Are you for or against limited lives and continues in games?

Are you for or against limited lives and continues in games?
Also what is the exact reason Holla Forums is against having easier difficulty settings in games?
I love Cuphead as is and I enjoyed the tears of nu-male journos but at the same time would have had no real objection to an easy mode.

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limiting the number of lives and continues you have is generally an outdated system from the arcades. Sometimes there's a point to it, but usually there isn't. There needs to be a punishment for failure, of course, but generally "lose an arbitrary amount of progress and have to do it again" is not a good punishment, unless the game wants you to go for mastery instead of just success. Even in that case, there are usually better ways to implement it like a ranking system.

But as for easy modes… Webm related

I like limited lives and continues, they make the game far more tense and you've actually got to learn it and produce strategies to progress. I don't really care about difficulty settings, but I believe that the best way to implement those is making the game easier but also giving the palyer an incentive to try the game at the difficulty it should be played: 2hu games lock up the final stage and instead give you a bad ending at the second to last, Ninja Gaiden ninja dog mode giving you a pink ribbon, in God Hand Gene pretty much calls you a faggot if you pick easy.

I'm fine with limited lives, but limited continues are retarded. There's no good reason to kick the player back to the beginning of the game if they keep fucking up in one specific area.

Depends on the game. They can be great for some games and horrible for others.

Do you have a single fact to back that up? To me it sounds like you've misunderstood something because I've never seen anyone whining about how doom has several difficulty modes.

Difficulty settings just show fear of commitment to a style. I'm fine with difficulty settings if need be, but make it regular ass easy normal hard. Too often you get a choice between 2 difficulties, the steamroller with no challenge or autistic sniper pixel hunt. Or 7 fucking difficulties with no idea what the optimum is.

Make it one, or make it 3.

git gud

We aren't, most of us just enjoy tearing up the NeoFag refugees who come here and whine about games being too difficult and how difficulty in video games is somehow outdated and """toxic""", even when said games have an easy mode, or even if said games offer multiple ways to approach an enemy and/or an area, like the Souls game.

Enjoying your website falling apart, NeoFag?

Dude in the webm couldn't have explained better. Consider me BTFO

HARDCORE ONLY

YOU DIE YOU RESTART THE WHOLE GAME

THATS HOW I ROLL

YOU WANNA PLAY CASUAL SHIT?

GO PLAY YOUR GAY SISSY EFEMINATTED CASUAL SHIT AND LEAVE THE MANLY BURLY MUSCLY HARD PULSATING ERECT GAMES ALONE

I would be for them, especially in action games. Unlimited lives, to me, is a well-intentioned but ultimately pointless olive branch to people who can't play action games.

The Wonderful 101 is one of my favorite games, but I would prefer if the lives system worked the way it did in Devil May Cry, or even just the way it did in Joe. Allowing anyone to jump straight back into combat after a failure state was a band-aid solution to the game's difficulty. I don't think it's really a black mark against the game, since anyone who takes this shit seriously will restart a mission after dying anyway, but you have to wonder why they even bothered trying to reach out to casuals, since most reviewers complained that the game was too difficult anyway. If you make concessions for non-core players you're just going to frustrate the people who would really enjoy themselves.

Well, they sort of did, there's Simple mode.

/thread.

Simple mode makes me crack up.
It's basically the devs telling these journos that if they don't want to put effort into beating their game, they don't deserve to gaze upon their bosses' final forms.

You also don't get to progress to the next world. Top of the keks.

I like Charlie as much as the next guy, but come on nigger

I have no idea what you're talkin' about, user. This is the first time I've seen that webm.

Another question for you problematic misogynistic hard-core gamers;
Is there a rule of thumb for defining if a game is too hard? Or does "git gud" apply to all games?

If the developers don't want to put in an easy mode, they shouldn't be badgered by a bunch of pissy trannies and soyboys from the gaming lugenpresse. Add an easy mode, whatever, but the "gaming jouranlists" shouldn't feel entitled to attack developers and shouldn't be surprised when people who aren't retards attack them.

...

Limited lives is useful if you want to challenge the player to beat the game without dying. This can reward skill, but eventually anybody can memorize the whole game.
I prefer the resident evil style of limited saves, even better if the player can save anywhere. The player can make mistakes, but if they try using the save system as a crutch, they might find themselves facing a unique challenge.

My only complaint about W101 is that is doesn't have a "restart from checkpoint" like Bayonetta or Meta Gear Rising to make going for pure platinum ranks less tedious. You need checkpoints to be able to do that.

My main problem is it means less of a tailored experience. Instead of a consistant experience the devs have to take into account three different playmodes and how they can affect gameplay.

Having a single difficulty, be it easy or hard, means the dev only has one route to consider and plan around, with every player having a consistent playthrough. And they also can't get away with stupid design decisions with "lol just play on a different difficulty"

I think the optimal Hard Modes of games are done ala Kirby Dream Land, where every enemy is changed and the entire game is redesigned. Esentially it's a different game than the original, with equally as much thought placed into its design as opposed to shit like enemies having increased health bars and damage, or something lazy common these days.

What? Sure it does, it's in the last tab on the menu. I think it's just called "Retry", but it's definitely there.

There is an easy mode called Simple. You just can't progress with it because you're not rewarded soul contracts. Alternatively, there are power ups for more health points, but they penalize damage output and make fights last longer.

TOO HARD? TOO HARD?

HUAHUAHUAUAHAUHAUHAUUAHA

GIT GUD FAGGOT

I know you're memeing, but I think it's worth discussing.
A game is too hard when:

Would not have happened if it had easy difficulty

I'm pretty sure that puts you back to the start of the level. Or maybe I'm just retarded it's been a while since I played it.

Gonna have to agree with this guy. There needs to be punishment, but not bringing me back all the way to the beginning, which are levels I've already mastered. It's not only a massive waste of time, but this practice was obviously done for arcade games. Otherwise I do love difficulty in games as long it doesn't waste my time.

Limited lives is just an artifact of the Arcade model which encouraged kids to keep pumping in quarters without getting too pissed off and walking away. It's not necessary unless you're directly trying to ape the Arcade feel.

That said, there definitely needs to be some other form of punishment for no skill play. Maybe, for instance, make the game entirely playable without power-ups… and when you die, you lose your power ups - forcing you to either beat the boss to get it back, or backtrack to reacquire them. Or perhaps give the player infinite lives, but have a certain threshold were they don't get the best ending/extra content if they use too many lives getting to that point - forcing another playthrough once they've gotten skilled… or maybe optional boss fights which reduce the death count.

Also, devs should be above a bit of bants poking fun at the player for low-skill play or making dumb choices.

Oh boy, then everything is too hard these days

Shouldn't. I meant devs shouldn't be above poking fun at the player.

And the penalties are like -10 and -15% damage, so it's easily negateable by the fact that you last 33-66% longer.

So let's define difficulty as the elements of a game that prevent you from completing it. Hard boss patterns, tough puzzles to solve, really tight fighting game mechanics, etc., all make it a challenge for the player to succeed. Artificial difficulty is difficulty that stems from things other than the game's actual design, like bugs. The Sonic Adventure games were buggy as fuck, but glitching down through the level to your death isn't very different than just messing up the platforming. The difference is that one is how the game was actually made and the other is unintended behavior. Dark Souls is not artificially difficult, the game plays exactly how it was designed (minus bugs). Battletoads is artificially difficult because one level is occasionally unbeatable due to a bug. The rest of the game is normally difficult, but when people say they didn't beat the game because of an unbeatable level, it doesn't really mean the game is that hard.

Obviously, git gud doesn't apply to artificial difficulty. Gitting more gud won't uncrash a racing game when you're in the middle of a race. The rest of the time, judging 'too hard' comes from the reward you're getting from it. The reward has to be satisfying proportional to the time investment required to get it. It could be personally satisfying, ie. beating a really hard fighting game boss by being really, really good at the game, or have in-game rewards or achievements.

Strongly for, the concept of punishment for making mistakes and limiting the total number of mistakes a player can make are a very important aspect of skill gratification. They also allow for more derived gameplay in the form of risk-reward mechanics. Should you risk damage or death to grab that 1up on the ledge over there to increase your overall amount of retries? This is a form of mechanic that can only function in a video game with limitations on retries.

People who think they're "just a relic from arcade games" have never even beaten something like the original Super Mario Bros. or NES Contra without cheating and just assume that the way modern Nintendo makes lives utterly meaningless in games like Super Mario Galaxy is the only way lives can be done (rather than an extremely poor implementation of it). The answer is not to remove mistake limitations entirely like indie hacks like Edmund McMillan would have you believe. The answer is to make them more robust.

Actually NES Contra maybe isn't the greatest example because you can effectively milk infinite lives off of enemies in the 3D stages since lives are tied to points, all enemies are worth points, and the grunts respawn infinitely. Still takes quite a bit of patience to do so though.

Another aspect of risk-reward mechanics is they incentivize more elaborate level design to facilite these kinds of scenarios. Finally, any game that forces the player to replay something after losing progress due to too many mistakes is forced to put considerably more thought into making levels compelling enough to still be fun on replays.

There's nothing wrong with easy mode. I'm not against easy mode, I don't think the majority of people are against easy mode. What I am against is when people suggest we have bullshit like, "press X to skip this boss fight" fuckery. Easy mode isn't a crutch, it can help people get acquainted with the game. It's only a crutch if you only ever play on easy mode and don't challenge yourself to master the game's systems.
In this case, the "easy mode" is baked into the game, as it is with most RPGs. You come across an enemy you can't beat? Get stronger, or get good. Either learn to better control your character and get the timings right, or go grind until you have enough souls to pump your weapon with Titanite until it can smash the big bad foe of the moment into paste with a few good light attacks. Not only that, but the game's peaks and dips in difficulty serve a thematic purpose, and if you get rid of that then you're fucking with the intended experience.
Well, I'm not sure what to say. If you don't have arms, them you probably shouldn't play video games. Maybe someone can build you a controller so you can play with your feet, but assuming you're of sound mental composition and you have the ability to play, then there's no reason you can't learn to get good like everyone else.

I'd say Classic Mega Man games had a fantastic implementation of lives. They were rare, but let you restart at checkpoints and not lose all your e-tanks. It doesn't restart the game but it does offer punishment enough to keep you from dying and give lives value

Yeah, I'd like to be able to finish games without pouring ungodly amount of hours memorizing every pixel of it

I find I do better if I'm limited by lives. If I'm playing a game and have little consequence from failing, I'm less likely to care and complete it. If the condition for failing is having to start from the beginning no matter what then I shape up really quick.

Never saw the point of continues if you have a life system though. A password save system is better and more rewarding. More personal too since its your password that contains all your efforts up to that point.

Pic related, its how I feel when seeing the ending to a game for the first time after having failed previously and had to restart.

Perhaps you should stick to movies or books then. Games are not about "finishing", they are about winning.

You can also do the same thing in Super Mario with Koopa shells. Such strategies shouldn't be discouraged, and honestly I think more devs should allow for (albeit more subtle) strategies like that in order for the player to game the system and reward not just skill with the game as it was intended to be played, but for finding novel ways to soft-break the game.

Although, the time period when that was viable is now pretty much over thanks to Youtube and the internet at large being able to widely disseminate such tricks.

Speaking of Mega Man, I always thought the later ones and X series with all their collectibles were a good example of handling difficulty without difficulty modes. That boss or stage too hard for you? Go collect the X-buster upgrade or BEAT letters.


I kind of disagree, the best way to reward the player for deconstructing games is with metrics like score or completion time. These kinds of lives-milking exploits are interesting but they really shouldn't be seen as anything other than design flaws.

I think games should have easy modes and even "tour" modes for people who either 1) can't adapt to heavy challenges or 2) are disabled and lack the motor skills required to "git gud". There's a lot of controversy over ableism in games and I find merit in these arguments to a degree. If your game requires certain reflexes or mobilities that disabled people to not possess, you are, in effect, excluding them from the game entirely. This is why there are accessibility ramps next to all public staircases. Otherwise, it would be ableist. Same with games.

I can't put coins in my desktop.

I think that a game is all about interfacing with mechanics to overcome a challenge, if you are easily overcoming challenge after challenge you are not really getting that much gameand are barley playing anything, and if you are stuck on an impossibly hard challenge and cannot progress then you arent getting any game either

I think continues work best in Sonic where they're a reward for excelling at the early stages and getting Chaos Emeralds, so there's more to the early stages than just "get through without losing lives". It makes playthroughs more interesting once you've already made it far in the game and have to start again.

Lives should only be limited if you do not lose progress from dying. If you die and respawn immediately where you are in the same level state, or reach some sort of checkpoint in the level, you haven't really lost anything. In that case you need to have a limited life count. It's almost indistinguishable from life points otherwise, except for minor punishments like losing items or powerups.

In a game where you have to start at the beginning of a level, an argument for infinite lives can be made. You want to focus on . On the other hand, going back to old levels can be useful for cementing mechanics in your head. Level selects compensate for that but not entirely; it's easy to feel like you'll beat the level next try, and you repeat this process for hours before giving up. Game overs force this upon you and sometimes it's more helpful than beating your head against a wall.

Maybe they shouldn't be playing the game to begin with…
Not the devs fault they got fucked over in life.

Easy modes and the like trivialize gameplay, which is the worst thing you could possibly do to a game. If your game doesn't require you to learn and master the mechanics it presents then interaction is pretty much a pointless gimmick and you may as well have just made a movie.

Some games that benefit well from saves are complex/long games that require some kind of special technique to be able to get past, like RTS or Tactics games. While action games could really benefit from lives so they can feel more like trial-and-error and less like "load a save and rush until you win"

I miss when Holla Forums was semi-ironically like this, i hate comfy/v/.

I think an argument can be made for checkpoints from stock as well as instant respawn from stock. One of the most interesting and thrilling aspects of the Gradius series is when you die at some later level and have to figure out how to recover with the extra ships you've stocked up on along the way. The tension builds up as you get closer and closer to game over but also closer and closer to resolving the puzzle of recovery from this particular checkpoint. It's supremely gratifying to pull off and there's nothing quite like it in any other scrolling shooter series.

I'm against running out of continues not deleting your save file in games that have continues.
A lot of people would straight up Git fucking Gud if games would throw their ass back to the start to try all over again.

Also games need to stop being afraid of telling the player they suck and need to practice.

...

Grim's a better waif than her.

I love challenge, but I absolutely fucking hate having to replay sections I've already beaten.
What killed my interest in Dark Souls was having to fight my way to bosses over and over. I have no issue with fighting hard bosses, but I felt like replaying the levels every fucking time was 1. Boring 2. Wasting my time and 3. Not actually making me any better at fighting the bosses themselves.
My friend had me try Bloodborne because he thought I would like it better, in the end I felt almost all my interest evaporate after having to do the same level for the 5th fucking time before I could fight the boss. I don't think of myself as impatient, I don't mind a slow experience or grind, but I do mind repeatedly "beating" the same content I already beat over and over. Maybe I just got ruined by my quake years where if I died I could just come right back in seconds and challenge that dude again until I beat him.

Are you sure it's a girl, there's no eyelashes. And considering the artstyle.

as much as i like a challenge, i dont like it when im stuck on a boss and have to complete 2 levels to get to them each time i fail.
im not really getting in good practice against the boss like that.

Now you've done it.

If there was a practice mode, would you use it to repeatedly practice the stage or level you're having trouble beating?

Have an option in the settings menu for unlimited continues/lives (but have the game still keep track of how many you go through). Keeps easymoders more or less happy and honest, gives folks who can 1cc shit their challenge.

Limited lives started as the original pay2win to milk shekels from gullible kids with games that typically had

This all the way.
That a fundamental rule. What are you a SJW LGBBQ+ supporter to suggest something like this?

You can say it's androgynous.

Not true. Tell me user, what gender is Namkang from Eternal Legend? A big burly hypermacho anthro reptile. Look at xirs blatantly male posture. That fuckin chest, those pecs, that everything. Tell me what gender xe is without googling. What gender at first glance..

*endless legend
after a night of drinking with friends

But those aren't in a cartoonish style, much less Disney classic style.

It is a furry, so irrelevant. Gay either way.

As a disabled person with fucked up eyesight I can play fine, even if it takes me longer to get into the meat of things. The main issue for me is WHY THE FUCK DO THEY MAKE TEXT SO TINY OR USE A WEIRD ASS FONT? STOP! Don't even get me started on fucking strategy games and their UIs made for ants. This was not a problem when games were not "HD." Why is it a thing to make UIs and fonts as small as possible nowadays? Fuuuuuuuck!

This is why I mainly play retro games. Apart from CRPGs, it's not a problem.

Firstly, it's not in the same cartoony and exaggerated style that cuphead is. Generally speaking, it's like that user said: eyelashes are an indicator that the cartoon character is female.
Secondly, reptiles are among the least sexually dimorphic species around. Be honest, can you really tell the difference between a male and female crocodile/iguana/turtle without look at its undercarriage?
Thirdly, VIDEO GAMES

I had the same problem, with normal eyesight, trying to play xbox 360 games on a 12 inch CRT TV.

It's an anthro reptile user. There is no excuse to give it a literal male body over a female body because it's anthro. Real life reptiles don't have a human male's barrel chest.

I only support limited lives and continues if the game is short.

Getting one of those goofy 27" 1080p monitors and moving it closer if you have to, should solve your ui/text readability problems.

So if I'm reading this thread and looking at the success of Cuphead, and I wanted to make an arcade shmup that takes about 30-50 minutes to clear without dying or something, I'd have to do the following?

I would stay away from the ~50 minutes range unless you really know what you're doing. Only very skilled arcade developers are able to make an arcade experience that lasts that long not outstay its welcome.

I guess what I'm saying is; It does not matter how objectively male-looking a character is, it can still be female. Grim Matchstick could be female despite the lack of eyelashes.

It all depends on how the system is built and what kind of experience you are trying to convey. I remember one side-scroller shmup not Gradius, but same style where your lives were literally limited by the number of pilots available in the story, since a new ship could be reconstructed at the drop of a hat. At the same time, limited lives doesn't work in games like Super Mario Oddysey anymore, though I would not have been surprised if they had implemented it given Nintendo's history with it.

Finite lives should mean that if you run out, you lose a large amount of progress. Either you lose everything or restart at the beginning of a long level. Losing every life should be heavily punished to foster the need to get better; in turn, the game should not become so punishingly difficult that you could lose all your lives within the first three minutes of an area and immediately have to restart the entire game.


Yeah, but one big thing about Gradius is that when you die, you lose all your powerups. If you respawned with even half of the total powerups you get, the game would have been infinitely easier to play. Even given the innate difficulty of the game if you never get hit and the sheer mechanical skill required just to play, the added difficulty of going back down to this snail's pace can make some parts of the game virtually impossible to complete without lots of practice.

I love Gradius, but you really do have to git gud to play that game to completion without any kind of cheats. Even cheating yourself a ton of extra lives, the game is still hard. It's a great example of a genuinely difficult game.


I like the idea of an easy mode that makes fun of you for selecting it. Like Ninja Gaiden Black "Ninja Dog" mode giving you extra healing items and inserting cutscenes that insult you relentlessly.

Say what you want about limited lives, but the arcade argument is the same shitty argument people like Dobson and Rock Paper Scissors uses say challenge is an outdated part of the game that should make way to handholding and skipping hard parts they don't want to put the effort in completing. Which goes against webm. Also kids were willing to spend quarters because they were more concerned about the gameplay and achieving a score not for the story.
For limited lives, it depends on the game. The appeal of the lives system is that it gives a reward for players that actively explore or display skills in the gameplay. So that when they earn the numerous lives they got from exploring the levels, expertly dodging obstacles they find that 100th coin/gem/ring, the player would feel like they earned those chances when they reach the point where a game over makes a difference between a checkpoint before the end of a level and the beginning of a stage.
I should also note that it depends on greatly how many checkpoints there are in the level or how you respawn. In New Super Mario Bros., the lives system wasn’t needed because an experienced player could easily gain a high number of lives yet still have the same result of going over a whole patch of level regardless of lives because of the level only have one checkpoint or two and usually around the middle of the level. And it’s also why you don’t see a lives system in Cuphead. There are no checkpoints in the platforming levels or bosses, so having a life system would be redundant when a game over would just plant you in the map anyways.
And even the penalty of a game over can be useful in some games (if the penalty is fair or isn’t too similar to the penalty of a lost life) In games like Megaman, losing all your lives brings you back to the Stage Select screen, as if the game is telling you that if the stage is too hard for you, then you should try another stage that may be easier for you. In older games, lives that make you restart the whole stage again would be subtle way for the game to say that you should review a different strategy in progressing the stage without taking too much damage and thus encouraging skill building.

Overwhelmingly against. Making you replay the same content is just a way for them to make games take a long time to play while not actually being long. We already have games with campaigns that only take a couple hours.

I would never play a game of any reasonable length or depth with limited lives, even if I were unbelievably good at it. The risk of seeing hours of my time come to naught doesn't hold any fun for me.
Losing repeatedly is a good thing anyway. If nothing poses a genuine challenge where's the fun?

It's more to do with the artstyle, eyelashes are a staple of female character design from back then.

Maldita Castilla does this actually. I can't even beat the game normally yet, but fuck it's so much fun,

Used to have one and it doesn't help when everything scales like ass.

TOPKEK

i think a ui thats difficult to read or navigate is a bad ui.

fuckin on point

Lives are a very artificial way to pad a game, that's true, but they also gave you a sense of risk in that you couldn't just walk into every enemy and expect to finish the game like that. Rewinding to an earlier part of the game is a good way to keep the player in the game without unnecessarily padding it, but I feel that modern games are way too lenient with checkpoints, to the point that enemies become a minor annoyance. I like the way they do it in Hotline Miami, where you restart a room upon death, but the enemy placement or the weapons they're carrying have slight variations every time you enter. I also like the Cuphead design of having the bosses mock you at the start of the round and after you've just died. It gives you a more personal sense of challenge, as in, this fucking insect is acting all smug and mighty, gotta tear it a new one. It also helps that upon restarting you get yet another chance at seeing the smug motherfucker mock you.
So overall, adding slight deviation and mockery of your failure and checkpoints that are fewer and further in between is much better than lives, otherwise lives are the get go for pacing a game.
Also is that screenshot from a beta version?

But the other shit you can get instead of extra health are complete upgrades. You're supposed to always have a bonus badge, but the health is so good they make it have a downside.

Fully for. Video games give the most enjoyment when they sentimentally challenge you to better yourself to succeed and a save point tells you to prepare for a potential asskicking.

I wouldn't mind a game that gives you lives to play with, limited checkpoints during the stage, and lets you onpy save at the end of the level.
That way, if you die too much, you need to start the level over, but if you did a tiny mistake you can still start from a checkpoint.
It makes the game more tense and forces you to git gud.

Simply adding an easier difficulty is fine. The problem is how it barely ever works out like that. See the slow creep from System Shock 2 to Bioshock Infinite. You make little consessions to let the casuals in, and slowly the game you liked erodes away, until there's nothing recognisable left of it.

It's a generation gap, or a NEET vs employed gap, or a shut-in-loser vs has-a-life gap.

Basically, if you're a child or don't have a job or don't do anything other than playing video games, you have a lot of time. You can dedicate hundreds of hours grinding mindlessly at an extremely difficult game to git gud, until finally you beat it. The pattern for a game that is very difficult it something like "lose-lose-lose for a hundred hours, then win". But for everyone else, who may only have a few hours PER WEEK for games, it would just be wasted effort. They want to be challenged, sure, but they also just don't have the same amount of time to spend grinding away. Their ideal game would be something like "lose-for-an-hour, and then get a small win; repeat until the big win".

The really big issue is that Holla Forums likes to pretend as if there is only one way to enjoy a game. If you don't play it exactly like they do, they you're doing it wrong and thus have not played the game correctly. On the other hand, if the game allows you to play it in ANY OTHER WAY other than the way they play it, it's too permissive and is a bad game. Holla Forums wants every game to be Smash "No Items, Fox Only, Final Destination" where every single game is basically a competition (if only a competition against yourself) to see who is the most gud.

I've seen how people who work live. They come home at night and watch TV for six hours.

yeah. having a reason to not want to fail makes a game and victory all the sweeter. lives are a straightforward, tried-and-true way to capture the players want for victory.
unless you get to the point where the feeling of victory is replaced by being glad its over. thats always unfortunate.

i rather liked how meat boy handled it. sure you get infinite lives, but if you play well you get a hard mode version of that stage with a sick remix.

That's because they're expected to play games that are so difficult that their brain perceives it as "work", when all the really want to do is relax.

I like the Castlevania-Ninja Gaiden solution of unlimited continues but limited lives per continue. That way it's on the player as to whether or not the game is truly over. For some types of games a limited save point/password system is probably the way to go.

I never understood the mindset that in order to git gud you have to waste hours upon hours to remember a pattern as an adult. Gitting gud means actually thinking and focusing with proper hand eye coordination. Someone who git gud can play like one or two hours and then something else, because after they lost a few time, their mind begins to focus on what they did wrong, strategize and then beat it and on to the next challenge. Gitting gud isn't repeating a stage over and over wasting time until you get past it, it's understanding what you went wrong and then getting past it. It's why when they say practice in order to become a better artist, they don't mean draw chicken scratch until you magically draw good, they mean learn anatomy and other techniques and practice to preserve hand eye coordination.

This hinges on the idea that the aforementioned - children, NEETs, and people whose primary hobby is video games - don't have other things to spend their time on. I'm a NEET, have been for almost 8 years, and I still have shit to do. I study music, I study Japanese, I study programming, I try to work out on a regular basis, and I do chores. When I'm not doing all that shit, I'm playing video games. While it is true that I could theoretically neglect any one of those things in favor of spending a huge chunk of time playing vidya, I mostly don't, so your argument is moot. Hell, even children have obligations, like soccer practice/piano lessons/arrangements with friends, etc.

Besides, you don't need to spend a great deal of time getting good at most games, even the so-called "hardest games of all time" like Contra or whatever are still dependent on nothing more than pattern recognition and the use of foreknowledge. You're not going to spend "hundreds of hours" getting good at any given game, unless you're a fucking autist who wants to do a no damage speedrun or some other self imposed challenge. Those sort of self-imposed challenges do not apply when talking about difficulty options, which are mostly just optional constraints that are imposed on you by the game.
Sounds like you're mad cause someone called you a casul because you expressed a method of play that your dissenter disapproved of. Why do you take retards seriously? Nobody gives a shit how you play, unless your method of play is gaining traction among a larger portion of the community and it seeks to alter some fundamental aspect of the game in question. There's a difference between people who have legitimate concerns over how games are developed with accessibility in mind, and people who just want to use their perceived elitism to shit all over anyone who doesn't play like them.

Checkpoints are a blessing for video games. If you really want to, you could have a make believe lives/continues counter in your head. However, a lot of games go overboard with checkpoints but at the same time trudging through the same boring shit a couple dozen times because a boss is wrecking your shit isn't fun.

If they're that tired they should go to bed. If you're awake enough to stare at a screen, you're awake enough to stare at a screen and move your hands a little.

If a person can master a game in only a few hours, EVERYBODY is going to say it was too easy, especially here. That's the whole point of OP asking about the lives and continues system. Difficulty is measured in games primarily by how many times you die and have to try again.

NEETs have more free-time than people who have jobs; that's a simple fact. All those other things you mentioned that you do? People with a job do those things, too. They don't just do their job and then go home and sleep.

I have a job and i work 60 hours a week. if you dont have time to git gud you dont have time for video games. Maybe stop having shitty obligations like children or succubi?

So no one who has a job can possibly not be a total babby level retard when it comes to games?

Limited lives and continues are artificial difficulty. Shit from when games made you pay a quarter per life in the arcades or they needed to stretch a tiny game on a low storage capacity cartridge as long as possible. It's only held up now by nostalgiafags and losers that need to virtue signal about how "hardcore" they are while not ever playing actually difficult games.

One can have a job and still be a shut-in loser with no life. All you've proven is that you live in a blue state where autismbux aren't enough to make rent.

I'm sure some of them do. I'm also sure that a lot of them don't. However, whether or not people who work have hobbies outside of video games has nothing to do with whether or not it takes an insurmountable amount of time to 'git gud' at even the hardest games that were ever created. Your claim that it takes "hundreds of hours" to master a difficult game is unsubstantiated. Even if it is, and there's some game out there that you'd like to play and be good at, but can't due to time constrains, this does not mean that the game in question is "too hard". It just means that you do not have enough time to devote to developing a skill at it, and therefore you should probably look to other less time consuming activities. There are plenty of games that aren't based around skill development, or that require very little investment.

Yes, and those are the games that Holla Forums would consider "causal" or too easy. Which is exactly my point.

What's wrong with that? They're casual because they're made for people who don't have a lot of time to devote to playing video games.

Maybe they should get a different hobby then.


You act like Holla Forums doesn't like comfy.

If they make a game more fun, they're worth having. Doesn't matter how they came into being.

Not according to Holla Forums, where "casual" is code for bad video games, or for people who are complete fucking losers who have no business being here.

Holla Forums only likes comfy if it has lolis in it.

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The problem isn't casual games, it the casualization of non casual games or in some cases the mainstreaming of niche games.

You people are so fucking SMALL, you know that? Small in mental stature. It's like talking to six-year-olds.

Hi, Neogaf.

You done throwing a bitch fit?

Comfy is an autistic memeword.

Bitch, this board is MADE on ad hominems. Just by calling it out, ironically, you're committing one yourself.

Not an argument, fag.

Neither was your… oh wait, you didn't even HAVE an argument! Nice.

Your entire stance is build on insulting people by calling them NEETs and children. Why shouldn't we just berate you at this point? You have chosen not to argue properly.

Comfy is for real.

Insulting? No, you misinterpreted entirely (not surprising). I was merely pointing out that there is a disconnect between most of the people here, and most of the people in the world (and, indeed, who games are even marketed to). It was only when people started insulting me and completely failing to understand, because they felt the need to defend themselves and their lifestyles, that I reacted in same.

...

See this is what anons are talking about here.

Don't you kids have spell-check on your fancy phones to prevent this kind of thing from happening? Waste of time.

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Just filter him at this point. It seem more and more likely that he's a goon or a gaffer that just wants to derail the thread.

yes

Even older shorter games that take like an hour but makes up for it in gameplay and challenge? Again you can tell if someone isn't much of a gamer if they think that if you spend hours after hours to memorize a pattern you're gitting gud, when really it's just taking the small effort to focus and think of a strategy to get past a challenge. It says something when people thinking that putting some effort to problem solve and focus means being a shut in.

Real question, how does a Neogaf come to the conclusion that they should use 8ch? Shouldn't the ability of basic criticism trigger them off the site? I had someone tell me back in 2012 they though just accessing 4chan would give them a virus, I like to think that person was pretty regular and has a thought that can easily be projected on the largely tech illiterate users of Neogaf and etc, plus we're h8ch. So I really got to ask, why do you niggers keep pretending to be Neogaf and baiting and derailing all over the fucking place?

I think the DMC series had a good system for this. Normally, if you die, it sends you to the beginning of the mission. But, you can purchase yellow orbs, which let you restart from the room you died in, like a checkpoint.
I really liked the fact that the "checkpoints" were an item you had to purchase, so you had to carefully decide whether you wanted to purchase the yellow orb (in-case you die) or purchase more healing items (so you won't die in the first place… but if you die anyway, you'll go back to the beginning of the mission).
It's made even more risky by the fact that each item permanently increases in cost each time you buy them, so if you go wasting a bunch of your items, then you'll have trouble purchasing them in the future when you really need them.
It seemed like a perfect balance that made me carefully think about what I should purchase, and carefully gauge my chances of success.

As others have mentioned, limited lives gives a sense of risk and promotes a desire to succeed. Infinite lives also allow for a form of save scuming where the player will immediately restart if they take damage on the road leading up to the challenge or during the first phase of the challenge. I do think that a lives system could be improved by adding a "Proof of Mastery" system where the point that you get sent back to gets closer and closer to where you died based on a consistent display of skill in getting back to where you died.

There's two common forms of bad difficulty: enemy-exclusive buffs, and not playing by the rules that are laid out.
The first variety can be seen in the maximum difficulty of games such as Halo, or in the Long War mod for Xcom: in lieu of modifying the enemy toolkit, they simply add a couple zeroes to the numbers of the tools your enemy already has, generally resulting in a more tedious experience as strategic options degrade to "minimize potential enemy contact".
The second variety is well-known among players of strategy games, where high-difficulty AI players are simply given free resources instead of playing with any greater degree of skill than their easier counterparts. This is a bad thing for the same reason the previous item is: it constricts player involvement, in this case by completely neutering any strategy that does not completely level the enemy; you can keep them bottled in as much as you like, the computer will still be able to crank out forces to oppose you because of the developer version of the Berlin Airlift.

If Cuphead was like Megaman where each boss had its own run and gun section then it would make sense to have lives. If you could retry the boss indefinitely after beating the run and gun only once then there's no point in having them together, they could just be split like it actually is in Cuphead. If you had to keep redoing the run and gun every attempt it would get tedious even if the difficulty was lowered (which would also make it less fun). I like Cuphead the way it is though and one of the great things about it is that you can never lose more than 2 minutes of progress.

Yep, there's no motivation like threat of failure. But don't apply that logic outside of videogames, though, please. Only rightwing nazi kkk members think it's ok to remove safety nets.

Lives systems, like any mechanic, need to be considered against the whole game to determine if it's any value. It works fairly well in Mega Man for example as limited chances to start from a mid-stage checkpoint. Just throwing together a bunch of bits and pieces that other games like the current generation of AAA does is not design, it's just parroting and mimicry.


Press 5 numbnuts.


The best easy modes restrict you from completing the full game, or make you feel like a loser like in IWBTG where the save points are "WUSS" and you get a cute pink bow. Also nice ID.


Shovel Knight did something interesting by having checkpoints be destroyable for loot. IWBTG just makes them sparser on higher difficulties which is cute.

Limiting lives and continues is the perfect system. If you suck fucking balls at the game you shouldn't be allowed to progress or see the game's content. Fuck casuals. Can't put in the effort and get good? Then fuck off, you're not a gamer.

Being forced to start your game over from the beginning sucks, but seeing how much better you are at those first levels definitely encourages you to press forward.

Bonus points if the first levels subtly teach game mechanics.
Super bonus points if speedrunning through the first level forces you to comepletely rethink what you're doing.

i was comfy the other day

Every time you fuck up in a mission then you should be forced to restart said mission. This is the only way vidya should ever be played.

I believe what he's mentioning how the Stage isn't a challenge, but the boss may be somewhat difficult or taxing or require a specific strategy, but instead of using your time and resources to beat said boss, you're stuck doing a 15-20 minute stage before you can re-try the fight.

I agree; that isn't honing my skills, I may have the stage down to outright muscle memory and what I need to hone my skills against is the boss. If a boss is complex, has multiple forms, then it makes sense to restart the boss fight from the beginning so as to better conserve health, fight better, learn better. If I ace the stage and get my shit kicked in by the boss, the boss is what I failed, not the stage, therefore the stage should not be what I need to re-do.

Ideally, retards should be killed at birth, die due to their own stupidity early in life, or otherwise be ostracized and reproduce at lower rates than non-retards, depending on how functional they are. Since we live in a diseased society that no longer has the stomach for overtly plucking out human weeds, I will have to settle for campaigning at every opportunity to make sure that no aspect of life, no possible way to spend one's time, no matter how trivial, niche, or irrelevant, is accessible enough for retards to feel comfortable or, perish the thought, happy. Every single place they turn, they must be met with the same insurmountable wall of ability requirements until they are driven to suicide. In this way, a small yet positive eugenic effect can still be achieved.

odd then, how the prosperity of non-retards is what allows retards to thrive.

Imagine how much better off the internet would've been if a simple step such as removing public education was undertaken.
That way retards wouldn't even be capable of reaching it due to not recognizing letters
reddit wouldn't have existed either

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>>>/suicide/

Awful education standards is what those are. That doesn't mean you throw out public education as a general concept.

just because public education left you retarded doesnt mean that was the point of it.

WOW, it's like mass products have lowered quality!
Maybe if you attend public school more you won't notice that ever again.

Its a mystery why it works pretty much in any other country than america.
Maybe its because you have all those noses running your shit?

Name them.

Spurdoland for one.

You guys forgot that there is a "SIMPLE" difficulty setting when selecting each stage except the final bosses?

Universal literacy just made it a lot easier to control people. Normalfags have one of about four different sets of beliefs that he just recites when he feels its appropriate.

Now imagine exact the same people, but they're voting on whether you should be able to buy ammo without additional background checks>>13737856

But user! (((New))) bolshevik progressive educations teaches kids how to think for themselves!
Teachers are no longer oppressive figures of authority but tolerant pretend-friends

Lives are a dumb system. Because it's artificial difficulty. Instead of lives, you should just make your game, y'know, actually fucking scale in difficulty. I think it'd say more about the challenge of a game if casuals simply couldn't make it past a certain boss or level because it's just too hard for them.
That's what games should do other than say "Sorry, you didn't git gud fast enough/don't have endurance to play a 3 hour game start to finish perfectly. Play the whole fucking game over from the beginning"

Historically, keeping the masses ignorant by controlling tools of communication or thought was central to control by powerful figures, be it religion, or royalty or whatever. Modern subversion of our language/communication is quite different, and the tools themselves are not to blame. Indeed, they are very very empowering if used correctly. Stop peddling your anti-intellectual bullshit.

archive.is/Sq2iL

If I'm going to take you seriously, I'd like you to at least show you understand half the power words you're using.

Fuck your rule, you're on an imageboard greentexting like the best of 'em what do I have to prove to you? Now go ahead and try to justify destroying literacy among the "normalfags".

You incorrectly assume that just because normalfags "can read", when in reality it's just semi-fluent cobbling letters into words and ability to write their name instead of drawing it. it's a net positive. Whereas illiterate morons in better ages used to be confined to their village posing threat to nobody but themselves as they had no entitlements or even a way to express it.
if they are so intelligent and literate why do they fall for ruses like "human rights", "open borders", "multiculturalism"
Have you ever seen nigger "deep fried" memes, or just a few IQ points above that, normalfag memes?

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Can you fucking read ? They fall for it because the language has been manipulated in such a way that they can't think otherwise. Diversity, multiculturalism, open borders, liberalism, whatever, those concepts instantly ring positively to them.
If you try to argue with a drone about those issues, he will rarely get mad, he will get uneasy, and think you're crazy, because you're challenging the twisted meaning those words have for him.

We're all retards on an imageboard, but when you use certain buzzwords it puts me on my guard because I know I'm about to be lied to. I'm sure you'd respond the same way if someone said you were "tacitly perpetuating the status quo"

So go back to cuckchan.

Your point?

Doubt it.
But that'd make life easier.

It'd seem that you can't read because if normalfags were illiterate serfs nobody would swallow that trash.

Isn't that the point of videogames, you immense retard?

Smart people can easily be stupid outside of their main area. Also most people aren't intelligent but they are vastly better than your average Middle Ages peasant, and they have to be to be useful in most forms of work. I don't see any point in limiting them and making them even dumber!


OK I see why you're worried about those three terms in particular. But no the terms are appropriate to what I was saying. In particular, literacy is generally required to be intelligent, attacking it can easily be considered anti-intellectual.

Wot

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the point of video games is to havr fun you autist. some games acconplish this yhrough making the game autistically hard, others through tough story choices, and some through in game visible progress (levels, story, etc.) once you see that youve accomplished something, you feel happy and can move on to the next one.

so this is the power of the spectacle . . .

but you can say the same things about movies or books. you only really feel like youre done with them if you understand it, a form of "winning"

So you would rather abolish any mechanic that would punish the player? This is the reason I hate this new instant gratification era.

just because youre misanthropic doesnt mean were failing as a society

never said that m80.
just because the game isnt autistically hard doesnt mean it doesnt punish the player in other ways.

isnt this a videogame board

Isn't getting a bit further than the previous time and beating your own highscore by a little a viable measure of progress? Arcade games already got that covered.

yes

Again, this mealy-mouthed definition serves no functional purpose. People can have fun with a bag of shit or solving a differential equation. That doesn't make them games. Here is a meaningful definition of video game that actually serves to delineate it from other forms of entertainment:


So no, the purpose of a game isn't to "have fun". It's to test one's skill. If there is no skill component then you simply do not have a game. It's the difference between simply tossing a ball around and using that ball to play the game of baseball, which has a rigid set of rules to test one's skill against other players.

imagine being this autistic.
A game is simply a form of playing that has some kind of organization, not necessarily to test skill.

Imagine feeling such a need to make excuses for non-game experiences and lump them in with actual games that you create an ethereal, useless special snowflake definition when it relates to interactive video entertainment which only serves to dull and obfuscate discussion. I challenge you to provide us with an example of a classical form of game (i.e., from any time before video games were invented) that does not test one's skill in some manner.

The word you're thinking of is probably "intangible" or "nebulous". Is that Action Points definition just a condensed version of Chris Crawford's definition?

I don't think AP got it from anyone in particular, or at least he didn't claim to in the video it came from. I think Crawford's definition is pretty decent, but I find that last dichotomy really questionable.

Also the art = no money; entertainment = money dichotomy is retarded.

It depends on the game. On certain games it would just feel like an exercise in torture, and would require some extreme autism. On others it works well.

Craps

Touche. I generally do not refer to gambling as "games" but there's no denying that people have in the past and continue to. Maybe we need a new word for the concept I'm trying to express?

Probably coming from the idea of ars gratia artis, a lot of people don't know that up until a few hundred years ago most art was made on commission.

Gambling was banned because it was a game with no gameplay. We should do the same to walking sims.

how is it a special snowflake definition? thats literally what a game is defined as, you retard.

This exchange seems to have gone right over your head at this point. Maybe a video aid will help, see

Did you get a score below 100 or something?

I find I agree with this guy more often than not. I am however really sick of the "hey look at how British I am, and I play video games by the way!" shtick.

Close. Timers would be the outdated thing you're looking for. Timers were used for almost every game leading up to Breakout in 1976, because whatever wasn't trying to remake Pong was still designed for two players.

Lives work on a game with a good difficulty curve, like any of the 8-and-16 bit Mario platformers. In fact, other than Super Mario USA, they give way more extra lives than are necessary to beat the game, even on your first try. If you fuck up too many times, you deserve to start a little further back.

Limited lives are a good thing. Limited continues are bad design though imo. Once you've beaten a stage twice or so, you've mastered it. What's the point in making the player repeat things they've mastered?

The ultimate example is Ninja Gaiden 3 on NES. I've beaten the game many times, and I can consistently get to the airship stage without dying once, every time. Before I had beaten it and had been sent back to the beginning, I always wondered why they did that. It just makes you spend 10 or so minutes getting back to where you were. Its just wasting your time, you've proven that you can beat it, so why not just start the player at the beginning of the stage? Its flawed design and was invented purely to suck time and make a game artificially last longer.

The argument for limited lives is that it forces that player to reach a competency "threshold" for that stage. You have to be able to beat the stage within a limited amount of allowed mistakes. The difference is in the amount of time youre asking the player to dedicate to doing the same thing over and over. Limited continues just goes a little too overboard imo.

The fucking webm you posted said the opposite, you mongoloid. "losing an arbitrary amount of progress and have to do it again" is good punishment because it requires you to consistently do well instead of lucking your way through the game.


Hello, my name is Holla Forums and I'll tell you why: Easy mode as multiple implications but I'll only bother with one (for the sake of brevity). If you accommodate you games for morons,then you have accommodate your games for morons. That statement probably doesn't make a lot of sense, so I'll elaborate with what I will call the "McFarlane effect".

When Family Guy first aired, it was a pretty modest comedy. It was actually pretty funny and didn't try too hard or go easy joke. If you didn't like it, you probably weren't disgusted by it, just not amused. It got taken off the air, but then it reaired years later completely dumbed down. Early family guy was like that one humorous co-worker. Even when his humor failed, you still appreciated the effort because he was a swell guy and his jokes were always fresh. He never took his jokes very seriously and never tried that hard to make you laugh as much as he was trying to maintain a fun and lighthearted atmosphere. New Family Guy was basically reddit. It had some clever jokes here and there, but that was in the middle of garbage. It's not worth watching because for every 5 minutes of good humor, you had another 15 of pure garbage. Because of what I know about Seth, I speculate that the dumbing down of Family Guy was not something he wanted, but had to do.

That relates to video games because the experience the games creates determines the audience that experiences it. An easy mode makes the game more attractive to those who aren't willing to otherwise experience the game that way you originally attended. Once they become embeded in your audience, then you'll have to continue catering to them because they affect public perceptions (i.e. word of mouth) and they affect publisher/industry perceptions. If you end up with, say, the Half life issue of morons going around in endless circles, you're going to have to adjust the game because you've already fostered this audience who believes their inability to complete a game is your problem, not theirs. If you have controls or cool features that are too complex to use, then you'll have to dumb those down too or make a new control scheme catering to easy mode players. If you don't, sales data will reflect that. Reviews will reflect that. These things could be avoided by simply demanding the player complete the challenges rather than expecting you to do it for them.

its not user, get off pol

i can smell the virginity off you if thats your source

Limited lives and continues are gay and I hate them

Do you have an argument?

can you give me a video that wont give me cancer watching? or any source of what a game is that isnt pretentious philosophy trying to twist definitions to be deep.

The important part of the video is condensed in a single fucking image that was already posted in this very thread:

All the game should have easy modes imo. You have to remember 1st is games are products. They have to sell well, the more people buying, and being satisfied, the more people they will incentive to buy and the better is the chances of the game having a second game being developted.The aim is to appeal to people who work, they get money and probably these same people have a family, so you can't always be as good as you had when you were 15 or so, with all the time in the world. You grow up eventually, get a wife, work, and have children so you get a life and you have to spend the time with your family plus work so, yes, easy mod is a must have if you wish to sell more copies to people who have money. In my case i have wife and kid, spend a lot of time with them, i work and sometimes i git gud, but when i don't feel like i just hack the memory and fuck the difficulty since i become a god anyways :/ But most people don't do it or can't so easy mode is recommended anyways…

Game developers cannot satisfy everyone in any case, so it'd be better for them to spend efforts on polishing and trying to make the best out of its genre despite the fact that it can be very challenging and have a very steep learning curve. Pandering does not end good, especially to more casual crowd. Overall we'll have more high quality products appealing to several types of gamers instead of mediocre shit that panders to everyone. If you cannot spare time to learn how to earn your entertainment in such medium as video games, you are better off watching films, reading books, etc.

I didnt know merely having an accent could be a "shtick".

He does call his channel "The Gaming Brit"

i grew up playing vidya, its not because i have less hours that i won't do it. If the game is very well made, it makes me die but not in an unbalanced/unfair way i usually just try harder, like Rocksteady Batman for example. But when a game is very good but I know it will demand much more skill and I know it will take some time to acquire it or grind and I don't want to spend that time, then i cheat. Now when the only point in the game is getting more skill, i just drop the game nowadays… But i agree that diversification is very important.

Better than that "TOP O TH' MORNIN' TO YA" asshole.

one of the best things about cuphead is one of the developers is literally named chad and looks like one

True, but it's not like he constantly bombards you with a bunch of slang only people who grew up in the East End would know.

Trial-and-error games like IWBTG aside, i'm fine with a lives system so long as they actually have value and aren't just showered on you like in the more recent Mario games. Continues are a different story, though. Since most games have an save system it's pointless to have them, and besides, having to redo the entire game because you fucked up at one section is too harsh, especially with very long games.
I'm not against easy modes entirely, but easy games (for the most part) are boring, and adding easy modes into challenging games allow any normalfag to look skilled at vidya whilst disincentivising them to actually get better. "Why try to get better at this game when I can just cruise through on easy mode?"


I've actually thought of a neat way to have lives in a game without making it seem cheap.
It's not perfect, but I think it could work.


They want the UI to take up less room but don't want to streamline it.


Women are not named grim you faggot.


Being a NEET with time to kill doesn't make you any better at vidya, it just gives you more potential time to get gud, key word being POTENTIAL. DSP for instance spends around 5-6 hours a stream playing vidya, and does that twice a day. He doesn't work a 9-5 or have anyone who depends on him anymore, he has all the time in the world to play vidya, and yet he STILL sucks at it.


You're an autistic memeword.

The singular purpose of "Lives" is to pinch shekels out of suckers at arcades.

Naturally, game dev's are retarded and kept putting it into games where it doesn't belong (as in, all of them) because they got infected with a jewish meme.

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Shitskin detected.

Nothing in vidya is intrinsically outdated as a base mechanic. A time limit on your gameplay is nothing to shy away from. Especially if that's a part of the challenge.

Limited continues (or some other sort of decefit to death, such as, say, losing half of your gold) are absolutely an essential. There's no tension to games otherwise. Ideally, you should lose around about a "world"'s worth of progress with a game over.

I think the typical implementation is impractical though. Starting on 3 or 5 rather than a larger number (I think 15 would be perfect) makes it clear that you're just trying to make the design of the game "traditional" while trying to appeal to casuals. Also, I've noticed in most platformers that there's always far too little, or too many extras.

Looks like somebody got told
DO AS YOU PLEASE


Intersting ideas though

A game needs to be loose enough to allow players to micromanage their level of challenge as they see fit.

Faggots who want limited saves and continues would be the first to cheese things and abuse mechanics: their thrill comes from being abused themselves, so their playstyle is to return the favor.

A proper gamer would instead try to play in a fun and capable way. And if need be, he will stop and retry until everything works as he mandates. Very few kids are self-aware and self-esteemed enough to do something like this, because it relies on self-control and self-administration of incentives.

Of course it is, how are you going to learn if you can't read

Get off this board

Why should you be able to practice the boss? That's absurd, bosses are to test the your skills you'v developed elsewhere in the game, turned to eleven.

Even my dead grandma could beat postal 2 if she quick saved as much as you, user.

intelligent != educated
if you made the argument that literacy is required to be educated then I'd agree
intelligence is genetic and outside of the first few years of development, it doesn't change over the course of one's life.

Being able to save your progress, having more than 2 continues, more than 3 lives - these are all cancers of vidya.

In a perfect world, if you died 9 times in Cuphead, you would have to start the entire game from scratch, with only your high scores saved.

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Basically what said, but you can also be educated vocally.

That's only true if you specifically consider intelligence to be separate from learned knowledge which most people would not agree is the case. Also intelligence is based on nutrition, stress and many other environmental factors even if we don't count education.

Important psa:
—————————————————–
savepoints allow harder games.
—————————————————–

If you create a final boss that the average person needs 50 tries on you need a savepoint cause people won't replay your game 50 times to beat it and reviews will tear it apart making it impossible to sustain a studio. Games with no savepoints have to be more casual to be beatable. Personally i prefer really hard + savepoints over easier gauntlet runs.

What you actually mean to say is that save points excuse excessive difficulty or bad design by turning instances into something to be done only once and forgotten.

It's not excessive when it's what people want.
50 tries on a really hard encounter with no mistakes allowed is more fun for me than replaying the same trashmob levels cause i fucked up on the latest boss.

I want you gone.

Except you can avoid so much more damage with the smoke bomb that it effectively increases your health by much more than 1 or 2. It takes a bit more tech skill, but in the end it makes the game easier.

honestly if you're a nignog or a puerto rican you have no choice but to believe that IQ means nothing, because having an average IQ of 80 is really depressing.

It's only slightly affected by environment.