In the past couple, I noticed an increase in the people saying that live system are always bad and are only something leftover from the arcade only to eat up your coins, make a game artificially harder or longer. Personally, I don't think that's the case... at least not always. Let's take a look at two games, one where I feel a life system is necessary or at least beneficial in some way and another where it is actually useless.
Mega Man (2 for example): Let's say you're at the boss gate and you have two lives left. If you die two times, you'll go back to the menu which will is a punishment since you'd have to do the whole level all over again. Now, let's say now there is have infinite lives. The punishment for dying is to do boss again, a boss that doesn't even last over a minute. That means that you need next to no skill to beat it because if you can try again until you succeed, which will probably be a brute forced win because you can try how many times you want, so really there is no punishment for losing. When a platformer that focuses on start to finish linear levels don't have lives, you don't actually need to be good at it to beat it, just try over again until you fluke it. It's not making the game artificially harder, it's more so making sure you are actually good at the game instead of brute forcing it. However, I believe that a game with a live system should have a ways to gain lives if you are good at the game. Whether that'd be hidden/hard to reach 1-ups, maxing out your score or other.
Super Mario 64: The live system in this game is indeed making the game artificially difficult. That's actually because SM64 is more based on exploration rather than platforming. And even when it features more tricky platforming sections, the stages feature little to no checkpoints. The punishment for having a Game Over is going back to the 1st floor which is bad since it's not making you do a difficult section, it's literally just wasting your time.
The thing that annoys the most about gaming opinions nowadays is that people will call anything that they can't do in a game "artificially difficult" while anything they manage to do "fair". I'm probably guilty of this myself and haven't realized it but I still think it's a problem.
But what do you think about lives in games?
Mega Man (2 for example): Let's say you're at the boss gate and you have two lives left. If you die two times, you'll go back to the menu which will is a punishment since you'd have to do the whole level all over again. Now, let's say now there is have infinite lives. The punishment for dying is to do boss again, a boss that doesn't even last over a minute. That means that you need next to no skill to beat it because if you can try again until you succeed, which will probably be a brute forced win because you can try how many times you want, so really there is no punishment for losing. When a platformer that focuses on start to finish linear levels don't have lives, you don't actually need to be good at it to beat it, just try over again until you fluke it. It's not making the game artificially harder, it's more so making sure you are actually good at the game instead of brute forcing it. However, I believe that a game with a live system should have a ways to gain lives if you are good at the game. Whether that'd be hidden/hard to reach 1-ups, maxing out your score or other.
Super Mario 64: The live system in this game is indeed making the game artificially difficult. That's actually because SM64 is more based on exploration rather than platforming. And even when it features more tricky platforming sections, the stages feature little to no checkpoints. The punishment for having a Game Over is going back to the 1st floor which is bad since it's not making you do a difficult section, it's literally just wasting your time.
The thing that annoys the most about gaming opinions nowadays is that people will call anything that they can't do in a game "artificially difficult" while anything they manage to do "fair". I'm probably guilty of this myself and haven't realized it but I still think it's a problem.
But what do you think about lives in games?