Incidentally, here is an idea I had that would have made a game like Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne a bit more fair. (For those not aware of this game, I note that it's a turn based RPG where the main character dying would mean a game over.) With that said, it could be applied to other genres. The way it works would be like this:
* When you reach a save point, you are given 3 lives. You can refill these lives by going back to any save point.
* If you die, you lose a life and respawn right where you were, outside of battle. (Note that, for certain types of games (like platformers), this would need to be slightly modified so that the player wouldn't die immediately due to respawning on spikes or in a bottomless pit, for example.)
* If you lose your last life, it's game over and you have to load from the last save point you used. (Whether you keep any items you found is a different design decision.)
* There may be extra lives hidden in some of the harder areas. Any extra lives are lost on hitting a save point, but said extra lives will respawn when this happens. There will be a cap on the number of lives you can have.

Basically, in this case lives would mitigate the danger of losing progress due to bad luck (instant death hits the main character, and SMT:N's press turn system punishes the player heavily for being unlucky with misses and criticals) or the player making a mistake (hitting an enemy with an attack it reflects, which additionally costs an extra turn IIRC).

I play a lot of shmups, so the 1-ups do feel invaluable. The biggest motivation for me in those games is to clear the game without using a continue, so adding another life to the already limited stock (usually of 3) is a huge help. It's risky, but I often go out of my way to try to get them. In Caladrius for example, you can collect gems to save up for a 1-up. Most shmups give you 1-ups at a certain score too.

Of course, there's still Touhou Marine Benefit (a Touhou fangame) and Touhou 14, where it's possible to gain large number of extra lives if you're playing as MarisaB (at least I think it's MarisaB in both games). Of course, it's for entirely different reasons, but it gets to the point where you are dying on purpose to refill your bomb supply.

By the way, Bloodstained's Classic Mode uses likes, and just like in classic Castlevania, you get lives at certain score thresholds; it's really just like classic Castlevania in this way (and others).

I never liked the idea of games giving you a limited number of lives to complete the entire game. If you're gonna do it, do it like in Castlevania where you get thrown back to the beginning of the stage if you lose all lives. That i find okay, but just deleting your progress for dying to often only destroys my motivation to try again. There are no upsides to limiting lives either in my opinion.

Sounds great. I haven't played RotN since I finished it, shortly after it came out. This sounds like a good opportunity to revisit.

Honestly, that's just quarter-munching with a different method of quarter input. In the same way that F2P w/P2W IAP has left games that take that path FUBAR, so, too, would resurrecting the concept of "pay per play" microtransactions also bring back a lot of game design concepts that are better left buried. You speak for yourself there. Gameplay is still king for some of us. :) (Though I've never especially cared about score in the vast majority of games that even keep score.) ...You are probably the first person I've heard of who played and enjoyed Watch Dogs for its story. =D
More to the point, you are kind of comparing apples and bacon there. You set old, heavily-gameplay-focused games (which, to be fair, was almost all there was back then) against modern, much-more-story-focused games (though, again, in the case of Watch_Dogs, my impression is that it followed a Hollywood-action-movie story template, and you're not meant to think too much about any of it) as if they were directly comparable. There are many, many heavily-gameplay-focused moderngames (hint: they're mostly not AAA), and I would absolutely rather play a lot of them than whatever trend-chasing, committee-designed products the globe-bestriding corporations have poured into the trough for us most recently.

I compared some popular games of their time to popular games of more modern times. I wasn't comparing games of the same genre, because like you said; many genres we enjoy today didn't exist then. Replace Watch_Dogs with The Last of Us or Bloodborne. Even an action-heavy game like Bloodborne or Dark Souls has a story built into it, even if they feel they are more about the gameplay themselves. The point I'm making is you can't put a gorilla on a screen and say "kill it" in most modern games, people would ask why, and quickly become disengaged from the experience. Sure some gameplay-centric games exist today, but they're not the most popular on the market (though I will say the significance of Angry Birds and Candy Crush particularly are worth noting). Mostly gameplay focused games are on platforms that have trouble delivering a deeper experience (mobile) and are in a place where quitting out at a moment's notice doesn't affect the game as much (also mobile). They are designed to be time wasters, not experiences. I don't disagree with you about what you say, I just think it's a fair comparison to take two popular games from the early to mid 80's and compare them to two popular games from the 2010's.

One ups were never important.
a) They don't take effect on your real life at the moment of death
b) As a mechanicm they are a cop out proving you never had the skill to do a perfect run,
c) Having the cop out available pushes people to the conclusion more often than not so that they don't bother attempting a perfect run.
d) Their function is to make a game more accessible to the low skilled, but in practice they are used to cover cracks in the games design (flaws) that manifests as unreasonable difficulty spikes.
e) Most games don't 'need' them as a mechanic anyways and the ones that do could get away with simply a hitpoint system or some such.

Look at how downhill D&D has gone.
Original AD&D if you die... sucks man better roll up anouther character.
It meant something when someone died.
D&D5th ed. Oh you have multiple death saves on temporary unconciousness and you have like literally nothing to spend gold on worthwhile, but tracking down a cleric for ressurection.
Now imagine every villain having the exact same system because the essence of D&D has always been what rules apply to you apply universally to the world hence why crits were the 'bane' of every party & not in fact as they quite often felt when rolling your attack dice 'a boon'.

Frankly I don't see why they didn't just toss the whole combat system and go with 'narrative combat' only.
You want streamlined go rationalise how your party got out of that situation and what damage they are likely to have taken; every other way you can do it's essentially doing the same thing with extra steps.


1 Ups are a meaningless cop out and they always have been.

I actually feel that "perfect runs" are not really in the spirit of the game.

In Zelda 2, lives serve an important role; by dying, your HP and MP are restored, and in some cases, you need that MP restore to cast the spells you need to cast. I believe that if the game only gave you 1 life, it might not be possible to beat the game with a low magic level.

Also, I believe I've seen at least one Super Mario World hack that required getting an extra life to complete. (You start the hack with 1 life and at some point it's necessary to deathwarp.)


I'm of the opinion that, in table top RPGs, death should be removed from the game mechanics entirely. In particular, I'm thinking that death should be at the discretion of the player in question and the DM, and not left to dice rolls during combat.

In general, I believe that games should not harshly punish the player for failure. It is through failure that players learn, and it helps if the player can immediately retry the section that caused the problem.

I'm glad they are gone. In any well written computer game, you can save and load whenever you want. So 1-ups are meaningless anyhow. They had their value on systems that couldn't save (like old consoles or handhelds), but on a PC they are pointless.

Judging by the original poster's manners, I was expecting this to be something about LGBTQPNZ.

I remember with Beat-em ups like Final Fight and Streets of Rage that after a certain amount of points you get an extra life and those lives actually worth their weight in gold because you had to really play well to get the lives and those lives would be the difference of getting an Game Over and completing the game. And with Super Mario bros with the Infinite lives trick.

Except that your lives counter is stored as an 8-bit signed integer, so if you get over 127, the counter will roll over and become negative. Dying when you have negative lives is a game over.

Sonic the Hedgehog 1 & 2 both have lives underflow glitches, where your lives counter (unsigned this time) can go below 0 and become very large as a result.

Very true. I have seen that happen before with other games where the lives beyond 9 would roll to 0 rather than 10 and that ended up being a game over.

Lives....

Lives were introduced as 'chances' and they made games super hard, which you had to get really good at or for arcades where you'd feed quarters and give a lot of money to the corporations and businesses, up until the arcades vanished due to home market...

when you remove the lives and can beat the game without dying, games you find are... fairly short. Plenty enough of speedruns, but i can beat MegaMan 2 i something like 2 hours, same with MegaMan X. But until you get to that skill and knowledge to take advantage of it, you could spend dozens or hundreds of hours. Usually bullet hells, or platforming, or only having 1-2 hitpoints before death.

Some games, where the users generate the content (Mario Maker for example) the concept is very simple and the levels are nearly infinite if you want to go there. Otherwise you may have a few lives with rouge-like games, or just one, and it may take a while but the basic loop of actions is more or less the same. Sneak near, fight a few monsters at a time, rest to full, repeat. Summon best monsters or use best abilities, repeat... etc.

Rouge-lite games, like Rouge Legacy, where you have an infinite number of chances but can improve the game a little bit, the game can still be hard as balls... And in Enchanted Cave 2, dying and ruining a whole run because you didn't think you needed to heal just yet and you're near the end of the level and just want to escape but maybe get a few more hits in...