Lives, Do they have a place in modern gaming?

There are good arguments for both sides.
Lives can interfere with the more story driven games we get nowadays. But can a game ever truly be a challenge if you can replay everything?

It depends on the type of game really. A platformer should always have lives, an RPG should never have lives, and then you get some in the middle.

You can't have a life AND play videogames.

Oh right, those lives.

Yeah I think they're good, in the right game, some shouldn't have lives though.

Mariobro took the words right out of my mouth.

Some games, sure.

But for most games nowadays, probably not.

I agree that it usually depends on the genre, where platform games expect the player to die once in a while because of obstacles, and being given another chance to avoid the obstacle through a lives system only makes sense.

In more story driven games, I think lives are unnecessary, because player progression is contingent upon the use of "save points." So in a way, it's like having an unlimited amount of lives - making it pointless.

Which was the last game you played that has lives and made good use of them?
The last of these that I remember would be on the N64.

Nowadays games either have no lives at all, or so many that it's as good as if they weren't there (SMG, NSMB).

Lives only make sense in arcade games where you need to reach a high-score.
Everyhwere else they are not necessary.

well, not sure if this helps the argument, but Sonic games didn't do that.

Probably Mario Galaxy.
But even then you got a WHOLE lot of lives.

If I had to make a guess, even though I haven't played the game, I'd guess Contra 4 might have them. Since Contra is a game that would use them well.

One (or few) hit kill games usually have lives while games that utilize health (zelda, rpgs, modern castlevanias, etc) don't use them because they expect the player to keep him/herself alive longer or replenish the health.

This post has been edited by Littlink on Feb 23 2009, 12:35 PM

Persona 3 and 4 are good examples of Lives in an RPG.

As mariobro said, Lives are a good concept in platformers (so if you screw up, you can retry it), though personally I'm not sure about RPGs unless you mean practically being able to skip your way through a game by taking note of narrow mistakes, or with your last save point being your 'life'.

Persona 3/4 have it so you get 10 lives on easy mode, because on any other difficulty if your main character dies(not your whole party) it's a game over.

On easy, you get 10 "guards" for your character.

For most platformers they are unnecessary, since when you get a game over, all it does it start you from where you just were.

Yet for some reason many people still fear the Game Over.

We need that "restart" back. ):

I always had this idea for a brutally difficult metroid-esque game where basically

you start the game with like 5 lives
you die in one hit
there is no way to replenish lives


okay go kick some ass


The whole game would, of course, only be about an hour long but I think it could be addictive as hell if done right
especially for niche players who don't mind quite a bit of punishment :>

Metroid-Slug-Vania

this was my thought exactly but I wanted it to feel like a survival horror in some cases


then again it's really hard to do horror in 3-D

They're fine in platformers except for Sonic Unleashed. In one Werehog stage, you have to traverse a really thin platform. WITH SPIKES. And one or two small platforms to save yourself on.

It could be more psychological horror than zombies.