Life Meter: Difference between revisions

 

== Anime/Manga ==

 

== Video Games ==

* [[Averted Trope|Averted]], surprisingly, in a [[Fighting Game]]. ''[[Bushido Blade]]'' and its sequel ''Bushido Blade 2'', is a game based around duels with melee weapons that's very unusual in the fact there are no life gauges whatsoever. You can literally be killed with a single blow.

* Likewise, ''[[Operation Flashpoint]]'' has no life meter; to determine the extent of your injuries, you simply check your body for wounds. Any wound to a vital area has a good chance of [[One-Hit Kill|killing you outright]], and wounds to the limbs affect your movement and accuracy. Though there aren't any health packs as such, you can get the wound treated by a medic if you can find one.

* ''[[Spyro the Dragon]]'' and its sequels had a creative, if basic, adaptation: The dragonfly Sparx literally served as a health meter, changing colors from Gold at full health down to green, and then disappearing entirely. After that, a single hit would kill you. The game explained this by way of some vague protective magic Sparx generated.

** Similarly, early versions of ''[[The Legend of Zelda]]: Ocarina of Time'' had the color of Link's tunic and shield change to indicate his health. Of course, the final version just used collections of hearts like previous titles.

** The newer Legend of Spyro games have actually stopped using Sparx as a health indicator and reverted to a conventional health meter, but for a good reason: The new combat system requires Spyro to have way more health than in previous games, which would have been difficult to show with Sparx.

* In ''[[Trespasser]]: [[Jurassic Park]]'', there is no HUD; your health is instead displayed by glancing down at a heart-shaped tattoo on your left breast (a rare example of a [[Third Person Seductress|First Person Seductress]]).

* ''[[Halo]] 2'' and ''3'' have no [[Life Meter]] per se. Instead, there's a meter for your energy shield. When it reaches zero, your now-unseen health bar can be diminished, obviously enough hits on you after the shield bar is depleted will result in your death. However, if not hit in a set amount of time, your health and shields will regenerate, the shield bar filling up again (Interestingly enough, Master Chief's health regenerates slower than his shields in Halo 3, meaning that if his health is low enough, but his shields have fully regenerated and were promptly depleted, he'd still have very low health. See the [[Word of God|word of Bungie]] [http://www.bungie.net/News/content.aspx?type=topnews&cid=13233 here], under the OMG Fix Mayleeey, Bungle! section, sub-section The Nitty Gritty).

* ''[[Viewtiful Joe]]'' had bosses with multi layered life meters, deplete the top most layer and you start working on the next one. They where color coded to show roughly how many hp were left, as an absolute unit, not percent.

* While ''[[Kingdom Hearts]] II'' and all following games used a green bar with green squares underneath representing the amount of health bars left for enemies, ''[[Kingdom Hearts]] I'' and the GBA game ''Chain of Memories'' used colored, multi layered health bars. This was kind of a problem in KH1 with [[Bonus Boss|Sephiroth]], as he had so much health the developers ran out of colors to use, so he has all the normal colors up to purple and an additional invisible bar.

** Oddly, how well you did in court effects how much health you have in your Magatama investigations, and every time you start the trial the next day, your health is full again. However, during the last case, your Magatama health is restored in the middle of your investigation... but doesn't recover when you go to court the next day. Considering how troubling the last investigation segment is, you're likely only going to have a smidge-higher than half health, making almost all mistakes fatal.

* In the early [[Tomb Raider]] games, it's only visible, if you get hurt or heal yourself.

** The colors for bosses go farther, too.

** Players can easily be confused by the life bar. It's shared by both Neku and his partner... but the gap between the two screens is not counted in the bar. So it's pretty easy to think "Oh I have a lot of life left..." but it isn't nearly as much as you think.

* [[Older Than the NES]]: [[Rare|Ultimate]]'s ''[[Atic Atac]]'' featured a graphic of a chicken, which decreased down to bare bones as you lost energy. (Eating food replenished it.)

* The above was directly lifted for classic kid's TV show ''[[Knightmare]]'', except that it was a human face instead of a skeleton and the skeleton would eventually also [[Nightmare Fuel|disintegrate away into nothing]]. That one also used green to yellow to red backgrounds as a more general measure.

** Similarly, [[Metroid|Samus Aran]] always begins with 99 points of energy, usually displayed as a simple white meter on the HUD, and adds 100 more points with each [[Heart Container|Energy Tank]] she finds, displayed as boxes above the meter.

* The swordsmanship minigame in the old computer game ''Sword of the Samurai'' (programmed by [[Sid Meier]] of ''[[Civilization]]'' fame) has an interesting spin on it, in keeping with the game's feel, which is to contain absolutely no anachronisms. Each time a combatant takes a hit, a brush draws the strokes in the kanji for 'life'; when it is complete, they die.

* The second and third ''[[Streets of Rage]]'' have a standard health bar for players and [[Mooks]], but a boss' health bar is slightly different from the player's. In game 2, the boss' health bar was shown in blue and the number of stars under their name showed how many health bars they had. By the 3rd game, they changed the stars to a number next to the health bar, which makes it look like the amount of "lives" the boss had. Once all the extra bars of health were gone, the boss' life bar would be shown in yellow/red like any other enemy. On higher difficulty levels, even some [[Mooks]] can have multiple bars of health like a boss.

* The arcade game ''[[Rolling Thunder]]'' has a segmented life bar, though this feature is hardly necessary: colliding with or getting punched by [[Mooks]] takes out half of the bar, and getting hit by any projectile kills the player outright!

* ''[[Echo Night]]: Beyond'' uses an EKG monitor; Richard's heartrate jumps whenever he encounters ghosts, but will even out if the ghost is friendly. ''Hostile'' ghosts, on the other hand, along with other disturbing phenomena, can push his heartrate up much higher... Reaching 300+ immediately kills him.

* The ''[[Doom]]'' games combined a percentile health meter with a central character face portrait that got progressively more bloody as your health decreased.

** And with ''[[Nitemare 3D]]'', but rather than getting bloody, the skin wore away like in ''[[Knightmare]]''. You'd be down to a skull when you were on your last 10% health, and when you died, the skull went dark.

* ''[[Heretic]]'' had a numerical life meter, but also a red gem on a chain that moved from right to left as health decreased. This interface was carried over to the first ''Hexen'' game as well.

* [[Truth in Television]]: EKG, EEG and other lifesign indicators used in hospitals.

* ''[[Sapiens]]'' uses a single symbol as a [[Life Meter]]. When you're in perfect health, the meter depicts a large heart. As you receive damage, the hearts decreases gradually, then disappears, then is replaced with progressively larger skulls.

* ''[[Catacomb 3 D]]'' has a human face which is slowly replaced, from the bottom up, by an image of a skull.

* In the old ''Batman: The Movie'', the [[Life Meter]] is [[Batman]]'s face, gradually replaced by [[The Joker]]'s face as the hero receives damage.

* The ''Madou Monogatari'' RPGs for the [[MSX|MSX2]], [[Game Gear]] and [[PC 98]] did the furthest to avert conventional analog or digital representations of the player character's health, which is represented instead by changing facial expressions.

* In Brazilian game ''[http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/guimo/screenshots Guimo]'', the life meter is a pair of eyes, that get bloodshot with every hit (when they're completely red, the player dies).

* Most ''[[Castlevania]]'' games have one for the player character, either as hearts or as a bar. Older games had one for bosses too.

* The platform games Rare developed for the Nintendo64 has an idiosyncratic, unique life meter each:

* In ''Flink'', Flink's life meter was the big red bottle in the corner of the screen, labeled "MAGIC" since it doubled as his [[Magic Meter]].