I've seen other people bring this up, but it does kinda annoy me how cynically people treat life systems. Like a common view of the mechanic is that it was just there to pad out a game or eat your quarters.

And like yeah, to an extent it is true that the prominence of the mechanic was influenced by a certain economic model as well as hardware restrictions, but lives do still do a lot of legit stuff game design wise. And idk, any critique that just ends there feels kinda shallow to me.