact with the first Sonic the Hedgehog's systems properly. The optional, ignorable special stages just further push players to succeed.
I completely agree with everything you said. The only reason I like lives is because the monkey living in my brain say "big number, me happy"
Just thought of how to implement lives correctly...pull a "meta/undertale" on the player. Every time you game over something changes and if you explore enough you can progress differently...essentially you never lose progress even when the game tells you you lost progress...
but then i'd have to waste time purposefully dying just to get the most out of the game
So eloquently put. As someone who usually likes lives systems, this definitely convinced me otherwise in the majority of circumstances. I guess I had never really thought about it too deeply before beyond just liking the idea of the tension they can exert on the player in certain situations. Amazing video as always.
"Limited lives are always bad"
[Roguelikes want to know your location]
I think roguelikes are fundamentally different!
A single life in a game that changes per run makes a lot of sense.
A single life in a game that the levels and enemy placement are always the same just makes it unnecessarily punishing.
That's why I personally love roguelikes and will play them time and time again, but I really dislike some old games (like a lot of NES platformers) because it's very tiresome to hit a wall and being forced to play the exact same first levels over and over again just to get another chance at the challenging level I got stuck at!
@@AllurinGirl31 Very reasonable counterpoint, I can see where you are coming from. However, I still disagree. There is the randomization difference you mention, but I don't see it as different in any meaningful way from hard designed levels.
Of the three Roguelikes I have beaten - Dungeon Crawl, NetHack and ADOM - large chunks of the game, which are clustered in the earliest levels don't end up feeling notably different after enough subsequent replays. You employ the same basic tactics, irrespective of the fact it has procedural generation.
In ADOM especially, my first victory was a Gray Elf Wizard, where every single attempt involved rushing right to the Bug Temple to grind some easy levels and then farming the endless dungeon to stock up on spellbooks. The level of difference in this early procedure was minimal at best. Dungeon Crawl and NetHack were not all too different in terms of early game being a by rote, almost mindless set-up phase.
If anything, I would have preferred it be hard coded so I could just blast through the busy work without having to pay attention.
I never said they were always bad. Just most of the time because of bad implementation. I think lives definitely fit with the roguelike design. I didn't mention it because most roguelikes don't have lives. They're usually a one life kinda deal.
@@Pariah6950 Three that were just in my notes I scrawled down while listening originally:
1:16: "Something I've said on my channel multiple times is that I just think limited lives are stupid and they're bad"
10:22: "For one thing, forcing players to replay stuff when they game-over sucks. It's just not fun"
19:33: "Lives do not offer genuine challenge, they just make the process of getting better at a game more tedious"
Maybe I'm being unfair because today was long, it's late and I've got a fair bit of grog in me but...
Leaving out Roguelikes in this discussion doesn't seem complete to me. Roguelikes, in their purest form do have lives, it's just you only have one. I don't see a good way to argue that "one life" is somehow different to "a game with lives" without engaging in a lot of semantics.
Even the title of this video is "Limited Lives are Bad". I actually agree with your points when it comes to life system in certain games. Super Meat Boy would be actively worse with an old school life system for example.
I dunno, your argument just struck me as incomplete I guess. Thanks for the reply though, it's appreciated. You've earned a sub even if I disagree.
@@4asgard5 I see what you mean. I feel roguelikes are different though because a single run of the game isn't the game, you know? Starting over isn't really starting over, if that makes sense.
I want to ask, how do you feel about the implementation of lives in a game like Doom Eternal or the use of quicksaves as a resource in Wrath Aeon of Ruin?
Also, if you haven't played Doom Eternal I'd really like to see your thoughts on it!
Haven't played Eternal yet so I don't know how that works. Never heard of Wrath Aeon of Ruin either. But the idea of quicksaves as a resource sounds interesting.
@@Pariah6950 Both are well worth checking out if you're interested! Eternal especially. The combat is top tier.
Agreed. Lives are a old concept from the arcade era where the main aim was to suck money from its players.
Yah it's an old concept, sure. So are risk vs. reward, score and any other basic game mechanic imaginable. So what?
Also, the fact something was used to make money doesn't mean it can't have other purposes, such as incentivizing skill and limiting your ability to bruteforce a game.
Playing Sonic Adventure 2 on Steam and trying to clear all the bonus missions is the first time I realized the lives system is broken. There's a "restart level" option should you screw up, but it costs a life. And when you reach 0 (your last life), the option to restart disappears. You have to exit the level and go back in, restarting from 4. It was annoyingly tedious.
11:37 OK is this whole video there because of Labyrinth Zone? "4th level" and "13 lives" are very specific amounts :P
One example that often gets skipped over is in the first Actraiser on SNES. You'll get "lives" as one of the RPG portion's reward, and the action stages have like one checkpoint in the middle, then one before the boss. You always start with the full amount of lives on your stat sheet, and get booted if you lose all of them
There is a game that i think did lives pretty well : Sonic 3 & Knuckles. In this game you must complete a zone which has two acts and a boss at the end of each. If you lose all your lives and get a game over, you can restart from act 1 of the zone and since this is a sonic game, you can try to look for secrets or ways to finish the act faster or safer. the game is not too hard so you're not really punished and you can learn pretty fast by sometimes just slowing down, the game reminds you that it's dangerous, speed and success aren't granted. going back on the subject of exploration, there's a lot of helpful things that you can discover like shields, lives and even special stages which even if you fail, can grant you a continue by collecting enough rings. (which is very useful because not only it gives you three lives after a game over but it can also reset the clock so you don't have to worry about a time over)
There's also Sonic Rush that i think did a pretty good job by letting you do two acts of the zone and then you can just fight the boss in a separate act and that progress is not lost, you just have to complete two acts before the progress is saved.
There's two types of players: the ones that want a challenge -above all else, and the one who just play the game without any further intentions (they don't care about getting the best ranks, mastering the mechanics, etc.).
Everything we talk about has to acknowledge that fact.
The argument of removing lives because it makes people have to replay sections is one that appeals to the players who don't care too much (which isn't necessarily wrong), but neglects the players that want a challenge.
I, personally, like a challenge. If I can literally die 50 times to a boss and there's no consequences to it, it trivializes the challenge. It isn't necessarily bad itself, but it makes it feel like just a random task and not an encounter. It would only really be enjoyable for those players who don't really give a fuck about the difficulty, the mechanics, etc. There's also games that WANT to provide a challenge deliberately; In such cases the type of players who don't like having a hard time won't be pleased to begin with, anyway. Again, lives cannot be isolated from the fact that different players look for different things.
I do agree that having a lives counter while being able to play any level that you want through the level selector (because you've already finished the game) is pointless. I also think that there should be some reward for those players who have mastered the game to a point where they can mass stack lives (because having the counter at 99 isn't enough IMO).
Most of this can be reduced to allowing lives to be toggleable and not putting them in pointless parts of the game or games where lives would slow the game down significantly. Like most things when it comes to games is very subjective what option is best for we play videogames for enjoyment and although there are ALWAYS objective aspects, enjoyment is subjective in and of itself.
In general, Lives can be good or bad depending on the demographic you try to appeal to.
Exactly I was watching a casual Streamer on twitch for Crash 4.....she was mindlessly dying because she didn't know how to use the infinite spin mask.
Like she was normal jumping one time and then switched to the mask when she needed to do 2 mask jumps.🤦♂️
She literally died 10-15 times mindlessly which easily shows Infinite lives for crash 4 is just for casuals*** at least when doing story levels*. I wanna say 20 times because she just kept falling to her death and in less then 2- 3 mins
It was so disgusting how casual it was. Limited lives literally makes you pay attention.
It depends on the game. Even the flashback Tapes give you unlimited lives which had to be done otherwise they couldn't have made em as difficult as they wanted to.
Which the flashback Tapes......Casuals won't even touch those at all. The flashback tapes require immense skill and more then the story missions period .
They will not even 100% just Crash's tapes either. Crash 4 literally showed when to correctly apply limited lives and when not to.
It's just like Nioh.....unlimited lives but you go back to the checkpoint
@@spiritualsoul2711 Exactly.
Ive heard some people say that difficulty levels are a signed of lazyness and/or poor design. I disagree.
I think it's only smart for a team of developers to allow flexibility on how much the game punishes the player. If you allow the player to choose it will feel like 1000x more fair and you gain waaaay nore fans and players than you could have forcing a difficulty level.
2:02
This line reminds me of that AVGN line where he says that the Tiger Electronic games are so outdated, that they were never in-dated.
I agree with pretty much everything you said.
One example that shows how limited lives can make a game easier are the old Mega Man games. I really like trying to defeat all the robot masters with just the buster, which requires actually learning the fight and avoiding their attacks consistently enough. However, the game actively punishes you for trying that with the threat of having to play the entire level all over again, so it's much better to try and use their weakness or spam E-tanks to get past them. This way, the game steers you towards defeating all the bosses by essentially just mashing buttons, even if you would actually enjoy the process of losing the fight a few dozen times while you're learning all the patterns and eventually having a more rewarding victory.
In Sonic Origin's case, people are probably so burned out by the amount of remasters and remakes that are significantly easier than the original, without even giving more experienced players the option to enjoy the original balancing, that it really is just a matter of principle for them.
As someone who has a rapidly shrinking amount of free time to "Git Gud" at video games AND a rapidly growing backlog of games to play, THANK YOU.
I'll happily choose to play a game with infinite lives. I play games to have fun, and I can't be bothered to restart whole levels over when i'm supposed to be learning *as I go*. As you said in your video, there are WAY better ways to incentivize players. The people mocking you in the comments just need to feel superior because they "Play Games Better", which is honestly very shallow while also ignoring the things you bring up in the first place.
For the most part I would agree that lives shouldn't exist in games anymore. However I do think there are some specific genres that really benefit from having them. Shoot em ups, bullet hells and stuff in that specific genre would not really work without a life system IMO. If I could beat a Touhou game by not even trying to learn the game properly and barely paying attention, they wouldn't be nearly as satisfying to beat. There's a reason why it feels so good to get a 1CC in a Touhou game (for those that don't know, which I'm assuming is 90% of the people reading this, 1CC stands for 1 Credit Clear. It means you beat the game without using a continue.), and it also benefits you by unlocking the Extra Stage and super boss, which tend to be ludicrously difficult. If you could gain access to that without putting in tons of effort, I don't think it would be anywhere near as satisfying. It helps that a run of these games is maybe about 30 minutes tops, so a run never takes *that* long.
It also helps you think about items and resources a lot more. You have a certain amount of bombs (screen clearing moves that give you I frames) for every life, which makes you think about your split second decision making. Should I use a bomb to try and bypass a bunch of bullets, or should I save them for later and risk losing a life? The game also rewards you a big deal by picking up collectibles that drop from defeated enemies for stronger shots, getting extra lives by grabbing enough point items (I don't know what else to call them), as well as other game specific things that do things depending on which Touhou you're playing.
I will say that this is admittedly a rare case overall though. Most of the time a life system isn't used like this, and instead just feels very tacked on. Mario Odyssey axed lives completely and it really didn't affect much of anything. I do like it when games like the Crash trilogy, or say like Mario Galaxy 1 and 2 drown you in lives, because then you very rarely if ever have to worry about game overs. Having lives be more plentiful doesn't make a game easier, it just removes the tedium of having to redo stuff as much. But at that point you may as well just cut lives entirely. It's still possible to make a difficult game without having to resort to lives. Rayman Origins/Legends, Celeste, Hollow Knight, etc prove that.
I guess the point is, ONLY include lives in your game if it actually benefits the game design and makes sense. If all it does is make you waste your time, just remove it from the game and rethink the design of said game. That's my two cents anyway.
But can't you just achieve the equivalent of a 1CC by beating the game with less than how ever many deaths? Like what Crash 4 does with the 3 deaths or less gem, but for the whole game.
Not really since the amount of lives you get depend on how aggressively you play, different types players will get different amounts a resources. A very aggressive but error prone player might get tons of lives but lose a lot in the process of getting said lives but still get the clear, while a more conservative player might be able to use all the resources well enough that he won't need to get that many extends.
Some games make things more complex due to scoring systems that encourage suicides or a rank system. So removing lives from certain arcade style genres/games is not only completely impossible without ruining the experience for scoring or survival players but would also make the games worse.
@@Pariah6950 Penis guy said a lot of things that I agree with regarding this. (God that felt weird to say)
The main point is just that removing lives would just make the games way less fun. If you didn't get lives from getting points, you would have no insentive to grab those items anymore, which would eliminate the risk vs reward factor. The other thing as well, is that they tend to let you set your life count in these games to a specific amount (I think the most any game lets you start with is 7 or 8?) which can let you give you an added boost if you need it, or you can handicap yourself if you really want to push yourself. Say if we did the Crash 4 approach where everybody can only die a specific number of times to get a 1CC, that player choice is completely gone.
The continue system is also directly tied to some game mechanics as well. For example, for Touhou 8 there is a time limit system. I won't go into all the minor details of how this works, but what you need to know is that after every stage, the clock moves forward by 1 hour. If the clock reaches 5AM it's a game over. However if you get enough time points at the end of a stage, it only progresses by 30 minutes instead which gives you a lot more leeway to beat the game. I also mention this because using a continue ALSO progresses the clock by 30 minutes. So with the lives/continues being so integral to the game's design, you really can't axe lives from the game without completely redesigning how a Touhou game works, and I really don't think they would really work or be anywhere near as fun, satisfying and rewarding like that.
Watching this video and your take on limited lives alongside your extensive coverage of Sonic games I can tell that you'd love Freedom Planet 2. This platformer has limited lives to every stage which you can increase by finding extra lives in the levels so it's actually worthwhile to collect the extra lives. ESPECIALLY since there's also a Streets of Rage style revival mechanic where you’d pay a set fee of gems alongside a life to instantly revive with 1HP, turning the life system into a resource you can use to keep going on that particular attempt.
Therapist: cures someone's depression
*Credit card declines*
Therapist 8:38
I like how in streets of rage 4 and shredders revenge they changed the main game up so you dont run out of continues but kept the outdated life system for an arcade mode for the option
Furi has an interesting "lives" system. It's a bossrush game, so this won't apply to most games, but it's a very interesting solution nontheless.
Both you and the boss have multiple healthbars. Depleting the enemy healthbar moves the battle on to the next boss phase, heals your current healthbar to full and gives you 1 extra if you lost one (you always start with the max of 3 full bars).
If you lose a healthbar the boss heals their current one, basically restarting the phase.
So on the surface it's just a classic "get the enemy healthbar down before he gets mine down", but not really. The immediate challenge is always limited to the current healthbar, not total healthbar. If you lose all health you have to restart the fight from scratch which adds a extra challenge and connects everything together. The best idea though is regenerating 1 healthbar after a success. That means you'll always go into a new boss phase with a minimum of 2 tries left in the bank, so if you die cause it's your first time and you took more hits cause you didn't know the enemy pattern yet you get a second shot.
As others have said: depends on the game. For instance, playing arcade games with unlimited lives feels like you take the challenge out completely, just mash buttons to win. In some games, limited lives can encourage you to up your skills, like old school shooters and run & guns. On the flip side, I've never beaten Sonic 1 because limited lives and no save / PW system, which can be frustrating.
Another insightful video. The reason I like your channel is that you talk about game design in terms of how the different elements work together to create a specific effect on the player. So it was strange to me when you said you don’t believe game design can be “outdated” only “good or bad.” You do a good job of explaining how you yourself approach games and how game design impacts you, but people in a different era had a different context and so different game design principles affected them differently. Players interact with game designers differently if they have to spend money at an arcade after every game over vs. us buying a video game once and playing it whenever we want.
Thing is, arcades still exist. Mainly in Japan. And modern arcade games are still designed with the pay to play focus. It's not about the time. It's the context of how you play the game.
@@Pariah6950 i forget that pay to play arcades are still around and some places and that does invalidate the “outdated” argument. Thanks for the reminder.
Beyond that, I agree with you.
I think the point of lives originally was to stop less skilled players from getting to harder areas and make them build more skill from playing earlier levels multiple times, but clearly lives are flawed
I think they are made from those arcade machines. You died? Well pay more!
The gaming industry was always all about profit maximization, the means only changed the mindset was always the same.
That's why many singleplayer games offer nowadays power and level up boosts, you suck or don't want to grind? Just pay 10€!
I bet if ea would make a game with limited life's, they would charge money to restart right at your body.
I would agree with the "risk-reward" thing, but take the limited lives system away and there's barely any risk there.
I don't agree. Death is the risk. And that can be a lot depending on how far apart the checkpoints are. That's why finding bonfires in Souls games is such a huge relief.
In arcades, lives were not really for padding the game out; that was just a bonus. The real purpose of lives was that if you ran out, you HAD to put in another quarter to continue the game where you left off. In a home console game, this would be slammed so hard, the game wouldn't even release before they revert it, but in arcades where the point of the game machines is to make money for the business, its a lot more understandable.
Also a game I find does the lives system well is the Prinny series. You get 1000 lives right off the bat. You have absolutely no way to get any more ever. Your task is to go through this ridiculously hard game with your 1000 lives and try to complete it. If you lose all your lives, the challenge is a failure and you have to try again from the very beginning, but with how many lives you have, you have ample for experimenting with harder segments to better yourself. You CAN take the safer and easier route to preserve lives, but unless you are already extremely good at the game, this is short-sighted at best as later levels' "safe" routes are often more dangerous and risky than earlier levels' risky routes. The game has a host of other problems, but the whole thing was specifically designed with your many, many limited lives in mind, making it a challenge of get through this gauntlet of stages before it kills you 1,000 times.
Oh one last thing: People absolutely did get a game over in Banjo-Kazooie... though an overwhelming percentage of them would be in Rusty Bucket Bay. I know I did a few times before I learned how to proceed THAT room.
To me there's a rush yoy get when you find a secret live hidden in the stage (for sonic anyway) and not having that feels off and unrewards you for exploring
Thanks for this food for thought.
I’m on the fence on whether a 3D platformer I’m designing should have lives. If it does, it should avoid these pitfalls.
What I have so far is:
- You always start a level with the same amount of lives. Farming them is impossible.
- If you die before reaching a checkpoint, you don’t lose any lives. It’s treated like a full level reset. Never a reason to kill yourself or induce a game over.
- When you beat a level, your score gets a multiplier for each remaining life, which affects your rank for the level. This incentivizes even pros to go for them.
- The game is designed around exploring the levels and having a high skill ceiling. Replaying a section isn’t just "going through it again" because you can try a different way through and/or get the satisfaction of improvement.
Like others have said, lives can add a good sense of stakes and tension, and I think that fits the tone of this game. But for those who don’t want it, there could be a mode where you get unlimited lives but lose the score multiplier.
That sounds like a good implementation. And I think resetting a level for a game over can be alright. It forces the player to reach a certain level of skill, but it's not too crazy punishing like a full game reset.
Less related to lives but something I think about death in platformers, for most games I think dying for falling in a pit is overly punishing. Pits aren't necessarily harder obstacles to avoid than enemies or traps, so why do they punish the player so much more? I think taking a chunk of health and putting them back on the last solid ground they touched works better for most games.
@@Pariah6950 I think it’s a matter of "realism". These pits are so deep that we call them bottomless. Most characters would die if they fell down, or they wouldn’t get back up anytime soon, if at all. So falling down a pit is a definite failure.
Also, respawning at the last solid ground can be more complicated than it sounds. You have to design all the platforms and obstacles to where the level can still be completed when you respawn. In certain setpieces, that may require resetting so much that you might as well be restarting from a checkpoint. You see that in the Lego games sometimes.
@@MasterDisaster64 Sucker Punch was able to do the "respawning" on solid platform thing in the Sly Cooper games pretty well. When you fall, you end up on the last solid non-moving platform.
You made me think of a way to amend the lives system.
If a player can clear a world/zone/whatever-else without dying once, a game over would only have to start the game from the world/zone/whatever-else you didn't not die on, meaning players can avoid needing to replay sections they've already mastered. This will leave them only to replay content they perhaps haven't bested; They will have only to climb what they have not mastered.
Fantastic video, I kept trying to write a comment during the video, but backspacing it every time you said exactly what I was going to.
I think everything "limited lives" are trying to do can only really be done well in roguelikes. Barring the game you mentioned at the end, as that is much closer to (as you said) just having multiple health bars, instead of the limited lives we're talking about.
I've also gotta say, limited lives in games where lives are placed cleverly make me sad, because if they were just a collectible and their progress was tracked, I'd actually find all the little platforming challenges these lives are hidden behind! Like Sonic Mania!
Personally I think limited lives are stupid but I want them as a option for the weird people that want to play like that
it punishes you beyond whatever checkpoint you've reached and also allows designers to add extra things like side paths that reward you with more lives or lil coins to collect
One of your criticisms is that grinding for lives is boring, and that you believe having the option to do something optimal that is boring is bad game design, so what do you think about grinding for levels, money, skills, etc in RPGs?
Not a fan of that either. Grinding sucks, universally. And I generally not much of an RPG guy.
I remember for Nier Automata I heard someone say that grinding to level 99 to take on the secret boss wasn't so bad. It only takes 4 hours. Which to me is insane. 4 hours is not bad? I could watch 2 movies in that time, or play a whole video game, or do anything else that is actually enjoyable. I loathe grinding, and almost never do it in any game.
@@Pariah6950 I suppose you said you're not a huge fan of RPGs but I'm still kinda curious, do you think the *option* of grinding is inherently bad? RPGs are generally built in a way where you give yourself permanent checkpoints, and I think of it as a challenge to do something (either grinding or doing a dungeon) in between each "checkpoint".
Though you can game over and that generally causes you to lose items, money, or even levels, I don't think of it as an issue since the worst situation you have is that you go back to exactly what you started with, and beyond that, generally you have fairly or even entirely free rein over when you save your progress, so it's a matter of whether or not you risk overextending your resources and dying, or segmenting your game by more checkpoints by going to the area you're allowed to save in.
And again, a lot of RPGs are pretty lax about this, I think of Dragon Quest 11, where as early as meeting the 3rd party member, you can warp to whatever location you wish, and that location always has a save point. Even then, the enemies don't actually fight you unless you touch or choose to interact with them.
I generally think of grinding as a way to make the game easier, you get better stuff faster, you get stronger party members earlier, but as you said, this is only a thing less experienced players would do, as typically an experienced player would know what level to be at and what strategies to use, so that's mostly the part I'm curious about, levels do have the potential to be punishing towards worse players, but they also doesn't completely cap out (at least, until obscene levels that are generally not necessary), and it also puts the potential to be less punishing in the players hands, as saving is generally a choice that they can make at almost any time
Personally as someone who absolutely hates grinding, I do find grinding inherently bad in game design. I would always strive to making grinding near impossible if I made a game. It's one of the things I like about the Zelda games. They play like action RPGs, but besides money everything is earned for doing specific tangible things. Strength and growth is based on the items and upgrades you acquire, so if you want to "grind", instead of fighting enemies for hours, you just play more of the game. Explore, do side quests, etc. Things that are actually fun.
@@Pariah6950 I see, you'd rather find upgrades as encouragement for pushing through the game, rather than bottleneck your playthrough with upgrades before moving on?
@@igirjei3717 Pretty much. That's one of the great things about Breath of the Wild. Technically, the whole game is grinding until you are strong enough to beat Ganon.
If the punishment for playing your game poorly is to have to replay the early game more, then you're saying that playing your game is a punishment. That doesn't sound like good advertising to me.
How do you feel about the lives system in Sonic Unleashed on the Wii?
14:58
For me, as someone who mostly played the Classic Sonic games with unlimited lives. Limited lives can be treated as a test of knowledge of the game.
Is that a defense for lives? I guess. I still hate lives tho.
For a game like Sonic, lives are important to introduce the game to new players, the whole game was structured behind the concept of always improving your gameplay to get go the end as fast and as optimal as possible. Without lives you will just continue from last checkpoint or act, without ever seeing the other routes and paths that were made for players to always look out for in a way to conserve their lives. With infinite lives you are basically removing content from the game without ever the incentive of actually exploring different paths of the level design each time you get a game over. Lives some times aren't just a sort of artificial punishment, they did design their games with that system for a purpose.
What about in retro games like Battletoads? Imagine that game without lives, would it really have its legendary status?
That is similar to Streets of Rage 4, where you just keep going. That use of lives is totally fine to me. Same goes for things like shmups and Metal Slug. Though I do think full game resets are a bit much. That's why I like that SoR4 has an Arcade mode if you want that, or story mode for level continues.
@@Pariah6950 I see it both ways, but your video was incredibly detailed that I can't necessarily argue against any of your points. I was rusty at games in general since I took a few years away from games, so naturally I was terrible. I'm more in a proper mindset and can actually excel in difficult games again, though I'm not the best. I'm playing Sonic Mania again, the lives shouldn't be in the game. I'm using Tails to farm goal posts and get medals, so naturally I will have 30 lives.
I only game over in Banjo Kazooie once in my entire life, Rusty Bucket Bay; then again I was a toddler and didn't have real game skills yet. My dad had to help with the last level of Mario 64 when I was 4.
The souls games don't rely on lives to present players with a clear and present challenge. Lives feel like artificial difficulty and a time wasting feature in the modern day. Super Meat Boy is one of the hardest platformers I've ever played, next to Celeste, neither of which have lives or game overs, yet there's a clear sense of achievement and victory when completing their respective levels.
I mean in those 2 games you also die at a significantly higher rate than games with lives (like 100 deaths per level) so the time loss is still present
I do feel you're a tiny bit over kill on giving limited lives a negative place in design. You talk about stringing together a game into one long challenge, but something like Mario is often made up of levels with checkpoints. You progress, get a checkpoint, and if you game over you go back to the title screen and resume where you left off. When you die in this kind of scenario you go back to the start of the level, and giving more weight and merit to check points. If you fail too much you essentially lose that check point and step backwards, in this case it does sort of encourage mastery of the previous and not relying on luck to have gotten that far... otherwise you'll be able to brute force the entire game. However, I understand that liking or disliking that sort of thing is subjective. Implementation is everything from a design perspective, limited lives by default aren't bad. The way the devs implement it is key, its just that its harder to justify their inclusion.
Take a SHUMP game, and remove their limited lives, something like Touhou would lose a lot of its core identity. (Just in case you dont know) You get rewarded for grazing bullets, aka getting as close to bullets without dying, the risk of dying is losing a life and getting closer to a game over. The game is designed around being hard, but fair, where you can memorize and practice patterns to perfection. Likewise, dying constantly until you get through the fight would really deprive you of the experience itself. This is the kind of game that benefits from multiple level difficulties. The more modern ones also allow you to continue despite gaming over, at the loss of score. It also helps to point out that dying also rewards you with extra bombs (aka the ability to become invincible and clear the screen of bullets' while doing massive damage). In this kind of scenario lives can also be strategic, or a means of ensuring the player may clear the stage isntead of dying literally every second.
My point is that limited lives, by its nature, isn't bad. It has its place and a role, but its very easy to misuse as a means of artificially punishing players for performing poorly. If a game has limited lives, it kind of needs to be designed around it to enhance the experience, but rarely do you ever.
It's 3:00 in the morning right now where I live and you just upload a new video. Nice lol
I feel like this a case by case basis. I would prefer lives in a game like crash or sonic where the levels for the most part are short and sweet but there isn't as much of a reason to have lives in a more open game like banjo kazzoie or jak and daxter. In my personal opinion the best thing to do is making limited lives optional like what was done for crash 4 because giving people the choice for limited lives or unlimited lives isn't hurting anyone.
lives are actually dated tho. they only exist because of arcade machines. they function as a way to get people to pay more to keep playing or let the other person in line play next. that's why it exists. now it is just a remnant of that design left over that no longer serves any purpose. it only fufills it's original function in some pay to win mobile games. it is a bad design because it only exists because of the time period it was in and the context. thus making it dated. also you could never go back to play previous levels in arcade games anyway
I think the first time the dilemma popped in my head was when I was playing Super Mario 3D Land, when they added power ups that add invincibility to enemies or level skips. I initially saw it as bad because it made things too easy, but thinking back, I think it might as well be helpful in seeing how the level would had worked overall. You keep failing and losing lives but you are not punished. You are helped. Sure, one might argue lives in this game became useless. I personally loss the meaning of lives when I started using save states and the like. The only time I saw game overs affecting me was in Hotel Dusk, where you lack lives, but if you press Retry in a game over, you will be at the last position you were without save files, but you will miss an extra key detail in the ending of the game.
Shoot em ups are probably the only thing where I felt lives were actually impactul when I wanted to do a 1 Continue run (1CC) to battle the True final boss. Yes, you need to go on hard or extreme and those require a massive grind and pattern recognition, but I chose to be challenged. And despite it all, I had joy in "proving myself". The issue here is that despite the easy difficulty option, one might still argue that barring the true boss for beginners is kinda gatekeeping, I guess. But shoot em ups were... built different.
I'd make the case that in the classic sonic games in particular, lives are actually beneficial. Especially in Sonic 2, finishing levels with a score of 10,000 points gives you a continue at the end of each stage. This encourages players to learn how to route stages so their time bonus and score bonus overlap to reach this threshold in each stage, somewhat similarly to the ranking system in later sonic games. You are encouraged to learn how to play these games better because of the lives system, and restarting the game each time you run out gives you more chances to utilize your abilities to maximize your lives/continue count each level.
This is how I beat sonic 2 as a kid back in the day, I needed a lot of chances to learn the final boss overtime, and it made me into a sonic freak. I understand the reasoning a lot of people despise lives systems, and I do think they should at least be optional, but in a lot of games the system increases tension and encourages replays that are NOT the same, as you state in the video, but are supposed to be growing and learning experiences where you get better and better at each game.
I also think that by taking away the lives system from sonic 2, it gives new players a fundamentally different experience in which they may not feel obligated to learn the intricacies of the physics engine and what is possible, or even to replay each level multiple times to get better. I believe this is part of the reason you see so many people saying sonic games are flawed, they play a level once, feel filtered by hard segments, and just complain the game is bad instead of learning how to play them well. A lives system probably would not fix that today, but back in the contemporary time of these games, when kids maybe got 2 games a year at maximum, it was a boon for replayability, and one I still get enjoyment out of to this day in games I have not played before.
New Sonic player here, bought generations and mania the day origins came out. Both had a lives system that exactly reflect what you said in the video: it discourages exploration, the count is easily exploitable via killing yourself etc. Sonic levels are (usually) fairly short and are meant to be replayed over many times so why am I punished to restart in generations by losing a life? Sonic levels also have a fair risk-reward outside of lives - you achieve faster times if you take the risk to go on the top path, and there's no reason to shoehorn in lives to add on frustration for no reason. I enjoy playing through life-less challenges in generations and it's more convenient for me to grind for an S rank as well, as opposed to normal levels where I need to restart after failing a jump to get a red star ring (and lose a life, while being circumvented if I quit the stage and restart instead).
While hardcore players enjoy limited lives it's more important to know that there are different demographics to a game, including casuals. I bought the Sonic games with an open mind that I'm gonna replay it over even after I've finished the game, but now I can't even finish Mania it because of a skill issue. Sure I'm still committed to play through the game because I like Sonic, but some casual players might've dropped by now. And don't even try to defend it as some 'natural selection' or 'skill issue' bullshit, that's just gatekeeping and elitism at its finest.
Asking the player for a minimum skill level is fine, but even if lives are removed checkpoints exist to fulfil that purpose; so it really sounds like they're complaining about the game not being difficult enough. In the end I still believe how Crash 4 and Sonic Origins handled it was a nice compromise: veteran players can still opt in for lives and relive the classic experience while newer players could have an easier time in learning the base game and even challenging themselves with limited lives later on. IMO Lives is just a bad and redundant game mechanic that is added for pure symbolism for the most part and detracts players from immersing in the game. It can be added as a challenge mechanic but in no way it should exist in the base game of any modern platformer. And idk, maybe if the game is well designed people will just naturally replay it instead of relying on lives to stretch out playtime?
Weird game to bring up and I don't know if you played it but Binding of Isaac has a really weird/interesting lives system that affects the gameplay so much more than the game just saying "try again". Lives in BoI are pretty strategic, I think my favourite example is the 9 lives one called Dead Cat. Where if you take Dead Cat all of your health immediately goes away and you're set on 1 heart but you get 9 lives. Although lives are rare and not really a main focus but you can use lives strategically a lot in this game like getting "free" devil deals.
Also, if you like hard games I do recommend checking this game out. Aside from a few characters I despise and 1 final boss the game will twist your balls fairly lol.
I love Binding of Isaac. Many others have commented and I totally agree. Lives can work very well for roguelikes.
its different strokes for different fokes. its all the stakes at play.... take ff7 for example which was restricted by the save spots... knowing that the last save was 2 hours ago makes the fights so much more at play. its like flipping a coin.. if there's nothing at stake its boring but make the stakes you have a million quid if you win then you're very much more interested.
One thing I feel like I should mention is that Doom Eternal does have lives. Though how 1ups work is that if you die, you continue to fight so it's basically like another layer of health. Otherwise, what's the point of 1up in the game where there is no game over. Unless you are playing Extra Life mode and Ultra-Nightmare. Also falling pits will not result in instadeath like in Doom 2016.
Speaking of Extra Life mode, this mode does what you would expect, a mode where you have limited lives. Then again extra lives function as additional layers of health and if in Extra Life mode you run out of extra lives and die, you will start over. Extra Life mode is basically a softer version of Ultra-Nightmare.
If you have problems with the perma death, then I am sure you have some bad things to say about Ultra-Nightmare. In a mode where you die at least once, you will have to start over. (and have to listen to King Novic again) And in Ultra-Nightmare, all 1ups have been replaced with mega armor.
Doom Eternal also has a Horde Mode and in that mode, you can rack up a lot of lives. If you played well, got all lives you could possibly get, and without dying, you could have roughly 38 lives. There is also a neat scoring system. You could get a score bonus for not using BFG at all, a bonus score depending on how many extra lives you have by the end of the Horde Mode, and other bonuses.
I do like the fact that Doom Eternal gives you the option to either play it normally or with limited lives.
In that case, those aren't really lives. Just extra health bars, similar to what I mention about Streets of Rage 4. Personally, I'm not in to permadeath modes in games. But I have no issue with them, as they are optional challenges that players can choose to take on if they want.
With unlimited lives you would probably die less than you would with limited lives for the main fact you wouldn't be stressing out on certain sections of the game with unlimited lives
6:30 at first I was gonna agree, but after thinking some more, I think that having the player make decision between doing what's fun and playing it safe is not necessarily terrible design, I wouldn't say it's good design, but I don't think it's bad.
I don't know. Considering the point of games is to have fun, I struggle to find the player being able to choose to not have fun as a good thing.
@@Pariah6950 the boredom of the grind by itself can discourage the player from doing it, but the option is there if they don't want to take risks by going to do what is fun with what they have, which depending on the players skill may be enough, this encourages the players to get better at the game to avoid the grind, at least in theory.
Sure. But then players who do make that choice have to go through a shitty grind. Why would you intentionally put something boring in your game at all?
@@Pariah6950 to have it as an option, but make it the less appealing option, as to say that it's not the intended way to play, but you can play that way.
Then this is just a principal thing. I would personally never want the design of my game to allow for players to bore themselves. I would only want to enable having a good time.
I don’t agree that unlimited lives means there’s no punishment for dying. Cause dying IS the punishment
Exactly. Not being able to progress is already a punishment. By not taking the game seriously and learning how to play, you force yourself to stagnate in the same point until you do. Eventually the player must take it seriously or there is no point in playing.
Lives are important for classic sonic games because in long term it encourages you to explore
I feel like lives could be interesting if people put more thought into them, rather than defaulting to the standard lives system.
Like giving the player a set number of lives to beat a stage that resets for the next stage, or giving the player a reward if they beat it without dying too many times, while giving them the option to die as many times as they like.
For example, in a New Super Mario bros. Wii, you could give each player a set of 5 lives in multiplayer, to stop them playing recklessly, as dying in those games just brings you back in a bubble without losing progress. You could also give everyone a shared lives (say 5x no. of players?)
Pehaps you could approach lives like an extension of a health system.
Most of the old games did not have saves. Playing the old turtle Nes games, you had to beat it with 3 lives and 1 shot or try other day. Sonic did not have a save state until the 3rd game.
I think it depends on the game. If you have the freedom to chose which level to play like Mario 64, then limited lives prevent the player from getting stuck on a level, getting annoyed, and quitting. Even if you have the option to just leave the level people are way to stubborn for their own good.
I just like how when you end your videos the screen goes into a black and white filter, similar to your pfp and thumbnails
I think it's cool when a game has a good game over screen, that's the only plus for limited lives
So if there's unlimited lives, how do you lose?
you lose when the game's challenge becomes too overwhelming.
@@AllurinGirl31 I'm too stubborn for that tbh
As someone who doesn't like lives, I think one genre of game that they could be good in would be roguelikes, akin to an easy mode. Since roguelikes are built on the premise that you lose your character if you die, adding a lives system to such a game can be a method at making it less extreme and therefore more accessible to casual players.
However, big asterisk here because I haven't actually played a roguelike with limited lives, this is just me theorising.
I always felt there was something wrong with lives so this video really helped flesh out my thoughts.
I'm just gonna add something here, depending on how the game is structured, not having lifes might make the game more boring, since you're always spawning easily and infinitely you end up just mindlessly charging forward without a damn worry because there is no big punishment for that, in that case lives do help in giving more value to the level and encourages the player to be more focused, the cases you mentioned of people being too cautious could be said that the game does not give enough lifes so a new player can keep up with the challenge.
I could say that lives system feels more like a safety net for difficulty, as if the developers aren't so sure if the challenge they created is gonna make the player bored or not so there is a life system for the player to be at least a bit cautious, I think it do work but for games that has actual good design it ends up not really having any reason to be there. And like you mentioned, I do agree that the vast majority of games do not need extra lives.
**cough** Sonic Colors Ultimate **cough**
Hey I am just making a new game that has lives! What could go wrong!
I think the only time lives REALLY excel is if you have a really hard game, and you have 2 modes, a beginner mode for players that just got the game, and an unlockable limited lives mode for players who already completed the game once. Kinda like hardcore modes in games except for really hard games where it's hard to not die.
i recently got sonic mania and was enjoying it and all my enjoyment stopped as soon as a got a game over. the bosses are the worst part of the game and theyre so confusing so if i fail too much i have to play the 2 acts again. i might be ok with 1 act but 2 is way too much. plus getting lives is way harder than it should be, 100 rings is too much since you lose every single one if you get hit and theres no way you could pick up even half.
sonic unleashed wii/ps2 has a set amount of lives you can have when you start a stage and you can't get more lives than what the game gives you at the start of a stage. You can't grind for more (but you can kinda unlock more lives by completing small challenge rooms in the temples that need a set amount of emblems to access)
back in the old days you have to start the whole game over when you lost all your lives
I really agree with this video, lives have always felt like a way to incorporate permadeath (something I really like in games) into games that aren't designed for it. Of course lives systems aren't the same as permadeath, but they feel like a weird, barely thought mix of permadeath and permanent progress.
After hearing this I think that games should make lives optional. Furthermore they should make individual levels available after they have been completed. This will give more options to the player and make the gaming experience overall more enjoyable,
i feel like you can answer all these early questions, by putting yourself into a mind of a child, who
played crash 1,2 on the ps1 in the 90s the first time. or any other classic, like ocarina of time.
we didnt know mechanics exist. we just played :D those lives we had in sm64, or crash. those were
all neccessary. it made you learn to take only a certain amount of hits until a level was done. if you died
too many times, you´d game over, and had to redo the level. that was the challenge back then for crash.
even bomberman on ps1, many other games i grinded ahhha.
the trick to walk on the bridges handle rope for example waas found out later, we had to suffer through
those levels for days xD and when you say you dont understand why people want that, and in the same
breath you say stuff cant be outdated. people wanna play it that way to feel nostalgic again about the
game they once picked up, but with the added aspect ratio, graphics. i made my comment before watching
the content of this video, to not be biased. i stopped after 2 min, and now will continue!