Health Meters: Search & Destroy

So anyway, for action games/action RPGs, graphics all the way! For anything turn based you better give me ready access to the math or I'll lose my mind.

Numbers. Hearts are about as accurate as an iPod's battery display.
-- Pleasant Plains ///

I was thinking about original Zelda for this -- how are the hearts inaccurate? The hearts are clearly marked as full or empty (sometimes one half-full), so health is clearly understandable as a fraction where full health = 1.

The ability to add hearts, thus increasing your overall health capacity is totally classic.

xpost

A similar, but more interesting execution of this concept I saw in Eternal Darkness (loosely based on Lovecraftian mythos), in which your health is measured in sanity. Every time you saw one of the Elder Gods or their minions, your sanity decreased. If it got too low, the game would start to fuck with you -- it would suddenly mute the game and put the green MUTE letters on your screen. Or your character's head would fall off and start reciting Shakespeare. Or it would prompt a fake error message stating your saved game had been lost and your memory card erased, thus fucking up your real-life mental state.

the numerical DOOM listing, it's too easy to miss how damaged you are
the Civ2 bar that I never understood (Civ3's was much better)
the "no bar, just look at how much the character is sweating" approach that was tried in some lame SNES games

Search: Fear Effect's heart-beat meter! Most impractical, but kind of clever.

Shadow of the Colossus implemented this so well that you forgot about your stat bars unless you need them (which wasn't very often because about a fifth of the game was combat)

MGS was good for this too.

and destroy health bars that have extra maximum values represented by colours! It's about as useful as the percentage progress bars on pc installations that don't actually represent the full percentage but they have a bar for each file!

Search : zelda hearts and any health indicator that flashes when low.

D: Blake Stone's horrible heart beat thingy
(http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~brlowe/Images/blake1.gif)

I understand the new King Kong game doesn't have *any* health indicators whatsoever. Apparently they want it to be more realistic in that people really have no idea what percentage close to death they are when someone's beating them up. The giant apes and dinosaurs bit may take some of the realism away...

However, the "ring" health system was actually pretty inventive.

If I'm expected to make calculated decisions and puzzle things out then go ahead and give me the hard numbers. A little graph is nice, but yeah, strategy without numeral indicators, well, that's not strategy at all!

My favorites though have to be the meters in games like Metroid or Fire Emblem where you get both, a graphic indicator bar and a numerical readout next to it. Those win. Metroid also gets massive bonus points for having the sense to make it so you only have to read two numerals at a time. Once you get into the 100s/1000s it gets kind of annoying to have to manage the relationships in your head on the fly, I really think there's a lot to be said for minimizing the amount of health info you have to deal with. (I hate RPGs where the smallest amount of damage you ever incur is like 3 points and your characters have 150 health early on. HELLO. REDUCE EVERYTHING BY 66%. THIS IS NOT THE ARCADE, I AM NOT PLAYING TO IMPRESS MYSELF WITH ZEROES)

Populus had a heart beat mixed into the music that got more and more frantic as you approached death.