When You Die, You Go Back to the Beginning.

[puggsoy]

It really depends on the game. Like Kriven said, for complex games that already have a lot of other things to take care of, this would be pretty lousy and ruin a lot of hard work. But for fairly simple arcade or platformer games, this is fine, and sometimes it might even be necessary to get the player to be careful. But I remember playing Kid Chameleon with my friend, and how we'd spend a whole afternoon trying to get as far as we can, and take turns whenever you get a game over. Sure, if it had a saving feature we might have actually finished it, but the fact that we didn't gave it so much play time. And it never really got boring to play those first few levels over and over, we'd still slip up on a trap we'd already seen 20 times.

So yeah, it depends on the game. It's not really common anymore, mostly because implementing a save feature is significantly easier than it used to be, but also because starting all over again would be horrible in most modern game mechanics. I'm sure there are some games that still do it though, and they probably have good reasons for it.