Topic: Lives System

You know, i was pondering this when i replayed Super Mario 3d Land and saw how many lives i had left, which is over 200. I was wondering your opinion on the life system. Do you think it is an old pointless relic, or do you still see some importance in it?

It's actually a problem with Nintendo...they overdo it with the extra lives.

It's only important when the lives actually have some value. Nintendo games nowadays seem to have completely devalued lives in the name of making games more accessible to everyone. Mario is basically immortal at this point. I wonder if the folks making Nintendo games think they're wasting their time when they design their game over screens. "No one's going to see it anyway"

They should have on future Mario game give an error screen if you ever get a game over. xD
"Error 404: Game Over not found."

I am error

Lives are getting more and more irrelevant. A few games have found great ways to punish death while still giving players infinite lives - some good examples are Shovel Knight and Elliot Quest.

Yeah, lives are kind of obsolete in design these days.

Basicly it harkens back to the old NES days when games were tougher. Nowadays if a game doesn't have infinite health or check points people complain that it's to difficult and the game gets a bad rap. I guess some habits are hard for Nintendo to break.

Arcade-style games like Woah Dave! and shoot-'em-ups still need lives. But as for the Mario games, they provide at least a theoretical incentive to collect coins. Plus they can show you how many tries you've been taking on levels without being a permanent death counter (I don't like those). And without one-ups, there'd be no one-up sound.

Some people actually do get game over anyway. It just feels unattainable to us who've been playing these Mario games for so long already. The shared pool of lives in 3D World can drain due to an inexperienced participant or other such multiplayer mayhem.

I think it's interesting that From Software has been around for a couple decades, but just hit mainstream recently with the success of their old school throwbacks to brutally challenging games. Now Bloodborne is being called the PS4's first must-have exclusive.

I honestly think lives and game overs are a thing of the past and really don't provide anything to the game. I like the way Rayman Origins and Rayman Legends did it, where you can still die and the game is still challenging, but there are no lives or game overs to worry about.

The point of lives in Super Mario 3D Land as far as I can tell was to see if you could accumulate as many as possible in the regular stages to cover all of your deaths in the special stages.

yesterday and today, I used my kids 3 amiibo's to get 5 extra lives a day on Captain Toad ... so yeah, a bit pointless these days...

Pretty soon all Nintendo games will eventually come with one of these in the box

Lives in games, or buying an amiibo?

If you're not putting quarters into an arcade machine, there's no point to having a lives system.

Just wait until they get to the very last stage. All of those lives will disappear quickly unless they make progress in it

I also want to point out that even if you lose all your lives, you're not punished any more than losing just one of them. The lives system is quite superficial and pointless.

Wanting to bump this up because i've been playing Rayman origins. this game is pretty good and it doesn't even use the life system at all. It actually make me think the live system is needless.

They can be a real pain in the ass with 2D games, when you are forced to the last save point when you run out.

A lives system can be pointless (as seen in most recent Nintendo games because of how many you get/lack of challenge in proportion to the lives you have) now, but it has worked before. When given minimal lives (or a bunch of lives and a lot of challenge to go through), it can really make you feel pressured by the game or, in the case of older games, have you see how far you can get/making the game actually challenging.

If you're going to give out hundreds of lives only to never have anything that poses even the slightest danger to losing them, then you're better off without having a lives system and instead, limited attempts.