http://m.imgur.com/qe7aNgSThis says a lot about the number of people who actually play games on GAF.
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1129619
I dunno, not every game needs health regeneration, OP. And... errr...
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=182923523&postcount=55
I truly appreciate this validation of my accusation in the OP that not using regeneration in favor of [redacted] is due to a dated reliance on primitive stat-drenched game design.
fucking lmfao @ stat-drenched
Wow. Health pick ups are such a primitive concept. Finding and picking up an item to heal is way too complex for my poor brain to handle! Disgusting!
reminds me of some posters who seriously believe boss fights are an outdated concept 
LMAO... I am not surprised.
People think lives system are an outdated concept. You know, the one where if you lose all your lives in a 3 minute level means you start over from the start of the level rather than the checkpoint? I never get how people can be so impatient and intolerable to games wanting you to improve.
The concept of "this traditional game mechanic is primitive" is really really dumb because they don't really think of the context of the mechanics. They just play modern games and believes anything old is outdated. Every mechanic has their place, as long as it fits within the context of the gameplay.
Lives ARE an outdated concept though, because most games these days allow us to save as much as we want and have virtually no punishment for losing all of them. They're are a holdover from the arcade days where you were given a limited amount of tries before being made to pay more money to keep playing, with that being the motivation to get better and not lose. Even older platformers had more stock in their amount of lives because losing those meant having to either restart the game from the beginning or lose a significant amount of progress, but that's barely ever the case anymore.
Most modern platformers with lives systems, with Mario being the most egregious, let you save your progress as often as you'd like on top of showering you with 1ups so lives become a complete afterthought. Alternatively, they're games like Captain Toad where 1ups are pointless and the "punishment" for losing all your lives is the same as losing just one, in which case why have lives in the first place? Games that use lives appropriately, like in your 3 minute example, are a rarity more than the norm.
This doesn't mean that every game has to be a super meat boy-style romp with an emphasis on speed and immediate respawns. But instead of using a lives system that only serves to punish players for reasons that barely ever apply to them anymore, they should give players incentives to do stuff like clearing stages with a low / no death count, whether it's just a better rank or something more tangible. Make your fail states be worthy of the name and not just a 1 sec interruption before you're back to doing what you were doing. Make levels have a limited amount of tries before having to do them over. There's tons of way to make people get better than resorting to lives.
Boss rushes and health packs being obsolete though?
