LogFAQs > #889615999

foolm0r0n posted...

The End Is Nigh for example is largely no lives, but it has special lives-based retro levels. Those are super frustrating and not that fun and I don't really want to play them, while the regular levels are incredibly addictive and awesome.

The End is Nigh played with lives in some neat ways but absolutely deserves critiquing too. It's a fine modern case study.

Its standard levels were like Super Meat Boy's: expect to die a lot, then restart quickly to die some more too. This is great.

Its cartridges each introduced different philosophies:

*Glitched cartridges are like the standard levels but much harder: this is pretty well great, just some odd difficulty spikes here and there (some got patched) but it works.

*Nine cartridges asked you to beat ten screens with only twenty lives. I thought these were fair, given their difficulty. These also had achievements encouraging you to get better than necessary at them, which will help in the next category.

*+Super Mega Cart asked you to beat ALL of the twenty-life cartridges you already played as well as a tenth one you had no experience with in a gauntlet-type situation...with only thirty or forty lives total, and failure means you restart all the way back to the beginning of the gauntlet. My main problem here was the final ten levels being brand new after everything else. The rest of the gauntlet had its frustrations but I thought it was fine -- that last surprise was an unfair trap though, and this type of suprise is not the last of its kind.

*The four Nevermore cartridges asked you to beat five-eight screens without a single death. These felt impossible at moments but ultimately they feel good to beat so I think these are worthy.

*+Acceptance combines those Nevermore cartridges and adds a new final world of five-six screens to beat in another gauntlet...again, with only one life. This is fucking bullshit and it wasn't very satisfying to complete it. This is incredibly difficult and is certain to infuriate along the way even before springing those final new levels on you. I consider this an irresponsible challenge to put on a gamer.

One other neat way TEiN played with lives was how the tumors you collected throughout the game affected how many lives you'd have in its final two worlds. One of them simply totaled how many tumors you collected and said you had that many lives to use -- the other did the same, except it would take your first 450 tumors away from you so you had to respect your lives even more. This was exciting and I could return to past levels to collect more tumors as I needed more lives, so this worked well.
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