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A life bar is used in many Video Games to display a character's health and how close the player is to failure (death, being knocked out, etc). Another variant of this is Life Points .

A typical life bar is a horizontal rectangle which begins full of colour. If damage is taken or mistakes are made, the coloured area gradually reduces. In some games, the bar can be set to unlimited, which means the full color remains the same even when one takes a hit.

There are many variations on the life bar:

  • In '' Street Fighter '' and other Fighting Game s, the bar doesn't immediately decrease when damage is taken. Instead, an area representing the damage is marked, and the life lost quickly drains away. This is useful in assessing the amount of damage caused by a particular attack.


  • Some games use an incremental bar, composed of many smaller bars. Each attack will remove a certain number of these bars. This system is used in the '' Mega Man '' series.


  • In many '', the life bar must be above a certain percentage by the end of the song to pass it (often around 75%). In other games, including '' Dance Dance Revolution '', '' GuitarFreaks '', '' Pump It Up '' and '' FreQuency '', the life bar must simply be above 0% to continue playing.


Another way of displaying a character's health is with numbers instead of a bar, commonly called Hit Points , or simply HP. HP may also be displayed with icons rather than numbers. For instance, '' Super Mario Bros. 2 '' uses small red icons (in 16-bit versions of the game, they're changed to hearts) in the top left corner to designate how many hit points the player has remaining.

In order to be more '', in which a Tattoo on the female player character's breast would become bloody if damage has been taken. In the Resident Evil videogames, health is shown both with the player character limping and pressing his wounds in pain, and with an EKG display in the inventory screen.