Law of One Hundred

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All Platform Games will have at least one type of common item that will give you an extra life if you collect one hundred of them.

Collecting these items is mostly for points, but if you can get 100 of these items, you will get an extra life, and the counter will revert to 0. One hundred is the magic number because the counters for these items usually contain only two digits.

Most of the time, the extra lives from these items are either too frequent to be meaningfully valuable or too infrequent to be meaningfully beneficial. The real reason for these items is that placing long trails of them throughout the levels motivates the player to progress onward, and the crisp 'collecting' sounds and the increasing counter gives a sense of achievement and progress to anything, even running to the right.

A Sister Trope to Every Ten Thousand Points.

Examples of Law of One Hundred include:

Video Games

  • The coins of Mario fame. They are exchanged for the extra life.
    • In Super Mario Galaxy, you can collect both coins and Star Bits. Fifty Star Bits equal one life. Same goes for 50 coins. You don't get an extra life for collecting 50 collectibles total, though; they have to be 50 Star Bits or 50 coins.
    • In Super Mario 64 and Super Mario Sunshine, 100 coins in one run on one stage allowed you to get a Star or Shine for that level, respectively. You also got lives for coins when you finished a level, but at 50 per life, and the extras were just wasted.
  • Similarly, in Gex Enter The Gecko, you are required to collect 30, then 40, then 50 of some random token (It actually changed appearance with each goal reached, but they're still found in the same place). The first two goals grant you an extra life, but the 50 collection goal gives you a remote, which is the game's equivalent of Mario 64 Stars.
  • The rings in the Sonic the Hedgehog series downplays this mechanic, while playing with it in other ways. All Sonic titles follow this basic framework, with minor variations.
    • Collecting a multiple of 100 rings does not reset the counter to zero, as holding any amount of rings (be it one or one thousand) will protect Sonic against a single hit.
      • The 8-bit (Master System and Game Gear) versions do not follow this rule; the ring counter resets to zero once Sonic collects 100 rings. If he collects exactly 100 rings and gets hit, he'll still lose a life.
    • Collecting 100 or 200 rings awards an extra life, but further multiples of 100 do not.
    • Taking a single hit will reset the ring counter to zero. However, reaching 100 rings twice in a single stage (for example, by collecting 100, taking damage, and collecting 100 again) will not award a second extra life. Same for collecting 200 rings.
      • In Sonic Unleashed, the Werehog survives on a life meter rather than rings, so getting hurt will not reset the ring counter.
    • Having 50 or more rings when you activate checkpoints or reach the end of an act usually grants access to a bonus stage.
    • The Super Sonic form requires 50 rings to activate, drains one ring per second, and deactivates upon running out of rings.
  • Crash Bandicoot used wumpa fruit.
  • Donkey Kong's were bananas. There were also bunches which added ten at a time.
    • Donkey Kong 64 didn't use bananas for lives (the game didn't have lives at all). Instead, they were the eleventy-jillionth set of things they made you collect in that game. There were 100 per character per level, though.
  • An alteration: Banjo-Kazooie had 100 notes on each level that reset themselves if you died or left the world. Collecting all of them on one run got you an extra life.
    • In Banjo Tooie, they were used to buy/learn new moves, but you only had to pick them up once.
    • In Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts, they're used as currency, buying parts and blueprints, locker combinations for crate rewards, and hints for Stop N Swop items from Bottles. You can even bribe the police to leave you alone for a set time, no matter what you do that's considered breaking the law. However, after getting everything, you have two notes left over, meaning you can only get the police to leave you alone for about twenty seconds total. Assuming you don't get the DLC, and then blow all that on Police Bribery.
  • Shadow Man had the Cadeux, 100 of which could be traded for a life bar extension.
  • Mystic Square gives you an extra life for every 100 point items collected. Perfect Cherry Blossom and Imperishable Night did something similar, but the intervals at which you gained lives were altered to more closely match the rate at which you got point items.
  • The later Commander Keen games had different versions in different games. In episodes four, it was "life water" droplets. In five, it was a commercial drink called Vitalin. In episode six, it was odd little winged creatures called vivas.
  • FPS games usually don't have these, but the early Turok games had little collectible diamonds that got you a life each time you collected 100 (complete with two-digit-only counter).
    • And of course, GTA 3 had 100 hidden packages to find. This didn't gain you extra lives, but each batch of 10 caused an extra weapon spawn point at your hideout.
    • There was also the Adrenaline from Unreal Tournament 2004: collect 100 of the pills, and you can activate a special bonus such as super speed or healing!
  • Mendel Palace does this, and gives your character a slight speed boost for every 100 stars he collects.
  • Croc turns this into a giant screw you fest. Diamonds sort of represent life; drop them below 0 and you die. Get 99 and gain one? You go back to 0 and gain one measly life. Avoiding diamonds coming up!
  • Pretty much the same thing happens in the D Si game Castle of Magic. Every time you take a hit in your standard form, you lose 20 diamonds, and can re-collect up to 10 of them. Take a hit with 0 diamonds, and you die. Take a hit in a powered-up form, and you lose the power-up. Take a hit with less than 20 diamonds, and you lose all of them (but can still re-collect up to 10, unless you had less than 10 to begin with.) Get 100 diamonds, though, and you get an extra life, but all your diamonds vanish. You do the math from there.
  • Standard coins in Sly Cooper, though it worked a bit differently. If you had no "charm" (protects your One-Hit-Point Wonder character from a single hit), it would give you one. If you already had one, it would give you another, sort of (meaning you could now shrug off two hits). If you already had two, then you would get an extra life, as two was the maximum. If you already had 99 lives and two charms, then the "coin" counter would not progress past 99. This was rather useful, so that if you took a hit, you could collect a single (very common) coin and be back to two charms.
  • In Warning Forever's 3 Lives mode, destroying 100 boss parts grants an extra life. Interestingly, the parts destroyed aren't part of a separate counter; rather, your life counter has two significant digits (i.e. "3.00" lives instead of "3"), so destroying a part increases your lives by 0.01.
  • In Tetris the Grand Master, you advance to a new section every 100 levels. "Levels" being pieces dropped + lines cleared, up to level x99, at which point you need to clear a line to continue leveling up.
  • In the NES Felix The Cat game, collecting 100 disembodied Felix heads will grant you an extra life.
  • Same goes to Wacky Races NES game, but with huge gemstones with a brilliant cut.
  • Turrican adds a continue for each 300 diamonds the player collects. Turrican II: The Final Fight reduced the amount required to 100.
  • Averted in Plok, where you did indeed collect 100 shells, but received a invincibility power-up instead of an extra life when you succeeded.
  • Bomberman 64 gave you a continue whenever you got 50 gems. Annoyingly, continues sent you back to the level-select screen; to continue from a level checkpoint, you needed lives. You started each "continue" with three lives... and the game didn't provide you with any ways to get more. Very annoying when you're a One-Hit-Point Wonder in a Nintendo Hard game.
  • The first Rayman game had small, blue sparkling spheres called 'tings', which, unsurprisingly, made "ting" sounds whenever you got them (except in later releases, in which case they made more of a "pop" noise). Collecting 100 earned you an extra life.
  • In Paper Mario, enemies dropped star points (equivalent to experience points) which gave Mario a level up for getting 100.
  • The TurboGrafx-16 version of Jackie Chan's Action Kung Fu has orbs to collect from defeated enemies. Collecting 100 of them will completely restore life and Kamehame Hadokens. The NES version (which is a shorter game) requires only 30.
  • Bug!! had those crystals. Getting 100 of them wouldn't net you an extra life, but you would need to collect 100 in each act if you wanted to play the bonus level (for an extra continue).
  • In Super Monkey Ball, collecting one hundred bananas gets you an extra life. For some reason, the banana counter actually has three digits, and immediately resets to zero when you pick up your 100th banana.
    • In Super Monkey Ball 2's story mode, though, the hundreds digit is actually used, and the counter displays how many bananas you collected across all the stages. Also, in story mode, Death Is a Slap on The Wrist, so extra lives don't really matter.
  • A few Kirby games do this with stars. Kirby's Dream Land 2 requires a mere seven, Kirby's Dream Land 3 and Kirby 64 bump this up to thirty, and Kirby's Return to Dream Land finally gets to one hundred.
  • In Fancy Pants Adventures, not only do Squiggles heal lost health, collecting 100 of them gets Fancy Pants Man an extra life.
  1. ↑ In both versions of this game, you get 1 life for an A-rank and three for an S-rank when you finish a level
  2. ↑ Instead, you got extra lives for having 100 or more rings when you touched a checkpoint.
  3. ↑ Both titles just give you an unlimited number of tries to beat a level.
  4. ↑ Which instead had the extra lives in the Gaia Gates.
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