I might be a little biased, but I've always hated this argument. For us old school gamers, extra lives posed a significant challenge, because the punishment for getting a game over was either starting the level over again, starting the world over again, losing half your money, losing progress by getting sent to a previous save point, or the worst case scenario: starting the entire game over again. I know that times have changed, but some of us still appreciate that challenge, because it gives us incentive not to be reckless. And this is also why 1-up's are always so valuable in these kinds of video games.
Little big planet is a semi modern game with lives. The punishment isn’t nearly as bad as the original super Mario on nes for example, but it’ll make you restart the level from the beginning.
LBP is a semi modern game with a life system that does a great thing in that aspect. It’s not as punishing as SUPER MARIO BROS on the NES, but it’ll restart you at the start of the level you were just playing.
Well, it's quite simple, everybody can easily understand why games used to have lives in them. It keeps you in your toes and you actually will value each chance you get as opposed to knowing you can just keep making mistakes after mistakes without any real rush of adrenaline. There are a few arcade games that won't let you continue, even if you inserted coins. A fine example is SEGA's Shinobi, the last stage won't allow you to continue if you lose all your lives. But I guarantee that those who overcame games like these felt amazing. It wouldn't be the same without this extra challenge. 8 and 16-bit games were also smaller and the extra difficulty was there in order to give the games more longevity. If you fail to reach Star Light Zone because you couldn't get pass Labyrinth Zone in Sonic 1, well, guess what, if you want to reach that without cheats, your punishment is to reach that area all over again and it will surely make sure you either play better, or give up trying. Things were obviously very different during the 80's and 90's, but the lives system was never pointless like your thumbnails suggest. Actually, playing these games using Save States or infinite lives or whatever just breaks what these games can truly offer. Yes, there are badly designed games in all eras, but those who require the player to play them properly are highly compensated, you feel like you achieved something, even if it doesn't mean anything to others, it just might for yourself and it feels great.
One thing I will give Nintendo credit for, is that they learned as early as 1986 that extra lives are pointless in adventure games like Metroid and The Legend of Zelda, and especially Kid Icarus. And this mentality carries over to almost every metroidvania in existence. Instead of extra lives, you only get one life with an extendable health bar, and every time you die, you get sent back to a previous save point/checkpoint
@@SonicTheCutehog the levels are the challenge. How do you think you lose the lives, just at random? The lives are gained through good gameplay and lost through a consequence of poor gameplay and the result of repeated poor gameplay without good interspersing it is a game over The game your username references actually uses this idea very well to encourage players to replay the early levels enough times to be able to get through them fast and smoothly without losing as many lives
i think the next mario game should get rid of lives but getting rid of time was already great i'd say that time limits are more of an useless aspect than lives even in the context of old home console games since that just rushed the player, going against the idea of artifically extending playtime with the repetition of lives
Lives should exist in certain games still as a way for you to not just brute force your way through a game you suck ass at. That being said games should also give players a fair chance to accumulate lives if they go that route
I haven’t watched yet but the lives system is like the point system in older games. It’s a relic of the arcade system used to keep kids pumping quarters into the game. In most NES games game overs would make you start the whole game over.
Lives predate video games: they are what pinball machines used. Early games typically gave you five balls, later ones three, but with more controlled playfields(more ramps and targets that keep you in control of the ball). A few pinballs did experiment with game timers after they went solid-state, but they were not popular. It's a system that basically assumes that there's no progression through content, and the goal of continued play is to achieve a higher score. What made lives disharmonious with video games is the existence of content as an end-goal and "beating the game". The systems that have been developed as alternatives tend to focus on checkpointing alone, and on unlocking progression, where the first time through you're presented with the easiest version of the content, but later you unlock a different goal or a harder difficulty.
The two scenarios where I think the Live System works really well are: 1. Sometimes I just wanna get this quick adrenaline rush and enter that flow state when playing games. I then love playing stuff like Touhou, Metal Slug or any 90s SNK Fighting Game. I'm aware that it's highly unlikely that I will beat them but seeing how far I can make it is exciting. Maybe I'll make it further than I ever have before. Who knows! When I get a Game Over it's not frustrating because I DONT have to start the game from the beginning. I treat it exactly as what it says, a "Game Over" as in, I go and do something else and try again another day. I think many people love this type of challenge. This "Will this be my best run yet?" But since modern games don't directly provide that, stuff like Speed Running exists. 2. The Megaman Games. Getting a game over actually incentives you to try a different stage and come back with more weapons and tools later. Sadly now with rewind and save state features I've seen people try to brute force the Heatman Block Section. I was kinda dissapointed since they'll never know the satisfaction of returning to this stage with Item-2 (an item that trivializes that section)
Erm. Arcade games were hard because otherwise what do you have? Some kind of strange interactive moving picture attraction. I'm sure those exist but that is parallel to a game and more like an attraction or casual time killing phone app. When someone wants to play a game, they must be challenged to reveal the design of the game itself. Without losing, there is no way to indicate the rules. Also no way to gauge success. That is why easy games are so frustrating.
Health systems are essentially small scale life systems. The 3 health you get in Cuphead is 3 life basically. You just don't restart you progress on the same level. That's why you get this feeling of tension and accomplishment from it.
Whenever this topic comes up by younger gamers feeling agitated or bewildered at the lives system it makes me kind of sad with just how much times have changed and how much excitement and fun they just don't have a clue about since Arcades are less common than in the past. The lives system actually predates even video Arcades themselves and come from the days of sideshows and carnivals. If you wanted to play a game like hit the bottle with a baseball to win a prize, you had to pay an admission fee to try to win a prize. If you were only given one attempt naturally people would feel cheated and discouraged if they weren't allowed more opportunities to at least get acclimated with the feel and mechanics of the game without immediately having to pay again. Over time these carnival barkers realized if the game only had a single prize with a single attempt it might work on unsuspecting first timers but would yield high turnover rate in the long run. They realized to keep players coming back and interested it would be more enticing to allow different tiers of prizes ranked from easy to difficult and for each play to allow a number of chances which was typically 3 to 5. Hence, when mechanical and video game Arcades became all the rage in the 50's, 60's and 70's they adopted this gambling philosophy as it made the most sense to help keep gamers happy and arcade owners earning money which in turn allowed them to invest in additional Arcade machines from the manufacturers in a cycle. Now the reason home video game consoles carried on the tradition was so customers could "feel" the same experience as the arcade with it's number of chances aka lives and continues to play. The better you would play, the more "prizes" you get in the forms of new levels, high scores, cut scenes, possibly a credits screen and full enjoyment out of the game. I could go on but it comes from the fundamentals of risk/reward gambling, sideshows and carnivals.
Not once in your wall of text did you ever give an argument as to why they're a good game design decision. If platformers can't or won't actually have consequences for a Game Over state, then fucking gut the mechanic entirely and have a different penalty for losing.
@@CassiusStelar I was mainly providing historical context as to where the lives/continues concept came from. I didn't argue anything because it should be pretty self-evident that having the lives and continues gives motivation not to screw up and adds challenge to the game. Unless you're saying that if the game doesn't punish you for getting a game over and you can just continue anyway without consequence then yeah I agree that part is pointless. It largely depends on the game and for me personally I prefer having infinite continues after running out of lives but with the penalty of restarting the current level over. I never liked limited continues where if you run out of both lives and continues you're forced to play the beginning of the game all over again like in the case of early Sonic games just to get back to where you were. Another form I like with lives/continues is if you can level select any stage up to the furthest level you've gotten in the game like in the case of Gradius V and Gradius Galaxies. Admittedly I'm turning 41 this year so I'm used to it but regardless of that I'm not wagging my finger from a rocking chair insisting all games be that way and I'm open to new ideas like how Cuphead and Shovel Knight handles the consequences.
@@CassiusStelarif the game doesn't punish you for playing poorly then a big part of the challenge is removed. Lives are an easy way to maintain a sense of challenge (unless they're cheaply implemented in an already difficult game) You just sound angry and need to git gud
@@shalpp THATS WHAT IM FUCKING SAYING. And modern games with lives DONT FUCKING punish you for game overing. EXCUSE ME for wanting to replace Defanged death states with something like a loss of collectibles or currency or a lowering of your stage rank. Get good. You need to get good at arguing. I beat Rain World as Saint.
Because this guy Shlapp above me doesn't have reading comprehension I wanna add onto this. Life systems are not an end all be all of difficulty, in fact, they're quite lazy. You want a level to be hard? Oh just don't put any extra lives in the level, who cares how the actual obstacles challenge the player. No, you wanna know what's actually a good way to punish death in a game? What Soulslikes and Hollow Knight do. You want your money back? Better not die again on your way back to where you fucked up last time
I predominantly play retro games, and to me lives and continues do serve as an incentive not just to do well, but to practice and really get to know the game, appreciating every aspect of its design and thoroughly understanding it in order to be able to beat it. I have no problem with lives but I will say, infinite continues are the way to go
Interesting, I agree that the life system is a bit grating in older games (for me), but right now I am playing the roguelike Hades and it basically has the same mechanic, and I love it. The way I’m playing now, you have a max of three “death defiances” that you can sometimes (but not reliably) renew if you use them, as well as HP. If you fully die with no defiances (aka lives) left you go back to the start and lose all your upgrades, and there’s no skipping the early part. Repeating what I’ve already done is fun because what used to kill me so easily I can pass through fairly quickly, I really can feel like I’m getting better at the game, and because there are different upgrades from run to run and you have incentives to pick different weapons at the start it stops it from feeling too repetitive. I suppose the main difference is the HP bar, which really does change a lot, but I couldn’t help think about it when I watched your video.
How dare video games have 1-ups that feel satisfying to collect and rewards risk with a checkpoint instead of coins that do nothing except unlock costumes in a multiplayer mode or something (Sonic Superstars)? How dare not every game be Super Meat Boy with 30 second levels where you die over and over at until you brute force them with infinite checkpoints and zero repetition? How dare video games force you to play well for 30 minutes to an hour without losing all your lives, instead of giving you a wholesome infinite continues cushion that takes away all tension?
I believe that lives can still have a place in modern games if balanced properly. I recently Platinumed 'Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon' which had a Veteran and a Casual mode. Casual mode gives the player infinite lives and essentially allows the player to brute force their way through without really having to improve. If a game doesn't have lives, then my favorite approach is to make it _very challenging_ but with an instant retry system. Games like Hotline Miami, Ghostrunner, and Celeste are perfect examples of this idea.
I view the lives system as a game pacer. If you struggle at a game and lose all of them, the game is basically going "hey, it's time to refresh yourself with some previous levels before you attempt this again." For me at least, when I get a game over I pretty much just take a break for the day. It's called "game over" so I assume that it's over for now.
which is exactly why it works very well in terms of arcade and mobile context you just get a game over, pass to the next player, and in mobile games context, you wait for the remaining time in the line but for home console games, i feel like it doesn't really work, specially if it's the only game you have, aside if you wanna stop, you could just save and quit
I feel like a lot of the comments on this video are really hung up on whether limited continues "artificially" make a game longer or more difficult, which is a very arbitrary and judgemental way of looking at things. I mean, what were you really expecting the developers to do back then if you think its "cheap"? Make a hundred levels fit on a 4MB cartridge? It's just a creative choice that changes the way a game is played with an outcome that still depends on the actual quality of the game itself. It was used best in older linear games with a set amount of levels that can be beaten in less than an hour by a skilled player. The way that the player progresses is changed by forcing them to master each section of the game before being able to challenge the next one with the greatest advantage. (power-ups, weapons, health, lives and continues of course, etc.) Just being able to skirt by a level by chance or luck carries consequences for the player and a perfect playthrough is rewarded. The entire game is a cohesive experience and your position relies on your previous actions. With the limitations of older hardware and small ROM space, developers naturally ran into the need to make their short games replayable and limited continues work for this problem while naturally complimenting the short length of these games. One of my favorite games, Ninja Gaiden (NES), even has unlimited continues, but it still uses the principle of not allowing the player to try endlessly until they win on the final boss, where dying will take you back to the very beginning of the extremely difficult final stage, 6-1. People call this "unfair" a lot, and that's technically true, but the actual outcome of this heightened punishment is that the player has to obtain the skill to get through the entire final stage consistently if they want to get another attempt to fight the final boss. It requires an amount of mastery that would be unnecessary if the game would just allow you to go back to 6-3 like any normal boss in the game does, and the game is better off for it, even though it only exists thanks to a programming bug that the devs left in because they thought it was funny. I once watched a video of a guy giving his thoughts on Ninja Gaiden, and he really had a shitty understanding of the game mechanics. In the final stage, there are two times where an enemy is situated on a platform diagonally downwards to the left of the player character. The distance is short, and the easiest and fastest way to get past these challenges is simply walking forward off of the cliff and slashing, since your player character has momentum while falling even if you didn't jump. The guy playing the game had absolutely no idea what he was doing there, because he didn't understand the nuances of the characters control. In the first instance, he waited for the enemy to reach the opposite end of the platform before jumping to get to the edge and slash, this is a very awkward solution as well as a slow one but he just assumed that's the only way and moved on. (you'll find out why he wasn't forced to learn later on) This challenge is repeated later in the level but instead with a gun enemy that can fire bullets, so this strategy would no longer work due to the bullets covering the space he would need to jump to. Instead of experimenting on alternate methods, such as using the natural falling momentum instead of jumping, he concludes that the only way to get past this enemy is to jump forward then move backwards to get downwards onto the side of the cliff directly opposite to the enemy, then jump to the towards the enemy while slashing to kill him. This is nearly impossible and he even admits this, but instead of reflecting, he just decides that the only actual way must be to keep a subweapon from a previous level in the stage, even though the entire game is designed in such a way that you only need your sword. You know why he didn't get to learn this? He used save states on the final boss to skip having to learn how to clear these challenges consistently. He bitched about how unfair it is you have to go back, then loaded a save state a dozen times on the first phase, the easiest one, as he just kept jumping straight into the enemy and his projectiles, over and over again, until he finally realized that the solution was using the walls on each side of the arena. It's not the most obvious idea to think, but it seems to be true that knowing that, if you lose, you'll be punished to a high degree, actually makes you more likely to experiment since you really want to know what the solution could be in the least amount of attempts possible. There are consequences to losing so you NEED to actually gain some new knowledge with each try. You're also more incentivized to learn the most efficient and satisfying way to get through a level if you have to complete it consistently. The guy in the video side stepped the games design and understood much less a result. Games like Ninja Gaiden DO come off as shallow, short experiences if you just brute force your way throughout the entire game with mediocrity and fail to understand how the game plays. I also noticed the difference made between unlimited and finite continues when I played different versions of Ghouls 'N Ghosts, first on the PSX port which gives you unlimited continues and then on the Supergrafx version which only gives you 3. When I played the PSX version, I tried over and over on each level until I won, but my level of skill on each level was the same, and even after I reached the final level, I would still die on the earlier levels a lot. When I tried the Supergrafx version, I actually needed to get serious with how I played and only then did I actually become consistent with beating the earlier stages. Finite continues wouldn't work well in any long modern 3d action game or even in retro inspired titles like Super Meat Boy which have hundreds of levels and are obviously intended to be progressed through across multiple sessions, since the games are not designed to be cohesive and repeatable one session experiences, but obviously, not every game mechanic is suited to every type of game.
I appreciate the challenge that a Lives System adds. That said, especially as I've gotten older and have less time on my hands for gaming, I will use State Saves to get through harder, old games - usually putting a State Save down at checkpoints so I effectively have infinite lives. If I like the game enough, though, I'll make an effort to actually get good enough to beat it without - in that instance, I use State Saves to practice sections of the game so I can actually figure out what I need to do and experiment with how do to it. I think if games offered a sort of "practice mode" like that, it would go a long way.
every time I find a Galaga cabinet in the wild, I must take the time to achieve the current high score. I've gotten very good at that game - usually getting up to level 24 or 25, I cannot fathom anyone being able to make it much further than stage 35....it's insanely difficult to get past that and the fact they coded it all the way to 200 is nuts.
Life System was pretty pointless in Super Mario 64. Lose 1 life - get taken out of the level. Lose all lives - get taken to the front door of the castle - and then can simply get back to the level entry you were at by walking for 15 seconds.
8:38 It might be impossible to run the timer out in some games, when you're actively playing, but there's a reason why it's in place. You can't pause arcade games, so if somebody was playing a game, But for some reason, they had to step away, the timer would continue ticking down anyway, and when it finally runs out, resulting in an automatic game over, the next gamer in line gets a chance to play... That is, if they hadn't already taken over the current play session
29:02 This is also made possible by shortcuts in the overworld map that you can unlock when you beat certain levels, so when you get a game over, you can take that shortcut to get back to where you were, bypassing the previous levels that you don't want to play again. Masterful design, if you ask me
It's different per-genre and each of these games' market has different expectations. Games that phase out lives as time goes on are mainly designed for short sprints but large quantity of levels like platformers. Some maintain the arcade-style short marathon where the holy grail is to clear the game without continues. A popular choice for shmups and beat 'em ups where their arcade flavor still persists. Won't starting from the start tiring??? Well, part of this arcade marathon trek is to perform better early so you can dump in the entire resource you've accumulated early on at the last stage. This includes racking up the life stock. It gives the player interesting strategies to plan out with this system. On extreme cases gaining lives is important to lose it on purpose so you make the game easier on the spot. While on the mainstream lives seem to be gone, it actually still persists, just in different forms or branding. Take a look at the on-the-spot revival items you can get on the modern games today like Dragon's Dogma's Wakestones or Devil May Cry's Gold Orb. These are lives, just rebranded as revive items. Use them or back to the save point you go. Monster Hunter gives you continues per quest. Basically it functions as a life counter before you fail the quest from dying too much and have to fight the boss again with its HP reset to full.
27:16 this is made even more hilarious when you have a game that gives you *two or more* lives between the start and where you die, thus giving you a net profit in lives at the end! Looking at you, Blade Mountain from Pac-Man World 2...
I think all games should have an OPTION to have infinite lives, but as someone who exclusively plays arcade styled games/difficult games, I prefer it like that, but it should always be an option. I personally think the "no games should have lives" argument is really stupid because I feel it misses the entire point as to why they exist In the first place, rather than having a challenge that feels good when finally complete, modern gamers beg for every game to fit into modern sensibilities, which I can kinda get, but not all games work with that kind of design and it comes off as really fucking obnoxious when I hear "fnflover2015" beg for infinite lives in castlevania
Pretty relevant, but I think you didn't ask one of the most relevant questions on the matter : do games even need to punish failure? There are interesting answers to be found. Some parts of the video kinda point towards them, for instance either regarding the tension when we only have one life left, or on the contrary the tedious aspect of doing the same thing over and over. Think of Prince of Persia 2008 for instance : when you die, you get back to where you failed without any delay or downside, and it's still pretty challenging. Other example, the goal of Heavy Rain was to be an action-adventure game without fail state. If a character dies, the game continues with the remaining characters. In this case there's still arguably a punishement since the game adapts and some content is removed, but you don't restart anything. That said, it's not for every game of course. But the question is worth asking.
In modern times where game overs are not a real treat anymore, It's a psychological thing. We just love seeing numbers go up when we get lives at large amounts and we feel threatened in the rare cases where you are actually going to get a game over if we mess up any longer. Games have been doing away with lives in the last 10 years and while that changes nothing much practically, it just...feels off. Like if you just took away some of the seasoning from a dish.
Back then, there used to be a limited # of continues... and using them up means starting the whole game from the beginning... so players were required to be skilled in order to enjoy the "ending" Just that nowadays many players suck lol
Its not that modern players dont have skill, if you die you atill have to get past the challenege, you just dont have to take 20 years getting back to where you died, letting you figure it out faster since you dont have to go all the way back
I'm so confused by this argument, and heavily disagree with it. In the way that a health bar tells you how many times Metalman can hurt you before you are good enough to defeat him. You number of lives is similar - it's a measure of how many times you can fatally fail on the way to all the way through the level and to the boss fight. If you master the level better you have more lives to practice against Metalman
I'm a strong believer in having unlimited lives in the easy mode of the game. Limited lives still definitely have a place in a Normal difficulty setting, depending on the game. I'd love to see more games do this, with limited lives on normal, and unlimited on easy. It's also possible to turn lives on/off separately from difficulty too. Some old games let you choose how many to start with, separately from the difficulty level. An option choosing between 3 starting lives, 10 lives, or unlimited lives sems like a good choice.
I think rating systems such as DMC or Rythm Games kinda bridge the gap. You can play through the whole game easily but if you want to go for higher difficulties or to get more skilled you go for a P or SSS
The mario games I get because in older Mario games you couldnt do a hard save of your progrrss unless you beat the mini boss or the boss of a world. Memo saves were available in new super mario but it was damn easy to accidentally be flush with so many lives youll never see a game over screen. I think saving at a halfway point means that the farther you get, the greater risk of losing all that progress if you were foolish.
Lives were for money making in arcades. Then to make a game keep you working on it for a while to make it purchase worthy. THEN it became sometimes pointless with easy games...Bugs Bunny Birthday Blowout? No way out : you stop or it keeps bringing you back to life.
3:09 Incorrect, even if you don't finish one gameplay loop, you get to keep your score, it's just not gonna be large as one after a gameplay loop i also got to mention that the reason why it took so long to abandon lives system in home console games was due to storage limitations, which meant there was not much content, so devs had to artificially extend the playtime 29:04 SMB3 is great and a great example, but the deal with warps and permanent checkpoints is that you get to be warped all the way back to the world, and not the level, and same can be said about the warp, i could simply want to go to a level somewhere in the middle of world 6, but i can only choose the start of world 6 or start of world 7 29:18 SMB3 movement is great but is slippery like most mario games (except for mario 2 USA) so i wouldn't say it's precise
I disagree that 30 lives trivialize Contra, you still lose your weapon upgrades upon dying so it can be way more frustrating than losing a life. Getting stripped of your powerups and upgrades in general as a penalty for dying is a horribly unbalanced and harsh punishment, many of the hard old games become unplayable on later levels if you screw up and die, without power-ups it becomes impossible to survive so in effect it doesn't matter how many lives you have, once you die even just one single time your run is pretty much over. This is what I hate about the classic Bomberman games, at their core they're super fun and exciting but the death penalty system that takes away your power-ups AND restarts the level from the beginning is devastating to the gameplay because it's designed in such a way that without them your abilities are utterly pathetic and you can only survive in the early game when you're like this, but the later levels will destroy you since they expect you to have all power-ups. It's such a dumb and counterintuitive design, I mean, what is the logic here even? if the difficulty got so high that the player died even with power-ups then how is he expected to continue playing after you take away some of the abilities that he had? Lives are supposed to give you a chance to retry the level with the same conditions and rules as before you died, if they change the playing field against you then it's straight up unfair and awful from the design standpoint.
No, I just don't want to replay same section over and over again even though I already complteted it. There are much better ways to insentivize replayability and secret seeking.
@@ukyoize But how do you feel when you finally do it? Sometimes I agree, a segment wasn't fun. But other times the higher stakes makes it feel amazing. Depends on the game.
age doesn't matter at all get an elderly man who never played a game before and get him to play a modern game such as celeste and then an old game with an end goal such as super mario bros, they will end up enjoying celeste anyway then get a kid and give them sonic 1, and let them play for hours, eventually they'll get used to the game's BS, and not mind it in the slightest
I hate how Super Mario Bros. games handle dying. Instead of just doing the death animation and respawning at the checkpoint, the game stops and you have to LOOK at Mario die, as a mini cutscene, and see how many lives you still have, before going back to the game.
because back then it kept you on your toes to preserve your progress so you don't go all the way back to the start of the level/entire game in some series case compared to some games really losing that challenge when you take it out(like in sonic where if you don't have a compromise of having that similar challenge rings are absolutely pointless past getting 1/super sonic unless more bonuses are added to it like a level up or shop system that adds ones you kept without getting hit.) & when arcades were more prominent it was a way to give longevity(go back & check out a lot of them they really were very short if you had endless continues.) for the sometimes pick up and play/marathon as far as you go mentality to go as far as you can or give up unless you were determined. they weren't pointless and more most people are either too hand held or just bad at them than really it being the same as putting too many autosaves or retrying without a consequence can make the game unfulfilling/bare if it doesn't have something to make up for it's way to properly reward a players replayability which is what hurt a lot of games switching from arcade to console.(especially fighting games during it's "dark age" that was more fg series having problems adding more modes for the single player showing the world & characters they have outside manuals/what i call "mvc2 syndrome" where outside the hype of things like roster it's very bare and not very replayable outside unlocking things for the gallery/with friends compared to earlier & later games.)
14:30 The best two examples I can think of in this regard are Mega Man X5 and X6. Like X4, and Mega Man 8, your health and ammo get refilled every time you die; But unlike X4 and MM8, You don't get sent back to the beginning of the stage (or permanent stage checkpoint) when you get a game over. Instead, you get sent back to the most recent checkpoint you crossed, so you might as well have infinite lives. I honestly can't think of many other games that do this
Shorter games have their place, especially if they are constrained for runtime due to memory restrictions and/or being part of an arcade setting, and having a system in place to limit the amount of mistakes you can make before a bigger punishment (having to restart the game/being locked out of content/having to pay to keep playing) is only logical, especially since a lot of older games are usually very skill based affairs. If you think about it like a setup from an arcade, the good players play the game very well and pay very little to do so, and make the game look appealing to onlookers. The onlookers then end up having to pay far more to finish the game as they lose their lives and have to credit feed to win. Some of these people will like the game enough to come back and spend more money on the same machine so they can hopefully become like the good players, and the cycle begins anew.
I know 2 games that made lives right: infernax and the wii version of sonic unleashed, in there, lives are a collectible, and they dictate your number of times you can use checkpoints before forcing you to start from the last savepoint, in games where you have mini gauntlet trials in succesion between savepoints, you better either find a way to get extra lives or git gud because it's gonna only get harder from here. Oh, also roguelikes have a good use for extra lives, as they are chances to cheat death and a lot of extra life mechanics can come with caveats like an item that gives you 9 extra lives, but reviving with 1 hp.
Having no consequences to losing makes a game not a challenge but just a series of events to do. Simon says walk here. The ending screen is not an entitlement to all players, kid. The end is for people who 'got gud'.
I just had to put this at the beginning of this wall of text cause I really want to ask. Why do you end up treating games that include lives like its a separate genre? You can argue that its reasonable to do that but it seems like its really not lending to good analysis. A point I don't make later but want to get across here. Life Systems are way too broad of a mechanic. It ties too deeply into the rest of the game experience to even really go anywhere when singled out. Its something to look at more on case by case basis. (The real Wall of Text comment) I'm gonna be a little harsh cause the question does kinda frustrate me and it is not new at all. This video is kinda bad. Its underinformed, lacks understanding of the topics beyond a surface level, and meandering. You mention Galaga and Contra but don't bother to consider that lives in those games are more akin to health in others as each life is a single hit. Saying you aren't punished for losing lives in Contra means something entirely different than in Super Mario. Cause you mentioned Cuphead later, replace the HP with "lives" or hits to see my point. In Contra the comparable life system is called continues. Timers aren't just about whether the clock ever runs out. Its about the player not wanting it to run out. Psychology matters a lot in games. It isn't just about the tangible impact of a mechanic, but about how it makes the player feel in the moment. It also means you can't sit around so it disincentives slow, potentially cowardly play, or cheese strats (depending on the circumstances). It steers player behavior. You know this but you don't recognize it enough to spot it without it effectively jabbing you in the side. But for the main topic, the simple answer is that its a holdover. A mechanic grandfathered in, but that doesn't mean its antiquated. It can have a point but it is not always implemented with true intent. Sometimes its part of real intentional design. Sometimes its there because someone thought that it simply was supposed to be there. A slightly more interesting question is why have life systems become less and less impactful over time. The answers are not groundbreaking. No player likes to lose progress but many have built up a strong aversion to doing anything twice. People complain about Metroidvanias cause they don't want to see the same room twice. Many complain about being sent back in linear games cause they have to go through a room again. So players complain, developers respond by making games easier so players get punished less frequently or by reducing the cost of consequences. A year or 2 passes, a popular game with a life system comes out or somebody plays a game older than them without save states (or maybe abusing save states) and somebody asks (either honestly or rhetorcally) "why are lives even a thing". Its a tiring topic with simple answers tbh. Its not a bad question to ask (technically no honest question is) but not 1 to spend a 30 min video essay on at this point. I don't really know how to even explain some of the weird points made. Some stuff is just "not even wrong". Just irrelevant and making bad associations. Saying a game has to have good pacing, good mechanics and be well designed is redundant. Pacing, mechanics and being fun is part of the design. If you just say "design" you are effectively talking about the whole game as it was intended. And "good" is subjective so its actually saying nothing in itself. It has rhetorical weight as a statement but it just jumped out at me cause the whole video comes across as a whole lot of nothing to me. You probably could've made a better video if it were about checkpoints and saving progress. I think more can be said about it from a player experience perspective. This video is about a design pattern but only about experiencing it. There is something to prove in doing something more than once. It proves you can do it more than once. Once can easily be a fluke and doing previous sections again, but better can give you leg up on the part you were stuck at as well. If you do the early stuff better you have room to make mistakes and learn the later sections. Don't look at design elements purely as solutions to problems, it leads to tunnel vision and causes a person to make weird conclusions. Megaman giving you stage select isn't about allowing you to see more of the game. It lets your full playthrough be different and ties into boss weaknesses. Going backwards and trying to link an effect to the intent so directly is weak analysis. You may as well ignore intent and end up with a strong point instead of a wrong point without saying much different. When you start talking about difficulty, you are actually touching a topic that can be expanded on and fail to do so because you don't dive in. What is difficulty? What part of a thing is difficult? We say a game is difficult but rarely explain what is difficult exactly. It does actually matter.
😅😅😅😬😬😬getting cooked in the comments my man….. yeah I don’t know what planet your from but NES games had lives in my and you needed every one of them pointless????! nope adversity builds character and long sufferance! You think learning the Konami code made Contra easier??? I’m sure Ghost n Goblins was a joke too right… naw fam this ain’t hit like you thought it would….
your "zeroith life" argument is one of the dumbest things ive ever heard btw. you even said it, it is keeping track of your "extra lives," and if it said x1 "on your last life," THAT would be the confusing, unclear way to do it.
Why did you never mention sonic 3? The rings are basically your lives but you can still die. And if you dont get hit you get extra lives which makes collecting rings be more incentivies. Sonic has a perfect live system, dont remove it sega please
I got that you said "basically" but that's not a lives system as the rings are a health system, not a lives system. And Sonic 3 literally has lives, saves, and continues. So it doesn't make much sense saying the rings are "lives" in this case. That would be implying you are losing lives when using Super Sonic in that scenario.
Unless you have the shield, you effectively have only one hit point if you want to go to the bonus round. If you had over 100 rings, you might be able to save 3 of them when you get hit.
I might be a little biased, but I've always hated this argument. For us old school gamers, extra lives posed a significant challenge, because the punishment for getting a game over was either starting the level over again, starting the world over again, losing half your money, losing progress by getting sent to a previous save point, or the worst case scenario: starting the entire game over again. I know that times have changed, but some of us still appreciate that challenge, because it gives us incentive not to be reckless. And this is also why 1-up's are always so valuable in these kinds of video games.
Of course
Little big planet is a semi modern game with lives. The punishment isn’t nearly as bad as the original super Mario on nes for example, but it’ll make you restart the level from the beginning.
LBP is a semi modern game with a life system that does a great thing in that aspect. It’s not as punishing as SUPER MARIO BROS on the NES, but it’ll restart you at the start of the level you were just playing.
@otnath The out of lives alarm haunts me lol.
@@mr.sparks5623Sonic the Hedgehog puts you back to Green Hill
Well, it's quite simple, everybody can easily understand why games used to have lives in them. It keeps you in your toes and you actually will value each chance you get as opposed to knowing you can just keep making mistakes after mistakes without any real rush of adrenaline.
There are a few arcade games that won't let you continue, even if you inserted coins. A fine example is SEGA's Shinobi, the last stage won't allow you to continue if you lose all your lives. But I guarantee that those who overcame games like these felt amazing. It wouldn't be the same without this extra challenge.
8 and 16-bit games were also smaller and the extra difficulty was there in order to give the games more longevity. If you fail to reach Star Light Zone because you couldn't get pass Labyrinth Zone in Sonic 1, well, guess what, if you want to reach that without cheats, your punishment is to reach that area all over again and it will surely make sure you either play better, or give up trying.
Things were obviously very different during the 80's and 90's, but the lives system was never pointless like your thumbnails suggest. Actually, playing these games using Save States or infinite lives or whatever just breaks what these games can truly offer. Yes, there are badly designed games in all eras, but those who require the player to play them properly are highly compensated, you feel like you achieved something, even if it doesn't mean anything to others, it just might for yourself and it feels great.
One thing I will give Nintendo credit for, is that they learned as early as 1986 that extra lives are pointless in adventure games like Metroid and The Legend of Zelda, and especially Kid Icarus. And this mentality carries over to almost every metroidvania in existence. Instead of extra lives, you only get one life with an extendable health bar, and every time you die, you get sent back to a previous save point/checkpoint
They still keep them in Mario though, with them even being in Wonder
@@SonicTheCutehog fine by me. They took out the time limit, so there has to be a challenge *somewhere.*
@@esmooth919 How about, you know, the actual levels being the challenge?
@@SonicTheCutehog the levels are the challenge.
How do you think you lose the lives, just at random? The lives are gained through good gameplay and lost through a consequence of poor gameplay and the result of repeated poor gameplay without good interspersing it is a game over
The game your username references actually uses this idea very well to encourage players to replay the early levels enough times to be able to get through them fast and smoothly without losing as many lives
i think the next mario game should get rid of lives but getting rid of time was already great
i'd say that time limits are more of an useless aspect than lives even in the context of old home console games since that just rushed the player, going against the idea of artifically extending playtime with the repetition of lives
Lives should exist in certain games still as a way for you to not just brute force your way through a game you suck ass at.
That being said games should also give players a fair chance to accumulate lives if they go that route
Some games have a trick to get extra lives, like the koopa stair trick in Super Mario Bros.
I think infinite lives loops should be banned
I haven’t watched yet but the lives system is like the point system in older games. It’s a relic of the arcade system used to keep kids pumping quarters into the game.
In most NES games game overs would make you start the whole game over.
Not to invalidate your video, but it actually has a simple answer: it's a holdover from arcade games.
Even further back, baseball.
Well it doesn't invalidate the video since that's pretty much what he says at the beginning. 😅
Lives predate video games: they are what pinball machines used. Early games typically gave you five balls, later ones three, but with more controlled playfields(more ramps and targets that keep you in control of the ball). A few pinballs did experiment with game timers after they went solid-state, but they were not popular. It's a system that basically assumes that there's no progression through content, and the goal of continued play is to achieve a higher score.
What made lives disharmonious with video games is the existence of content as an end-goal and "beating the game". The systems that have been developed as alternatives tend to focus on checkpointing alone, and on unlocking progression, where the first time through you're presented with the easiest version of the content, but later you unlock a different goal or a harder difficulty.
completely agreed
there's a reason arcade games work with it but not home console games
The two scenarios where I think the Live System works really well are:
1. Sometimes I just wanna get this quick adrenaline rush and enter that flow state when playing games. I then love playing stuff like Touhou, Metal Slug or any 90s SNK Fighting Game. I'm aware that it's highly unlikely that I will beat them but seeing how far I can make it is exciting. Maybe I'll make it further than I ever have before. Who knows! When I get a Game Over it's not frustrating because I DONT have to start the game from the beginning. I treat it exactly as what it says, a "Game Over" as in, I go and do something else and try again another day. I think many people love this type of challenge. This "Will this be my best run yet?" But since modern games don't directly provide that, stuff like Speed Running exists.
2. The Megaman Games. Getting a game over actually incentives you to try a different stage and come back with more weapons and tools later. Sadly now with rewind and save state features I've seen people try to brute force the Heatman Block Section. I was kinda dissapointed since they'll never know the satisfaction of returning to this stage with Item-2 (an item that trivializes that section)
Erm. Arcade games were hard because otherwise what do you have? Some kind of strange interactive moving picture attraction. I'm sure those exist but that is parallel to a game and more like an attraction or casual time killing phone app.
When someone wants to play a game, they must be challenged to reveal the design of the game itself. Without losing, there is no way to indicate the rules. Also no way to gauge success. That is why easy games are so frustrating.
Health systems are essentially small scale life systems. The 3 health you get in Cuphead is 3 life basically. You just don't restart you progress on the same level. That's why you get this feeling of tension and accomplishment from it.
Whenever this topic comes up by younger gamers feeling agitated or bewildered at the lives system it makes me kind of sad with just how much times have changed and how much excitement and fun they just don't have a clue about since Arcades are less common than in the past. The lives system actually predates even video Arcades themselves and come from the days of sideshows and carnivals. If you wanted to play a game like hit the bottle with a baseball to win a prize, you had to pay an admission fee to try to win a prize. If you were only given one attempt naturally people would feel cheated and discouraged if they weren't allowed more opportunities to at least get acclimated with the feel and mechanics of the game without immediately having to pay again. Over time these carnival barkers realized if the game only had a single prize with a single attempt it might work on unsuspecting first timers but would yield high turnover rate in the long run. They realized to keep players coming back and interested it would be more enticing to allow different tiers of prizes ranked from easy to difficult and for each play to allow a number of chances which was typically 3 to 5. Hence, when mechanical and video game Arcades became all the rage in the 50's, 60's and 70's they adopted this gambling philosophy as it made the most sense to help keep gamers happy and arcade owners earning money which in turn allowed them to invest in additional Arcade machines from the manufacturers in a cycle. Now the reason home video game consoles carried on the tradition was so customers could "feel" the same experience as the arcade with it's number of chances aka lives and continues to play. The better you would play, the more "prizes" you get in the forms of new levels, high scores, cut scenes, possibly a credits screen and full enjoyment out of the game. I could go on but it comes from the fundamentals of risk/reward gambling, sideshows and carnivals.
Not once in your wall of text did you ever give an argument as to why they're a good game design decision. If platformers can't or won't actually have consequences for a Game Over state, then fucking gut the mechanic entirely and have a different penalty for losing.
@@CassiusStelar I was mainly providing historical context as to where the lives/continues concept came from. I didn't argue anything because it should be pretty self-evident that having the lives and continues gives motivation not to screw up and adds challenge to the game. Unless you're saying that if the game doesn't punish you for getting a game over and you can just continue anyway without consequence then yeah I agree that part is pointless. It largely depends on the game and for me personally I prefer having infinite continues after running out of lives but with the penalty of restarting the current level over. I never liked limited continues where if you run out of both lives and continues you're forced to play the beginning of the game all over again like in the case of early Sonic games just to get back to where you were. Another form I like with lives/continues is if you can level select any stage up to the furthest level you've gotten in the game like in the case of Gradius V and Gradius Galaxies. Admittedly I'm turning 41 this year so I'm used to it but regardless of that I'm not wagging my finger from a rocking chair insisting all games be that way and I'm open to new ideas like how Cuphead and Shovel Knight handles the consequences.
@@CassiusStelarif the game doesn't punish you for playing poorly then a big part of the challenge is removed. Lives are an easy way to maintain a sense of challenge (unless they're cheaply implemented in an already difficult game)
You just sound angry and need to git gud
@@shalpp THATS WHAT IM FUCKING SAYING. And modern games with lives DONT FUCKING punish you for game overing. EXCUSE ME for wanting to replace Defanged death states with something like a loss of collectibles or currency or a lowering of your stage rank.
Get good. You need to get good at arguing. I beat Rain World as Saint.
Because this guy Shlapp above me doesn't have reading comprehension I wanna add onto this. Life systems are not an end all be all of difficulty, in fact, they're quite lazy. You want a level to be hard? Oh just don't put any extra lives in the level, who cares how the actual obstacles challenge the player. No, you wanna know what's actually a good way to punish death in a game? What Soulslikes and Hollow Knight do. You want your money back? Better not die again on your way back to where you fucked up last time
I predominantly play retro games, and to me lives and continues do serve as an incentive not just to do well, but to practice and really get to know the game, appreciating every aspect of its design and thoroughly understanding it in order to be able to beat it. I have no problem with lives but I will say, infinite continues are the way to go
Interesting, I agree that the life system is a bit grating in older games (for me), but right now I am playing the roguelike Hades and it basically has the same mechanic, and I love it. The way I’m playing now, you have a max of three “death defiances” that you can sometimes (but not reliably) renew if you use them, as well as HP. If you fully die with no defiances (aka lives) left you go back to the start and lose all your upgrades, and there’s no skipping the early part. Repeating what I’ve already done is fun because what used to kill me so easily I can pass through fairly quickly, I really can feel like I’m getting better at the game, and because there are different upgrades from run to run and you have incentives to pick different weapons at the start it stops it from feeling too repetitive. I suppose the main difference is the HP bar, which really does change a lot, but I couldn’t help think about it when I watched your video.
to be fair it's a rogue like since it's randomized and all
It's the legacy of the arcade and also video game rentals
How dare video games have 1-ups that feel satisfying to collect and rewards risk with a checkpoint instead of coins that do nothing except unlock costumes in a multiplayer mode or something (Sonic Superstars)? How dare not every game be Super Meat Boy with 30 second levels where you die over and over at until you brute force them with infinite checkpoints and zero repetition? How dare video games force you to play well for 30 minutes to an hour without losing all your lives, instead of giving you a wholesome infinite continues cushion that takes away all tension?
I believe that lives can still have a place in modern games if balanced properly.
I recently Platinumed 'Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon' which had a Veteran and a Casual mode. Casual mode gives the player infinite lives and essentially allows the player to brute force their way through without really having to improve.
If a game doesn't have lives, then my favorite approach is to make it _very challenging_ but with an instant retry system. Games like Hotline Miami, Ghostrunner, and Celeste are perfect examples of this idea.
There is actually a BIG consequence for losing a life in Galaga. If you had an extra ship attached, you would lose all your fire power.
I view the lives system as a game pacer. If you struggle at a game and lose all of them, the game is basically going "hey, it's time to refresh yourself with some previous levels before you attempt this again."
For me at least, when I get a game over I pretty much just take a break for the day. It's called "game over" so I assume that it's over for now.
which is exactly why it works very well in terms of arcade and mobile context
you just get a game over, pass to the next player, and in mobile games context, you wait for the remaining time in the line
but for home console games, i feel like it doesn't really work, specially if it's the only game you have, aside if you wanna stop, you could just save and quit
I feel like a lot of the comments on this video are really hung up on whether limited continues "artificially" make a game longer or more difficult, which is a very arbitrary and judgemental way of looking at things. I mean, what were you really expecting the developers to do back then if you think its "cheap"? Make a hundred levels fit on a 4MB cartridge?
It's just a creative choice that changes the way a game is played with an outcome that still depends on the actual quality of the game itself. It was used best in older linear games with a set amount of levels that can be beaten in less than an hour by a skilled player. The way that the player progresses is changed by forcing them to master each section of the game before being able to challenge the next one with the greatest advantage. (power-ups, weapons, health, lives and continues of course, etc.) Just being able to skirt by a level by chance or luck carries consequences for the player and a perfect playthrough is rewarded. The entire game is a cohesive experience and your position relies on your previous actions. With the limitations of older hardware and small ROM space, developers naturally ran into the need to make their short games replayable and limited continues work for this problem while naturally complimenting the short length of these games.
One of my favorite games, Ninja Gaiden (NES), even has unlimited continues, but it still uses the principle of not allowing the player to try endlessly until they win on the final boss, where dying will take you back to the very beginning of the extremely difficult final stage, 6-1. People call this "unfair" a lot, and that's technically true, but the actual outcome of this heightened punishment is that the player has to obtain the skill to get through the entire final stage consistently if they want to get another attempt to fight the final boss. It requires an amount of mastery that would be unnecessary if the game would just allow you to go back to 6-3 like any normal boss in the game does, and the game is better off for it, even though it only exists thanks to a programming bug that the devs left in because they thought it was funny.
I once watched a video of a guy giving his thoughts on Ninja Gaiden, and he really had a shitty understanding of the game mechanics. In the final stage, there are two times where an enemy is situated on a platform diagonally downwards to the left of the player character. The distance is short, and the easiest and fastest way to get past these challenges is simply walking forward off of the cliff and slashing, since your player character has momentum while falling even if you didn't jump. The guy playing the game had absolutely no idea what he was doing there, because he didn't understand the nuances of the characters control. In the first instance, he waited for the enemy to reach the opposite end of the platform before jumping to get to the edge and slash, this is a very awkward solution as well as a slow one but he just assumed that's the only way and moved on. (you'll find out why he wasn't forced to learn later on) This challenge is repeated later in the level but instead with a gun enemy that can fire bullets, so this strategy would no longer work due to the bullets covering the space he would need to jump to. Instead of experimenting on alternate methods, such as using the natural falling momentum instead of jumping, he concludes that the only way to get past this enemy is to jump forward then move backwards to get downwards onto the side of the cliff directly opposite to the enemy, then jump to the towards the enemy while slashing to kill him. This is nearly impossible and he even admits this, but instead of reflecting, he just decides that the only actual way must be to keep a subweapon from a previous level in the stage, even though the entire game is designed in such a way that you only need your sword. You know why he didn't get to learn this? He used save states on the final boss to skip having to learn how to clear these challenges consistently. He bitched about how unfair it is you have to go back, then loaded a save state a dozen times on the first phase, the easiest one, as he just kept jumping straight into the enemy and his projectiles, over and over again, until he finally realized that the solution was using the walls on each side of the arena. It's not the most obvious idea to think, but it seems to be true that knowing that, if you lose, you'll be punished to a high degree, actually makes you more likely to experiment since you really want to know what the solution could be in the least amount of attempts possible. There are consequences to losing so you NEED to actually gain some new knowledge with each try. You're also more incentivized to learn the most efficient and satisfying way to get through a level if you have to complete it consistently. The guy in the video side stepped the games design and understood much less a result.
Games like Ninja Gaiden DO come off as shallow, short experiences if you just brute force your way throughout the entire game with mediocrity and fail to understand how the game plays.
I also noticed the difference made between unlimited and finite continues when I played different versions of Ghouls 'N Ghosts, first on the PSX port which gives you unlimited continues and then on the Supergrafx version which only gives you 3. When I played the PSX version, I tried over and over on each level until I won, but my level of skill on each level was the same, and even after I reached the final level, I would still die on the earlier levels a lot. When I tried the Supergrafx version, I actually needed to get serious with how I played and only then did I actually become consistent with beating the earlier stages.
Finite continues wouldn't work well in any long modern 3d action game or even in retro inspired titles like Super Meat Boy which have hundreds of levels and are obviously intended to be progressed through across multiple sessions, since the games are not designed to be cohesive and repeatable one session experiences, but obviously, not every game mechanic is suited to every type of game.
I appreciate the challenge that a Lives System adds. That said, especially as I've gotten older and have less time on my hands for gaming, I will use State Saves to get through harder, old games - usually putting a State Save down at checkpoints so I effectively have infinite lives. If I like the game enough, though, I'll make an effort to actually get good enough to beat it without - in that instance, I use State Saves to practice sections of the game so I can actually figure out what I need to do and experiment with how do to it. I think if games offered a sort of "practice mode" like that, it would go a long way.
every time I find a Galaga cabinet in the wild, I must take the time to achieve the current high score. I've gotten very good at that game - usually getting up to level 24 or 25, I cannot fathom anyone being able to make it much further than stage 35....it's insanely difficult to get past that and the fact they coded it all the way to 200 is nuts.
Life System was pretty pointless in Super Mario 64. Lose 1 life - get taken out of the level. Lose all lives - get taken to the front door of the castle - and then can simply get back to the level entry you were at by walking for 15 seconds.
It is pointful. Extra lives reward exploration by giving you more convenience. Dying over and over punishes you with inconvenience, as it should.
8:38 It might be impossible to run the timer out in some games, when you're actively playing, but there's a reason why it's in place. You can't pause arcade games, so if somebody was playing a game, But for some reason, they had to step away, the timer would continue ticking down anyway, and when it finally runs out, resulting in an automatic game over, the next gamer in line gets a chance to play... That is, if they hadn't already taken over the current play session
Super Mario Bros 3 on GBA is just a remaster, not a remake. It is basically just a port of the SNES Mario All Stars version.
29:02 This is also made possible by shortcuts in the overworld map that you can unlock when you beat certain levels, so when you get a game over, you can take that shortcut to get back to where you were, bypassing the previous levels that you don't want to play again. Masterful design, if you ask me
if you get a game over, your skill card is revoked and a skill issue file is on your permanent records warrant.
And also you loose all bragging rights
It's different per-genre and each of these games' market has different expectations. Games that phase out lives as time goes on are mainly designed for short sprints but large quantity of levels like platformers. Some maintain the arcade-style short marathon where the holy grail is to clear the game without continues. A popular choice for shmups and beat 'em ups where their arcade flavor still persists. Won't starting from the start tiring??? Well, part of this arcade marathon trek is to perform better early so you can dump in the entire resource you've accumulated early on at the last stage. This includes racking up the life stock. It gives the player interesting strategies to plan out with this system. On extreme cases gaining lives is important to lose it on purpose so you make the game easier on the spot.
While on the mainstream lives seem to be gone, it actually still persists, just in different forms or branding. Take a look at the on-the-spot revival items you can get on the modern games today like Dragon's Dogma's Wakestones or Devil May Cry's Gold Orb. These are lives, just rebranded as revive items. Use them or back to the save point you go. Monster Hunter gives you continues per quest. Basically it functions as a life counter before you fail the quest from dying too much and have to fight the boss again with its HP reset to full.
27:16 this is made even more hilarious when you have a game that gives you *two or more* lives between the start and where you die, thus giving you a net profit in lives at the end! Looking at you, Blade Mountain from Pac-Man World 2...
I love this. It’s like otherthinkers unite but with depth.
I think all games should have an OPTION to have infinite lives, but as someone who exclusively plays arcade styled games/difficult games, I prefer it like that, but it should always be an option.
I personally think the "no games should have lives" argument is really stupid because I feel it misses the entire point as to why they exist In the first place, rather than having a challenge that feels good when finally complete, modern gamers beg for every game to fit into modern sensibilities, which I can kinda get, but not all games work with that kind of design and it comes off as really fucking obnoxious when I hear "fnflover2015" beg for infinite lives in castlevania
Pretty relevant, but I think you didn't ask one of the most relevant questions on the matter : do games even need to punish failure? There are interesting answers to be found. Some parts of the video kinda point towards them, for instance either regarding the tension when we only have one life left, or on the contrary the tedious aspect of doing the same thing over and over. Think of Prince of Persia 2008 for instance : when you die, you get back to where you failed without any delay or downside, and it's still pretty challenging. Other example, the goal of Heavy Rain was to be an action-adventure game without fail state. If a character dies, the game continues with the remaining characters. In this case there's still arguably a punishement since the game adapts and some content is removed, but you don't restart anything.
That said, it's not for every game of course. But the question is worth asking.
In modern times where game overs are not a real treat anymore, It's a psychological thing. We just love seeing numbers go up when we get lives at large amounts and we feel threatened in the rare cases where you are actually going to get a game over if we mess up any longer.
Games have been doing away with lives in the last 10 years and while that changes nothing much practically, it just...feels off. Like if you just took away some of the seasoning from a dish.
Back then, there used to be a limited # of continues... and using them up means starting the whole game from the beginning... so players were required to be skilled in order to enjoy the "ending"
Just that nowadays many players suck lol
So people paid more, more like
Its not that modern players dont have skill, if you die you atill have to get past the challenege, you just dont have to take 20 years getting back to where you died, letting you figure it out faster since you dont have to go all the way back
@@maddoxreddish4352 aside that when you get sent back, you have to pass through what you already passed
@ssg-eggunner exactly, if you know a part you shouldnt have to redo it all over to get to the troubling part
I'm so confused by this argument, and heavily disagree with it. In the way that a health bar tells you how many times Metalman can hurt you before you are good enough to defeat him. You number of lives is similar - it's a measure of how many times you can fatally fail on the way to all the way through the level and to the boss fight. If you master the level better you have more lives to practice against Metalman
I'm a strong believer in having unlimited lives in the easy mode of the game. Limited lives still definitely have a place in a Normal difficulty setting, depending on the game.
I'd love to see more games do this, with limited lives on normal, and unlimited on easy.
It's also possible to turn lives on/off separately from difficulty too. Some old games let you choose how many to start with, separately from the difficulty level. An option choosing between 3 starting lives, 10 lives, or unlimited lives sems like a good choice.
completely agreed
i can tolerate any bs from any game if it's something like post game content or higher difficulties
I think rating systems such as DMC or Rythm Games kinda bridge the gap. You can play through the whole game easily but if you want to go for higher difficulties or to get more skilled you go for a P or SSS
The mario games I get because in older Mario games you couldnt do a hard save of your progrrss unless you beat the mini boss or the boss of a world. Memo saves were available in new super mario but it was damn easy to accidentally be flush with so many lives youll never see a game over screen. I think saving at a halfway point means that the farther you get, the greater risk of losing all that progress if you were foolish.
Lives were for money making in arcades.
Then to make a game keep you working on it for a while to make it purchase worthy.
THEN it became sometimes pointless with easy games...Bugs Bunny Birthday Blowout? No way out : you stop or it keeps bringing you back to life.
3:09 Incorrect, even if you don't finish one gameplay loop, you get to keep your score, it's just not gonna be large as one after a gameplay loop
i also got to mention that the reason why it took so long to abandon lives system in home console games was due to storage limitations, which meant there was not much content, so devs had to artificially extend the playtime
29:04 SMB3 is great and a great example, but the deal with warps and permanent checkpoints is that you get to be warped all the way back to the world, and not the level, and same can be said about the warp, i could simply want to go to a level somewhere in the middle of world 6, but i can only choose the start of world 6 or start of world 7
29:18 SMB3 movement is great but is slippery like most mario games (except for mario 2 USA) so i wouldn't say it's precise
I disagree that 30 lives trivialize Contra, you still lose your weapon upgrades upon dying so it can be way more frustrating than losing a life. Getting stripped of your powerups and upgrades in general as a penalty for dying is a horribly unbalanced and harsh punishment, many of the hard old games become unplayable on later levels if you screw up and die, without power-ups it becomes impossible to survive so in effect it doesn't matter how many lives you have, once you die even just one single time your run is pretty much over. This is what I hate about the classic Bomberman games, at their core they're super fun and exciting but the death penalty system that takes away your power-ups AND restarts the level from the beginning is devastating to the gameplay because it's designed in such a way that without them your abilities are utterly pathetic and you can only survive in the early game when you're like this, but the later levels will destroy you since they expect you to have all power-ups. It's such a dumb and counterintuitive design, I mean, what is the logic here even? if the difficulty got so high that the player died even with power-ups then how is he expected to continue playing after you take away some of the abilities that he had? Lives are supposed to give you a chance to retry the level with the same conditions and rules as before you died, if they change the playing field against you then it's straight up unfair and awful from the design standpoint.
Arcades.
I like the shaders you're using
To create artificial tension and prolong short games, I am looking at you megaman.
Hop off the goat. Mega Man allows you to play all of the stages and get cool powers to make the other stages easier.
Younger gamers bothered by a simple risk/reward system.
No, I just don't want to replay same section over and over again even though I already complteted it. There are much better ways to insentivize replayability and secret seeking.
@@ukyoize get good.
@@ukyoize But how do you feel when you finally do it? Sometimes I agree, a segment wasn't fun. But other times the higher stakes makes it feel amazing. Depends on the game.
Older gamers have a couple of hours to play on weekends and don't want to spend it on the same thing over and over again.
age doesn't matter at all
get an elderly man who never played a game before and get him to play a modern game such as celeste and then an old game with an end goal such as super mario bros, they will end up enjoying celeste anyway
then get a kid and give them sonic 1, and let them play for hours, eventually they'll get used to the game's BS, and not mind it in the slightest
I hate how Super Mario Bros. games handle dying.
Instead of just doing the death animation and respawning at the checkpoint, the game stops and you have to LOOK at Mario die, as a mini cutscene, and see how many lives you still have, before going back to the game.
hmmm maybe there should be a skip button for cutscene
"It just feels like this arcade game was designed to take your money."
Well no shit.
The whole point of arcade games with infinite continues on emulator is to be able to beat the game on 1 credit
because back then it kept you on your toes to preserve your progress so you don't go all the way back to the start of the level/entire game in some series case compared to some games really losing that challenge when you take it out(like in sonic where if you don't have a compromise of having that similar challenge rings are absolutely pointless past getting 1/super sonic unless more bonuses are added to it like a level up or shop system that adds ones you kept without getting hit.) & when arcades were more prominent it was a way to give longevity(go back & check out a lot of them they really were very short if you had endless continues.) for the sometimes pick up and play/marathon as far as you go mentality to go as far as you can or give up unless you were determined.
they weren't pointless and more most people are either too hand held or just bad at them than really it being the same as putting too many autosaves or retrying without a consequence can make the game unfulfilling/bare if it doesn't have something to make up for it's way to properly reward a players replayability which is what hurt a lot of games switching from arcade to console.(especially fighting games during it's "dark age" that was more fg series having problems adding more modes for the single player showing the world & characters they have outside manuals/what i call "mvc2 syndrome" where outside the hype of things like roster it's very bare and not very replayable outside unlocking things for the gallery/with friends compared to earlier & later games.)
just don't place too many checkpoints then
the consequence is still there, you have to retry what you almost beat
14:30 The best two examples I can think of in this regard are Mega Man X5 and X6. Like X4, and Mega Man 8, your health and ammo get refilled every time you die; But unlike X4 and MM8, You don't get sent back to the beginning of the stage (or permanent stage checkpoint) when you get a game over. Instead, you get sent back to the most recent checkpoint you crossed, so you might as well have infinite lives. I honestly can't think of many other games that do this
5:30 what is this beat em up game?
It was a trick to artificially stretch out a game.
Shorter games have their place, especially if they are constrained for runtime due to memory restrictions and/or being part of an arcade setting, and having a system in place to limit the amount of mistakes you can make before a bigger punishment (having to restart the game/being locked out of content/having to pay to keep playing) is only logical, especially since a lot of older games are usually very skill based affairs.
If you think about it like a setup from an arcade, the good players play the game very well and pay very little to do so, and make the game look appealing to onlookers. The onlookers then end up having to pay far more to finish the game as they lose their lives and have to credit feed to win. Some of these people will like the game enough to come back and spend more money on the same machine so they can hopefully become like the good players, and the cycle begins anew.
@@FamilyTeamGaming tbh it only worked with those arcade setups since there was that payment thing anyway
i feel like i would regard those old games better if they didn't do that, quality matters more than quanitity of hours in playtime
Dude, are you Brazilian? You have an accent that reminds me of Portuguese
😂😂😂 no man I’m actually Mexican
I know 2 games that made lives right: infernax and the wii version of sonic unleashed, in there, lives are a collectible, and they dictate your number of times you can use checkpoints before forcing you to start from the last savepoint, in games where you have mini gauntlet trials in succesion between savepoints, you better either find a way to get extra lives or git gud because it's gonna only get harder from here.
Oh, also roguelikes have a good use for extra lives, as they are chances to cheat death and a lot of extra life mechanics can come with caveats like an item that gives you 9 extra lives, but reviving with 1 hp.
Having no consequences to losing makes a game not a challenge but just a series of events to do. Simon says walk here. The ending screen is not an entitlement to all players, kid. The end is for people who 'got gud'.
The life system isn't even that punishing so why even have it
I just had to put this at the beginning of this wall of text cause I really want to ask. Why do you end up treating games that include lives like its a separate genre? You can argue that its reasonable to do that but it seems like its really not lending to good analysis.
A point I don't make later but want to get across here. Life Systems are way too broad of a mechanic. It ties too deeply into the rest of the game experience to even really go anywhere when singled out. Its something to look at more on case by case basis.
(The real Wall of Text comment)
I'm gonna be a little harsh cause the question does kinda frustrate me and it is not new at all. This video is kinda bad. Its underinformed, lacks understanding of the topics beyond a surface level, and meandering.
You mention Galaga and Contra but don't bother to consider that lives in those games are more akin to health in others as each life is a single hit. Saying you aren't punished for losing lives in Contra means something entirely different than in Super Mario. Cause you mentioned Cuphead later, replace the HP with "lives" or hits to see my point. In Contra the comparable life system is called continues.
Timers aren't just about whether the clock ever runs out. Its about the player not wanting it to run out. Psychology matters a lot in games. It isn't just about the tangible impact of a mechanic, but about how it makes the player feel in the moment. It also means you can't sit around so it disincentives slow, potentially cowardly play, or cheese strats (depending on the circumstances). It steers player behavior. You know this but you don't recognize it enough to spot it without it effectively jabbing you in the side.
But for the main topic, the simple answer is that its a holdover. A mechanic grandfathered in, but that doesn't mean its antiquated. It can have a point but it is not always implemented with true intent. Sometimes its part of real intentional design. Sometimes its there because someone thought that it simply was supposed to be there.
A slightly more interesting question is why have life systems become less and less impactful over time. The answers are not groundbreaking. No player likes to lose progress but many have built up a strong aversion to doing anything twice. People complain about Metroidvanias cause they don't want to see the same room twice. Many complain about being sent back in linear games cause they have to go through a room again. So players complain, developers respond by making games easier so players get punished less frequently or by reducing the cost of consequences. A year or 2 passes, a popular game with a life system comes out or somebody plays a game older than them without save states (or maybe abusing save states) and somebody asks (either honestly or rhetorcally) "why are lives even a thing". Its a tiring topic with simple answers tbh. Its not a bad question to ask (technically no honest question is) but not 1 to spend a 30 min video essay on at this point.
I don't really know how to even explain some of the weird points made. Some stuff is just "not even wrong". Just irrelevant and making bad associations. Saying a game has to have good pacing, good mechanics and be well designed is redundant. Pacing, mechanics and being fun is part of the design. If you just say "design" you are effectively talking about the whole game as it was intended. And "good" is subjective so its actually saying nothing in itself. It has rhetorical weight as a statement but it just jumped out at me cause the whole video comes across as a whole lot of nothing to me.
You probably could've made a better video if it were about checkpoints and saving progress. I think more can be said about it from a player experience perspective. This video is about a design pattern but only about experiencing it.
There is something to prove in doing something more than once. It proves you can do it more than once. Once can easily be a fluke and doing previous sections again, but better can give you leg up on the part you were stuck at as well. If you do the early stuff better you have room to make mistakes and learn the later sections.
Don't look at design elements purely as solutions to problems, it leads to tunnel vision and causes a person to make weird conclusions.
Megaman giving you stage select isn't about allowing you to see more of the game. It lets your full playthrough be different and ties into boss weaknesses. Going backwards and trying to link an effect to the intent so directly is weak analysis. You may as well ignore intent and end up with a strong point instead of a wrong point without saying much different.
When you start talking about difficulty, you are actually touching a topic that can be expanded on and fail to do so because you don't dive in. What is difficulty? What part of a thing is difficult? We say a game is difficult but rarely explain what is difficult exactly. It does actually matter.
😅😅😅😬😬😬getting cooked in the comments my man….. yeah I don’t know what planet your from but NES games had lives in my and you needed every one of them pointless????! nope adversity builds character and long sufferance! You think learning the Konami code made Contra easier??? I’m sure Ghost n Goblins was a joke too right… naw fam this ain’t hit like you thought it would….
your "zeroith life" argument is one of the dumbest things ive ever heard btw. you even said it, it is keeping track of your "extra lives," and if it said x1 "on your last life," THAT would be the confusing, unclear way to do it.
8 views in 25 minutes? You fell off hard.
2:05 because all programmers know that counting starts at zero.
Why did you never mention sonic 3? The rings are basically your lives but you can still die. And if you dont get hit you get extra lives which makes collecting rings be more incentivies. Sonic has a perfect live system, dont remove it sega please
I got that you said "basically" but that's not a lives system as the rings are a health system, not a lives system. And Sonic 3 literally has lives, saves, and continues. So it doesn't make much sense saying the rings are "lives" in this case. That would be implying you are losing lives when using Super Sonic in that scenario.
Unfortunately, you're too late. Sonic superstars has infinite lives, So it's impossible to get a game over
Sonic the Hedgehog puts you back to Green Hill
Unless you have the shield, you effectively have only one hit point if you want to go to the bonus round. If you had over 100 rings, you might be able to save 3 of them when you get hit.
rings can still fall off in ocasions, so it's not a big difference either