old school games like mario and sonic where you needed to find extra lives to keep playing so you wouldn't get a game over. majority of games to day has you re-spawn at check points or last auto saves from moments ago.
Games aren't really designed around the concept of lives anymore, mostly because games were a lot shorter when lives and game overs were big. If people had to completely start over a level (or, god forbid, the entire game) nowadays, it's much more of a hassle than it was playing Sonic the Hedgehog.
Save games has eliminated the need for lives, otherwise you could just reload a past save and carry on.
Games these days have more of a story and encourage the player to finish the game, without being forced to start from the beginning when they run out of lives.
Yeah this is completely true. Makes me a bit sad thinking of the old days of gaming.
Guess everything changes for a reason, and maybe this was for the better of gaming. Imagine GTA4 with Lives, you'd get to the end of the game, and then on the last mission, you die and you're lives are depleted. Game over, start from that fucking boat again!
Designers actually want you to see the whole game now. So they don't pull stupid crap that forces you to immediately redo all or part of it. What made sense in the arcades does not make sense now.
On the game saving note, I've been playing Wolfenstein 3D. Everyt ime you die you lost all your weapons and most of your Ammo, as well as a life. So I just reload the most recent save.
Because modern games are far too long for that. If you die on the final level of Streets of Rage, its not that much of a problem because you only have to invest less than an hour in order to get to that point.
They're not necessarily gone though. There are some games that still have them. Mario Galaxy has them but in a different fashion. Once the level is beat, the game is saved and you never have to re-do the level again. When playing the level, you get 3 lives (or more if you've earned them) to try and beat it before the game kicks you back out to the star ship hub.
They're just being used differently and is very dependent on the type of game being played.
Lives are completely redundant outside of an arcade, where they are only there to get more money out of you. What japan doesn't realise is that the rest of the world has embraced the internet and isn't interested in arcades any more. Also Japan will always have that "because that's the way it's always been" mentality, so games like Mario will always have lives, even though they got all the money out of me they were going to get when I bought the game.
It's because developers have finally made a distinction between arcade games, and home games. Arcade games were meant for you to lose lives, and pop in more quarters, and they were the first popular games really, so when home consoles came around, they were all about "bringing the arcade experience home". Now home games are a wholly different and unique experience on their own, and have found their own footing. The arcade aesthetic doesn't work with home games, so it's a welcome removal.
When done right, things like use of lives or limited saves can make a game more tense, exciting, and ultimately rewarding to play. It doesn't work for every game, but it has its place. There is a definite thrill to being on your 'last life,' and that feeling is hard to reproduce in a game with unlimited tries.
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