Infinite lives

Wednesday 17 Jan 2007

So I’ve been wondering about something lately. Do you remember, those who are old enough, when you used to start a game from the beginning and play it as far as you could get before you died? Arcade games were like that, so were console and PC games - games like Super Mario Bros, Lode Runner, Centipede, Pac-Man, you name it. So they had a concept called lives, where after a certain score or level or after collecting enough coins, you earned yourself an extra one. If you died (usually in one touch, what’s this thing called health and why would we want that in our game?) you lost a life, and started again from the beginning of that stage.

Now, the reason I bring this up is that games still have this concept of lives. Except, now they mean nothing. Absolutely nothing. What is the point? I mean, I played New Super Mario Bros and 1Up mushrooms pretty much grew on blocks of their own free will, like mushrooms are wont to do. And losing your last life meant nothing except you get a little “Game Over, would you like to continue?” message. You say yes, and suddenly you have five lives again. So what was the point? Why did they bother with a meaningless number? In New Super Mario Bros, when I was running short of lives (which happened once or twice I confess to my shame, although I did happen to get every coin in the game which was a little harder than just getting to the end), I just visited stage 1-1, got the Super Mushroom and destroyed the entire stage to earn five free green mushrooms. I did this a few times and suddenly I had 30 lives again, so then I went back to where I was and carried on. It’s absurd to do this, but it seems to be what’s encouraged by the game - they put in this “number of lives” figure which decreases when you die which means it should be a bad thing to run out them, and they put in a mechanism to get more of them. So obviously I’m going to try not to run out of lives - then I would get the dreaded Game Over screen. But it’s such a waste of time trying to keep from running out of lives. Why do they do this to us?

Kirby: Canvas Curse is another offender: every stage you complete you get a chance to get more lives by making Kirby jump a long distance. You can get up to three lives every time. So when you’re running short of lives (which happens slightly more often in Canvas Curse/Power Paintbrush than in New Super Mario Bros), all you’ve got to do is pop back to level 1-1, finish it in 30 seconds and do the jump successfully. Rinse and repeat for many more lives. So why do they insist on putting lives in the game?? If they’re going to hand them out at the drop of a hat then they’re completely meaningless. I can think of many other offenders, almost all being Nintendo games. All the Mario games since Super Mario World, for example Mario vs Donkey Kong and Yoshi’s Island DS to name a very recent game (where I’m on 60 lives after world 2!). It seems to be ingrained in the platformer psyche, but it needs to be extricated. Nothing annoys me more than that screen: “Game Over, Do you want to continue?” Huh? Does that make any sense?

It’s good to see that some developers have thrown out the concept completely, instead opting for a system where you can always continue. Treasure’s games like Astro Boy and Gunstar Future Heroes let you continue from whatever stage you want to and number of lives never shows up anywhere. Essentially it’s the same sort of set up as those other games from Nintendo, except without the little counter that denotes how long you have until you are going to have a Game Over screen. If you’d like to imagine how a Mario game would work without the 1-up mushroom you need look no further than Castlevania. Now imagine if that had lives - how horrible!

Dear Mr Developer

Please can you remove the 1-up mushroom from your game.

Regards,
Peter
Supporter of the Infinite Lives