Topic: Lives System

I never thought of that - if they got rid of lives, one of the most iconic Mario sound effects, 1-Ups, could become irrelevant. Or I guess they could find another use for it for nostalgia, but really... either way, it is true about the lives in multiplayer Marios being less obsolete, especially with less experienced players. Even without a shared life pool, I have lost quite a few lives when playing with my less platformer savvy friends, due to things like collisions - and I've seen them run out of lives plenty (with the game counting their game overs and tossing them five more lives). With shared life pools, playing with these friends adds a new challenge: earning lives at a rate that outweighs their deaths (which becomes harder in later levels, where their deaths accelerate and the number of easy lives decrease).

Still, playing on my own where I can rely on my own experience with platformers and don't have to avoid friendly collisions, I see how superfluous lives have become. As mentioned, Rayman Origins/Legends successfully maintains challenge without a lives system, and Shovel Knight is an excellent example of how to add a punishment for death without lives. Still, Game Over screens nowadays either serve to simply tell players they're dying too much or take them back a few stages. Lives primarily existed so arcade players had to keep paying for their gaming session, and without that they're either pointless or frustrating (depending on the punishment they may come with). Some games, like Mario, seem to have lives out of tradition and it's hard to imagine them not having lives. Sadly, this will likely carry into smartphone style games now, requiring players to pay for lives to avoid waiting an arbitrary amount of time for them to replenish (which by some irony nearly takes it full circle back to arcade games, making them relevant again). Still, I welcome games that avoid using lives, I feel like it's a rather lazy way of adding challenges or, if lives are easy to get, completely pointless.