7 Wild Ways to Measure HP More Interesting Than a Crappy Bar

few bits of video game Furniture are as well worn and comfortable as the health bar the onscreen stick that for over 40 years has been telling players at a glance how close they are to carking it you know like this one sorry why is it a half health health bars remain almost ubiquitous regardless of how modern or narratively ambitious a game may be in all other respects yet occasionally a game will be released that looks at this most vital HUD element and thinks hold up I have other ideas here are seven clever ways games represented your remaining hit points other than with a crappy horizontal bar in the corner hang on how have I lost [Music] health if I was Isaac Clark engineer fighting for survival on a Necromorph infested mining ship I'm not sure I would want a visual representation of how close I was to death luckily then the Isaac from Dead Space can't actually see how much VI and vigor he has remaining because dead space's genius take on a health bar is strapped to Isaac's spine this is the resource integration gear or rig for short the hardware that CEC employees bolt themselves into in order to go mining in deep space it augments the wearer's strength but most notably contains a visual representation of a user's well-being right up the spine which may be inconvenient for the wearer but is very convenient for you controlling an engineer like Isaac in third person or I suppose anyone stood behind Isaac who if they see the bar start to dip should probably start running in the opposite direction the rig might still in essence represent Isaac's Health in bar form but hey it's at least vertical and a bit curvy and crucially is inventive enough to have its own in Universe law it means dead space can get away with having no heads up display on screen whatsoever and the game is much more immersive as a result which is a good thing assuming you want to be as immersed as possible in a game like this bold assumption I'd say he's here who is Ammon PS2 game the getaway asks one simple question why should guy Richie get to make all the hardboiled British gangster stories just because he works in a medium where everyone's mouths move properly you have no idea do you son you thought I was ready for the old people Zone when be GRE done with you we bury you and your kid oh I see why now released in 2002 the getaway is a London set violent soaked open world crime epic that tells a Fantastical tale about kidnap and revenge where it's possible to cross the temps in zone one in under 30 seconds watch it honestly what will they think of next it's not a great game but it was certainly ambitious especially in the way it tried to appear more cinematic by doing away with any onscreen information for instance there's no mini map while you're driving to figure out where you're headed you have to watch the car's turn signals sorry just trying to get into the head space of a character who drives like this but still uses their indicators the getaway also does away with a health bar instead protagonist Mark's poor health is represented by blood stains pooling in the fabric of his suit and visible difficulty walking toss up the getaway isn't the first game to indicate damage with increasing levels of blood flecking the screen or such like but we have to give a nod to this game for doing it early and doing it rather the well best of all the way you recover health is wait for it leaning on a [Applause] wall doctors don't want you to know this one simple trick he really did it brachia oldest of our Recreations by 50 million years the only true Jurassic native all right real talk when Dream works interact I decided to make the health bar in trespass a tattoo on protagonist an's body they may have had something in mind besides disrupting the mediums interface Main Stays you see what I mean nevertheless however much cleavage was involved having Anne's Health literally be represented by a heart on her chest was a unique idea and in many ways is representative of everything that trespasser a game in which you wash up on Jurassic Park site B Island was all about in that it is creative experimental and of no use whatsoever to anyone trying to play the game trespassers strove for absolute realism in a bid to make and survival Adventure on site B feel as authentic as possible unfortunately while this included having no traditional headsup display it also meant no inventory so you can only hold one thing at a time plus having to manually control an's hand leading to gunfights so hilariously clumsy that having to physically look downwards to see how much health you had was just one more hassle in Practical terms trespasses ruthless adance to realism meant you would most often see the heart tattoo when you had no life left and were dead on the floor for instance having broken your legs trying to drop from a height of more than 3 ft still it's a neat idea even if it's sadly not in a very good game and you have to admire trespassers Relentless dedication to realism and physics to be fair that is exactly what I would do in that situation you might be wondering how Minecraft got onto this list when the way it measures player health is famously by Hearts sorry this is so boring but as my niece keeps trying to tell me Minecraft isn't actually as boring as it looks and sounds and seems merely consider the genius way the game indicates the health reserves not of you but of another creature in the game Behold The Humble wolf a beast that can occasionally be found roaming the blocky Minecraft wilds instead of harvesting these wolves for whatever resources they might be concealing within consider throwing them bones until they are so full and grateful that they have become tame tame wolves will fight on your behalf making them extremely useful allies especially if you don't want to go through the hassle of killing all your own cows but you'll have to be mindful of how much damage they've taken in the line of duty perhaps on an especially sharp cow and tame wolf health is represented rather brilliantly by how high up they carry their tails a high happy tail indicates a wolf that is full of Health while a sad drooping tail tells you that this wolf may be on its proverbial last legs and may even be close to [Music] death the tail indicator is a nice touch and a clever way of telling at a glance how full of Boundless Energy your adorable Wolfpack is without having to look at a boring not adorable bar here you to have some food to say thank you for a job well done wait they made a baby wolf hang on I thought this was a game for children just making sure my niece's mother is aware of this yes Janet yes Minecraft yes it's wolf smut [Music] freezing to death on an abandoned Icebreaker ship in the middle of the Arctic is bad got it indeed in brutally cold conditions How likely you are to survive is intrinsically linked to your ability to find and retain warmth so it was a clever move of 2008 horror game cryostasis sleep of reason to tie the main character Alexander's Health directly to his body temperature damn I got chills how much health is that going to cost me to find out how close you are to death consult this complex looking Gizmo in the bottom left of the screen the bar around the edge represents the external temperature which seeing as you spend the game trapped in the belly of an ice locked tanker is usually very low unless you happen to be stood right by a comforting fire or fizzling flare when you buy something warm you can bring your internal temperature up to match that of your surroundings effectively restoring health the system makes it vitally important to keep an eye out for anything warm you can poke your frozen fingers towards especially because when gone wrong Frozen sailers take a swing at you their Frosty touch will send your core temperature plummeting all told it's a great way to immerse the player in the fiction and really makes you appreciate the fact that you in all likelihood are not current Curr freezing to death in the hold of an Arctic Icebreaker ship and if you are well congrats on getting Wi-Fi I guess X-Men Origins Wolverine is a game based on the movie of the same name it's a loose adaptation in that we don't recall a bit in the theatrical version where Wolverine does this this staggeringly violent hacken slasher does regrettably feature a conventional health bar but we have to include it in this list anyway because frankly you never need let that boring old bar in the top left distract you from Logan's wice inducing Antics Center frame why because Wolverine's actual character model tells you exactly how healthy the titular X-Man is here's a hint if you can see his exposed rib cage might be time to find a rock to hide behind what you're seeing is of course Wolverine's famous mutant healing powers the same ones that have kept him alive and healthy since his canonical birth in the late 19th century fogan is a man out of time with little in common with his 19th century peers except for the way that now he's mostly skeleton because in a technical Master stroke developer Raven software made it so that Wolverine can actually have chunks of his body shot sliced and exploded out of him exposing his adamantium inid as such you can always tell when Wolverine is in rude health or on the ropes just by taking a glance at his torso to see if he looks like a Loosely strung together bag of aul or has regeneratively healed into an attractive Hue Jackman time to get to work the only problem with this genius way of showing Wolverine's health is that the flow of this otherwise fast-paced game will be frequently interrupted as you find a bit of rock to jam the camera up against so you can watch fascinated as Wolfie slowly heals a totally normal way to spend your [Music] [Music] time opening your inventory in a Resident Evil game is not often good news usually it means it's time to pause your exciting Zombie Adventure to rearrange a suitcase in the hope of squeezing in just one more piece of heavy artillery and for most of the series it probably also contains bad news about your physical condition behold the ECG a measure of your characters available Health reserves that in a lot of Resident Evil games including the first one and Resident Evil Village is visible on the inventory screen when you take damage this electrocardiogram will represent that with your character's heart activity readout getting weak and wobbly a really fun and weirdly scientific L accurate way to represent [Music] health I mean considering this is also a game in which health is recovered by Hawking down a whole potted plant the Resident Evil ECG gives you a different and visceral indicator of your closeness to death but what the system doesn't give you is just as important as health meters go this one is not very granular at all with just a few different colorcoded stages between full health and imminent death it plays into the risk reward theme of any good survival horror is it worth consuming a precious herb when your health is merely orange maybe it's only just dipped over so slightly into orange there's no way to know precisely introducing an element of guess work into your healing strategy I mean come on there's no sense using a first aid spray when you've only been lightly maimed Man video games are [Music] weird oh good it's to full health that's a relief so those were seven games that have a really interesting take on the good old health bar can you think of any other examples if so why not pop them in the comments and maybe we'll do a commentary Edition what I'm trying to do the oh my why what's happening I don't know what's happening inside me is it just your bad Health in general

Channel: Outside Xtra

Views: 463,683

Keywords: Ellen Rose, Luke Westaway, Outside Xtra, video games, gaming

Id: yHNwz-bdO8I

Length: 14min 18sec (858 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 06 2024