#1ups

[kneipe]

jena 2017

[houseshoesandtallboys]

1UPS

[thesfid]

Some next level #SuperMarioBrothers is going down. #NESSpectrumMarathon #RetroGaming #1ups https://www.instagram.com/p/Bnc_d8JHLg2/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=3jpbj5oc6w51

[kneipe]

leipzig 2017

[turtlewuzhere-blog]

Berlin street art.. #berlin #streetart #art #germany #1ups #turtlewuzhere #iturtle #streetphotography #travel #international (at Berlin, Germany)

[blazehedgehog]

Do you think lives in platformers are an outdated concept?

I think infinite lives in platformers is kind of cheating, in a way. When you die in a game with infinite lives, it’s sort of like… who cares, right? You’ll just spawn back at a checkpoint a few seconds earlier and try again. You can die a thousand times on this one jump and it doesn’t matter.

Limiting the number of times a player can retry introduces an interesting tension. After a certain point it lights a fire under the player’s butt and says, “Hey, you should stop and think about your next move, because you don’t have very many left.”

Like, Dark Souls does this, right? If you die, you drop your souls, and if you die a second time, that resource is gone forever. You could lose 100,000 souls, and that would be this huge loss. So you get this great moment of “I HAVE to do this. I cannot fail.”

And, I mean, think about even “physical games.” Like Chess. You only get to make so many mistakes before you just straight up cannot recover and lose the entire game. Besides starting the whole game over from scratch, there are no infinite retries in Chess. There is a hard “game over” state.

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Not all games benefit from this, of course. Super Meat Boy is not a game that would be improved if you had a limited number of retries. The whole point of that game is you spawn in, you run for two seconds and die on the first jump, respawn, run for two seconds and die on the first jump, respawn, run for two seconds and die on the first jump, etc. Unless the game gave you hundreds of lives, it would get annoying quickly.

Which is probably how this whole thing started. By the end of the SNES era, you had games like Donkey Kong Country and Yoshi’s Island, which would just shower you with 1ups. Whenever I replay DKC1, I think I leave the first world with at least 25 lives, and there are minigames in Yoshi’s Island where if you play your cards right, you can win hundreds.

So already, the 1up was being depowered. It stopped being something you thought about. And then you get to Crash Bandicoot. Crash Bandicoot does this annoying thing where once or twice on every island, you run in to a level that dumps dozens and dozens of 1ups on you. It’s usually because the level directly following is crazy difficult, and they know you’re going to burn through 30-40 lives trying to complete it.

I can definitely see how that would lead some people to start thinking about how lives are useless, because it’s literally the dawn of the Meat Boy design. If you’re making levels intentionally designed to be failed 30+ times, then yeah, lives seem like a problem that needs to be eliminated.

But people said the same thing about high scores, too, and I think that there are definitely a lot of games out there that still benefit from scoring systems and leaderboards.

I think there are still places where a lives system is a benefit. I think the key is to simply treat lives with respect. Don’t flood the player with 1ups, and don’t be too stingy, and make failure feel like failure instead of coddling the player.