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Meaningless Lives: Difference between revisions
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{{trope}}
{{Video Game Examples Need Sorting}}
In the beginning, there were [[Nintendo Hard]] games which you had to finish in a single sitting. To make these games more fair, creators implemented "lives" so that you wouldn't have to start all the way at the beginning of the game if you
Then came game saving, a feature that allowed the player to quit and start again later more or less where they left off. ''[[The Legend of Zelda (video game)|The Legend of Zelda]]'' and ''[[Metroid]]'' were the first few to do
But some developers didn't care. They liked "lives" and wanted to keep them despite having save features. People expected them to be there. Hence Meaningless Lives.
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*** [[Super Mario Galaxy 2]] is this to about as much degree at the first game. The hub has the usual five odd lives, as well as a infinite supply in the basement via the Chance Cube in the casino (aka, about 20 possible lives to get for about a 100 coins apiece). And the standard five from Princess Peach's letters to Mario. And the Chance Cubes in most levels. And the fact unlike most 3D Mario games, you keep any lives you gain in a level if you exit without beating it, meaning easy 1-Up farming.
**** To say nothing of the [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqs7Q7jYzI4 infinite 1-Up trick] about halfway through the game.
**** If you quit the game on one save file and go to another, the number of lives you had on the other save file will be transferred to the current one. This number can range from something small, like 2, to [[media:
** [[New Super Mario Bros. Wii]] has over a dozen intentional ways to get infinite (or high numbers of) 1-ups, and they're all documented in videos in the game. In other words, the game tells you how to get them. Although getting lives is trivial, losing them holds a little more weight as 7 deaths in one level (except on hard levels) makes the Game Guide pop up which means your file can [[Lost Forever|never]] have shiny stars. Also, in multiplayer there isn't time to collect as many 1ups unless [[Completely Missing the Point|everyone cooperates]], and running out means you need to sit out the level until it's completed or everyone dies.
** ''[[Super Mario 3D Land]]'' does things similarly to ''New Super Mario Bros. Wii'', having a fairly easy infinite-life trick in the ''second level of the game''. The game even rewards you for finding the trick by letting you get over the normal maximum number of lives. Just as in ''New Super Mario Bros. Wii'' however, losing too many lives in a row causes the game to give you help and [[Lost Forever|take away]] your [[Bragging Rights Reward]] of shiny stars.
* In Mario vs. Donkey Kong: Minis March Again, which was the first game in the series to even HAVE lives, losing all of them causes you to... gain five more. Yeah...
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** Not to mention the fact that at the end of every level, every 1000 force gems gives you a fairy. Since you need 2000 just to complete the level, that's two right there. Each level has, without exception, over four thousand force gems, and usually more. And that's not counting the infuriating mini-games that could get you ''even more'' fairies.
** And this was even more useless if you were playing multiplayer, where you only lose fairies if all players are down simultaneously, and that's ''extremely'' rare seeing how individually downed players will automatically revive themselves after about 10 seconds - no worse for wear. In fact, this actually makes even having ''health meters'' [[Up to Eleven|effectively meaningless]] in this game.
** Most Zelda games have a "Game Over" screen, which doesn't make you lose any progress; you just get sent to the nearest building or dungeon entrance as if you had saved and restarted. Many of them have ''inverted''
* Attempted subversion in ''Gex: Enter the Gecko'', where running out of lives would erase all your progress and force you to start again. At least, that's the theory. The problem was that the game had to prompt the player to overwrite their save file, making it incredibly easy to avoid the punishment.
* ''[[Conker Live And Reloaded]]'' would reset your lives to 3 if you lost them all and chose to retry. You were thrown back to the previous checkpoint, but since literally every new room was a checkpoint this was not much of a penalty.
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* Averted in ''Starfighter: Disputed Galaxy''. The game saves your progress as you go ''and'' allows you to stock up to ten lives at a time (which can be repurchased or refreshed altogether on buying a new ship). However, if you manage to run out of lives, the game resets your progress completely and forces you to start over.
* Averted in the original ''[[Rayman]]''. It had both lives and saving, but the lives were justified because the levels were [[Nintendo Hard]], long enough for your level checkpoints to feel precious, and it had ''limited continues''.
* Averted in both ''[[Prince of Persia]]'' and ''[[
** It's worse than that in
** The first ''[[Prince of Persia]]'' game does have "Meaningless Time". Death restarts you at the beginning of the current level, so there is no reason at all not to reload your save file, getting your time back as well.
* In the PSP game ''[[Prinny: Can I Really Be the Hero?]]'', your character starts with 1,000 lives and the game consists of 10 levels. The game can be pretty hard at times, but you won't ever expend the 1,000 lives you start with, with most people losing somewhere between 100 and 300 over the course of the entire game.
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* In ''Street Fighter 2010'', losing all of your lives simply takes you to the continue screen, where you can restart on the very same stage anyway. The only real penalty for using a continue is that your score is reset.
* ''[[Wolfenstein 3D]]'' likewise has lives, 1-up pickups, and score that gives you lives in a first-person shooter where you can save at any point. Apparently, Id Software needed time to shake off the platform game conventions while working on the predecessor of today's FPS's.
* [[''NES Remix'']] resets your lives at the start of each stage and has [[Death Is a Slap on The Wrist]] since you'll simply to sent back to the start of the current stage in the event of a game over (and if you don't care about rank you can just restart the substage you were on). However, it also has meaningless in a far more sinister sense, any [[1-Up]]s you pick up will do absolutely nothing.
* ''Sweevo's World'' had a bug that allowed Sweevo to lose two lives at once in some circumstances, at least in the [[ZX Spectrum]] version. If this happened on his last life, the life counter (which normally only went to five) wrapped around to 255.
{{reflist}}
[[Category:Video Game Rewards]]
▲[[Category:Meaningless Lives]]
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