Our mate
Ali has had his
Mechanaught game reviewed over at
Jay's. We really like the game.
It's not perfect, but what it does it does really well. It is what a good Flash game should be, a nice time waster, not a life changing experience.
Something in the review about it though really caught my eye,
"My biggest gripe with Mechanaught is actually the implementation of
lives. I thought we'd covered this was an unnecessary and annoying idea
for a browser game. I sent out flyers and everything. This is a flash
game, not an arcade hall with a sticky floor. You're not going to get
quarters out of me, just an enraged baboon-like hooting.
If you run out of lives, that's it. Game over. You can go back to your
most recent save, but it's still frustrating. Maybe some people will
like the added difficulty, but the rest of us are going to be annoyed
that dying carries such a stiff penalty instead of simply popping you
back to the beginning of a stage. Maybe if health kits were a more
frequent find, it wouldn't be as much of an issue."
I must have missed the memo. It's one thing that a games difficulty may be out slightly for some players ( No one will ever get it perfect for everyone ), but a game with lives and a game over mechanic is far from a dated notion.
An end of level boss was originally a spike in the difficulty to increase the length of a game. These soon became the norm to the point that most players expect a boss battle and feel cheated if they don't get one. And yet, they are there for the very same reason that lives are. It's to increase the longevity of a game and introduce a pronounced risk / reward, in the case of lives something which is clearly tangible from the offset.
I just finished Arkham Asylum the other day. Fantastic game, believe the hype. All the reviews said it's about 10 hours gameplay, but I've been off the xbox for a while so I'm a bit rusty, it must have taken me more like 12/14 ( I've still got to go back and max those achievements out. I'm a gamer score whore ). That didn't have lives, and just as well as it would be in the bin by now if I got a Game Over after dying 3 times and then sent back a fair way.
That's a 10+ hour game, not a 30min Flash game. A lives mechanic only really works if you can complete the game with the base number of lives, or you can either collect extra ones or have continues ( Or it's pure score attack, Geometry Wars being the perfect example of a popular console shoot'em up with a nasty ol' Game Over ) so you can actually complete it.
I think it's fair to say that there isn't a progressive Flash game with 10 hours playability before the job is done. Yeah you may have played DTD for 10 hours in total ( Which has lives in the form of energy ) but nothing that I know of that's 10 hours from the start of the tale to the conclusion ( Does Dofus count ? Feel free to correct me if it does ).
Lives are a valid mechanic for small Flash games. I'm not saying every game in Flash should use them ( Untold games shouldn't ), but a lot of games suit them, need them in fact. Just to repeat myself, they lengthen the game play ( The game play we can't lengthen with more real content due to budgets ). It may be a slightly artificial and forced way to do it, but in adding a clear risk and reward to the game it works well.
The alternative being ? Grinding out a victory ? I'm old enough to have used infinite lives pokes in games, and no matter how hard you try you soon succumb to the safety / apathy that offers and with no risk you miss out on that all important money shot that is reward.
Squize.