[Jayextee]

How about the reverse of removing the lives system; removing extra lives?

3 chances to do the whole thing. Sounds good to me. Stick in a save system, sure (because S3K babbies love that kinda shit) but make it only register what zone the player got up to. 3 chances to get through it upon reloading. Sounds fair.

Modern gaming brats don't like the idea of repeating something until they're better at it? Congrat-u-fucking-lations, pandering to pricks who want everything handed to them on a plate and then spoon-fed to them is one of the main things ruining games for the rest of us. Not that I'm becoming incredibly sour at gaming trends or anything...

[The KKM]

Oh cry me a fucking river. Didn't find lifes fun in 1993 and don't find them fun now. Mindless porting of Arcade mechanics that mindless babbies like you (since you decided to go all bitter there) keep mindlessly repeating because nothing can go different from what you did as an infant.

[Jayextee]

The KKM, on 17 February 2014 - 06:55 AM, said:

Oh cry me a fucking river. Didn't find lifes fun in 1993 and don't find them fun now. Mindless porting of Arcade mechanics that mindless babbies like you (since you decided to go all bitter there) keep mindlessly repeating because nothing can go different from what you did as an infant.

YES! A bite!

Here's your fucking river: so, I suppose when learning a new language, you expect to only pronounce each and every word only once, and then it's committed to memory, yes? Or when learning to ride a bicycle, you only need turn the pedals once and then the bike rides itself to your destination, yes?

No. The world doesn't work like that. I don't see why games should.

Once you remove that barrier that is difficulty ('fake' or otherwise) and put the player into a state of constant progression, the experience is devalued by virtue of the fact that it tends to become a trial-and-error checkpoint/reload fest where the same section is repeated ad nauseum until it is beaten. Players demanding more punch for their pounds (bang for their buck, eruptions for their euro? I don't know, make your own clash/currency alliterative simile here :P) have historically never reacted to experiences that only take a short time to beat. And with the checkpoints closer to the sticking points of games (or in the case of quicksave/load mechanisms) this simply means ramping up the challenge on a macrocosmic scale to compensate. 'Fake' difficulty that is a much worse offender than making the player beat early levels (which, in theory, they would get better at to the point of being able to get creative, improvise more play out of, and attain better scores or times. WAIT, that's a "mindless" arcade mechanic, isn't it? />. Of course, it may also mean the padding of game lengths, but hey. If something didn't rob someone twenty hours of their life, it's "too short" yeah?

What I advocate is something more akin to the tradition idea of what a 'game' is, a set of obstacles and/or puzzles with a limited set of player resources (in this case, lives) to overcome them with. As per my initial argument; "beat it in three attempts" is a statement that lends itself more to raw ludology (in concurrence with the definition of a 'game' that statement has a goal and a hard-set rule attached to it) than "keep going until it's beaten" (which is a statement describing nothing more than an iterative task).

The KKM, on 17 February 2014 - 06:55 AM, said:

Mindless

Nice try bub, but I like game mechanics rather than virtual cud-chewing. Stop ruining games with your sense of entitlement.

That was fun.

This post has been edited by Jayextee: 17 February 2014 - 07:18 AM

[Palas]

SpeedStarTMQ, on 16 February 2014 - 03:09 PM, said:

Because nowadays getting a Game Over usually just means starting from the beginning of the level/zone/whathaveyou, rather than starting the entire game again, which is what Game Overs were originally all about back in the arcades and the majority of the early to mid 90's games.
Having lives is part of this feature, because running out of lives is what gets you a Game Over, but as they are more or less redundant in today's world where games have save files and are often easier than games of the late 80's and early 90's,why bother having lives either? Why not just make lives infinite? If you die you die, and getting a Game Over just means you'll have to start the level again at worst, rather than the entire game. For Sonic and Mario at least, starting a level all over again is hardly much more of a chore than dying and restarting at a checkpoint.

For some games that use the lives and Game Over system still, it makes no difference anyway. Sonic 4 and NEW Super Mario Bros are so difficult to lose all your lives on that you'll probably never see the Game Over screen in your entire lifetime. It just makes the whole system pointless.

That's hardly technical. It's but a design choice that doesn't need to be taken for granted. And it's not even about making a game harder or easier. It's just how the game deals with frustration, which is bound to happen whether there are lives or not. Does it show you that you've failed? There are many approaches, which is why Game Overs might or not be important and that has nothing to do with technical aspects.

So for instance, should you give infinite lives to the player, is there anything wrong with counting how many times he gets a Game Over and making that affect his playthrough somehow? I mean, there's nothing you can't count in games and return to the player in the form of a reward or a punishment. Heck, you could even count how many times the player loads the game. Lives are - again - a number just like any other and there is no reason why Sonic Team should ditch them for the sake of modernity or whatever you would call it.

The KKM, on 17 February 2014 - 06:55 AM, said:

Didn't find lifes fun in 1993

I suppose you didn't find school fun at that point in time either, but how do you see it today? That's the thing, see. Fun is not a concrete block you have delivered at your home once you spindash the first time, but a continuous process of remembering, forgetting, learning and experiencing. Lives may not have been fun the first time you got a game over, but passing through the point in which you got a game over, but this time with more lives, may be double fun. And that's the entire point.

This post has been edited by Palas: 17 February 2014 - 07:57 AM

[The KKM]

Doesn't having fun being /v/ defeat the whole purpose of being /v/?

[Covarr]

The KKM, on 17 February 2014 - 06:55 AM, said:

Oh cry me a fucking river. Didn't find lifes fun in 1993 and don't find them fun now. Mindless porting of Arcade mechanics that mindless babbies like you (since you decided to go all bitter there) keep mindlessly repeating because nothing can go different from what you did as an infant.

When lives bring you back to a checkpoint and game overs bring you back to the beginning of the stage, it's hardly the same as porting an arcade mechanic, which would typically send you back to the beginning of the game on a game over. Personally, though, I'd like to see the word "lives" itself removed. Call it attempts or something, to make it really clear that you have three attempts with checkpoints, and using them up resets your checkpoints. I bet people would eat it up like it were a new idea if you rename it.

What could be really fun, however, is revamping the idea entirely. What if there were no game overs, no life count, none of that. Instead, the game runs on a rolling checkpoint system. After you hit a checkpoint, the first time you die you go back to that checkpoint. The next time you die, you go back to the previous checkpoint, and each time you die after you go back one checkpoint farther, and so on. It would reset every time you hit a new checkpoint (or one you'd hit previously, if you start further back than it). This would obviously work best in more linear stages, or if you could design in choke points for checkpoints; something like Sonic 2 where checkpoints are often placed bizarrely, or very close together on alternate paths where you can drop from one to the other, wouldn't handle it as well.

[SpeedStarTMQ]

Palas, on 17 February 2014 - 07:52 AM, said:

SpeedStarTMQ, on 16 February 2014 - 03:09 PM, said:

Because nowadays getting a Game Over usually just means starting from the beginning of the level/zone/whathaveyou, rather than starting the entire game again, which is what Game Overs were originally all about back in the arcades and the majority of the early to mid 90's games.
Having lives is part of this feature, because running out of lives is what gets you a Game Over, but as they are more or less redundant in today's world where games have save files and are often easier than games of the late 80's and early 90's,why bother having lives either? Why not just make lives infinite? If you die you die, and getting a Game Over just means you'll have to start the level again at worst, rather than the entire game. For Sonic and Mario at least, starting a level all over again is hardly much more of a chore than dying and restarting at a checkpoint.

For some games that use the lives and Game Over system still, it makes no difference anyway. Sonic 4 and NEW Super Mario Bros are so difficult to lose all your lives on that you'll probably never see the Game Over screen in your entire lifetime. It just makes the whole system pointless.

That's hardly technical. It's but a design choice that doesn't need to be taken for granted. And it's not even about making a game harder or easier. It's just how the game deals with frustration, which is bound to happen whether there are lives or not. Does it show you that you've failed? There are many approaches, which is why Game Overs might or not be important and that has nothing to do with technical aspects.

So for instance, should you give infinite lives to the player, is there anything wrong with counting how many times he gets a Game Over and making that affect his playthrough somehow? I mean, there's nothing you can't count in games and return to the player in the form of a reward or a punishment. Heck, you could even count how many times the player loads the game. Lives are - again - a number just like any other and there is no reason why Sonic Team should ditch them for the sake of modernity or whatever you would call it.

I count 'lives' and what I would call 'tries' as two separate entities. I would say lives would be when a game gives you a certain amount of tries, whereas tries are infinite but are counted. An example of 'lives' would be Mario or Sonic, whereby once you've lost your quota, the game starts you again entirely or at the beginning of the stage you started, losing all progress at that time.

A 'try' would be what some of the Zelda games do. Whereby you can fail as many times as you like, and it won't penalize you, but it DOES show how many times you've failed. Zelda I does this;


I have no issue with Game Overs and Lives. Retro games shine for this reason, whereby beating your score is essential to the experience, as games back then were often much harder and lacked a save feature. However, in today's world, they are largely redundant and an unnecessary left over of a bygone era. There's nothing wrong with anything you've said, just that it applies less and less to newer games which still use these systems.