Games - Life bar

	Games - Life bar

A life bar is used in many video games to display a character's health and how close the player is to failure (death, being knocked out, etc). Another variant of this is life points.

A typical life bar is a horizontal rectangle which begins full of colour. If damage is taken or mistakes are made, the coloured area gradually reduces. In some games, the bar can be set to unlimited, which means the full color remains the same even when one takes a hit.

There are many variations on the life bar:

In Street Fighter and other fighting games, the bar doesn't immediately decrease when damage is taken. Instead, an area representing the damage is marked, and the life lost quickly drains away. This is useful in assessing the amount of damage caused by a particular attack.

Some games use an incremental bar, composed of many smaller bars. Each attack will remove a certain number of these bars. This system is used in the Mega Man series.

In many rhythm games, the life bar starts out only partially full, and can be filled by successful play. The game usually ends when the life bar is fully depleted. In games such as beatmania, Donkey Konga, and Taiko: Drum Master, the life bar must be above a certain percentage by the end of the song to pass it (often around 75%). In other games, including Dance Dance Revolution, GuitarFreaks, Pump It Up and FreQuency, the life bar must simply be above 0% to continue playing.

Another way of displaying a character's health is with numbers instead of a bar, commonly called Hit Points, or simply HP. HP may also be displayed with icons rather than numbers. For instance, Super Mario Bros. 2 uses small red icons (in 16-bit versions of the game, they're changed to hearts) in the top left corner to designate how many hit points the player has remaining.

In order to be more immersive, some games do away with the life bar (and other on screen displays) completely and try to present a player's health in other ways, such as showing the player character limping or displaying visible wounds when they are injured. A particularly notorious example of this features in the first person shooter Jurassic Park: Trespasser, in which a tattoo on the female player character's breast would become bloody if damage has been taken. In the Resident Evil videogames, health is shown both with the player character limping and pressing his wounds in pain, and with an EKG display in the inventory screen.

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