In the wake of Doom, games slowly but surely became more forgiving and less likely to knock you back a few paces just for failing a challenge. Super Mario 64 allows players to save after every collected power star, rendering the franchise's signature 1-UP mushrooms practically meaningless. Action games like The Getaway and Gears of War allow injured characters to heal some or all of their health back just by kneeling behind some cover. Player-coddling found its standard-bearer in the quicksave, the one-button immortality machine that became a reflexive part of many post-Doom first-person shooters. Kill an enemy, tap "F3." Repeat until you win. Yawn!
But shockwaves of the quicksave revolution aren't all bad. It's easy to wax nostalgic about the game-over-bred familiarity of Super Mario Bros.' signature World 1-1, but let's face it, restarting from the beginning every time you died was annoying. Where's the fun in spending hours working through the first four levels of Super Ghouls 'n Ghosts, only to be thrown back to the beginning by a tricky passage in the fifth? Gaming in the days before pervasive saving was often a masochist's errand, and one of limited appeal to anyone who wasn't willing to put in hours of mind-numbing practice.
Still, it's easy to feel that today's gamers are being a bit coddled by the overly forgiving nature of many action games. For evidence, look no further than the tepid critical reaction to a Dead Rising save system that actually forced players to (gasp!) find infrequently placed save points. "An awkward save system bogs down your progress more than the repetitious play," moaned a 1UP review. "Potentially forcing players to replay sections because of an overly punishing save system is the polar opposite of fun" whined a Gamespot review. Still, some writers recognized the importance of limiting a player's outs. "It forces you to put some skin in the game," said Wired's Clive Thompson in a commentary on the game. "That's why people seek out life-threatening sports like sheer-face mountain climbing and skydiving. In situations of genuine danger, your senses snap open and you experience things more fully - or, as any extreme athlete would boast, you live more fully."
And even in the age of the quicksave, some games are still willing to capture that extreme snap, God bless 'em. Much of Resident Evil's tension comes from the limited number of saves offered through typewriter ribbons scattered about the game world. Maximo: Ghosts to Glory cumulatively raises the cost of each continue, meaning it's possible to run out of options after hours of play and dozens of play sessions. Steel Battalion, in an extreme example of negative reinforcement, actually deletes your save file if you fail to hit a pyrex-encased eject button before you die.
Are these systems annoying? Sure. Do they sap the fun out of a game? Occasionally. But in an age where everyone seems to run from responsibility, it's nice to see some games are willing to let you know that screwing up has consequences. So here's a toast to the punishing, brutal, unforgiving, masochistic games of the world - the kinds of games brave enough to have game over screens that actually mean the game is over. For those about to die, we salute you!
Kyle Orland is a videogame freelancer and co-author of The Videogame Style Guide and Reference Manual. He's written for a variety of print and online outlets, as chronicled on his workblog.
