VG Thought

As I was listening to the podcast I was reminded that Sleeping Dogs has a mid-fight health recovery system. Basically if you kick enough consecutive asses you go into hyper-mode and in hyper-mode getting kills restores health. In the podcast I think Golem briefly mentioned systems that reward score with health and I think this is a pretty good example (though the game doesn't explicitly have score - it's just that super meter). In this case (and I think it generalizes well enough per my experience - Lords of Shadow has another similar system) the idea of translating score into health lends a sort of see-saw balancing feel to the combat, where you can approach each fight at an "average" or lazy level of play and only switch into high-skill mode when that starts to fail. Being able to play at a skilled enough level to go into health-restore mode is in and of itself enough of a saving grace to allow the player to experiment, goof off, or make mistakes. They know that at any given point if they've lost enough health to put them in danger of dying they can concentrate their efforts to recover back to a safe state.

It's kinda like the opposite of extends, but has the same effect that being able to play well at some point creates tolerance for mistakes. Where extends require you to play well *first* to gather extra life before you can slack off and take advantage of them (presumably when the game gets harder).