Life bar

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A life bar or life points are 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.

• In Elite Beat Agents, the life bar (called the Elite-O-Meter) starts out full and gradually decreases as time goes on. The player must keep it above zero in order to continue playing, and above a certain percentage of the meter at breaks in order to get better results on the top screen.

• Some video games also feature a recharging life bar (Sometimes depicted as an energy shield). In these games, the player character cannot usually take as much damage as a player with a traditional life bar, but health regenerates over time (Usually when the player is hiding from enemy fire). Notable examples of this are the Halo series, Call of Duty 2 and 3, Destroy All Humans! and Gears of War.

• Gears of War makes use of a cog-shaped icon called the "Crimson Omen." If the player takes a certain amount of damage in a certain amount of time, a red cog begins to appear on the screen, becoming more defined, and then filling with blood. When it is completely full, a red skull appears in the middle, in most cases signifying that the player has died (in two-player co-operative games, however, the player may not have been killed outright; in those instances, the other player can revive the incapacitated player, provided, of course, that they themselves do not become incapacitated; if that happens, then both players die, and the mission fails).

• In a similar vein, Call of Duty does not have a life bar, instead choosing to start by showing where the damage is coming from, then, if enough damage is taken quickly enough, the edges of the screen begin turning red. If too much damage is taken in too short an interval, the player dies, and the mission fails.

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 video games, health is shown both with the player character limping and pressing his/her wounds in pain, and with an EKG display in the inventory screen. Peter Jackson's King Kong: The Official Game of the Movie has no life bar; instead, the screen flashes red, and vision becomes blurred (more damage indicated by a deeper red coloration). In more recent games, characters usually slouch over and breathe heavily (as a result of low health) when left on idle.

In a large number of games, if the player's health is almost empty ('critical'), it may flash or give some other warning indication to reflect the severity of the damage incurred. In the Legend of Zelda games, a continuous beeping sound would play if the player fell to a critically low number of hearts. In Call of Duty 2, blood seeps onto the screen and the player character can be heard groaning in pain.

In Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, the length of the health bar (and the amount of damage the player can take) increases upon the completion of the 'Ambulance' missions. Likewise, the armour bar increases upon completion of the Police 'Vigilante' missions.