/vr/ - Retro Games

>>5021843
Of course not, but as it's a question about contemporary games this isn't the right board for it.

>>5021843
Yes, it's purely a time-wasting mechanic created as a profit-generating scheme for arcade machines.

>>5021853
Lives were outdated the moment games came to home consoles.

Not really, the player needs to be punished with a game over screen. But if lives are "farmable" like in super mario world then they are unnecessary.

>>5021859
>Lives were outdated the moment games came to home consoles.
don't tell that to the sonic and mega man fags

>>5021859
The absolute state of this board

>>5021860
>the player needs to be punished with a game over screen

The punishment is being forced to restart the level. If the game over makes you restart the entire game, that's excessive in a home setting. If the game over just takes you to the title screen but then brings you back to the same level anyway (through saved progress or a password), then it's redundant and unnecessary. You already have to restart the level on each death, so you're just wasting the player's time by kicking them back to the title screen for no reason.

>>5021843
the fact that you have a limited number of attempts until you have to start all over adds a sense of tension and a drive to improve your gameplay that would otherwise not exist

>>5021860
>the player needs to be punished with a game over screen
why? what's wrong with just sending the player back to the last checkpoint until they succeed? you seem to be fine with super mario world doing that.

>>5021870
Sounds like you need to git gud and stop whining

>>5021871
not really. the challenge itself creates all the tension.

>>5021876
>>5021865
sounds like you need to make an actual argument

>>5021873
>what's wrong with just sending the player back to the last checkpoint until they succeed?
makes the game easy, and not every game is supposed to be easy
>you seem to be fine with super mario world doing that.
smw is supposed to be easy

>>5021843
Arguably

>>5021880
I did, and then you claimed you're too incompetent to play games with game over screens

>>5021882
>makes the game easy
how so?
>smw is supposed to be easy
what evidence to have to suggest that it was intended to be easy? even adults have trouble finishing it.

>>5021885
>I did
where?
>and then you claimed you're too incompetent to play games with game over screens
now you're just making shit up

>>5021889
>how so?
consistency is a skill
>even adults have trouble finishing it.
maybe if they are mentally retarded, I suppose

>>5021894
It's okay anon,

>>5021882
Sending the player back to the checkpoint until they win actually allows you to make the game more difficult, because if the checkpoint is permanent (until the player turns off the game) then it means you can ratchet up the difficulty in each segment since the player isn't required to complete the entire level in a single go and they can move from checkpoint to checkpoint. Each segment can be designed as a standalone challenge with difficulty weighted as such. But if the expectation is for the player to beat the entire level at one time with no checkpoints then the difficulty must account for that so as not to be unreasonable for the player.

>>5021896
>consistency is a skill
elaborate
>maybe if they are mentally retarded, I suppose
not everyone is an incel like you

>>5021906
so you had trouble finishing super mario world? did your mother drink when she was pregnant? it also explains why you need me to clarify every single point I make

>>5021860
Ok you make pretty dumb argument.
Lets take dark souls for example.

Each time you died,it says "you died" kinda like a game over.
Only difference is you dont have a limited number of try.

>>5021909
projecting my supposed lack of skill isn't an argument. i've beaten plenty of games considerably harder than SMW.

>>5021914
>kinda like a game over
Game over screens send the player back to the title screen/first level. Maybe to the last time he saved the game, if we're being loose. At least that's how I use the term.
>Only difference is you dont have a limited number of try.
precisely

>>5021915
>projecting my
that's not how this term works you brainlet

>>5021923
yes it does. still waiting for an actual argument.

>>5021923
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_projection_fallacy

>>5021859
What a silly thing to say. It depends entirely on the type of game.

>>5021919
>Game over screens send the player back to the title screen/first level.
That's an excessive, archaic punishment designed only to make money for arcades. At home it just wastes your time and pads out the length of a game. And before you start with the "consistency is a skill" crap, just let me remind you that people do no-death runs, low percent runs, etc of games to challenge themselves regardless of whether a game uses lives or game overs. There's no need for the developer to force that on the player arbitrarily; players interested in spending more time with a game and increasing their personal challenge will come up with ways to challenge themselves.

>>5021959
There's nothing arbitrary. It's the developer giving a set of challenges to be completed withi a finite number of attempts. That's totally valid. You don't have to play those kinds of games if you don't like them, but trying to say it's an invalid way of making a game in general is just balls to the wall retarded.

>>5021876
Not an argument you stupid cunt

>>5021959
>That's an excessive, archaic punishment designed only to make money for arcades
you suck at videogames
>And before you start with the "consistency is a skill" crap
it's true, regardless of how you feel about it
>just let me remind you that people do no-death runs, low percent runs, etc
>self-imposed challenges exist so stop liking games that are hard by default
hm no thank you

>>5021980
You're assuming a lot. I do enjoy hard games, I just don't enjoy my time being wasted. Lives and game overs are literally just time-wasting devices employed by arcade games to reduce the player's ability to practice later levels and get more money from the players.

And you always have the option of trying to beat the game without dying, so there's no reason to force it on everyone. I also enjoy beating games on no death runs. Arcade ports of certain shmups will allow infinite continues, but the ultimate goal is achieving 1CC, which is the real challenge. This can be the case without also wasting the player's time with resets and limiting the ability to practice the later stages.

I don't understand why you think disliking the time-wasting inherent in limited life and game over systems equates to disliking challenge or being bad at games.

>>5022015
>I don't understand why you think disliking the time-wasting inherent in limited life and game over systems equates to disliking challenge or being bad at games.

Not him, but it could be because you whine like a little girl. Holy shit man, get a grip.

>>5021843
Pretty much.
I'm fine with lives in old games, but it's one of those features I feel doesn't need to be brought back, unless arcade machines become a thing again, a place where they make sense, obviously.

>>5021860
>the player needs to be punished with a game over screen
Like in the sense that you die, yeah, obviously there's consequences for not performing.
Lives are a meaningless feature for games where you can save, however, which is why while it was still around in Wolfenstein 3D, and Rise Of The Triad, the feature was scrapped for Doom and Duke Nukem 3D.

Being able to save is an important feature for a game which is many, many hours long, and it kind of invalidates extra lives as a concept. Going back to Wolf3D and ROTT, I can't think of a lot of people who actually played with lives, they'd make saves at the start of the level or before bosses, and reload from there.

>>5021885
>literally projecting

>>5021876
How?

>>5021843
Well, yeah. Lives are by definition an exclusionary mechanic. It means a limited number of attempts before having to start over. This means that only people with a requisite level of skill will be capable of progressing through the game. Modern video games need to be inclusive so that even people with no skills can beat the game.

>>5021871
That can add some tension, but it's just a better idea to make tension by making the gameplay itself challenging.

>>5021882
>and not every game is supposed to be easy
True, but there's also the matter of player convenience, if the game is too inconvenient to play it may put players off.

I'm not saying "you deserve to win because you played", obviously, but being able to say, save each level, and potentially having mid level checkpoints and checkpoints before boss fights (depending on what kind of game you're making), makes the game much more flexible for players, allowing them to take it a chunk at a time, and not need to spend time redoing more than they need to if they fail.
Say you want to play maybe one level a day, a save system is a good idea and extra lives are add very little to this, at least in the traditional sense. You can still challenge the player by making enemies really hard, or making complex puzzles, potentially under timers.

Lives make more sense for arcade machines (ergo you get x many tries for your spent money), or games from an era where battery saves existed and could be good for certain games, but maybe isn't necessary because this game is only like 3-4 hours long (if that), and without a battery the game is cheaper for the consumer to buy.

It's important to not hold the player's hand and just walk him through your game, you want to make a challenge, but I think it's also important to accommodate the player and not waste his time, because you also want him to actually play your game. 30 minutes, an hour of lost progress, that can hurt, but you can also deal with it, but then 8 hours of progress, that's a lot of work to do all over again.

>>5021914
IIRC Dark Souls also punishes you the more you die, as you lose more and more. Which I think can be a good mechanic for challenge.

>>5021959
>That's an excessive, archaic punishment designed only to make money for arcades.
Originally, yeah, but a lot of old arcade style shooters using a system like that, aren't actually that long, so I feel it's actually kind of ok to have a lives system there.

>At home it just wastes your time and pads out the length of a game.
Well, it can, and some games aren't well designed, I can think of a dozen movie license games from the 8-bit and 16-bit console era which had lots of 'artificial difficulty' or just very poor thought out design, but then you also get into the territory of "Is this actually a good game and would I really enjoy this much more if I could save every level?", and for a lot of them, the answer would actually be no.

>And before you start with the "consistency is a skill" crap, just let me remind you that people do no-death runs, low percent runs, etc of games to challenge themselves regardless of whether a game uses lives or game overs. There's no need for the developer to force that on the player arbitrarily; players interested in spending more time with a game and increasing their personal challenge will come up with ways to challenge themselves.
I suppose that is true. That doesn't mean you can't have a good game with extra lives as part of the challenge, however.

I don't think a game such as say, Life Force, would be greatly improved if you replaced the extra lives with a battery save. Games like that are like short challenge gauntlets and I'm kind of fine with them requiring more skill; you see how good the player is and how far he can get, maybe he can even get to the end without a game over.

>>5021959
>That's an excessive, archaic punishment designed only to make money for arcades

No, it's a result of a mindset that video games are about gameplay and not about story progression. Games these days play more like movies than they do like actual games. Can you even call it a game if you can't lose?

>>5022321
>No, it's a result of a mindset that video games are about gameplay and not about story progression
Not that guy, but there's a lot more to it than that.

The joy in games that require you to beat the whole thing in a row with few mistakes and force you to start over from the beginning when you fail comes from:
1) The satisfaction of completely mastering an entire game.
2) The tension caused by having to earn attempts at the later parts of the game, knowing that making mistakes will require you to go back and earn another attempt..
3) The mystique of the later levels that you don’t get to see as often as the earlier levels.

A properly designed game of this type is generally expected to have these qualities:
1) The game rewards becoming better and better at the earlier levels of the game as you are forced to replay them to earn attempts at the later levels. Mastery of earlier levels should leave you with more lives remaining, grant extra lives from score or pickups, grant power-ups from pickups, etc. so that the better you get at the early levels, the more equipped you become to handle later levels. This continued discovery of what each level offers feels good.
2) The difficulty of most the individual challenges is not super high, so that achieving the ability to perform every challenge in the game in a row with few mistakes is doable for an average player.
3) The game is short enough that mastering the entire thing is doable for an average player and isn’t too exhausting to do in one playthrough. (Generally less than an hour.)

A game designed with saving/locking in progress after every level or every sub-section of a level is less likely to be designed to deliver on the above, so while you can obviously make up your own arbitrary challenges in any game (“beat every stage in Super Meat Boy in a row with no more than three deaths total”) it’s less likely for that experience to be enjoyable because it wasn’t designed to be played that way.

>>5022331


It’s a shame this topic gets wrapped up in e-cred/git gud talk because it’s not really a matter of a game like Contra being harder or easier than Cuphead or whatever in an absolute sense; it’s just a different experience.

>>5022337
>>5022331
I like your take on it.

>>5021882
>makes the game easy
No, it just makes it longer than necessary. You're not doing anything other than wasting the player's time when you have a life limit. It's logical to have lives in "endurance"/highscore games like Pacman, but they don't belong anywhere else.

After playing Mario Odyssee, I'd say no. Death in that game was a joke that held no consequence whatsoever (except in the post-game challenge areas), so while it was fun to play (and I understand why they designed it that way) it never really felt like I had to ever give a shit about dying. Given that, (and to tie it into actual /vr/ discussion), I'd say it applies rectroactively as well.
That being said, not every single game of a type needs one. Warioland 2 was a classic and you couldn't even die in it. It's all about how the game is designed in the end, I guess. Say, I wouldn't still remember the summer I frantically tried to beat Zombies ate my Neighbors every day and especially the day I did it if there was saves in every level (or a password system that wasn't a hinderance), but I also don't enjoy Metroidvanias that have lives systems.

>>5022539
>Warioland 2 was a classic and you couldn't even die in it.
Warioland 2 is kind of an outlier in its genre in that way. You couldn't be killed, but taking hits cost money, and actually getting around required basically environmental puzzle solving and exploring very thoroughly, especially if you wanted all the loot and all the gold to get all the endings, which there were many of. If there was a videogame which would suit the many asinine criteria of David Cage, Warioland 2 would be an excellent example (no game overs, multiple endings, etc), except it doesn't play itself, rewards skill, and is better than anything he could ever put together.

It wasn't a typical game for me, and growing up with the first Warioland, the changes took some getting used to, but I took to it and just loved it, some of the best $4 I've ever spent, and one of the few, I guess you could call it sort of a "collectathon" games, that I 100%ed.

>>5021843
who cares about lives in old games, I'm going to savescum anyway and load every time I die and reach max lives

>play Rayman
>lose all lives
>lose a continue
>repeat until you lose 5 continues
>game irreversibly over
Cancer. Lives will always just limit the player and gameplay. There is literally NO reason to have lives in a videogame. You can always just kick the player back to the last checkpoint, or not make checkpoints at all. Or force a level restart after losing a set number of lives. You can keep score by other means, timers/points/collectables.
Extra lives are usually easy to farm, so they're just a fucking waste of time in most games. If a game wastes your time without being fun then it's a shit game.
Spyro, for example, has lives but getting a game over simply returns you to the hub world and you can continue the current level from the beginning with 4 lives. That's fine, but what's the point of lives? Death has no penalty, and even if it did you can just spend an hour grinding until you have 99 lives. Lives don't belong in games which aren't specifically centered around them. If you have lives, then losing all of them should kick you back to the start menu and your save file should be removed and saved as a high score/snapshot of some sort. If this doesn't happen, then lives have no purpose. They lose any purpose if you have the ability to just load a game to before you lost a life and they lose purpose if you can "revive" anyways after losing all lives. But, not every game can and should just kick you back to the menu. This feature doesn't belong outside of games like asteroids, pacman >>5022437, or competitive games.

So yes, they're an obsolete feature which was adopted from arcade games which required you to pay money per life/continue. A game like, for example, original mario shouldn't have had lives especially since it already had a timer and a point system and you could have just subtracted points on death. Anyone who had less deaths would score better.
It's a tragedy that lives were still a thing in ps1/n64 era.

>>5022576
Score was more of an outdated relic than lives ever were. Who cares about score in fucking SMB besides autists who need to go to California? Like, shit, any game that wasn't almost expressly score based that had a score always confused the hell out of me.

>>5022634
Honestly, score is a pretty pointless mechanic, but it still tickles me seeing that counter go up when I play Wolf3D or Rise Of The Triad, collecting treasure and tokens, getting score for kills, looking for secrets, etc.
There's little point, sure you get more extra lives, but you can just make a save when convenient, so it makes even less sense.

I guess I just like the slight arcade touch it gives games which otherwise don't fit so neatly among those kinds of games.

Are health points obsolete too in games like Doom? God mode is better and no need to save that way.

>>5022663
Best response. This thread is fucking surreal.

>>5022576
>There is literally NO reason to have lives in a videogame.

I honestly can't even tell if you people are being serious at this point. Og course there's a reason with some kinds of games. It's the developer giving a set of challenges to be completed withi a finite number of attempts. That's totally valid. You don't have to play those kinds of games if you don't like them, but trying to say it's an invalid way of making a game in general is just balls to the wall retarded.

>>5022663
>>5022673
There's enough non-faggot replies in this thread to weigh against people who want to be handheld.

>>5022692
It's more that I find it impossible to tell who's being genuine but whiny and who's false flagging for chortles. It's fuckin' surreal yo.

>>5021940
your post is entirely devoid of substance and adds nothing to the conversation

>>5022663
No one is advocating against failstates in games.

>>5021965
>i'm not going to explain why it's valid and just call you retarded instead

>>5021980
>it's true because i said so

>>5021843
Yes, starting with when every game had a save feature.

>>5022040
not an argument

>>5022721
There's no way that it could not be valid. A game is a set if arbitrary challenges. Are you for real? How is that not valid?

>>5022663
no. the point is games have moved on to less archaic ways of punishing for sloppy play. nice strawman faggot.

>>5021843
No but your dick is

>>5022717
It doesn't need more substance, the question is plainly ridiculous. There are many many types of games that have been and could be made and of those some are best when the player has a limited number of attempts. It's obvious.

Now in the case of arcades, letting players change the challenge to get more lives by paying money... That I could see having a valid issue with. But simply setting a challenge with a limited number of attempts in tandem? A perfectly fine way of making a game.

To imply a game maker should be forced to give players infinite tries at a time is lunacy.

>>5022737
Like what? Slapping you on the wrist and calling you a bad boy?

>>5022709
Well, some are obvious bait, but I see some which seem sincere.
I can see from what position the argument comes from, I made this post; >>5022261
And I stand by most of my post, however reading the thread, I change my mind a bit, because I think some posts are rather convincing.

I wouldn't expect to see extra lives in the typical first or third person action game today, the notion is absurd, FPS hasn't really been made like that since the very early 90's, and TPS games I think mostly moved away from lives as soon as they became a staple on PC, in short, design sensibilities for *some* genres has made it where the idea of lives is, if not outright obsolete, highly quaint and unconventional.

Upon reflection however, there's certain types of games where they're very suitable, generally more arcade oriented titles demanding skill, and the games aren't actually very long, so a game over usually isn't an entire afternoon of lost progress.
I think some people have bitter memories of genuinely poorly made games with artificial difficulty, and associates many games with them unfairly.
Also many people (such as myself), were just rotten at videogames as a kid, and haven't revisited games as they've gotten better with age.
Then, there's also the fact that some people are just not cut out for some genres of videogames, but rather than reflecting on their capabilities and coming to that conclusion, they just disregard certain games as badly designed.
There's of course also genuine scrubs.

>>5022749
To me it's like someone set up a challenge to throw a basketball through the hoop ten times in a row and then there's someone on the side saying it's a bullshit challenge because they shouldn't have to do it in a row. It's just fucking weird to think a person like that really exists.

>>5022751
I think they don't want to accept the idea of a game that isn't quite like they're used to.
Some would say modern games are too homogenized and have coddled people into this mindset, but I'm not so sure that's true, I saw thinking like that back in the 90's, both from myself and others.

>>5022678
>Og course there's a reason with some kinds of games.
Which is a made point in the rest of the text.
>developer giving a set of challenges to be completed withi a finite number of attempts
Ok, it shouldn't be in the main gameplay and should only be in a separate challenge mode.

>>5022634
>Who cares about score
Nobody. But if you want to put a value on skill it's far more accurate and less annoying than lives.

>>5022770
>it shouldn't be in the main gameplay and should only be in a separate challenge mode.
You say it like it's an absolute; why?
Why can't the game itself be a 'challenge mode'?

They are in most modern design approaches.

>>5022770
>Ok, it shouldn't be in the main gameplay and should only be in a separate challenge mode.

That's utterly ridiculous.

>>5022770
You're being ignorant, there are videogames which are designed entirely like challenges, at least one which was just an entire game of nothing but a huge boss rush, like 40 of them from beginning to end.
Can't remember the goddamn name.

Obviously they're not obsolete, what a shitty opinion.
Games like Mega Man are balanced around having 3 lives, so you can usually just barely finish the level on your first playthrough dying on both checkpoints. It adds tension and makes for more enjoyable difficulty. Also, being sent to the beginning of a level upon using a continue can be beneficial, and even fun for optimising your play.

The upcoming Doom Eternal will have a lives system, apparently. I wonder how it'll work, no checkpoints and instead you are revived on the spot and is taken to the beginning of the level when you run out of lives?

>>5022795
>there are videogames which are designed entirely like challenges
Doesn't change the fact that lives are a redundant and pointless gimmick in the large majority of games

>>5022871
Sorry, the /v/ scum whose first platformer was super meat boy can't understand your argument

>>5022437
>No, it just makes it longer than necessary
Why have any challenge at all at this point

>>5022634
>>5022662

You could tie endings to the score, best ending only with best score, that would also make it relevant again.

live systems were ruined by
>handing out lives like candy
>frequent autosaves
>lives carry over between save file loads
>death not meaning anything due to various reasons, including above listed

Only game with a life system which I could actually appreciate it was Donkey Kong Country 2, because
>the game was difficult
>saving wasn't automatic, you often had to be several levels before you could be able to save in a world
>saving costed in-game currency
>lives and currency were reset every time you turned off the game

>>5022960
lol

>>5022938
>limited lives is a challenge even though in 99% games you can just refill the lives if you're willing to waste your time doing so
>limited lives is a challenge even though you're not punished when you lose all of them and can continue for free and worst case scenario you have to restart the level
Are you this cucked by lifefags?

>>5022576
I'd bet you're ok with people who "beat the game" with savestates.

>>5021871
I'm not a fan of limited continues, I feel like it's overly punishing and there are hardly any home console games designed around it. I think the castlevania series handled it perfectly
>die: go back to the checkpoint
>game over: go back to the beginning of the level
This design seems the most fair and rewarding to me

>>5021965
My main gripe with limited continues is that most retro games were not designed around that challenge and just did it to pad out their game. If a game truly took that into mind and designed around it, then it's fine, but for me it really only works, in a home console, with shmups

>>5022968
>>limited lives is a challenge even though in 99% games you can just refill the lives if you're willing to waste your time doing so
see >>5021860
>>limited lives is a challenge even though you're not punished when you lose all of them and can continue for free and worst case scenario you have to restart the level
then why are you complaining about them
>Are you this cucked by lifefags?
This, not using cheats and savestates makes you a cuck too!

>>5023027
many games are like this

>>5023109
>then why are you complaining about them
Because then they're obviously a gimmick feature taken from arcades that has no place in the actual game and just worsens the game quality and experience.

>>5023208
>a gimmick feature taken from arcades
so are you too much of a scrub to enjoy arcade games?

>>5023039
>My main gripe with limited continues is that most retro games were not designed around that challenge and just did it to pad out their game.

What makes you think the game wasn't designed around it?

>>5023208
>Because then they're obviously a gimmick feature taken from arcades that has no place in the actual game

Disagree and disagree very strongly.

>>5023109
>using savestates makes you a cuck too!
Thinking that using savestates will worsen your experience is cucky, yes.

>>5023216
>if you like a game you will always want it's mechanics ported to any other game and genre
You retarded?

>>5023450
>using cuck unironically
>claiming cheating doesn't ruin the game experience

This board gets funnier and funnier all the time.

>>5023453
>savestates
>cheating
Are you retarded?

>>5023469
Oooohh are you going to try and say that using savesates in a game that doesn't have them is somehow not cheating? This should be fun! You write out whatever drivel you have that will attempt to justify it and I'm gonna go make some popcorn.

>>5023507
I don't have time to argue with idiots. Not everyone is a neet who wants to re-do everything they already did to get to the point before they lost a life.

>>5023452
Literally no one in this thread argued that lives should be in every game, illiterate-kun.

>>5023514
And that's why they cheat

I grew up mostly playing games with lives, got used to them and expect them, therefore they're an essential feature.

>>5023517
You're cheating your own free time.

>>5023514
That's not a reason. That's just a string of insults. You're saying that you think altering a game to make it easier isn't cheating. If you can justify that somehow then go for it, but as is you're simply admitting to being a loser who can't handle games as they were designed.

>>5023549
>can't handle games that are poorly designed

Considering modern games barely have any gameplay mechanics, lives surely are obsolete, specially considering how hard it is to die in the first place.

>>5021906
>if you beat a kid's games you're an incel

Surely smells like a game journalist

>>5023553
It's a fallacy because you're trying to call a game that wasn't made piss-easy to appeal to you "poorly designed". But that's not the case. They're well designed games that don't appeal to you.

>>5023587
False

>>5023610
Lol okay use all the savestates you want and keep telling yourself you're really playing the game. Just don't be surprised if you get made fun of for it.

>>5023615
>get made fun of
I'm laughing at you right now

>EVERYTHING THAT DOESN'T WORK FOR MY TINY, TINY BRAIN IS ARCHAIC AND NEEDS TO GO
Liberal zoomer: the thread
Games are about gameplay. Players are expected to be able to face challenges and be punished for not meeting the skill requirement to do so. Current games, that have no punishment for failing endlessly are the PERFECT representation for the state of current society. It's ok to be a lowlife, stupid, subhuman degenerate, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise. You're special, you're unique, you're a winner. People that are superior to you clearly have something wrong with them, they must not have a life outside the game. I mean, how could someone muster enough dexterity, logical and learning skills to perform better than you? These people are weird and just plain wrong.

It's time for lives to go. It's time for gameplay mechanics to get so shallow and diluted, that you won't be able to distinguish the weirdos from someone like me, a unique and special individual. Now THAT is what I call progress.

>>5023627
For thinking it's funny that some dude on the intarwebs is so bad that he has to simultaneously cheat and convince himself it's not really cheating when he's playing a freakin video game? Laugh away I guess, lol.

A few weeks ago I went to a fantastic video game exhibition. It featured hundreds of coin-ops all on free play. Everyone implictly understood that in such a busy environment they got one credit, played their best, then moved on. What kind of dick would hog a machine here? During the afternoon there I realised during my laps of the place there was actually a guy and his fat girlfriend credit feeding Bubble Bobble. They played it for something like three hours, dying again and again and again. I'm not sure if they actually did complete it in the end, but they had eventually gotten pretty far. I sat and watched them for a while and noticed they clearly did not understand what the power ups did, what the extend bubbles did, what the power up bubbles did. They had no strategy to complete the levels and watching them slowly work out how to beat the levels where you had to bounce on your own bubbles was painful.
Every time they reached the fail state of Game Over they didn't reflect on what they did and where they got stuck or how they are playing the game. They didn't start all over again and this time play more conservatively or try for certain power ups, or try for the level skips. They just hammered the start button and ran straight into the same enemy for another five minutes.
So these cunts cheerfully wasted three hours of everyone's time who could have tested their skills at a fun game, three hours of their own time blindly staggering through a game they did not comprehend just to say they "did it". They flicked through a catalogue of content and saw all the things! That's what games are!
It turns out it was ok though. Because they could mindlessly do the same shit again and again like useless fucking monkeys their experience was optimal.

>>5023662

Now imagine that, but with everyone doing it, everyday, everywhere.

>>5023637
>difficult modern games don't exist
>games haven't figured out more interesting ways to punish sloppy play

>>5023537
>it's essential because i said so

>>5022960
>Donkey Kong Country 2
>difficult

>>5023662
So basically you're mad that a couple showed up, found a game they enjoyed and had fun with it a bunch even though they clearly weren't masters at it? It must suck to be so easily upset.

>>5023670

Whenever a modern """difficult"" shows up, it sells itself solely on the novelty of being a difficult game, so zoomers will MEME it up on the interwebs and the game will make its bandwagon shekels.
And no, they haven't figured objectively better ways to punish noobs.

>>5023674

Ah, yes, ignoring context is one of brainlets preferred tactics.

>>5023678
Not him but most games now have both difficulty modes and achievements or trophies which often present quite robust challenges. So while It's true that many games are designed so most people can at least finish them (without resorting to cheats or savestates like some do eith old games) many also have a lot more to them for those looking for something hard to master.

Also there's a cultural divide, the Souls ganes here got a real reputation for being difficult, but in Japan Monster Hunter is wildly popular and has much tougher challenges.

>>5023681
Ohh right, they should have moved around like sheep to please you. Did you even think to ask?

I would like to remind you all that very few games sold themselves on "low" difficulty, so shove that "dey dum down gaems to sel more" faggotry right into your festering cunt.

FYI; One of them is aimed at preschoolers, and the other is aimed at people who have never played a JRPG before.

>>5023708

No games ever sold themselves based on difficulty, until games became so shit and easy that a game that had classic difficulty started being considered "hard". Go fuck yourself.

>>5023713
That's because you only play shitty games by shitty companies who make consistently trivial games, anon. It's as big a difference as eating shit from McFaggots instead of getting a proper mince burger with good cheese.

>>5023723

That's some grade A projection there, faggot.

>>5023730
>no refutement
So you admit that you only play shit games and complain instead of buying actual good games.

>>5022015
>You're assuming a lot. I do enjoy hard games, I just don't enjoy my time being wasted. Lives and game overs are literally just time-wasting devices employed by arcade games to reduce the player's ability to practice later levels and get more money from the players.

No, you're just retarded. Any fucker can keep playing the same thing over and over and eventually learn to do it. You're not actually getting good at the game though if you're only retrying the part that you keep dying on. Having to restart is a sign that you need to work on your basics, not fumble endlessly until by some fluke you manage to make it through.
This of course assumes that the game is designed for game overs.

>>5023731

I don't settle for eating shit. Good games make up a tiny fraction of the current industry, and even those are dragged down by a myriad of bad tropes or practices.

It's more like you admit you play shit and like it.

>>5023747
They always made up a tiny fraction of the industry.

>>5023750
Sure they did, kid. You weren't even alive then. Keep telling yourself whatever's needed to sleep at night, like every other zoomer.

>>5023747
I agree with this guy >>502375 There have always been more bad games than good. But now there are vastly more games made for more kinds of gamers than ever before. And I am a genuine "oldfag"

Not everything is perfect now, but it never was. As always, enjoy and support the good and ignore the bad. Year after year my backlog gets bigger and bigger, that's my only problem.

>hurr durr calling out shitty game design instead of rating it 5/5 breddy good *tips 50% for the shittiest continue system on the planet* lol zoomers git gud xdxdXd

>>5023739
>Any fucker can keep playing the same thing over and over and eventually learn to do it.
Yeah, it's called practice. The more you do a thing, the better you get at it. Arcade style continues are literally designed to limit the player's ability to practice later stages so they'll have to spend more money in their attempts to beat the game or achieve high scores. Totally unnecessary and irrelevant in a game you play at home and don't spend quarters to attempt, except to pad out game time for no reason.

>>5023910
This 100%

>>5023878

Look at this seething 15 year old nigger.

>>5023910
>Arcade style continues are literally designed to limit the player's ability to practice later stages so they'll have to spend more money in their attempts to beat the game

Holy shit you're backwards. They're designed to let you play the game more as you replay levels you're already good at. That's a good thing. The better you get, the longer play time you get out of your quarter.

It really sounds like you don't actually like playing games, at all. If anything it's like you just want to brute force your way through them so you say you played them. That's assuming this thread is sincere though which I still find a little hard to believe.

>>5023754
>>5023747
You're a fucking idiot if you think there was ever a time when a console had a majority of good games vs bad games.
Or you just have horrendously bad taste.

I always thought Contra was a great example of lives and continues being done in an interesting way, and most modern games have since adopted a similar pattern for using lives.

For the unfamiliar, in Contra, when you lose a life, you basically respawn right then and there rather than restarting the level. It's kind of like a glorified HP system but you don't get them back at the end of a level.

>>5022663
what a ludicrous fucking strawman, no one here is advocating against allowing a player to lose, they're arguing against wasting player's time by forcing them to repeat the entire game after dying an arbitrary number of times.

>>5024624
I don't think it's out of place for short and intense games, being able to practice later stages endlessly I think can take away from what's supposed to make them challenging.

For a game that's designed to be extra hard, and isn't particularly long, I think there is value in only being able to retry a stage a certain number of times, with the game expecting you to rely on actual skill, rather than just rote memorization.
If you just learn the particular movement and attack patterns of enemies, when and where they spawn, and only handle them based on how you remember the exact parts, are you really using skill, are they really trained tactics and reflexes, or just following a track?

>>5024624
Saying lives are obsolete is equally ridiculous though which is why that post is funny. This thread is a fucking goldmine.

>>5024624
The challenge is doing the whole thing in one go though. It's getting a basketball in ten times in a row. It's doing it all that's the impressive part and it's what beating the game is all about.

>>5024831
Not every game should be a fucking speedrun.
>the challenge
So make it as an achievement in game, not a necessity. Anyone who wants to go for "100%" will have to do it, anyone who doesn't want to waste too much time won't. Everyone is happy and nobody gets let out. See "Eryi's Action"

>>5024715
>skill, rather than just rote memorization.
No such thing because they're the same.
>If you just learn
>are you really using skill
Yes. That's exactly what skill is. You don't immediately know how to beat a game and you shouldn't. Learning how to beat it means gaining skill in it.
>being able to practice later stages endlessly I think can take away from what's supposed to make them challenging.
Doesn't make sense. You're just making some nonsensical limitations. Someone endlessly playing a game will by definition be able to endlessly practice late levels, thus learn the game and play through it blindfolded. Also, later in your post you say this isn't skill (which is wrong)
>noun; the ability to do something well; expertise.
>verb; train (a worker) to do a particular task.

>>5024719
They aren't obsolete, they're just overused and not necessary in most games. A lot of times they just get in the way. If a game is very, very short then lives are usually ok. If a game is endless, then lives are usually necessary. But if a game is just some generic platformer/RPG then there's never a reason to have lives.
If losing all lives just kicks you out of the level and you can retry without penalty (like 90% games), then they're not necessary. Either remove them or have each level get a life limit which won't carry over to next levels. Or, just don't have them at all and force a level restart on your death (either get insta-killed or have hit point system) which is what you should do if you want death to have a penalty.
If losing all lives kicks you to the title screen, then your game should be short. As in, beatable in an hour or less by an average player.

>>5022770
>But if you want to put a value on skill it's far more accurate and less annoying than lives.
>Far more accurate
In arcade games, sure. Who gives a fuck about how many goomabs you squished on the way to Bowser? Who gives a shit about the number of rupees you kill Ganon with? Beating the game is the skill, not doing stupid shit to make the meaningless number go up. Hell, if anything it means you're less skilled because of all the extra lives you now have from grinding enemies.
>less annoying than lives.
It's useless information to crowd the screen, which while small is actually still annoying. Beating the game before you run out of lives feels like an achievement, beating the game with an inflated and useless number feel like you wasted your time.

>>5021843

Yes, a leftover from the arcade days.

Back then:
>use up lives
>pay money to continue

Now:
>lose a life and suffer a small setback
>lose all lives and suffer a slightly bigger setback maybe

Pointless.

For some shmups, it's a very obtuse thing to have lives. Some will be a game where you have "lives", die, and continue exactly where you were. This is arbitrary whereas you can just give the player "HP" and have the "HP" act accordingly to score like "lives" do. This happens in a few doujin titles. One life with 3 HP isn't really different than 3 lives with 1 HP.

"Continues" are also weird in that, "3 continues with 3 lives with 1 HP" isn't actually different than "3 lives with 3 HP".

It can easily be redesigned accordingly.

>>5024351
>console
Considering this board rarely talks about non-Windows retro computers, it's pretty safe to say the the industry has always been shit, especially Atari 2600.
There's like 6000+ DOS games. I barely hear about more than 10 of them cause they're mostly shit.

>>5026171
They are different in connotation and the expectations players have built up. Losing a life means losing all resources and starting from a blank slate, losing health means just coming closer to losing all resources. Similarly extra lives and extends need to be repurposed into health pick ups. And indeed you see this in how differently health bars are implemented in shmups like Guwange where losing health and losing a life are 2 different things and Deathsmiles which sort of incorporates extends into a health bar based system. And the continues point is just retarded. Continues are a little extra, you aren't meant to be using them outside of practice and goofing around which is why your scores don't save if you use them.

>>5026171
I don't think you understand what arbitrary really means.

>>5026120
The goal in both has always been to finish without dying at all.

>>5025556
>But if a game is just some generic platformer/RPG then there's never a reason to have lives.

For an rpg no, for a platformer it absolutely makes sense.

>Not every game should be a fucking speedrun.

Beating something without dying too often doesn't make it a speedrun. That's the challenge of many old games. If you can't handle it, fine but the world isn't changing to suit you.

>>5026319
>the world isn't changing to suit you.
What are you talking about? There haven't been any games which punish losing all lives in over 20 years. Even most retro games don't punish death. The world is definitely moving away from the outdated arcade meme mechanics.
That's the whole fucking point, why the hell would you have lives if you're not going to punish losing all lives? You literally cannot fucking argue that something like crash bandicoot should have lives.
If your game has to resort to limiting the number of times it can be played to be """challenging""" then it's not difficult, it's just shit trying to make itself look difficult.

>for a platformer it absolutely makes sense.
Sure, if it has less than 10 levels and kills all your progress when you lose all lives. Otherwise you're just wasting the player's time forcing them to repeat everything they can already beat.

>>5021859
>it's purely a time-wasting mechanic
sometimes it is yeah in the worst cases, like if a game makes you replay a bunch of easy sections only to get to the challenging part, and if you lose your lives there you have to replay the same easy boring part, that's just bad game design. Games that use lives well have save points, or they are really short games in general, which would mean if you can't get to the end of the game with the given lives, you need to get better at the game.

>>5026178
I would probably say there's a couple of hundred of games for DOS which vary from "alright" to "great" (only a few dozen being excellent), but you're right in that most aren't anything worth playing, or even acceptable in quality.

I came in to say yes, but reading the thread, I change my mind, they are still suitable for some kinds of games.

>>5026394
>learning is bad game design

yeah i mean having to play the easy parts of the music first is just bad composition, just jump to the mid section. Another marxist skill and effort to perfect play is "inconvenient" post. Just stick to casual games seriously.


>>5026120
another marxist who despises challenge and wants everything reduced to lowest common denominator to make himself feel better.

>>5026171
the whole point is to 1 credit clear, lives fit perfectly into that equation and when you become a scorer it becomes risk reward and lives represent evermore the limit of mistakes you can make. Nobody who plays shmups with any kind of real interest is using continues for anything more than practicing a section.

>>5022576
>how dare the dev challenge my ego with an actual challenge and implemented expectation of standard to progress! learning is so inconvenient!

millenial marxist scumbags are the laziest most lacking piles of shit ever conceived.

>>5026441
>>5026443
I don't think they're marxists, I think they're just garden variety lazy people.

>>5025556
>They aren't obsolete, they're just overused and not necessary in most games.

You need to stop confusing your personal preference of what kinds of games you like to overall game design. It's fine if you don't like the challenge of having to beat a whole game within certain parameters, but that doesn't make it bad game design. The world doesn't and shouldn't revolve around you.

>>5026620
>>5026443
Okay, retards, explain why Spyro having lives isn't completely moronic. I'm all ears.
You can't, it's just shit game design using an outdated mechanic that doesn't belong in it's genre.

>>5023017
There's literally nothing wrong with save states. You're just saving time.
>case 1
>use savestates
>beat the game in a few days
>have fun because you don't have to fuck around with lives and built-in saves and your playthrough is consistent

>case 2
>don't use savestates
>realize the game is hard
>grind lives for hours
>beat the game the (((intended))) way
>takes a few weeks
>have a miserable experience because 80% of your time spent is just grinding for extra lives
The first option is clearly superior. Unless you don't value your time, and by extension, yourself.
Now, I'm not saying anyone will ever lose all lives in most games since almost all games are piss easy and even if you do most games have infinite lives anyway. But you're literally arguing against this in Rayman 1 of all games where you'd have to fucking farm lives because the game was released rushed and untested and everything is unforgiving and a 1 hit kill in the second half of the game. Infinite lives is a must unless you're a sadistic fuck with too much time in his hands.

>>5026443
>this person is lazy because they don't waste as much time playing videogames as I do and instead has a life and a job
Call me when you grow up, kid.

>>5026390
>If your game has to resort to limiting the number of times it can be played to be """challenging""" then it's not difficult, it's just shit trying to make itself look difficult.

This is one of the most idiotic things in the whole thread

>>5026630
>i will believe in anything thats needed for me to be able to be a subhuman faggot and not feel wrong or guilty

This is unironically how millenial commies actually are like.

>>5023687
And now world is perhaps the easiest entry in the franchise. Don't talk to me about the like two endgame fights because all older entries had that kind of shit all over.

The concept of a difficulty curve has all but been lost to time.

>>5026630
Savestates are excusable, but some people will abuse them.
It's a matter of choice.

Limited lives before the whole game restarts is entirely excessive. It is without any second thought an outdated mechanic.

>>5026668
I only abuse them in games like yugioh where there's an unfair amount of drop-chance farming.

>>5026639
Commie spotted

>>5026630
>just get the game over with asap dont spend time with it and enjoy it, just view it as a chore to get out of the way!
The fuck is wrong with you dipshits? Why even play games if you dont enjoy difficulty? And anyway only shit games let you grind lives

>>5026107
Its not useless information it's an objective metric of your performance that gains more value as you understand what goes into getting a bigger score. Unless the scoring system is broken any retard can figure out that a bigger score will demand more effort from the player. The more you understand about how scoring works the easier it is to feel satisfied when you get a pb, because it's no longer just a number but is instead a clear representation of your skill. Beating games without dying is a low level challenge that's necessary for truly good scores in most games anyway. Really just compare it to getting good lap times in racing, it's the same deal. To an outsider a difference in 2 seconds will seem like nothing, to a player it will show hours and hours of practice.

>>5021843
no, as long as there's a difference in punishment between losing a life and losing all of them. in some games, they feel kinda pointless but that trend isn't limited to new games

>>5026624
I haven't played Spyro so can't comment on it specifically. Obviously not every game makes sense with a limited number of lives. But that doesn't make the ones that do work well with it, where beating the game in a single try is the main goal, any less valid.

>>5026459
The more I read here it just sounds like they don't like playing video games. They literally describe having to play the whole game like it's some sort of vile time wasting job.

I feel a little bad for them because they're clearly sucked into and invested in the culture of video games and they feel like they should enjoy them. But in reality they don't enjoy time spent playing and just want to complete a game as quickly as possible so they can say they "beat" it, but never have to waste time "playing" it again.

>>5026747

But that's it. That's literally it. Soibois and women hate games and hate people who are able to enjoy thesemlves alone, but games have been the big normie thing since the beginning of the 7th gen, so they have to pretend they like it to get attention. Games are sort of like a job to these people, they are a means to an end, they have little fun doing it.

>>5026759
Lol I'm not going to engage in yet another discussion on /vr about how much you people also hate modern games. Suffice to say most of the old folks I know playing Candy Crush and shit on their phones have fun while playing at least.

>>5026624
don't you lose all the treasure you've collected so far in the level if you get a game over? it's rare and easy to avoid but it isn't pointless

>>5026704
t. grandpa

>>5026816
Oh so you're a zoomer then. It's no wonder you can't find fun in games, you've been conditioned to play for the metagame like unlocks, cheevos, skins and lootboxes so anything that gets in the way of getting rid of your checklist is instantly bad. Surprised you even play these games since they're not on steam

>>5022874
That's basically how Turok worked. There were reasonably common checkpoints you'd return to if you died and had lives left, and less common save points where you could actually save the game. Die with no lives left and you went back to the save point with whatever amount of lives and ammo you had then.

>>5022874
Presumably the same as it worked in DOOM 4 arcade mode which is exactly as you describe. That's the most fun mode in the game too, removes a lot of the cinematic shit and adds a neat scoring system too. The lives are scattered around levels, often in hard to reach spots or requiring exploration. Gets pretty tense on nightmare when you're at the end of a long level and have to deal with a tough combat arena. It was a late addition so a huge chunk of players aren't aware of it.

>>5026816
>outing yourself this easily

It's like you're here because you know no one wants you here.

>>5026854
>>5022874
My bad, you don't get revived on the spot if you die in DOOM 4 arcade but the checkpoints are very generous.

>>5026780
No. Only enemies respawn, everything remains collected.

>>5026828
Cringe

>>5026724
Everything you just said is pretty much only applicible to games based around score systems like endless arcade games and stuff like NiGHTS. Apply it to something like even the simple NES Super Mario Bros games and it falls apart. Scores in platformers are pointless because there's very often a way to just cycle through an area or a level either until the time limit's up or until after, where you let yourself die then just replay the level, probably one that has an easy extra life in it. Man, sure is skill around here.
There's a reason score in platformers rather quickly went away even by the middle-to-late period of the SNES' life span. Nobody cared about them like the do times in racing games or scores in arcade games because there was other concrete objectives to accomplish.

Also (not to you, but to the thread in general), if you feel like having to play through the game again is a waste of time, it sounds less like you have a legit concern and more like you're just not enjoying your time playing the game. People don't mind replaying levels if the game's fun to play, so maybe if you feel like you've wasted your time because you didn't beat the game, then you need to play a different game.

>>5027065
>Also (not to you, but to the thread in general), if you feel like having to play through the game again is a waste of time, it sounds less like you have a legit concern and more like you're just not enjoying your time playing the game.

So much of this. They're games, not jobs. The point is for them to be fun.

>>5026630
>Case 1
>use savestates
>beat the game in a few hours
>feel underwhelmed because nothing in the game challenged you

>Case 2
>play the game properly
>realize the game is hard
>git gud
>beat the game the intended way
>takes a few weeks
>Have a great experience because you grew to overcome the challenge in front of you and conquered it

The first case is the actual misvaluation of your time, since you're wasting it on a sub-par experience that will leave no lasting memories or gives no actual acheivement.

>>5027065
Bad scoring systems are bad yes, nobody disputes this. That does not however invalidate the idea of score, nor its potential when combined with different genres. Platformers and other free scrolling games can benefit from scoring systems just the same as anything else, but they have to be extra careful to prevent exploitative strategies and balance risk vs reward well. Though arguably there is more need for scoring in games that move at a relatively set pace like shmups, rail shooters and rhythm games because they don't have the natural risk vs reward that comes with moving fast. Still, if games like the new Doom can have fully functional and even fun scoring then there's no reason why platformers can't.

Also, scoring went away quickly on consoles in general, and was always pretty poor compared to arcades because there simply isn't much incentive for developers to flesh out these systems and give their game a high skill ceiling and a lot of replayability because of the format.

>>5026630
>realize the game is hard
>grind lives for hours
>beat the game the (((intended))) way
>takes a few weeks
>have a miserable experience because 80% of your time spent is just grinding for extra lives

Of course if you don't bother trying to improve at the game and just "grind lives for hours" until you can brute force your way through it's going to be miserable. If that's your attitude why spend any time on the game in the first place?

>>5027080
Either I misspoke or you misread, I didn't mean to say the entire idea of scoring system was garbage. Just that they're so often implemented poorly that for 90% of games minimum they're not actually very good as skill checks. A game has to be almost explicitly designed around scorebuilding for it to work that way, though that's honestly pretty cool when it works.

>>5026747
>They literally describe having to play the whole game like it's some sort of vile time wasting job.
I think more the idea that having to repeatedly do the same part over and over again is frustrating, for it wearing down the enjoyment of those parts, and frustration at not advancing.
Playing the same level over and over, and nothing new happening, means the it's not going to remain enjoyable for very long, even if it's the players fault.
I'm not agreeing with them on extra lives, but I see their logic, if you really suck at a game, it's not going to be that fun. If they could advance, they wouldn't complain.

I think it's not necessarily so much not liking videogames, such as them being bad at videogames, perhaps being bad at certain genres (I know I am, I'm useless at RTS), without either realizing it or acknowledging it.
Or maybe they're only used to particular genres, then looking at another genre, particularly in the past, they find that the game wasn't catering to them like they hoped to.

>>5026630
I remember grinding the shit out of DKC on my real SNES, I was determined to beat it. I was having fun at first, then I got to the ice world. I decided to grind a shitton of extra lives, I did get better throughout the fucking ice levels, but I still got a game over in the last one. I felt like I wasted all the time I'd put into it, and I felt disappointed that it was ruined by utter shit game design. I haven't touched the game ever since.

>>5027072
>The point is for them to be fun.
Which is exactly why lives are bad, they make the game less fun and make them feel like a job. I don't notice them because whenever I play anything I usually have an abundance of lives, which just makes the lives mechanic utterly pointless to me. As for shit players who will lose all lives I again repeat, most games with life mechanics give you infinite retries anyways so they themselves make lives useless and this is an undeniable fact, which means they probably shouldn't be in the game and they were forces because of arcade influence.

>>5027075
>sub-par experience
Identical experience. Better, actually. Look, you're going to replay the level you're failing an identical number of times either way. Therefore replaying anything before is just a waste since you'll always pass it anyways. I'd rather do full runs over and over than have to stop at one part and replay everything from the beginning. It's a more consistent and less tiring experience.
I'm not saying I'd be autistic enough to save before a difficult jump and then reload 10 times in a minute while failing it. I'm just saying savestates are more convenient restore points before levels than most old save systems. I personally don't use them as anything other than a reliable pause system (same as save files), and it's faster and usually better than in-game saving which might not even exist in some games.

>>5027081
It's not my attitude, Rayman 1 just doesn't give you any other choice. Either brute force, cheat for lives or use savestates. And replaying the entire game is also brute forcing, just less efficient and longer.
I just want to play a game that's not unnecessarily prolonged. And I generally prefer more relaxing games than severely punishing ones. It's one thing to not have save points in super mario since you can beat it less than an hour, but Rayman 1 which requires a 100% completion to finish the game and potentially over 6 hours to beat is just shit.

>>5027330
>I generally prefer more relaxing games than severely punishing ones.
well then don't play the fucking game

>>5027330
>Identical experience.
Inherently wrong. You're altering the inherent difficulty of the game, changing the experience at it's core. If t he game expects you to beat it in one go, it not only ramps up the difficulty throughout but it expects the player to have some level of fatigue by the time they get to that point, or to have used up many lives/powerups/etc by then so that it's harder on them. That in turn causes the player to try and get through older levels using less lives and holding onto more powerups in later playthroughs, improving their ability to play. In the savestate-as-checkpoint method, that isn't there, effectively making it a non-identical experience.
>Therefore replaying anything before is just a waste since you'll always pass it anyways.
Only if you're a robot, there's always human error. On the other hand, during the next run you may discover a new area in the level with an extra life or power ups or something that you didn't know was there before, which also changes how you tackle future levels. Those aren't needed so much in a savestate run, but it's also proof that they're different experiences.
>I'm not saying I'd be autistic enough to save before a difficult jump and then reload 10 times in a minute while failing it.
If you're already using savestates, then why wouldn't you? You're already altering the experience, why not go whole-hog, especially if you consider replaying areas "wasted time"?

As angry as that all probably sounded I'm not against using savestates if you're playing for fun, but I don't believe in being able to say you've beaten the game if you use them, with MAYBE the sole exception of using them to pick up from where you left off later, since people used to just leave their systems on when they had to leave, which I don't think is too much different.

>>5027330
You should just play walking simulators then

>>5027348
What game are you even talking about, idiot?

>>5027359
Kill yourself.

Spelunky is an excellent example of a lives system in a modern game and how it makes the game massively more tense and meaningful to play each time. Crucially there is no way to continue so every time you start the game you have to be completely dedicated to your every move or you will waste your chance. It's not like playing most modern games where your performance is largely irrelevant to whether you can see all the content. Because the levels are randomised you also cannot brute force the game by rote - you must understand how the game works or you will fail.
It also cleverly weans casual players off of previously learnt behaviour from other games - you can unlock shortcuts to get back to later stages of the game on startup. Yet it quickly becomes apparent this is a false economy as doing this locks you out of long term game secrets (that the author dubs "The Chain") and also just plain leaves you far behind equipment wise what even an average player would have with them if they had played the game from the start. The player is nudged into playing the game properly with all the tension and fun that entails. It's actually probably one of my favourite videogames ever. I'd recommend the post mortem book as he covers things like lives, credit feeding games and time limits in game design and his reasoning for embracing them.

>>5027330
>Therefore replaying anything before is just a waste since you'll always pass it anyways
Not really especially not if you play anything difficult, if you could beat whole games after beating each level once then games would be extremely easy. Especially if you are playing something with demanding execution, becoming consistent will take you far, far, FAR more time than simply beating something. I'm talking difference in dozens or sometimes hundreds of hours. The best way of course is to seperate play into practice and real runs, but obviously not all games work with this approach.

>>5027350
>expects you to beat it in one go
I didn't mention a game like this. Just talking from my point of view here. I haven't played that many 1-try games and the ones I did play I never even saved since there's no point in doing so if it's short. I'm just saying that most games aren't expecting you to beat them in 1 go and saving/pausing is much easier with a save state.
>If you're already using savestates, then why wouldn't you?
What kind of a stupid ass argument is this? I assume you're also for banning guns and knives because if you can kill people and steal their property, because why wouldn't you?
I did this only with a yugioh game which I already beat 100% twice just because I couldn't be bothered to farm an insane amount of cash again.
As said before, spyro doesn't punish retrying after losing lives. I'd actually just load a savestate just to replay the level properly and have to 100% it in one go rather than have over half the level looted. Aesthetically better and honestly a bigger challenge.

>I don't believe in being able to say you've beaten the game if you use them
I don't fully disagree.
>the sole exception of using them to pick up from where you left off later
Which is what I basically use them for. Also for creating an archive of a finished game or porting the save file to another device I'm using. Sometimes I just use savestates for experimentation, which I wouldn't count as "gameplay".
>MAYBE
I don't understand why you're so religious about this. Games are supposed to be fun, you shouldn't be limited by some artificial morality or obligatory purity.
I'm not just talking about savestates now, but other tools as well. Without those speed running, modding and secret finding (ones that can't be found otherwise) wouldn't exist. Some people like to tinker with games and find that experience fun as well. You shouldn't immediately say they're wrong for having fun differently.
Of course, I'm not speaking of exploiting games in multiplayer or anything.

>>5027330
Which is exactly why lives are bad, they make the game less fun and make them feel like a job.
> I don't notice them because whenever I play anything I usually have an abundance of lives, which just makes the lives mechanic utterly pointless to me

Are you even reading the drivel you're spewing now?

>>5027432
>I didn't mention a game like this. Just talking from my point of view here. I haven't played that many 1-try games and the ones I did play I never even saved since there's no point in doing so if it's short. I'm just saying that most games aren't expecting you to beat them in 1 go and saving/pausing is much easier with a save state.
I meant one try as in one full set of provided lives and continues, I forgot that some games/people call lives a "try" too.
>What kind of a stupid ass argument is this?
If you're already cheating and changing the experience to make it easier, why would you not go all the way?
>I assume you're also for banning guns and knives because if you can kill people and steal their property, because why wouldn't you?
Oddly that only works if the guns/knives are already banned, because if they're not illegal then doing something else illegal with them doesn't follow. A better one would be like "if you already raped someone, why not kill them, since you already committed one felony".
>Which is what I basically use them for.
From how you talk it sounds like you use it to subvert any possible game over situation, rather than the "leave the system on" thing.
>I don't understand why you're so religious about this. etc...
Sure, if you're having fun, go have fun. Nobody's stopping you from having fun. But you can't in turn say you beat the game you used savestates to beat is all. If you don't care for being able to say you beat a game, fine. And nobody's even saying TAS or hacking or such is bad, but that's a completely different conversation entirely. At that point you're changing the point of the game to play it in a unique way, to which point the original challenge of the game is discarded anyway. You're playing it for different reasons at that point.

>>5027090
That I can agree with, console games in general took a lot of what made arcade games good and then completely fucked it up. Scoring was one of the main things that suffered as a result of this. Worse yet, because most people were primarily exposed to console games (and still are) rather than the original inspirations, it soured people's view on scoring as a whole because all they've ever known is broken, grindy shit. It's sad because scoring adds so much to games, and it hasn't been replaced with anything. Speedrunning is kind of an attempt to fill that hole that a lack of decent scoring systems left.

>>5027330
>And replaying the entire game is also brute forcing, just less efficient and longer.

What the fuck are you saying?? Learning to do something well is the polar opposite of brute forcing it. Are you genuinely retarded?

Thanks for being so accommodating by the way! It's tough cause I want to help my friend out (his father was the cyclist killed by a cement truck a few weeks ago) and he's in a crazy time, but I know it will be a short term situation, whereas I love cooking at the coffee shop so I want to get as much experience as soon as possible.

>>5027418
Yeah, I don't disagree. I just find that a ton of games don't punish death in any meaningful way so I get why some would use it.
>if you could beat whole games after beating each level once then games would be extremely easy
But you can do this anyway in a lot of games because of built-in saves in games. You can also use those to never save until you finish a level perfectly, which I forgot to address here >>5027432. A ton of games basically give you built-in savestates, just pre-level ones. It's just easier to load a savestate especially since you skip all the menu time and on some consoles loading time. I personally wouldn't ever savestate in mid level, but if I ever had any issues with a game that supports saves I wouldn't even think twice before using a savestate right after entering a level.

>>5027435
What's the issue? They create a permanent indicator of bullshit which isn't needed and is just an arcade era gimmick in most games.

>>5027454
>I meant one try as in one full set of provided lives and continues
Oh. Well, I found that a lot of games I played don't have a continue limit.
>If you're already cheating and changing the experience to make it easier
I'm not cheating.
>something else illegal
How is loading a game illegal or not allowed? Might as well ban emulation and memory cards
>From how you talk it sounds like you use it to...
No, I'm just defending save states as a practical tool just like I would defend emulators. And I don't care what other people might use them for.
>you can't in turn say you beat the game you used savestates
I never said that, but not everyone is this religious about beating games
I personally beat most games I still emulate on their native console before I even knew what a save state is. Not to mention basically everything I play is in the era of games which had the ability to save within the game which you literally can't argue is any different than savestates unless you use it in places where you can't normally save.

zoomer and git gud are not arguments

>>5027489
>They create a permanent indicator of bullshit which isn't needed and is just an arcade era gimmick in most games.

You literally make no sense now.

>>5027507
Complaining about posts with plenty of substance containing "zoomer" or "git gud" isn't a counter argument either. The framing of the discussion doesn't even fit what is being discussed. Half the people are talking about the merits of lives and scoring as systems independently, others are saying they're useless in a lot of console games because they are poorly implemented. Then you have absolute morons in between who don't understand what the systems are used for and why.

>>5021843
i had this thought after playing the Bioshock series, particularly Bioshock 2 where i died a LOT.
I was constantly in the Vita-Chamber.

I thought to myself, what if there was a game where you only had ONE life? Like in real life? Maybe come back as a different character? I dunno. we've gone full circle from the NES days where game over meant going back to the start to Bioshock where dying 20 and 30 times to get through one room almost became a matter of trial and error to just pass one room.

I saw Hideo Kojima or someone along those lines saying something like that soon after Bioshock Infinite came out, and I'd been thinking exactly the same thing. interesting.

>>5027489
>I personally beat most games I still emulate on their native console before I even knew what a save state is.
No wonder you bitch about having lots of lives, you only play the same old easy shit you're already familiar with and good at.

>>5027489
>I'm not cheating.
You're using an external tool to break the rules of the game. That's dictionary-definition cheating.
>How is loading a game illegal or not allowed? Might as well ban emulation and memory cards
You're the one who brought up the murder allegory, which is specified as what that line was talking about, please re-read.
>No, I'm just defending save states as a practical tool just like I would defend emulators
Which is outside the scope of discussion on if lives are outdated.
>I never said that, but not everyone is this religious about beating games
You'd be surprised at how many times people run around claiming they beat "super hard game X" only for it to be because they savestated their way through it. It's gotten under my crawl over time.
> the ability to save within the game which you literally can't argue is any different than savestates
It is, because it's somethign the developer explicitly allowed and designed the game around (hopefully).
>unless you use it in places where you can't normally save.
Well, if you savestate when you save then it's no different sure, but if you use it to get around any/all save limitations then it's cheating.

>>5021882
This guys right. Games that made me restart the level were always much harder and frustrating, but infinitely times more rewarding and challenging than games that just always had me return to the check pointa. Anybody who disagrees is just a shit cunt at games who needs it to babysit them all the way through.

>>5027589
Games that aren't brutally difficult usually have more replay value.

>>5026441
>>5026317
>I don't think you understand what arbitrary really means.
>the whole point is to 1 credit clear
The whole point of giving HP is to make it 1 life per credit. It's literally the same thing.

>>5028248
found the marxist.

challenge and learning are just so INCONVENIENT!

i.t.t

shit players hate the reality of challenge and learning so wish to redefine the landscape to suit their lowest common denominator needs and enforce it as the standard on everyone else to appease the ego.

We get it you've been conditioned by western marketing subversion to dislike anything long term investment or requiring of actual investment in favor of being adhd strickens who want the illusion of achievement and mindless subversion for a few days making you more efficient consumers but please just shut up and play some easy gay elf rpg or whatever and stfu about it.

Those of us with fortitude and higher i.qs want to enjoy challenge and the visceral feedback of genuine progression through perseverance based growth of skill.

>>5028309
Mods?

>>5028284
It's not the same thing since dying usually removes powerups abd affects score.

But more importantly there is nothing arbitrary about designing a game like that.

>>5028248
I would say it's the complete opposite. Easy games are the ones you master quickly and then get bored of. It's hard games that you can really sink your teeth in and learn.

>>5028309
>challenge and learning
Once you master/finish a challenging game why the fuck would you go back to it? Kid-friendly games have better atmosphere and are more relaxing to play. If I want to have fun without having to tryhard I'm not going to play some shit that forces you to tryhard.

>>5028319
Can you really not imagine that someone might like a challenge but also not like having their time wasted? Forcing me to replay the earlier stages I can play blindfolded isn't productive, is just a timesink.

>>5028350
>Once you master/finish a challenging game why the fuck would you go back to it?

you can never master a game so your premise is false, there's always room to go slightly faster, more perfect, score higher (in most cases anyway) it's why all the arcade shmup wrs for example have been competitively grinded at for decades, even fucking r-type got a new wr just this year, the dodonpachi doj wr took the chinese player 20k hrs of play spanning many years and can still potentially be beaten (he still plays), it comes don to what you choose to see as the ceiling. Then you have games that are just fun, i've 1 lifed AvP on hardest dips many times yet it's still fun to fire it up and do it again albeit more aggressively, more efficiently and so on.


>>5028362
>not like having their time wasted?
a ridiculous self serving subjective notion to begin with.

>>5028362
>Forcing me to replay the earlier stages I can play blindfolded isn't productive, is just a timesink.
same goes for playing a piece of music but your perspective is wrong, the performance is the WHOLE piece/game and included in that is maintaining focus in the early parts and being prepared for the harder parts, it's far easier to load up a state or whatever at a late point in the game as it removes all the stress, urgency of decision making and so on that playing in a solo sitting creates, it removes all the tension.

>>5028321
of course the leftist instinctively drives towards silencing all who says things he doesn't like, you authoritarian echo chamber degenerates are disgusting.

>>5028350
>Kid-friendly games have better atmosphere and are more relaxing to play. If I want to have fun without having to tryhard I'm not going to play some shit that forces you to tryhard.

Ok so be honest with yourself? you say it yourself you want a childish game with little challenge to hedonistically relax too, so why are you concerned with or taking part in this discussion?

Games for your relaxation low effort mindset exist, no ones taking them away. The concept of the highest ceiling or why anyone would go for it is simply alien to your outlook and i bet it expands to all your life, You are lazy, apathetic and completely ignorant to the fulfillment and benefits brough about but high effort and investment and that's fine, you're more the consumer looking to get back into that childhood safe head space and also that's fine but it means you have no real place in this discussion and through lack of experience can NEVER have any clue about the opposite.

>>5028362
Then play other games?

>>5028350
Once you've practiced a song to perfection, it's enjoyable to perform the song.

>>5028375
You know that people practicing music actually DO practice hard parts on their own sometimes, right? In fact, it's pretty common to practice all the individual parts on their own before putting it all together. It's all about practice. Arcade-style game overs exist as they do because it's a way to limit a player's ability to practice so you'll get more money out of them. Putting that mechanic into home console games is just a lazy holdover that disrespects the player's time for no reason. If you want to do a no-death run you always can.

>>5028350
>Kid-friendly games have better atmosphere and are more relaxing to play.

That's fine so long as you understand it's your personal preference. Many people play games specifically for a challenge as that's what makes them fun.

To me it's easy, kid friendly games that are wastes of time. We don't have to like the same things though.

>>5028383
>why are you concerned with or taking part in this discussion?
Because shitty extra lives are implemented in every single game in fifth generation when they shouldn't be.

>>5028629
It's your opinion that they shouldn't be.

>>5021843
Fucking babies and their handholding, tutorials, save features, passwords, etc. Kids need to learn what it's like to have to finish a game in one sitting.

*shambles away mumbling about kids getting off my lawn*

>>5028647
They don't serve a purpose. That's the whole point of the thread.

>>5028683
>posting obvious bait

>>5028548
People practice hard parts in games independently even if they have continues via level select cheats, practice modes and savestates while understanding it's not legitimate until they get a real full run. Thing is you have a naive view on this and view things like lives and continues in a vacuum where in reality they have a lot of effect on the rest of the game design. Developers have moved away from this continue and lives based model and what happened? Games lost all challenge completely, and worse still they consistently show no regard towards players who want to limit themselves to 1 life clears and such because they are designed around checkpoints with things like unskippable setpieces/cutscenes, lots of boring downtime, a lack of restoration items, no scoring and huge length (because games lack difficulty people expect a lot of content), among other things. Only problem with lives and continues is when there are no practice modes or level select cheats, but virtually all modern games with continues have them so it's a pointless complaint.

>>5028548
This

>>5028796
Games that had lives weren't challenging, just look at the entire ps1 library. Even games with a life limit let you bypass it with infinite retries and give you 3-4 free lives again.

>>5028890
>games with limited lives werent challenging because of some exceptions I found released during the fifth gen
Come on nigga. And also blatantly untrue, a lot had infinite continues which sucked but continuing also had its drawbacks like restarting levels in Castlevania, and many others put hard caps on your continues. Funnily enough these games ended up becoming notorious for their difficulty just because of the continue cap, look at Ninja Gaiden 3. You are also ignoring the main point.

>>5021843
No, but you need to use them correctly. Lives are best utilized in games like Contra or Castlevania - short (shorter than 1hr when played perfectly) super hard games that require perfection. The idea is that they force you to master every stage in the game.

In a normal game with infinite continues, you will never master a stage - you will only learn it as well as to beat it, and then you will never see it again (thanks to save or password system). But with limited lives and possibility of a real permanent game over, just because you BEAT the stage, that doesn't mean you won't see it again - if you screw up badly in a later stage, it's back to the beginning. So games with lives and permanent game overs ask player to perfect and master every stage of the game to beat it. Every hit they take reduces your chances of completing the game. That is something completely unique, and never seen otherwise.

There are other ways to create similar feeling - 1 hit deaths of Kaizo platformers, or the unique checkpoint system of Shovel Knight - but still, lives are a pretty good way of doing that.

Also of course, in easier games with infinite continues, lives are completely meaningless artifact that serves no real purpose.

>>5028696
They do serve a purpose, explained repeatedly, you just claim it's bullshit because it's not what you want out of a game.

Again, throwing a ball through a hoop 10 times in a row is an impressive challenge to complete. 10 times spread over 500 attempts isn't.

Just because you dont like a given challenge ina game doesn't make it any less valid or fun fir those who do.

>>5029031
>There are other ways to create similar feeling - 1 hit deaths of Kaizo platformers

This isn't true, platformers like Kaizo and other "precision platformers" with overabundance of checkpoints aren't anything like that. If you go with that kind of difficulty you effectively have only 2 options - remove all depth and variance from mechanics and level designs making the whole game just a matter of executing a very tight preset path, or allow your game to be trivial and beatable by sheer luck. Many aspects that come into play with lives just simply don't exist with such a system, such as risk minimization for consistency, consistency in general and risk vs reward in the case of games with indepth scoring. I play both styles a lot and the differences are very clear

>>5029043
Are we talking about pic related, or you have to fetch your basketball and run back every time

Because the running part isn't impressive.

>>5029056
It is if running for it and back is part of the particular ball throwing game and can be done more/less efficiently or straight up failed if you are lacking consistency. If early levels can't be further optimized in a game then it's a problem with the game mechanics/levels/systems, it's lacking depth. A lack of lives just makes this problem clearer.

>>5029053
I'm saying they're comparable, not the same. Both lives and "kaizo style" demand mastery of a stage from the player, in that way (and only that way) they are similar.
I prefer lives too, and for the same reason - more depth and resource managament elements - but because lives are now a dirty word in game design, "kaizo style" became more popular. Which is ironic when you think about it.

Volgarr the Viking does something similar to lives system - while there are infinite continues, originally the game had no save system of any kind, so after you quit you had to play the game from the very beginning. Eventually devs added a save system due to casual backlash, but it's obvious game isn't balanced for it - game is best played from the very beginning each time since you can carry over equipment from earlier stages, and otherwise you will be brickwalled by trying to go against challenges that are balanced to be best tackled by a max upgraded character (a'la Gradius).

And I mean, game takes about an hour and is SUPER consistent once you beat it once, so there's no real NEED for a save system.

>>5022745
I have never heard of or seen for myself any context in which a limited number of attempts at completing an entire game adds objective positive value to that game or is even widely subjectively considered as doing so.

>>5029056
Huh that part is irrelevant.
We're talking about doing it all in one go, like beating a game within a set number of lives. At this point It's getting really hard to believe you're not just acting extremely stupid just to stir up a shitstorm.

>>5022871
As early as Mega Man 2 they added a password system for game progression, which was functionally the same as infinite lives. The concept of "limited tries" began as a technological limitation and has been obsolete in home gaming ever since we had the ability to save our progress.

>>5029089
>Both lives and "kaizo style" demand mastery of a stage from the player

I disagree with this, all it demands is one good attempt. In some cases you do learn levels, but that's more of a happy accident than the expected end result of the system, because you'll get by on luck and won't be able to repeat what you did just as often. IMO, the precision platformer style is popular because it's addictive from the combination of this luck factor, and the goal being right in front of you. Roguelites are very popular these days too despite being extremely harsh because they have way more luck involved and a very strong addictive factor because of it.

I think Dustforce struck a nice balance, the levels are lengthy enough and rank system is punishing enough to force consistency. Volgarr was great too, Path of Valkyrie being a particularly smart design decision. But truth be told the perfect solution has already been found ages ago in arcade ports having practice modes. But it hasn't been accepted because people have no self control and prefer credit feeding, and because separating gameplay from practice is alien to modern players outside of competitive circles.

>>5029107
>As early as Mega Man 2 they added a password system for game progression, which was functionally the same as infinite lives.

No it's not the same as infinite lives because running out of lives in Mega Man means repeating the stage, not resetting the game. Inputting a password still makes you repeat the stage, so none of the importance of lives is diminished. Unless you mean grinding extra lives or something

>>5029114
Running out of lives in Mega Man means repeating the game, not a stage. The passwords were there so you didn't have to repeat the entire game. They were a form of saving your progress, which made the concept of limited lives obsolete. Passwords were just inefficient "saves" which are functionally unlimited tries.

More modern games like the aforementioned Super Meat Boy do away with the password and lives systems altogether and not only save your progress after each completed level but allow you to practice and repeat any given stage as many times as it takes to beat it, which is just a more efficient version of the way Mega Man 2 and onward work.

If anything "lives" are just a dick measuring contest for on-spectrum people who get super into memorizing a game.

>>5029137
Am I getting trolled or do you not actually play ANY of the games you're talking about? Mega Man doesn't restart the game if you lose your lives you dipshit, it boots you to a screen where you can press continue which either restarts the level, or boots you back to the robot master screen with all your progress kept intact. SMB system doesn't work like the one in MM and is much worse for various reasons I covered in these posts >>5029110 >>5029053 >>5028796

>>5029095
Well we just have polar opposite opinions on game design. Most classic games loose all tension with infinite lives.

>>5028908
>fifth gen
>exceptions to this rule
Not really. Games with limited continues are the exception from that point onward.
>ignoring the main point.
The main point (of the thread) is the question of lives being obsolete. No, they aren't in arcade-style games or games with the main challenge of being finished without continues. But the issue is that lives were introduced in games that not only don't need them, but also let you have effortless limitless continues anyway (or let you get infinite lives manually by backtracking) which combined with save systems completely nullify the value and the point of lives, making them nothing more than a useless gimmick. Any game which lets you save your progress is clearly not a game that should have lives, or at least it shouldn't have limited continues and should implement lives/retries better.
As for your comment on people who want a challenge, I agree that there should be a 1 life and/or 0 continue setting in games (developers are too lazy to implement this). But it's kinda hard to do this if you allow saving. I'm actually 100% for saving games when you can, since games got much longer later on and while you can expect a kid to sit in front of a console/computer 24/7 and finish it most people who aren't NEET will just not have the time. And as I'm completely against DRM and corrupting user data I personally wouldn't play a game that babysits your save files if you were to implement a hard core mode. Don't get me wrong, I'd actually just let it delete the save file and I'd be perfectly fine with that, I'm just not fine with (((cloud))) saving. There's just the issue of backing up saved files, which any idiot could do. Though this is a non-issue since the "1 life mode" is nothing but a personal challenge you're doing for a sense of achievement and I can guarantee than 90% of people who go for it wouldn't cheat, and those who do won't feel better for doing it any more than other people who cheat for completion do.

>>5029095
Then you simply don't play games much, and don't talk to people who play games much. It's been pointed out time and time again in this thread alone

>>5021859
That may be why they were created, but without them, the games were hardly games. And all game playing is purely time wasting.

>>5029095
What are you even doing on vr if you're this ignorant about games?

>>5029180
>The main point (of the thread) is the question of lives being obsolete. No
All that needs to be said honestly. Games implementing lives poorly is just a sign of developer incompetence and lack of creativity, not that the systems are obsolete. They function great when used properly, like anything else.
>As for your comment on people who want a challenge, I agree that there should be a 1 life and/or 0 continue setting in games
Well it should be a separate mode but it's not really doable in a lot of games

>>5029235
>Games implementing lives poorly is just a sign of developer incompetence and lack of creativity, not that the systems are obsolete. They function great when used properly, like anything else.

Yes. This exactly.

>>5021859
>Yes, it's purely a time-wasting mechanic created as a profit-generating scheme for arcade machines.

That's not time WASTING though. You paid to play a game, the better you are then the longer you get to play. You are the most ass backwards child I've ever seen here and that's really something.

If video games were girls, beating them within the life limit is marriage. Cheat codes is molestation, Gamesharks are rape, and Save States are chaining them up in your basement.
Don't be a Dahmer or Fritzel, guys. Please your games properly.

>>5029682
I'd rather be a rapist than a married cuck.

>>5029692
Then just be a married man instead of Billy Bob's prisontime onahole.

>>5028324
Getting hit with an HP system can take away score and lose powerups if you design it that way. It still makes no difference.

If you have infinite continues I don't have a problem.

>>5029951
Healths distinguished from lives by being variable instead discrete and simple. Why draw a lives system as health? No point if they do the same thing.

>>5029692
>I'd rather be a rapist than a married cuck.

this is what indoctrinated demoralized marxism looks like.

>>5028548
all the ports and mame have practice ability though, most of the japs now just use arcades for grinding pb/wr runs and do all practice elsewhere, that's not what we are talking about though you can practice sessions with credit feeding if must be, but you/they are talking about beating games with limitless lives and not in a single go.

>>5029971
You're arbitrarily killed when you're not actually dead. There's no point in defending one form of terrible video game logic over another.

>>5030109
Then why advocate for health? Its already used for when you want variable damage and no loss of resources besides health on hit. It's anything but arbitrary, it serves a very real function within the game. And who the fuck cares about "video game logic", we are talking function which is different between the 2 and indeed the shmups that use health reflect that, usually giving each life its own health bar while having variable damage and lower punishment for losing health vs lives.

>>5030114
Cause you're all acting like we need to respect the 'tradition' of the life format when the 'tradition' of this system is what helps makes games, especially shmups, so repetitive, uninventive and well deserving of remaining in a niche that no one cares about. Shmups are a good example of "played one, played em all" when it comes to resource management and why Super E.D.F. and U.N Squadron remains the only unique ones worth replicating with their health systems.

>>5030125
Why are they unique and worth replicating instead of, say, Guwange? Answer indepth please. You're not just a clueless shitter who never played the genre yet still thinks he has valuable insights right?

>>5027574
Roguelikes often give only one life. Die and your character is gone and you start over.

Playing with things like coming back as a different character or changing the story is some way sounds cool. Are there any games that do something like that?

>>5030131
>Guwange
>muh 90th danmaku replication
Super EDF has leveling up weapons in which you have to change the weapon in each stage instead of picking one weapon type and going through the whole game with it like always.
UN Squadron has you buying plane upgrades.
Twinkle Star Sprites is a vs. shmup with HP that was replicated with the 2 Touhou Phantasmagoria titles and this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PB9vvFPv0Wc

Exception also has an HP system:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXZY1tiKWYo

>>5030152
>replication
aka you are totally clueless and surface level with no knowledge about the game what-so-ever. There are no games that play like Guwange, it's entirely unique. The rest of your post is nonsense, how does the health bar contribute to the weapons switching vs a lives system? Radiant Silvergun and Strania do weapon switching far better than EDF and they both have a lives system. You're just shifting goalposts in a completely different direction not relevant to the topic at hand. There's also a ton of variation between game mechanics and styles of shmups. Even just talking about CAVE, Guwange, Dangun Feveron, Ketsui and Ibara play nothing alike. The difference is even greater when you compare shmups from different developers.

>>5021859
Arcades died off cause they're a filthy cesspool of little brats and unwashed cretins. They should stay dead.

>>5026441
>yeah i mean having to play the easy parts of the music first is just bad composition, just jump to the mid section
What an awful comparison. I was talking about this for a example' a platforming game that makes you play for 5 minutes before reaching a new kind of enemy. Not knowing how this enemy works and needs to be defeated, you try something and it fails, you lose a life, and the game puts you back to the start, needing to play for another 5 minutes to get to that same enemy and try something different this time.

If a game has save points but no extra lives or continues and the character dies in order to return, that implies the character has 1 life which replenishes through save point resurrection. That is still a life system. You would have to make the game have 0 lives or one, non-ending life.

Doing so would be like Tetris, a Hamtaro game or some type of game where you control a character that walks around and competes in mini games or completes objectives like Sneak King where the character doesn't actually die, whether or not there's a save system.

Unless the character's immortal, you still have a lives feature.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2zgD4d9NnQ

>>5030193
How retarded do you have to be to be able to write this as your main contribution to this topic?

Lives ARE obsolete, there are much better ways of creating a challenging experience. In Cave Story, you lose powerups when you get hit, which you need to replenish yourself. You can retry as many times as you want, and I never once felt it was too easy, in fact, it did force me to git gud in a way that I genuinely enjoyed.

>>5030206
How is that better besides that it's easy? That is just a way easier version of old school shmup checkpoints that everyone complains about, meaning that if you want to make a game more difficult than Cave Story you will end up with the same problems as the checkpoints.

Why does this topic even exist? No dev of any value comes to this shit site, so it's like having morons argue with morons over an industry that will never take you seriously and will do what it wants regardless of the whining of untalented /vr/oomers.

>>5021843
Yes, don't send me back to the start of the world because I'm having trouble with one part of one level, I want to keep trying at the part I can't beat, not the whole world

>>5030132
Rogue Legacy

>>5029951
>if you design it that way

This is the important part. Deciding to give limited lives with which to complete a game isn't an arbitrary decision.

>>5030219
How is lives difficult?

>>5030091
My point is that if you have infinite continues in a shmup so that you only ever have to restart the level and not the entire game, you don't lose any amount of quality, you only lose the game forcing you to replay earlier stages for no good reason. It also doesn't prevent 1CC runs or no-death runs.

Meanwhile, other people in this thread are suggesting that allowing infinite continues is the death of difficulty and makes those games worthless and easy. I'm just saying that the only thing infinite continues does is allow you to keep playing the level you're stuck on without having to replay all the levels you already know you can beat. Then you can eventually attempt a true 1CC run if you're looking for an extra layer of challenge.

>>5030383
I forgot to mention: I of course think that would apply to literally any game featuring lives and continues. It just allows the player's time to be respected.

>>5030385
>>5030383
Just find another hobby, dude. It's clear you're trying to force yourself to like gaming so you can rush through as much as possible. This has been such a sad thread because you keep referring to playing games as being like work. And it's totally 100% fine if you feel that way, just understand that your opinion doesn't represent many of us.

>>5030445
It's not that I'm forcing myself to like games or trying to rush through as many games as possible or any of that nonsense you're projecting onto me. But the way I see it there are two possible situations:

1. Play up to Level 7, encounter things you haven't dealt with before, die too many times, and have to go back to play through Levels 1-6 before being able to get a bit further into Level 7, dying, and having to start all over again from Level 1.

2. Play up to Level 7, encounter things you haven't dealt with before, die, restart the level repeatedly until you beat the level and keep going.

I just tend to prefer the second method overall and think it's better design that's more respectful of the player. Now, do I still go through arcade style games with the goal of 1CC? Yes, I actually do, and I find that fun. But I don't see the point in imposing that restriction on every player from the outset. Allowing infinite continues doesn't prevent me from making 1CC attempts, it just allows me to keep practicing the levels I'm stuck on without restarting the entire damn game all the time. It doesn't magically make the levels any easier, so I don't get that aspect of your argument, either.

I just don't get this weird false equivocation you seem to make where because I don't like being forced to restart a game I must hate difficulty, hate challenge, hate games, etc.

>>5030445
You think of it as rushing, I think of it as using time more efficiently and having a more fun-dense experience. You're "rushing" through the game either way, but being forced to replay the whole thing to the point where you're stuck doesn't make fucking sense and it's just a time wasting "mechanic" which I guarantee would cause many people to drop the game. Imagine if fucking Pokémon forced you to the title screen when you faint or don't beat a gym leader. Imagine if Mario kart kicked you out after you fail a single race. Imagine if crash bandicoot kicked you out to the title screen for losing all lives when you're at the final boss and you've completed 95% of the game. You have a retarded way of thinking and obviously cherry picked some games in your head where 1 life or 0 continues work fine. Well they don't work for all games, in fact they don't even work for most games especially more recent ones. See >>5029235 >>5029180
I'm all for making an achievement or another collectable if you manage to beat a game with no continues or deaths, or of limiting the number of lives per level (which is essentially hit points) but not globally enforcing them. But you shouldn't force people to finish a whole game perfectly in one sitting.

Also, not him. And also,
>opinion doesn't represent many of us.
Who's "us"? It represents the majority of people and represents plenty of people on /vr/.
>find another hobby, dude
And this just proves that you're a fucking idiot who's forcing his opinions down other people's throat, trying to make them believe that your idea of good/fun is absolute. Just stop arguing, idiot.

>>5030370
When'd I say that they are more difficult? Games that use lives generally happen to be more difficult but that's because lives were very prominent pre gen 5

>>5030383
Infinite continues did harm people's interest in arcade games because they have no self control and the games don't directly spell out that you should be 1cc'ing them. Practice modes are better because they are very explicit, no confusion over whether or not it's playing the "right way" or not.

>>5030786
I'd argue that those people probably wouldn't be all that interested in arcade games anyway and would eventually get bored doing it the long way with limited continues. They're probably also the same people who don't care about score and just want to see the end of the game. It's up to each player if they want to take on the challenge of 1CC.

>>5030949
Modern players don't even know what a 1cc is, much less understand that the games were balanced around a clear. And there is no incentive to figure it out because unlimited credits on ports.

>>5030614
>You're "rushing" through the game either way, but being forced to replay the whole thing to the point where you're stuck doesn't make fucking sense and it's just a time wasting "mechanic" which I guarantee would cause many people to drop the game.

No I'm not rushing, I am playing and enjoying myself. And as has been said repeatedly it obviously doesn't work well with all games, but some it deffinitely does.

>>5030219
It doesn't force you to redo parts that you've already completed (and therefore demonstrated your ability that you can do it), instead, it gives you increasingly harder challenges, so you always feel like you (1) have room for improvement and (2) are working toward getting better. It's quality over quantity. If you fail in the Last Cave, it's okay, it's hard, try again. If you were forced to do the previous part again after a few tries, that would not contribute to your improvement, you would still die in the Last Cave, it would be redundant and unnecessarily tedious. Getting to try it as many times as you want subtracts nothing from the satisfaction you feel after you got through. It is better to prolong the game time by having the player face more difficult challenges rather than forcing them to do something they can do over and over again.

>>5031020
>And there is no incentive to figure it out because unlimited credits on ports.
Just add "complete the game without using a continue" as an achievement in the game and people will try to do it.

>>5031056
>It doesn't force you to redo parts that you've already completed

Yes it does, it spaces out checkpoints quite far sometimes in fact such as with hell which is the only actually challenging part of Cave Story. Even Last Cave has no checkpoints (or maybe 1 somewhere in the middle, don't remember now). And despite that they are both very easy. But that has nothing to do with what we are talking about which is lives systems. Lives can be implemented in so many different ways, including ones that would make Cave Story easier and less tedious such as giving you a few lives that restart you from where you died, and only forcing you to repeat a level when you lose all of them. You guys can't even follow your own arguments really.

>If you were forced to do the previous part again after a few tries, that would not contribute to your improvement

That's wrong, it DIRECTLY contributes to your improvement. You learn how to do stages that were hard at first without getting hit, then you start going faster and faster, discovering better strategies for everything, learning how to utilize your mechanics and committing more of the game to memory which helps your consistency. It CAN make you better at future challenges, but I don't see why you would even expect that, it's retarded.

>>5031070
Hell and the Last Cave are pretty much the only parts where you don't have check points and have to improve a lot to get through, and I wouldn't call either of them easy, not on your first playthrough anyway. The reason why I brought this up is you can make the game longer by having the player grind through parts they've already done, but I see it as more desirable to have them try something they haven't done and feel their improvement directly.

>it DIRECTLY contributes to your improvement
>It CAN make you better at future challenges
It CAN, but it does not necessarily DO. The Last Cave is more difficult than pretty much any of the stages you faced before, the best way of getting better at it is by fucking doing it. If you had to do the whole level again after you died a few times, you wouldn't improve MUCH because the cave has totally different shit that you haven't done before.

>>5031094
Yeah but you would improve at the level you are doing a great deal more than you would if you just sloppily ran through it once and moved on. But anyway what does this have to do with the weapon level and health implementation system? You could have all of this with lives with the right balance of checkpoints and lives.

>>5031048
>I am playing and enjoying myself
So am I

>>5031057
And there it is. The solution to this entire debate.

>>5031057
>>5031392
Nah nobody trusts cheevos, it has to be an actual game mechanic to enforce the idea, locking tlbs endings and such behind it is a good start but there's no reason not to go the whole way and just remove continuing. As I pointed out the perfect solution is to split the game into practice mode and the actual game with the actual game blocking you from using continues. That way shitters can go to practice mode and credit feed or restart levels or whatever without having any misunderstanding about how the game actually works.

>>5030590
Not the guy you've been talking to, but I understand what you're saying as a matter of personal taste.
And I agree that it has nothing to do with difficulty.
I disagree with your use of the word "respect" as if a game is beligerently wronging players if it's based around restarting. See >>5022331 for why I enjoy games with limited tries.
(In general, I think this "respecting the player's time" meme is cancerous. It's just a pretentious way of saying "_____ isn't fun to me.")

>>5031405
>has to be an actual game mechanic to enforce the idea
Nah, nobody trusts anyone. How can I be 100% sure you actually finished it properly? Game devs should backdoor their games and continuously upload everything you do to their servers so that when you hit 100% they (and hopefully everyone else) can manually confirm you played the game legit. Maybe this should satisfy your superiority complex.
This is how retarded you sound.

>split the game into practice mode and the actual game
This is stupid as fuck. Just use difficulties at this point. Easy for infinite continues and hard for 0. Normal shouldn't be added because clearly we can't agree on what normal is since it's definitely game dependent.

>>5031427
>that ramble
What is this gibberish, I'm talking about games forcing and incentivizing certain desired playstyles, cheevos aren't trustworthy because they are always a mix of legitimate interesting challenges and dumb afterthoughts put in just for the sake of it with no real way to distinguish between the 2 other than experience. That's why they are untrustworthy compared to actual in-game rewards or outright a lack of alternatives.
>This is stupid as fuck.
Why? It works perfectly. And it's completely independent of difficulties, you can still have various difficulty modes outside of practice. Splitting continues by difficulty is just encouraging lazy thoughtless design on the part of developers.

>>5031438
What is "practice" in your head? As in you play through the whole game normally?

>>5031443
Have you never played a practice mode in a game? They're completely free level select modes that let you start on any level with any amount of lives, often even allowing you to select which checkpoint you want to start with, your power level, your starting score and other things. Credit feeding can be moved to that mode without any problems. Playing normally is playing with 1 credit either for a clear or score. It's the ideal system

>>5031509
Which retro games did this?

>>5021959
what about score attack games?

>>5031542
sonic has a lvl select code

>>5031542
Well console shmups had level select accessible through cheats like Super R-Type, saturn and dreamcast ports like Gunbird 2 had level select accessible from the get-go. Practice mode as a seperate entity only became a big thing in more modern ports of games, though there's probably a bunch of dreamcast ports that have it too that I can't remember. See PS2/360 Cave ports, M2's recent ports and a bunch of others

>>5031252
Are you really though? Because the way you talk it doesn't sound like you do. The whole notion of replaying levels feeling like a chore just makes no sense to me. I didn't buy a game so I could push through it once and then never touch it again. Carts were fucking expensive, when I bought (or buy) a game I was planning to play the shit out of it.

And sure I beat the previous levels last time, but probably not perfectly and there's always room for improvement. But the way you talk, where ever having to play something more than once is considered a chore that wastes your time... I just don't get it. How can you say you like playing video games when you're almost literally saying that you don't like playing video games. You want easy content (your words) and nothing to repeat. That doesn't really sound like games to me. Have you ever tried books? Some of them are pretty fucking awesome and it's really hard to lose.

>>5031542
When you start a game of Nemesis on the Gameboy, it presents an options screen of settings you can change. One of them is which of the 5 levels you want to start from. But you won't get the ending credits unless you play all 5 levels in a row.

In Nemesis II, they formalized it under the name "practice mode" (pic related)

>>5031509
No, this is shit.

>>5031598
>Are you really though
Yes, stop enforcing your idea of fun down everyone's throat.
>probably not perfectly and there's always room for improvement.
Which is why you can still replay the game later, as an option.
>You want easy content (your words)
>your words
Who's ass are you pulling your bullshit from
>almost literally saying that you don't like playing video games.
I'm saying I don't want to be forced to repeat a fucking game just if I get stuck at a single level.
See >>5030614. Would you be willing to replay any of these listed games when you lose near the end? And would you be perfectly okay with it?

>>5031598
>being THIS much of a neet

>>5032193
Why? Elaborate

>>5032203
Doesn't fix any of the real issues. One of which being that you can't have limited retries on games that aren't short because you simply must implement a saving feature, which is a limitless retry enabler.

>>5032209
It fixes literally every single issue you could possibly muster up.
>One of which being that you can't have limited retries
Yes you can it's called lives and checkpoints that exist regardless of credits. Have you never played Gradius? It had no continues, it had a limited amount of lives.
>games that aren't short
>saving feature
Don't give a shit about those games they have no challenge to begin with

>>5032214
>Don't give a shit about those games
>but I still argue as if I'm talking about every single game in existence
Then stop posting until you specify which genre and games you have in mind. It's already agreed that this is basically only a good idea for arcade games.
>played Gradius
Which is an arcade-style game. And it's pretty short.

>>5032225
I assumed you could follow a post chain and had basic deduction skills. I made it quite clear that I am talking about the kinds of games which use lives and continues to begin with, though arcade style doesn't mean much in the /vr/ context since that's most console games pre fifth gen

>>5032231
Not him but I also find you hard to follow at times. Anyways, lives work perfectly well in arcade and arcade style games.

>>5032254
Then you must be confusing me with some other anon because I remained consistent and stayed within the topic of arcade games. The whole discussion spun out of me talking about arcade 1cc's after all. Obviously lives, continues, scoring and hard game overs in their pure forms don't work for a lot of existing games and styles, for better or worse.

>>5032264
>Obviously lives, continues, scoring and hard game overs in their pure forms don't work for a lot of existing games and styles, for better or worse.

I agree with that, but although there are many game styles that don't work there are many that obviously do. Arcade style action games being a good example.

>>5032290
>eats random boxes
>doesn't eat the human
Is this dinosaur retarded?

>>5032295
The boxes are full of tasty goodies. Filthy humans are too gross to eat, only good for gutting.

Probably my favorite method of making every attempt matter is just showing in big numbers the amount of times you have died and having something special for players that didn't die, even if you cheat you will feel like a scrub for not getting your reward the right way, specially in internet era where you see good players constantly. It can be applied to almost any arcade game too, giving you unlimited lives but showing a massive number of deaths next to your score, didn't older games punish you by sending you back too? That can be applied as well so there is no lack of punishment.

>>5031057
>Just add "complete the game without using a continue" as an achievement in the game and people will try to do it.
Shubbels Knight did this, along with no deaths and I think no damage as well.

>>5032519
Then it's a well designed game which doesn't discriminate against 90% players.

>>5032592
Man, lives are not fucking problematic. Are you fucking deceased crab? Yoyre always whining about the stupidest shit now

>>5032596
They aren't, they're just unnecessary and obsolete.

>>5032614
They're not that either though. At all.

>>5029137
Jesus fucking christ, get off the internet kid, you must have never seen a mega man game in your life.

>>5032323
metal slug kind of did this, taking away all survivors when you die

As a default lives are pretty much useless as a mechanic, but they can have a place in some games with more serious punishment for death.

Lives are the overworld hp bar and the overworld is the boss, if you suck you start at the beginning of the boss fight

>>5031392
Acheivements solve nothing. They're analogous to extra challenge modes or personal challenges in older games, extra content to do if you like the game, not the game itself. No dev is gonna balance their game around funneling players towards getting an achievement like that, meaning it's not the intended way for most people to play the game. It's just a crutch for devs to not need to put any challenge into their main game because "if you want to have fun do the extra stuff lol", which is even more disrespectful to my time ESPECIALLY if you need to beat the main game to unlock it. Why should I need to play it twice in order to have beaten it once?
Maybe I'm more casual about these things, but if I don't love the game I'm not gonna put in more work than it requires to beat it, same as not getting 100% of all the collectables in a collectathon.

>>5034495
Achievements don't discriminate against people who aren't NEET, so at least they're better than no continues+no saves.

>>5034605
>You have to be NEET to beat a video game

>>5034607
You do if it's a long game and it forces you to beat it """fair""" in a single sitting which is something that some retard in this thread wants.

>>5035337
You're being a real noodle wristed bitch about this.

>>5034495
>Maybe I'm more casual about these things, but if I don't love the game I'm not gonna put in more work than it requires to beat it

If you don't love a game why are you putting in the time to beat it? That's where the wasting comes in.

>>5035337
Anything you can beat in a single sitting isn't a very long game. What are you even on about at this point?

>>5036550
"Sitting" isn't a unit of measurement. Just because you CAN sit in front of a game for 8 hours and beat it doesn't mean everyone will do so. There's a difference between a game lasting less than an hour and a half and lasting over 2 hours.
>Anything you can beat in a single sitting isn't a very long game.
Nobody said this anyway, why are you confused? The whole argument is about lives being obsolete in games with save systems and most games just having lives for the sake of having them and doing nothing with them as a game mechanic. It's one thing to have a life limit in a "stage rush" game like pang, but having it in crash or mario 64 is retarded, especially since they have infinite continues AND a save system. Smash bros, for example, has limitless continues and just halves your score after each continue, which I guess is fine for games that rely on score but the game should either STOP when you lose all lives or not have lives at all.

I'm not exactly in love with extra lives as a mechanic, but what's with all the slackjawed faggots around here?

>>5036835
Obviously I didn't mean an 8 hour game. God damn why do you act like such an idiot over everything?

Lives aren't obsolete in the right kinds of games. Listing off kinds of games they don't work well in won't ever change that.

>>5037052
/vr/ steadily getting worse. More and more youngfags are coming here, I mean fuck did you see the thread about someone talking about super Mario Bros is impossible without save states?

>>5037052
>>5038367
It's almost all one guy who is extremely dim witted and probably on the spectrum.

>>5038371
I'm the guy who originally posted >>5021859 and I haven't posted anything in this thread for a few days now. So no, it's not just me.

>>5038371
Possibly. I just wish I didn't see so many terrible posts on this board, it used to be a lot better a few years back.
But to stay on topic, lives can be good depending on the game, even to this day, to think it's completely outdated is asinine, or possibly just the bad opinion of a complete weenie.

>>5038393
Well congrats, there's more than onr turbo retard on the board. I'd still be shocked if one of you wasn't also responsible for the Super Mario 1 thread that's been mostly the same infantile bitching.

>>5038367
>Mario Bros is impossible without save states?
This is exactly why you don't see Mario speedruns. Oh wait..

>>5035749
Because I like it. There's a difference between like and love. I love DKC2, I like DKC1. I've 102%'d DKC2, but never 101%'d DKC1. I beat both all the time, but I don't go too far out of my way for bonuses in DKC1 unless I need lives.

>>5029156
Exactly. The consequence for losing all your lives in MegaMan is having to start from the beginning of the level rather than the most recent checkpoint. So extra lives aren't worthless from a gameplay standpoint but the system also doesn't require starting over from the beginning of the game every time.

Although, Mega Man is definitely a game that can be beaten in one sitting and the way you can choose multiple paths through the game encourages multiple playthroughs from the beginning.

>>5041004
Megaman is very nice and flexible like that.

>>5021843
They've always been obsolete if you like to nodeath games. But the answer is obviously yes. How many recently released games have a traditional lives system in them?

>>5021843
your life is an obsolete feature

>>5041004
That doesn't make using lives in a game obsolete though.

>>5041004
Megaman butchers it by having randomly dropping lives, such a dumb system

>>5041814
Why? They aren't a huge deal, again when you run out of lives you just have to start from the beginning of the level.

The only time it's really a problem is when there's a place to easily cheese infinite 1-ups.

>>5041784
never said it did

>>5041861
>The only time it's really a problem is when there's a place to easily cheese infinite 1-ups.
Ah, memories of switching to Leaf Shield on MM2's Wily Stage 1 near the birds and taping down the fire button while I go eat dinner.

>>5041453
If that's the criteria then quality must be an outdated feature too.

>>5042360
>quality has always been an outdated feature
Your comment doesn't really work in response to that post.

>>5042389
It does. If lives are outdated because they're no longer used, then so must being a good, quality game, because that's also no longer being made.

>>5042391
>If lives are outdated because they're no longer used
Well that is what outdated means, yes

>>5042395
Link the concepts anon, you can do it.

>>5042396
Okay. How about "false equivalence"?

>>5042409
Then lives being outdated is not provable with modern games not using them because the fact that the games aren't of the quality one would expect of a video game in general proves the exact opposite more than it does anything else.

>>5041861
The part of the problem is that I ran around with 6+ lives not because I did something to earn them but because I got lucky with drops. It's a dumb system that misses a big positive aspect of lives which is that you can EARN extra ones by various means that have more risk attached

>>5042440
You can do that, too. There are extra lives hidden in specific locations. There's nothing wrong with an RNG that is friendly sometimes, especially with such a minor aspect of the game as free lives.

>>5042423
Lives became an outdated system once the world was no longer interested in playing games that had them. Games without them were introduced and people kept playing them, even preferring them. That's what makes them outdated.

A lives system doesn't really feel necessary with newer games; it didn't even feel necessary with early 2000's games. Max Payne doesn't have a lives system and there's no need for it to have one, for example. It is a fantastic game despite this. Once games got closer to being full fledged simulations, lives adopted an uncanny quality.

>>5021861
Sonic fan here, fuck lives. There’s no way I could’ve beaten ristar without abusing save states

>>5042901
Max Payne could use a lives system, 3 wouldn't be the abomination it was if it was designed with constant level restarts in mind

>>5042957
>Max Payne could use a lives system,
Absolutely not. There was no deficiency in the design that a lives system would have fixed.

>>5042959
You mean ignoring huge as fuck load times and unskippable cutscenes? Those simply wouldn't make it past the conceptual stage of development if 3 was a lives based game. Hell even the first 2 games had this, I doubt the escort or sniper sections would make it in had it not been for quick saves.

>>5042957
>>5042970
I haven't played 2 or 3 but if you wanted a live systems for 1, you just sucked at the game. Even with level restarts that game isn't THAT hard.

>>5042983
I've done multiple no damage and no death runs of the game anon, which is why the moments where it wastes my time stuck out so much. It has nothing to do with difficulty. 1 has a bunch, less than 2 and far far less than 3 but still, sections where you stand around and wait for a helicopter to stop shooting, escort missions, long elevator rides, that slow part where you shoot the sniper rifle in the dock and other stuff. They knew that you could just save right after them so they didn't care. If you couldn't do that they would definitely remove that shit, anybody playtesting would complain very quickly.

>>5043007
The only section I can think of that really bothered me like that was the sniper section in the dock. Everything else, I think that's just you. Brief pauses in between action isn't a bad thing; it builds suspense for the action, and also makes the experience overall more relaxing, which is something most people appreciate, considering video games are a pastime.

Also, you're missing the bigger picture here. Lives became an uncanny element in game design. Once 3D became realistic and detailed enough, the idea of having "lives" became cartoonish. People preferred quick saves or frequent checkpoints, because those things didn't get in the way of immersion as much. I'm also not entirely convinced that MP1 wasn't designed with level restarts in mind, due to my above reasoning and also because overall, the levels are still balanced really well for this style of play. Another example here might be Halo, which came out the same year, actually had the option to restart a level in the pause menu, and didn't have a lives system either. Plus, a lot of games around this time tended to have rooms or sections that were a bit drawn out, and a factor in this was probably time and resources; creating 3D assets wasn't as easy, so longevity was achieved by drawing out the usage of the ones you already had, by making slower or more repetitive parts in stage progression.

>>5042970
>You mean ignoring huge as fuck load times and unskippable cutscenes?
No, what I mean is what I said: None of the existing flaws would have been fixed by a lives system, including those two.

>>5043018
It's a bad thing because it removes player agency sacrificing gameplay for cinematic elements which is a massive problem of modern games. Lives are good because they hold back developers from bringing this cancer in. Max Payne is a weird case like a lot of games of the time period. It's indirectly inspired by console games which Wolf 3D and early shooters emulated, which themselves were born out of attempts to emulate arcade games, so you have this weird mix of pure gameplay and heavy cinematic elements. The fact that it's playable with level restarts is exactly because of these roots, even if some elements like lives were removed. The game even has an arcade like rank system too. Once the influence waned though, the series took a step towards cinematics and story over gameplay. Max Payne 3 is sadly the logical conclusion to this, a 50/50 split of gameplay and cutscene. It's pretty disgraceful. Lives are "outdated" sure but that's very much a negative.

>>5043023
Are you looking at a lives system in isolation from the rest of the game? That is a nonsensical perspective, every game is built around its punishment system with things being tweaked and changed accordingly. A game like MP3 with level restarts simply would not make it past playtesters, if it even got that far.

>>5043037
>Are you looking at a lives system in isolation from the rest of the game?
No, I just think it's a weird suggestion to make when thinking about fixing a game's shortcomings. Why go about it in such an indirect, fundamentally game-changing way when all you actually want to achieve is to shorten the load times and make the cutscenes skippable? You can do this directly. No use for a lives system. No need for this to fix those shortcomings.

>>5043042
Because lives nearly force all of this and many more very good design decisions like thinking of levels as full levels that have to flow rather than as a series of arenas connected by cutscenes like it is in MP3. It's preventing a problem from existing rather than putting a band and on bad design

>>5043030
>Lives are good because they hold back developers from bringing this cancer in.
I see no reason for thinking this. If anything, it'd be more reasonable to assert that once 3D graphics and physics became more realistic, people simply wanted games to become more like cinematic simulations rather than just stay as games. Also, imo those games in the early 2000's had the best balance so far. They aren't weird, they were perfect.

>>5042901
>Lives became an outdated system once the world was no longer interested in playing games that had them. Games without them were introduced and people kept playing them, even preferring them. That's what makes them outdated.

Wuality became outdated once the world was no longer interested in playing games that had it. Games without it were introduced and people keep playing them, even now preferring them. That's what makes quality outdated.
I don't see the problem?

>>5043391
The cancer runs deeper yes I agree with that, but forcing lives by itself WOULD fix a lot. As I already said, if a game is made in such a way where you are sent all the way back when you die a couple of times, these long stretches of robbing player agency will stick out like a sore thumb to both developers and playtesters because they are unfun wastes of time. This adds a very strong incentive for both removal and not including them to begin with. Early 00's were ok but they were all about compromise, it's the last period of arcade game influence being prominent but the games were starting to become polluted with every problem you see in modern gaming, and seeing pure experiences as lesser and to be "compensated for" with story, immersion and unlocks. Even in the late 90's you had Half Life and Unreal setting the tone for what's to come.

>>5043991
I don't see why you're defending lives still when games like Max Payne and Halo are honestly more fun than any game that has lives in it. And what is more important to games than fun?

>>5044012
I love Max Payne 1 but it can't hold a candle to many classic run and guns like the better Contra games, Rolling Thunder 2 and others in terms of fun gameplay. It's also only good on accident, the mechanics featured the most by developers and remembered the most (shoot dodges and bullet time) are also fucking useless and contribute practically nothing to the fun of the game. You can see that the developers didn't understand what made it fun because they removed all of it from Max Payne 2. And 3 is the logical conclusion to this cinematics-obsessed mentality. You are right though that the decline of lives systems is the end result of the mentality that was birthed by tech advanced though, and it's sad because this design mentality is shit.

>>5044025
>It's also only good on accident, the mechanics featured the most by developers and remembered the most (shoot dodges and bullet time) are also fucking useless and contribute practically nothing to the fun of the game.
All of my what. Without the bullet time and dodge mechanic, it wouldn't be the same game at all. The game wouldn't work as it is. You can trace each bullet coming at you perfectly, enemy placement is exact, and you recharge your bullet time gauge with kills. The game is designed to encourage you to take out rooms of enemies in as few maneuvers as you can, just one if you're able, without getting hit. And that's what makes it incredibly fun.

>You can see that the developers didn't understand what made it fun because they removed all of it from Max Payne 2.
Although I haven't played it, you may have a point here. But I can forgive it considering the first game is as good as it is. And I find it hard to believe that something that good was good on accident.

>>5044062
What dodge mechanic? There is only 1 dodge mechanic that matters in the game, it is the space bar roll. Shoot dodging is a waste of time and (usually) health because it is slow, requires too much leading and has over a second of recovery. It is not only useless, using it frequently is detrimental because it makes the game both slower and harder. Rolling isn't like this, it has invincibility frames, is fast, doesn't slow down the game and has almost immediate recovery. It's by far the most useful mechanic in the entire game. Bullet time is a bit more useful but the game is beatable and even more fun without it because it's so fast paced. If you remove the slow moving bullets that you can dodge with strafing and roll dodge the game will be shitty and won't allow for running and gunning without taking damage. If you remove shoot dodge the game will stay just as fun if not more so because people won't be tricked into using it by the game's advertising. If you remove bullet time the game just gets a bit harder. Max Payne 2 kept the bullet time and shoot dodge but it didn't keep the slow bullet travel time or roll invincibility, meaning you can't dodge bullets without slow mo abuse. That's another thing a heavy punishment system tends to help with, if you can only take one or two hits before dying the developers have to make sure you can avoid everything.

>>5044093
>That's another thing a heavy punishment system tends to help with, if you can only take one or two hits before dying the developers have to make sure you can avoid everything.
But you can still do that, in this game and plenty others without lives, so what's your point?

What are you suggesting, really? That a game like Max Payne have lives, and when you run out, you start the whole game over? But it's not an arcade game, it's much longer than one, so that wouldn't be fun at all. Restart the whole level when you run out? But you can already play it that way if you'd like, you can even restart the level when you die just once. Would you prefer games just be made shorter so it's not annoying when the whole game restarts upon losing all your lives? Then you can't have as many environments, more complex stories, OR more complex games for that matter (there are way more subsystems in a modern open world game than there are in any arcade game, for example). You basically want games to just stay as digital toys then. That's fine if that's what you want, I guess. But you should have plenty of those types of games already to play.

>>5044112
That kind of design has become very rare as lives and continues stopped being used. Especially in any kind of shooters, Max Payne is one of the very few that lets you dodge everything, even Vanquish doesn't. Meanwhile if you look back at arcade and console action games nearly every single notable game allowed you to dodge everything if you are skilled enough, even ones with health bars. The influence and incentives were simply in the right place. Restarting a whole game would be a bit too extreme for Max Payne but limiting health and forcing level restarts would absolutely prevent 2 and 3 from being such regressions. Though it is doable, the game is split into 3 episodes each one being about 40 minutes long, the length of the average arcade beat em up. I'm also speaking strictly about action games, adventure strategy and rpgs rarely used lives to begin with. But yes in my opinion such an approach makes for the best action games by far, though going back to it isn't going to happen sadly because the tech limitations aren't there. Best you can hope for is for smaller devs to keep the style sort of alive.

>>5042949
>There’s no way I could’ve beaten ristar without abusing save states
So in other words, you've never beaten Ristar?

>>5044012
>games like Max Payne and Halo are honestly more fun than any game that has lives in it.
Max Payne is fun but nowhere near this suppsoed greatness, and Halo was shit without it's Multiplayer which has no place in this kind of discussion.

>>5042949
is this a troll? ristars not hard to begin with you braindead millenial scum

>>5044231
You sound like you just want to press some buttons and see on-screen numbers change and call it day. Not everyone is satisfied with that alone though.

>>5044257
How did you make that jump? Are you honestly saying that anyone who enjoys older action games is a brainlet or something?

>>5044258
>How did you make that jump?
I'm just assuming that you only like older games based on that statement of yours. Indie games don't count as new ones btw. But if I'm wrong, I'm wrong.

>>5044257
But I don't play RPG's

>>5021859
You're wrong. Lives are a way of essentially creating limited autosaves for a short game. When losing all your lives and restarting the game meant losing 30 minutes of time, it wasn't that large of an investment, compared to lets say, 3 hours of progress.

That's not to say that longer games can't have lives, but they need to have a failsafe in case the player loses all their lives, such as saving at specific points, so they can't abuse the save feature and game the system, while keeping the threat of lives a very real threat.

Generally, without lives, the only penalty a gamer has to lose is their time instead of their progress. Video games become less about skillful play and more about endurance and rote memorization.

Some games like Doom circumvent this by eschewing lives but keeping a loss of progress upon death, losing your arsenal and starting from the beginning of the level. It's not the equivalent of lives, but it's a large enough set-back to keep the fear of death instilled in the player.

>>5044261
>Older games are only changing numbers

>>5044261
What's there to like even as far as modern AAA action games go? Doom 4, Bayonetta 2 and maybe DMC5 if that won't be shit? That's all I can think of

>>5044270
They're not, but you kinda make them into that, plus pressing buttons, when you renounce new games in favor of them. People who did see more in them, like I did, who already enjoyed the adventurous side of them (i.e., the side driven by more detailed graphics and narratives), and who saw the potential for true virtual reality in them, typically went on to still find many enjoyable games as time went on and we went through the 2000s and even the 2010s, at least as far as I'm concerned.

>>5044282
You really read that wrong if you read it as "ALL NEW GAMES SUCK" or something. You mentioned two specific games and said they were better than e very game with lives, which I vehemently disagree with not because those games are new, but because they're not as enjoyable to play as many other games that have lives in them (and some that don't, too). It'd be like if I said something like Nier Automata (probably my favorite overall game at this point) was better than every game that didn't have cutscenes or something.

>>5044282
>They're not, but you kinda make them into that, plus pressing buttons, when you renounce new games in favor of them.
What? That doesn't make sense on any level, unless you think engagement with game mechanics and gameplay over story, "atmosphere" and aesthetics somehow boils down to "just pressing buttons and watching numbers increment" which is a very dumb view on games that misses their point

>>5044285
Fair enough.

>>5044293
The only reason I can imagine for renouncing newer games (i.e. non-/vr/ games) for old ones is that you praise mechanical gameplay over everything else, since older games only do mechanical gameplay better than newer games on average.

>>5044295
Well yeah obviously, but game mechanics aren't just "pressing buttons to watch numbers change", it's ridiculous to suggest this. It's just treating games as games, not escapist simulators or movies

>>5044306
>game mechanics aren't just "pressing buttons to watch numbers change"
They are if that's all you want from them, which I suspect a person does when they think older games are by and large way better than all new games.

>It's just treating games as games, not escapist simulators or movies
Well, that's the thing. Video games don't have to just be games. Since they have an audiovisual component to them, they can be a lot more than just games. There's really nothing adventurous about a game like Space Invaders or Tetris, after you've played it for some time, and especially after you've played something that has come out since then, that has much more detailed worlds to go through.

>>5044314
And yet, a ton of people still play Space Invaders or Tetris (or even stuff that isn't just arcade score-mongering like SMB or Sonic or the like) while LSD and Gone Home and the ilk fade away very quickly and only get played by Youtubers nowdays.

>>5044314
Boiling down a focus on mechanics to "watching numbers change" is just completely retarded, for a start scoring which I guess you're referring to is just an easy way to encourage and represent a certain type of gameplay developers want from the player usually involving a lot of discovery and risk taking which demands a lot of focus, concentration and long-term engagement.

>Video games don't have to just be games
They don't but they are an active medium so they have to value the player's agency above all else or else the non-game elements overwhelm the games themselves. Ditching abstractions like numbers and text describing events in favor of characters that smoothly animate and communicate more info to you quicker and more intuitively is good. Wasting the player's time on cutscenes, cinematic pacing and other nonsense borrowed from other mediums is not.

Also what's the point of going through detailed worlds if your engagement with them is low and passive? I've already seen so many game worlds that the novelty wore off, and without novelty there's nothing left but cookie cutter thoughtlessly put together game mechanics, low amount of fun for the time you spend playing, and game design that treats the player like a moron. Waste of a medium.

>>5044267
>Generally, without lives, the only penalty a gamer has to lose is their time instead of their progress. Video games become less about skillful play and more about endurance and rote memorization.

But that's the opposite. Older arcade games are about endurance and memorization. They'll even have things like enemies that shoot from off-screen or that can spawn on top of you and the only way to avoid it is to know in advance that it will happen or to just luckily be out of the way already. As games progressed and shed lives systems and adopted save systems they became more about skill. Memorization becomes a lot less difficult if you can just play the same level repeatedly, so the developers have to implement skill-based challenges that test your ability to actually execute the solution.

Just look at Super Mario Bros versus Super Mario World. In SMB, the best way to beat the game is to have the levels all memorized and just know when to jump and where so you can run through it without getting hit. In SMW, there are secrets and stages that you have to actually use a technique to beat, like using the cape parachute to hover a far distance. You might know that you need to use the cape to get from Point A to Point B, but actually DOING it requires practice and timing.

The idea that games have become more about memorization now than they were in the arcade days is laughable. Games only became more about skill and execution over time, even aside from lives systems.

>>5044621
Nah thats wrong virtually all arcade games are all about execution with memorization being the easy part, you simply wont get something on the level of a Psikyo 2 ALL nowadays even if you include those garbage precision platformers like Super Meat Boy. Also memorization is how you get good at any game thats not distinct from skill but merely a subset, so youre both dumb

>>5044012
Halo was always extremely mediocre, I'll take Rise Of The Triad over that shit any day of the week.

>>5044323
>Boiling down a focus on mechanics to "watching numbers change" is just completely retarded
I agree, but like I said, that's what YOU are doing, not me, when you claim that older games are overall better than newer ones, since like I said, that really only means that you praise mechanical gameplay over everything else, and mechanical gameplay consists of just the hard 1s and 0s.

>Also what's the point of going through detailed worlds if your engagement with them is low and passive?
None, but it's not like all new games are walking sims. The games we've been talking about aren't.

>>5044790
Why do you think so?

>>5044323
>Wasting the player's time on cutscenes, cinematic pacing and other nonsense borrowed from other mediums is not.
Only if handled badly. Which most devs do.

>>5044871
Because Rise Of The Triad is really fun, it plays like an arcade shootemup but from the first person perspective, you have lots of weird and unusual powerups (and powerdowns) that flips the gameplay on its head, not to mention all kinds of traps and gauntlets to pass, and secrets all over the place.
The graphics are photorealistic digitized ones, with live actors, but the action and gore of the game is absolutely, positively balls to the walls, an exploding guard might flip you the bird with his severed hand as it goes flying, one mook may send two severed heads flying among all his gibs, and roasting enemies with the flamewall turns them into a skeleton, collapsing with xylophone noises.
The weapons range from infinite ammo machineguns, to countless flavors of rocketlaunchers, magic staffs, and the Excalibat, which besides how it can be just swung against enemies to either gib them or send them flying into the sky, also lets loose a horizontal volley of exploding baseballs, sure to decimate swathes of enemies in particularly gory fashion.
There's dozens of player characters for the player to choose from, all with different stats and appearances.

It's fast, it's fun, it has a lot of character, it has a wonderful pumping soundtrack, it just barely takes itself seriously. It even has the lead dev in costume and makeup to play the final boss.
Halo doesn't have even half of the character of Rise Of The Triad.

>>5044906
It sounds fun, I'll have to try it. But you're aware that not everyone cares all that much for borderline wacky balls to the walls stuff, right? I mean, it sounds like it caters to an entirely different kind of person than a game like Halo does, which makes it weird to compare the amount of character they each have.