But lives never had much meaning in the first place. The penalty of being set back to a checkpoint is often big enough to keep me on my toes, especially in those longer levels.
Lives mechanics were carried over from the arcades, which often designed barely beatable games to milk poor saps for every quarter their parents could spare. Not entirely a bad thing, mind. I enjoy myself some arcade-style gaming now and then, with F-Zero and in the long past some Touhou. But the mechanic serves to disrupt the player for its own sake further than it serves to create tension.
Sometimes, there
are tense moments with lives. But in a world with savestates and rewinds, it's up to the players' own discretion how they feel about losing lives anyway.
That's why I have no problem introducing an autosave feature, and treating lives like imaginary cookies. Oh cool, you found this negative possibility space that I didn't think of during development but thought of during testing. Have an extra life. Or, oh hey, looks like somebody's good at using the cape feather and flew under the checkpoint. Here's a 1-up.
In fact, it makes it even easier to induce player rewards for skill when you have a setup wherein lives don't
really matter, because you can place more or less than should be expected of a section with that difficulty otherwise without having to worry about how it affects your difficulty curve, making lives become more akin to achievements than quarter devouring monstrosities.
Like Torchkas said though, it depends on the individual game, or in this case, ROM hack. I tend to have a strong preference toward not including lives systems, but in some games, Like F-Zero X, it creates an interesting player-game dynamic where the player is constantly measuring the risk/reward of any move, with boosts and an incredibly high possibility space for what the player can do, which Mario just sort of lacks. Lives aren't a measure of risk vs reward in Mario, they're a measure of punishment for the player, telling them to do things they already mastered over again because they're struggling with a particular jump or point of enemy placement which is often completely unrelated from whatever is between there and the last save point.
I've become very grumpy these last few years, and have been biting my tongue here in SMWC's forums quite a bit. I just want to let you all know that if ever I come off as harsh, I still care about you all. You guys are great.
(Avatar by
http://reyleias.tumblr.com/, butchered by me)