Get A Life
This week, Anthony John Agnello made a case for eliminating extra lives from games, that once-ubiquitous convention of having multiple tries at a stage before a “Game Over” and a major setback. The games that still use this system, he argued, would be better off without them, focusing on their actual challenges rather than implementing an arbitrary barrier that just drags the whole thing out. Other games, like the newest Mario adventures, just throw lives around willy-nilly, rendering them little more than collectibles and nostalgia fodder. Down in the comments, jakeoti provided an example of an old game that was definitely made worse by tacking on extra lives and a newer one that played with failure in an interesting way:
For an early and good example of how extra lives hurt games, look at Zelda II: The Adventure Of Link. That game gained absolutely nothing but copious amounts of frustration from its terrible extra life system. It was already a tedious slog in a lot of ways, but having to go all the way back across the map from the start if you died one too many times in a temple was frustrating. The only good to come of it was the iconic Game Over screen.
One of the best alternatives to extra lives is the Fiend’s Cauldron used in Kid Icarus Uprising and brought back for the singleplayer in the latest Smash Bros. games. For those not in the know, at the start of every stage in Uprising, you devote money to the Fiend’s Cauldron to raise the difficulty level. The more money you put in, the more brutal the level will be, but you also earn more money, better weapons, and certain achievements. But if you die in the level, the cauldron will dump out a bunch of the hearts you invested and lower the difficulty. It feels like the game is mocking you for losing, telling you “It’s okay, we’ll just make it easier for you.” Some of the challenges call for you to beat levels on the highest difficulty, meaning that not only do you have to make it through the brutality of a Level 9 stage but you also have to do it, in theory, on one life. At the same time, if you’re just trying to play the game for fun or the story, it’s not going to hurt too much if you lose.
And Unexpected Dave points out that many of the hardest old games are grueling challenges even when you use modern technology to remove the consequences of losing all your lives and might be more fondly remembered had they taken a different approach:
It’s interesting to play old games on different platforms and see which ones are still fun and challenging when you take away the limited lives. Playing an arcade beat-em-up with “infinite quarters” tends to feel really sloppy, as you just power through any challenge that ostensibly requires practice and skill. A lot of NES games, on the other hand, are still very difficult even with infinite lives. Battletoads, for example, is not a game you can simply power through. The checkpoints are set up in such a way that you need to learn how to beat several obstacles in succession. If Battletoads had infinite lives, or even just infinite continues like a Mega Man game, we would be calling it “brutal but fair” rather than simply “brutal.”
Venerable Monk posited that perhaps the answer lies in changing the ways players are punished for failure, and provided a few recent examples of games where it’s fun to lose:
Recently I’ve found that there are games that make failure something to be enjoyed in its own right, rather than merely a barrier to progress. By some cosmic magic, my best examples both happen to be space exploration games. Affordable Space Adventures for the Wii U has an interesting two-stage failure system that had my partner and I laughing out loud when we’d inevitably fail.
The short version goes like this: It is certainly possible to wreck your ship, forcing the game to respawn you back at a checkpoint. But there’s also failure states that don’t permanently damage the ship. Early on in the game, it’s possible to fly too close to some storm clouds and be struck by lightning. Instead of exploding and respawning somewhere else, all of your ship’s systems die and it drops out of the sky like a rock.
Once your ship hits the ground, it has to go through a reboot cycle that’s displayed on the Wii U’s gamepad screen, and the operator has to restart the engine and all the control systems by hand with a few taps of the screen. Dropping out of the sky like that never lost its humor, probably because it was totally our fault for flying into a storm cloud, and because you don’t lose any progress at all (unless you fall through a laser beam or something, which is even funnier).