Basic Trope: Egregious lack of checkpoints or save points.
- Straight: The game has a long level, and it contains no checkpoints.
- Exaggerated: You have to beat the entire game with one life and/or you cannot continue should you lose.
- Downplayed:
- The level contains no checkpoints, but it's fairly short anyway.
- The checkpoints can be destroyed by the player.
- Justified:
- Mission Control normally provides the save points. However, they turn against you in the penultimate level.
- You're playing in Final Death Mode. With the possible exception of on-exit, saving would be cheating.
- Inverted: There is a checkpoint on every single screen of the level, which effectively means that Death Is a Slap on the Wrist. And/or you have Meaningless Lives.
- Subverted: There appear to be no checkpoints, but they do exist, they're just hidden far off the beaten path.
- Double Subverted: The final levels have no checkpoints at all.
- Parodied: The game screws with you by having an incredibly long series of check points at the beginning before anything happens and after the final boss but before you walk into the final scene.
- Zig Zagged: There's an abundance of checkpoints, but many are in bad locations.
- Averted: Checkpoints are common.
- Enforced: The hardware that runs the game is really primitive and does not support checkpoints.
- Lampshaded: "Uggggh... will this game just give me a checkpoint already?"
- Invoked: The Big Bad purposely destroys all the checkpoint flags in the level.
- Exploited: The developers purposely do this to add Fake Difficulty to the game.
- Defied: You play the game on an emulator and use save states.
- Discussed: ???
- Conversed: ???
- Deconstructed: Bob, a retro-gamer, buys a copy of the game on the Internet and plays it. He becomes sick and frustrated of the game's lack of checkpoints, and quits.
- Reconstructed: Bob downloads a remake of the game for the Xbox 360. The remake has checkpoints added.
Back to Checkpoint Starvation
