How come almost everyone seems to believe nowadays that limited continues in a videogame is a bad thing? I can't think of a single game made past the 16-bit era that has limited continues, and I don't consider that to be at all a good thing. Limited continues have so many good traits that it's hard to list them all.
>Extend the playtime so that even a short game can take weeks or months
>Slowly turn you into a master of the game by forcing you to memorize patterns, develop strategies, and gradually turn each moment and level into something you have complete understanding and mastery of
>Raise the stakes and the feeling of tension
>Makes the ending - an ending which you weren't sure that you would ever see, an ending which you've built up in your mind to be almost mythical - that much more rewarding to earn
To be clear, I don't think that limited continues are absolutely necessary to enjoy a game, but I find it baffling that I'm almost alone in considering them to be a good thing.
They aren't a good thing.
>Limited continues have so many good traits that it's hard to list them all.
Most modern Nintendo (Mario, DK) games still do have Lives, it's just that you can rack'em up and never hit 0 and if you were to lose all your lives, well idk, but you probably just start right back where you died.
Even in Castlevania if you lost all your lives in a stage you could continue at the beginning of the stages.
We have too many games and they are all wat longer than before, maybe the majority of people have fried their brain and we need games we can finish in one sitting or people get bored (i'm in this category on newer games). Anyway, you still can play whatever you want as if you have one live and reset your games everytime you frick up.
Unlimited continues ruins certain types of games, a lot of arcade ports to sega saturn and ps1 were ruined because of it. My main example is sonic mania, because of unlimited continues they have to stretch out the levels so they take almost 10 minutes to complete. You can't release a high end beat them up or platform game these days that can be beaten in 40 minutes because people will whine about it.
I don't think people replay games they finished just because they are fun these days like with older games.
I don't agree that all games should favor maximum customization on the user end. Sometimes less is more. However these days difficulty itself is seen as "non inclusive"
turn you into a master of the game
These days people don't play games to play them. They play them to consume them. To "finish" them and then throw them out like an empty fast food bag.
Ewww that's a scary thought. You might very well be right though. Do you think that has to do with the fact that there's no completionist rewards outside of achievements? As in there's no unlockables any more because they're all just behind paywalls as DLC now?
I do believe that has a lot to do with it. No reason to replay a game if all the things that should be rewards for doing so are simply bought.
I think another reason is that modern games demand a lot more of a player's attention. Be it they be story based, open world so much of the playtime is travel, multiplayer games that demand you level up to get rewards before they go away. Rarely do you die, get tossed back to the start of the level, and then just keep going like an NES game. There's so many things that get in the way of the gameplay that the idea of starting the game over and mastering it is no longer fun, just annoyingly tedious.
Mastery of a single player game is a lot less appealing when online multiplayer exists to give that mastery some context and sense of reward outside your own basement, and I when I say multiplayer I'm including co-op. You can try to larp about muh zoomers in response to this but you know why arcade leaderboards and speedrunning exist and why SFII was a big deal so it would be nice if you didn't.
Except those trying to "master" via multiplayer or speed running/social exposure shit, are an extremely minority overall. Most people keep coming back to multiplayer either for a casual match, or more insidiously, due to GaS mechanics rewarding daily log-ins or weekly meter filling goals.
There is too much trash out there, if someone find a good game they will replay it or add rules to make the next run more challenging. Videogames are played by everyone but it's the same niche as before if you don't count casual players...and you don't count non-retro shitgames
This. Modern "gamers" seem to love everything about video games except actually playing them.
>To "finish" them and then throw them out like an empty fast food bag.
You forgot about "doing all achievement" and then "next game".
If you're going to allow continues at all then there's no point in arbitrarily limiting them UNLESS it's tied to difficulty settings or if it's somehow worked into the basic game mechanics, systems, or structures.
Limited continues were designed for the arcade era when the purpose of video games was to extract as many quarters out of players as possible. In an era where I fully pay for the game upfront, this design feature no longer holds up. Let's look at your so-called pros in depth though
>Extend the playtime
Artificially extending the playtime is just exhausting. I'd much rather just pay $5 for a good short game that I'll be finished with in a week or so than pay full price for a game with a small number of levels that are stretched out into "months" by limited continues
>Slowly turn you into a master
Good tutorialization in the early levels of a game and a proper escalation of challenges will do this anyway.
>Raise the stakes
This can be a good thing, but it can also just become a problem. If I'm a master of levels 1-9 and just haven't figured out level 10 yet, having to replay them constantly to get back to the point where I'm actually being challenged can be both tedious and too much of a struggle of attrition to care about. Like maybe level 8 has that bit I still struggle with so as I replay it again and again I become more and more likely to frick it up out of fatigue (or having to get back into the groove if I take a break and come back to it). Sometimes, just getting to play from level 10 is where the actual fun is. Hell, sometimes the tension gets so high I stop having fun at all!
>Makes the ending more rewarding
Just as this ties into your above point, my rebuttal ties into mine: sometimes when I get to the ending I'm just relieved it's fricking over and I can stop trying now.
I don't think that limited continues are inherently bad, but I do think that most of the time they're just a bit of artificial difficulty that could easily be replaced by a well-thought out checkpoint system that is sparse but provides permanent rewards for mastery of early challenges.
You talk like a gay, and your shit's all moronic.
Well either argue against my points or stick your dick in my mouth to shut me up.
If you want to replay a game, you can just replay a game. Not really a game mechanic is it, just turn it off. Permadeath as a mechanic is easy implemented on the user level, I used to do it all the time just for fun in PC games. Play until death, turn the game off. There you go, problem solved
I just beat Omega Boost and it has unlimited continues. Not only that but a more recent game the developers caved into the customers whining. Apparently before you only had one credit thus had to 1CC Final Vendetta to beat it. Then they implemented three continues. But yeah, I don't mind limited continues.
>It has limited continues*
Limited continues/lives adds a level of tension that is simply not there otherwise. Ever beaten a final boss on your very last life? You'll be sweating by the end of it. There's nothing else like it in gaming imo...
>I can't think of a single game made past the 16-bit era that has limited continues
Rayman, dude.
Rayman did it badly though because it still offered saves and passwords and was intended as an ongoing adventure you kept picking up where you ended at. The limited continues were a dev oversight and just made the game tedious with life farming.
if the continues are limited it's a sure sign the game is early gen arcade shid
Most of the types of platformers you’re describing were movie license games and weren’t very good to begin with.
>nowadays
Zoomers' new favorite word now that they have life experiences beyond school. It's been "nowadays" in vidya for 20 years.
>I'm almost alone in considering them to be a good thing
Good, one less thing the greater moronic population isn't moronic about.
Limited continues are a shitty holdover from coin-eating arcade games that were only adopted for as long as they were because of the rental market and hardware limitations. A lot of home console games instituted code systems so players could maintain progress. Even the autistic speedrunners and high-score-humpers have learned to self-regulate. wtf is your problem?
Lots of games still have limited/no continues, they're just designed in a way to not completely shit on user experience.
The problem is moreso arcade ports (particularly shmups) that only give you a limited amount of credits. These games were designed to eat coins, but even in an actual arcade, as long as you had more coins, you could theoretically give yourself unlimited continues and finish the game. They remove this from the console ports and the games become unbeatable, even on lowest difficulty. Imagine even trying to beat Street Fighter or something on higher difficulties with no continues, easy for an expert maybe, but for a novice it would just be no fun.
I don't mind limited continues, but if the game has a password system AND limited continues, now you're just fricking around.
>almost everyone seems to believe nowadays that limited continues in a videogame is a bad thing?
do they?
It may be that games became longer and story-based by the time of 32-bits. It might make sense for sonic but games like that became less common, and I don't hate continues but not on my 100-hour epic.
Which arcade games had limited continues? Pretty much none, they were limited by the number of quarters that could be extracted from you. But now that you paid a pile of quarters to play a game at home, at your leisure, what would the point of limited continues be? Just to stretch the game out and make you study it autistically? You'd never do that in the arcade, you'd die and put in another quarter and continue.
It's just an artificial way to stretch the game out over time.
>Which arcade games had limited continues
Haunted Castle
rofl
It was a necessary evil. I get that it gives a feeling of a bigger adventure, and it's fun every once in a while, but gameplay-wise it just wastes your time with padding that doesn't have anything to do with the challenge/section of the level you're facing. By the 32-bit era, storage issues were no longer a thing so you were allowed to have many colorful backgrounds with little repetition, so it went away.
I think it's fun trying to beat a game in a sitting every once in a while too, it has the same effect.
Gaming itself is a waste of time
It should be an *enjoyable* waste of time.
>doesn't have anything to do with the challenge/section of the level you're facing
Many games reward you for doing better at them (extra lives, power ups, etc.) in ways that carry over level to level, so mastering earlier levels does actually affect the challenge of later levels.
I like games that lean heavily into this (as opposed to ones that do things like convert your super bombs to score and reset them to 3 at the start of the next level or whatever)
Too many games to spend life playing YOUR game over and over.
There are entire genres based on playing multiple runs. If it's a short game like Downwell I don't see the problem, Mario even has multiple war gates for experienced players to skip ahead. Some challenges are just meant to be a gauntlet like how fighting games have arcade ladders
>Just as this ties into your above point, my rebuttal ties into mine: sometimes when I get to the ending I'm just relieved it's fricking over and I can stop trying now. I don't think that limited continues are inherently bad, but I do think that most of the time they're just a bit of artificial difficulty
Artificial difficulty is literally just "difficulty I don't like". You can apply this logic to permadeath in roguelikes too. Or video game death in general. Nothing is fair because singleplayer is inherently asymmetrical and the entire game is an arbitrary challenge by the developers. If artificial difficulty was a type of difficulty (instead of just the subjective experience of being frustrated) you'd think there would be games people consider simeltaneously easy and artificially difficult, but there never is. It's just a pretentious way of saying "it's too hard" or "it's not fun" without really explaining why.
There's no "natural difficulty" except the natural difficulty people like you have navigating life with a low IQ. People will always be butthurt sore losers looking for a reason why they should have won.
WHOMST
This game over screen looks familiar. What game?
Adventures of Bayou Billy. A game notoriously made much harder to the point of ridiculousness in the US version.
Continues shouldn't exist to begin with, the game should just end there
Adventure Island is nearly impossible to beat without the bee.
>How come almost everyone seems to believe nowadays
False assertion. Prove your claim first or you're just talking shit.
I beat Hammerin' Harry on Famicom the other day and I thought it should have had limited continues, like 3 maximum.
I love limited continues because I grew up playing arcade games and I have a big preference to games that still try to simulate arcade gameplay.
But arcades had unlimited continues.
Not for me since I'm poor.
A video game is no different than a movie. You wouldn't have a memorable movie you only half watched. For that reason I use save states.
I bought the game, I should be able to slam 100 quarters in a single run if I feel like it
>b-but muh challenge???
If the game is any good I'd replay it with self imposed limits.
People just don't like the extra difficulty. It's that simple.
I don't agree that all challenges should be self imposed. Art is better with restrictions that take you outside of your comfort zone, but these days most people would rather blame the game than git gud
Also many console platformers etc. were never arcade ports
You can do all of those things without limited lives though if you make your games actually difficult. Also it's a holdover from arcade systems trying to milk customers out of as many quarters as possible.
Surely resources are part of difficulty like anything else, lives are just another resource
I have kids,shit to do and a stack of games I'd like to get to someday. I don't have infinite time to piss away like I did as a kid.
Literally just savestate
I started collecting 30 years ago and have an actual collection. I barely get time to dick around in my gameroom. I don't have a problem with continues or needed to get better just tossing out a reason people may not want to grind out the same part of a game 50 times in a row.