Erm. Arcade games were hard because otherwise what do you have? Some kind of strange interactive moving picture attraction. I'm sure those exist but that is parallel to a game and more like an attraction or casual time killing phone app. When someone wants to play a game, they must be challenged to reveal the design of the game itself. Without losing, there is no way to indicate the rules. Also no way to gauge success. That is why easy games are so frustrating.

I still remember how much the DeSmuME creator hated Pokémon fans, even going on mini rants in the FAQ section.

I think rating systems such as DMC or Rythm Games kinda bridge the gap. You can play through the whole game easily but if you want to go for higher difficulties or to get more skilled you go for a P or SSS

36:15 drastic is WAYYYYYYY better for this

Correction: DS stands for Developer System not Dual Screen as said by Nintendo back in the day

Twilight Menu is not emulation. It loads the DS ROMs using the 3DS CPU compatibility with DS games, basically making it backwards compatibility hacked to load SD card files instead of physical games. In fact, Twilight Menu is just the DSi's homebrew menu on the 3DS.

8:30 you could also use a drawing tablet as those also use pens. additionally if you want to use the pen a drawing tablet has on a screen I'd advice either a pen display or pen computer (a drawing tablet but with either a display in it functioning like an external monitor or just flat a full on computer inside depending on what kind you get), but those are often a lot more expensive than drawing tablets are. As for what brands are good for both, I'll go with either Huion or Wacom as those are the 2 big ones in that industry with Wacom kinda being the standard for the industry they are mostly used in and Huion being cheaper (though still of really good quality).

After all those years of tutoring and being held back as super seniors trying their hardest to graduate, you'd think they'd amount to something? Nope. Just being bum bums.

Got to do android. Get a lot of freedom on android and you have a few options.

Nice video! Love this format. Can you do N64 next?

27:16 this is made even more hilarious when you have a game that gives you *two or more* lives between the start and where you die, thus giving you a net profit in lives at the end! Looking at you, Blade Mountain from Pac-Man World 2...

*Directors' System. Not dual screen.

cool

So you spent the first SEVEN minutes(almost 8!) just talking about what the DS is instead of going straight to emulation?

How dare video games have 1-ups that feel satisfying to collect and rewards risk with a checkpoint instead of coins that do nothing except unlock costumes in a multiplayer mode or something (Sonic Superstars)? How dare not every game be Super Meat Boy with 30 second levels where you die over and over at until you brute force them with infinite checkpoints and zero repetition? How dare video games force you to play well for 30 minutes to an hour without losing all your lives, instead of giving you a wholesome infinite continues cushion that takes away all tension?

They are that bad if you remember the prices b4 the pandemic and want to pay ~$15 for a complete in box game that is going for $45+ loose now. I know it doesn't seem like that much, but consider you're not going to buy only 1 or 2 games for a span of years. It adds up and now it competes with modern game prices instead of being a cheaper alternative.

I feel like a lot of the comments on this video are really hung up on whether limited continues "artificially" make a game longer or more difficult, which is a very arbitrary and judgemental way of looking at things. I mean, what were you really expecting the developers to do back then if you think its "cheap"? Make a hundred levels fit on a 4MB cartridge? It's just a creative choice that changes the way a game is played with an outcome that still depends on the actual quality of the game itself. It was used best in older linear games with a set amount of levels that can be beaten in less than an hour by a skilled player. The way that the player progresses is changed by forcing them to master each section of the game before being able to challenge the next one with the greatest advantage. (power-ups, weapons, health, lives and continues of course, etc.) Just being able to skirt by a level by chance or luck carries consequences for the player and a perfect playthrough is rewarded. The entire game is a cohesive experience and your position relies on your previous actions. With the limitations of older hardware and small ROM space, developers naturally ran into the need to make their short games replayable and limited continues work for this problem while naturally complimenting the short length of these games. One of my favorite games, Ninja Gaiden (NES), even has unlimited continues, but it still uses the principle of not allowing the player to try endlessly until they win on the final boss, where dying will take you back to the very beginning of the extremely difficult final stage, 6-1. People call this "unfair" a lot, and that's technically true, but the actual outcome of this heightened punishment is that the player has to obtain the skill to get through the entire final stage consistently if they want to get another attempt to fight the final boss. It requires an amount of mastery that would be unnecessary if the game would just allow you to go back to 6-3 like any normal boss in the game does, and the game is better off for it, even though it only exists thanks to a programming bug that the devs left in because they thought it was funny. I once watched a video of a guy giving his thoughts on Ninja Gaiden, and he really had a shitty understanding of the game mechanics. In the final stage, there are two times where an enemy is situated on a platform diagonally downwards to the left of the player character. The distance is short, and the easiest and fastest way to get past these challenges is simply walking forward off of the cliff and slashing, since your player character has momentum while falling even if you didn't jump. The guy playing the game had absolutely no idea what he was doing there, because he didn't understand the nuances of the characters control. In the first instance, he waited for the enemy to reach the opposite end of the platform before jumping to get to the edge and slash, this is a very awkward solution as well as a slow one but he just assumed that's the only way and moved on. (you'll find out why he wasn't forced to learn later on) This challenge is repeated later in the level but instead with a gun enemy that can fire bullets, so this strategy would no longer work due to the bullets covering the space he would need to jump to. Instead of experimenting on alternate methods, such as using the natural falling momentum instead of jumping, he concludes that the only way to get past this enemy is to jump forward then move backwards to get downwards onto the side of the cliff directly opposite to the enemy, then jump to the towards the enemy while slashing to kill him. This is nearly impossible and he even admits this, but instead of reflecting, he just decides that the only actual way must be to keep a subweapon from a previous level in the stage, even though the entire game is designed in such a way that you only need your sword. You know why he didn't get to learn this? He used save states on the final boss to skip having to learn how to clear these challenges consistently. He bitched about how unfair it is you have to go back, then loaded a save state a dozen times on the first phase, the easiest one, as he just kept jumping straight into the enemy and his projectiles, over and over again, until he finally realized that the solution was using the walls on each side of the arena. It's not the most obvious idea to think, but it seems to be true that knowing that, if you lose, you'll be punished to a high degree, actually makes you more likely to experiment since you really want to know what the solution could be in the least amount of attempts possible. There are consequences to losing so you NEED to actually gain some new knowledge with each try. You're also more incentivized to learn the most efficient and satisfying way to get through a level if you have to complete it consistently. The guy in the video side stepped the games design and understood much less a result. Games like Ninja Gaiden DO come off as shallow, short experiences if you just brute force your way throughout the entire game with mediocrity and fail to understand how the game plays. I also noticed the difference made between unlimited and finite continues when I played different versions of Ghouls 'N Ghosts, first on the PSX port which gives you unlimited continues and then on the Supergrafx version which only gives you 3. When I played the PSX version, I tried over and over on each level until I won, but my level of skill on each level was the same, and even after I reached the final level, I would still die on the earlier levels a lot. When I tried the Supergrafx version, I actually needed to get serious with how I played and only then did I actually become consistent with beating the earlier stages. Finite continues wouldn't work well in any long modern 3d action game or even in retro inspired titles like Super Meat Boy which have hundreds of levels and are obviously intended to be progressed through across multiple sessions, since the games are not designed to be cohesive and repeatable one session experiences, but obviously, not every game mechanic is suited to every type of game.

18:20 the ironic part is that they probably made this to ensure that newbies wont panic because they put an window in fullscreen mode and dont know how to toggle it back

honeslty, customizing the gap between the screens and the input issue may be very easy to do. its an open source emulator, so if you know a bit of coding you probably can do that... i would try if i was not busy with my own projects, and burried in debts so i cant work for free >.> nor charge for an feature that im not completely sure i would be able to implement.

I think all games should have an OPTION to have infinite lives, but as someone who exclusively plays arcade styled games/difficult games, I prefer it like that, but it should always be an option. I personally think the "no games should have lives" argument is really stupid because I feel it misses the entire point as to why they exist In the first place, rather than having a challenge that feels good when finally complete, modern gamers beg for every game to fit into modern sensibilities, which I can kinda get, but not all games work with that kind of design and it comes off as really fucking obnoxious when I hear "fnflover2015" beg for infinite lives in castlevania

It's different per-genre and each of these games' market has different expectations. Games that phase out lives as time goes on are mainly designed for short sprints but large quantity of levels like platformers. Some maintain the arcade-style short marathon where the holy grail is to clear the game without continues. A popular choice for shmups and beat 'em ups where their arcade flavor still persists. Won't starting from the start tiring??? Well, part of this arcade marathon trek is to perform better early so you can dump in the entire resource you've accumulated early on at the last stage. This includes racking up the life stock. It gives the player interesting strategies to plan out with this system. On extreme cases gaining lives is important to lose it on purpose so you make the game easier on the spot. While on the mainstream lives seem to be gone, it actually still persists, just in different forms or branding. Take a look at the on-the-spot revival items you can get on the modern games today like Dragon's Dogma's Wakestones or Devil May Cry's Gold Orb. These are lives, just rebranded as revive items. Use them or back to the save point you go. Monster Hunter gives you continues per quest. Basically it functions as a life counter before you fail the quest from dying too much and have to fight the boss again with its HP reset to full.

The two scenarios where I think the Live System works really well are: 1. Sometimes I just wanna get this quick adrenaline rush and enter that flow state when playing games. I then love playing stuff like Touhou, Metal Slug or any 90s SNK Fighting Game. I'm aware that it's highly unlikely that I will beat them but seeing how far I can make it is exciting. Maybe I'll make it further than I ever have before. Who knows! When I get a Game Over it's not frustrating because I DONT have to start the game from the beginning. I treat it exactly as what it says, a "Game Over" as in, I go and do something else and try again another day. I think many people love this type of challenge. This "Will this be my best run yet?" But since modern games don't directly provide that, stuff like Speed Running exists. 2. The Megaman Games. Getting a game over actually incentives you to try a different stage and come back with more weapons and tools later. Sadly now with rewind and save state features I've seen people try to brute force the Heatman Block Section. I was kinda dissapointed since they'll never know the satisfaction of returning to this stage with Item-2 (an item that trivializes that section)

"It just feels like this arcade game was designed to take your money." Well no shit.

It comes down to length. If you have no life system, almost anyone can power through a game so short as SMB (by today's standards). Also because no life system means you can retry a very short section a lot of times, and very quickly adapt to it until you pass it. In old games, having lives means you can not practice later parts of the game that often, so truly mastering a game takes years of dedication. Game makers these days want to appeal to casual gamers (or busy adults that can't practice that much) more than before, so they want to avoid getting them frustrated. But then, they have to resort to fill games with a lot of parts devoid of gameplay (many open worlds) to make them last longer. I recommend you checking the channel "The Electric Underground", he specializes in shmups, but he has many videos covering this kind of topic.

The mario games I get because in older Mario games you couldnt do a hard save of your progrrss unless you beat the mini boss or the boss of a world. Memo saves were available in new super mario but it was damn easy to accidentally be flush with so many lives youll never see a game over screen. I think saving at a halfway point means that the farther you get, the greater risk of losing all that progress if you were foolish.

One note: timer in a beatem'up is simply to reset the game of the player is idle in a part with no enemies, or of someone simply evades an enemy without advancing any further and hogging up the machine. Some like TMNT will kill you if you stay idle for a minute or so.

😅😅😅😬😬😬getting cooked in the comments my man….. yeah I don’t know what planet your from but NES games had lives in my and you needed every one of them pointless????! nope adversity builds character and long sufferance! You think learning the Konami code made Contra easier??? I’m sure Ghost n Goblins was a joke too right… naw fam this ain’t hit like you thought it would….

I like the shaders you're using

I'm so confused by this argument, and heavily disagree with it. In the way that a health bar tells you how many times Metalman can hurt you before you are good enough to defeat him. You number of lives is similar - it's a measure of how many times you can fatally fail on the way to all the way through the level and to the boss fight. If you master the level better you have more lives to practice against Metalman

Lives were for money making in arcades. Then to make a game keep you working on it for a while to make it purchase worthy. THEN it became sometimes pointless with easy games...Bugs Bunny Birthday Blowout? No way out : you stop or it keeps bringing you back to life.

well let me tell you that playing on anbernic console is very cool, i remember when i was a kid i had a friend wih gba sp and i always wanted one for me, then i heard about rg35xxSP and i buyed one it was the best decision in my life btw nintendo emulate their own hardware snice wii era so, a chinese console can be a good way to play some games

3:09 Incorrect, even if you don't finish one gameplay loop, you get to keep your score, it's just not gonna be large as one after a gameplay loop i also got to mention that the reason why it took so long to abandon lives system in home console games was due to storage limitations, which meant there was not much content, so devs had to artificially extend the playtime 29:04 SMB3 is great and a great example, but the deal with warps and permanent checkpoints is that you get to be warped all the way back to the world, and not the level, and same can be said about the warp, i could simply want to go to a level somewhere in the middle of world 6, but i can only choose the start of world 6 or start of world 7 29:18 SMB3 movement is great but is slippery like most mario games (except for mario 2 USA) so i wouldn't say it's precise

I haven’t watched yet but the lives system is like the point system in older games. It’s a relic of the arcade system used to keep kids pumping quarters into the game. In most NES games game overs would make you start the whole game over.

I know 2 games that made lives right: infernax and the wii version of sonic unleashed, in there, lives are a collectible, and they dictate your number of times you can use checkpoints before forcing you to start from the last savepoint, in games where you have mini gauntlet trials in succesion between savepoints, you better either find a way to get extra lives or git gud because it's gonna only get harder from here. Oh, also roguelikes have a good use for extra lives, as they are chances to cheat death and a lot of extra life mechanics can come with caveats like an item that gives you 9 extra lives, but reviving with 1 hp.

I hate how Super Mario Bros. games handle dying. Instead of just doing the death animation and respawning at the checkpoint, the game stops and you have to LOOK at Mario die, as a mini cutscene, and see how many lives you still have, before going back to the game.

Arcades.

Life System was pretty pointless in Super Mario 64. Lose 1 life - get taken out of the level. Lose all lives - get taken to the front door of the castle - and then can simply get back to the level entry you were at by walking for 15 seconds.

2:05 because all programmers know that counting starts at zero.

Having no consequences to losing makes a game not a challenge but just a series of events to do. Simon says walk here. The ending screen is not an entitlement to all players, kid. The end is for people who 'got gud'.

There is actually a BIG consequence for losing a life in Galaga. If you had an extra ship attached, you would lose all your fire power.

I love this. It’s like otherthinkers unite but with depth.

The “relic of the arcade” argument is partially the answer but it’s still missing a small piece. Back in those days gaming was typically a social event. (Normal) People didn’t really sit there and game alone for hours and hours like they do today. The lives were not timers for when YOU get to play next. It was the timer for when The next player gets to play. This applied in the arcades as well as at home. “I got next” “pass the controller” those were good times. With that being said I don’t know why people get so mad at younger generations for sharing their perspective on things older guys like me just don’t even stop to question because it’s just always been like that. Thank you for sharing your perspective. Hopefully I offered some useful insight.

if you get a game over, your skill card is revoked and a skill issue file is on your permanent records warrant.

Super Mario Bros 3 on GBA is just a remaster, not a remake. It is basically just a port of the SNES Mario All Stars version.

I just had to put this at the beginning of this wall of text cause I really want to ask. Why do you end up treating games that include lives like its a separate genre? You can argue that its reasonable to do that but it seems like its really not lending to good analysis. A point I don't make later but want to get across here. Life Systems are way too broad of a mechanic. It ties too deeply into the rest of the game experience to even really go anywhere when singled out. Its something to look at more on case by case basis. (The real Wall of Text comment) I'm gonna be a little harsh cause the question does kinda frustrate me and it is not new at all. This video is kinda bad. Its underinformed, lacks understanding of the topics beyond a surface level, and meandering. You mention Galaga and Contra but don't bother to consider that lives in those games are more akin to health in others as each life is a single hit. Saying you aren't punished for losing lives in Contra means something entirely different than in Super Mario. Cause you mentioned Cuphead later, replace the HP with "lives" or hits to see my point. In Contra the comparable life system is called continues. Timers aren't just about whether the clock ever runs out. Its about the player not wanting it to run out. Psychology matters a lot in games. It isn't just about the tangible impact of a mechanic, but about how it makes the player feel in the moment. It also means you can't sit around so it disincentives slow, potentially cowardly play, or cheese strats (depending on the circumstances). It steers player behavior. You know this but you don't recognize it enough to spot it without it effectively jabbing you in the side. But for the main topic, the simple answer is that its a holdover. A mechanic grandfathered in, but that doesn't mean its antiquated. It can have a point but it is not always implemented with true intent. Sometimes its part of real intentional design. Sometimes its there because someone thought that it simply was supposed to be there. A slightly more interesting question is why have life systems become less and less impactful over time. The answers are not groundbreaking. No player likes to lose progress but many have built up a strong aversion to doing anything twice. People complain about Metroidvanias cause they don't want to see the same room twice. Many complain about being sent back in linear games cause they have to go through a room again. So players complain, developers respond by making games easier so players get punished less frequently or by reducing the cost of consequences. A year or 2 passes, a popular game with a life system comes out or somebody plays a game older than them without save states (or maybe abusing save states) and somebody asks (either honestly or rhetorcally) "why are lives even a thing". Its a tiring topic with simple answers tbh. Its not a bad question to ask (technically no honest question is) but not 1 to spend a 30 min video essay on at this point. I don't really know how to even explain some of the weird points made. Some stuff is just "not even wrong". Just irrelevant and making bad associations. Saying a game has to have good pacing, good mechanics and be well designed is redundant. Pacing, mechanics and being fun is part of the design. If you just say "design" you are effectively talking about the whole game as it was intended. And "good" is subjective so its actually saying nothing in itself. It has rhetorical weight as a statement but it just jumped out at me cause the whole video comes across as a whole lot of nothing to me. You probably could've made a better video if it were about checkpoints and saving progress. I think more can be said about it from a player experience perspective. This video is about a design pattern but only about experiencing it. There is something to prove in doing something more than once. It proves you can do it more than once. Once can easily be a fluke and doing previous sections again, but better can give you leg up on the part you were stuck at as well. If you do the early stuff better you have room to make mistakes and learn the later sections. Don't look at design elements purely as solutions to problems, it leads to tunnel vision and causes a person to make weird conclusions. Megaman giving you stage select isn't about allowing you to see more of the game. It lets your full playthrough be different and ties into boss weaknesses. Going backwards and trying to link an effect to the intent so directly is weak analysis. You may as well ignore intent and end up with a strong point instead of a wrong point without saying much different. When you start talking about difficulty, you are actually touching a topic that can be expanded on and fail to do so because you don't dive in. What is difficulty? What part of a thing is difficult? We say a game is difficult but rarely explain what is difficult exactly. It does actually matter.

Lives predate video games: they are what pinball machines used. Early games typically gave you five balls, later ones three, but with more controlled playfields(more ramps and targets that keep you in control of the ball). A few pinballs did experiment with game timers after they went solid-state, but they were not popular. It's a system that basically assumes that there's no progression through content, and the goal of continued play is to achieve a higher score. What made lives disharmonious with video games is the existence of content as an end-goal and "beating the game". The systems that have been developed as alternatives tend to focus on checkpointing alone, and on unlocking progression, where the first time through you're presented with the easiest version of the content, but later you unlock a different goal or a harder difficulty.

To create artificial tension and prolong short games, I am looking at you megaman.

I'm a strong believer in having unlimited lives in the easy mode of the game. Limited lives still definitely have a place in a Normal difficulty setting, depending on the game. I'd love to see more games do this, with limited lives on normal, and unlimited on easy. It's also possible to turn lives on/off separately from difficulty too. Some old games let you choose how many to start with, separately from the difficulty level. An option choosing between 3 starting lives, 10 lives, or unlimited lives sems like a good choice.

I view the lives system as a game pacer. If you struggle at a game and lose all of them, the game is basically going "hey, it's time to refresh yourself with some previous levels before you attempt this again." For me at least, when I get a game over I pretty much just take a break for the day. It's called "game over" so I assume that it's over for now.

Nah nigga you wrong fr on god no cap 💀💀💀