Board 8 > Wario Land 3 GOAT

(+) Yeah! (+)

You know in video games when you're having fun, and then all of the sudden your health runs out and you die and the game says, "Sorry, no more fun for you," and you get all sad? Never happens in Wario Land 3.

This is your reminder that health meters were invented by greedy corporations for the purpose of stealing all your quarters in the early '80s. How they've survived into modern game design, I do not know. >_>
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god no

WL2 better in every way
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A while back I wrote up a huge wall of text response to a topic calling certain games with non-death "easy". I don't have it anymore but it was something interesting that really got me thinking. Lives in video games are literally a relic of the arcade era that have only become so pervasive in modern games by tradition alone. They don't add anything practical to games and often detract from them if their death system is annoying (pointlessly long animations for deaths, erasing progress on continues, etc.). Wario Land 2 and 3 perfectly demonstrate how big the issue is by not having it at all; they throw away the "life" system and they go in the opposite direction by actually integrating non-death into their core gameplay (powerups are negative conditions inflicted on Wario, which would probably deal "damage" in traditional games; getting hit reduces coins which you need to save for max completion, but you can still take hits at 0 coins). People have this whole thing where they need arbitrary "death" in games to call them difficult, but it's a really stupid point of view.
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The way I see it, each video game is one large puzzle you're trying to solve. Now, to use an analogy, if you were doing a jigsaw puzzle, video game death would be like taking a bunch of the pieces you already placed back out of the puzzle because you didn't place one piece fast enough. It does introduce more difficulty, but is it the best way of introducing difficulty? I say design the puzzle to be trickier on its own merits, and let the player keep all progress they make when trying to solve it.
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-hotdogturtle-- posted...

Wario Land 2 and 3 perfectly demonstrate how big the issue is by not having it at all; they throw away the "life" system and they go in the opposite direction by actually integrating non-death into their core gameplay (powerups are negative conditions inflicted on Wario, which would probably deal "damage" in traditional games; getting hit reduces coins which you need to save for max completion, but you can still take hits at 0 coins).

It's been well over a decade since I've played WL3 (something that needs to be rectified soon), but IIRC wasn't passing through walls during the brief invincibility period after getting hit a legitimate strategy and in fact the only legitimate way to reach some areas?
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Epic Yarn did the no-death thing better
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I hated this game. So tedious.
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lol wtf am I talking about? lol. oh, just Wario Land 3 when you are trying to do something and fail. Death? nah. Gotta try that s*** again? STILL MOTHERf***ING ANNOYING!!

no health bar? Overrated. Wario Land 3 is still really good though and I like it a lot frustration aside.
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Nanis23 posted...

Epic Yarn did the no-death thing better

That's the other game that typically takes all the flak for not having deaths in it. It's different than Wario because it doesn't have any special mechanics behind it. It's more like a traditional platformer, just without a life system. When you fall in a bottomless pit, you just respawn at the last solid ground that you were standing on, but there's no arbitrary number decreasing, and no onscreen text saying "you have died". And apparently that's too radical a change for people to handle. People are always like "well there's no penalty for falling off the stage then". But there is, you lose a significant portion of your beads, which you need for ingame completion, even moreso than Wario's coins. Falling off or getting hit in Epic Yarn is even more detrimental than it is in Wario Land, and also more detrimental than it is in other Kirby games where you can simply tank hits with your extra health. Just because the game doesn't tell you that you died, it doesn't mean that it doesn't work the same way.
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Wario Land 4 is the real GOAT
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