The 6 Most Awesome Ways To Lose Popular Video Games
If we didn't die in video games, there would be no challenge. We'd just sit there endlessly mowing down our enemies until we lapsed into a Ruffles-and-Mountain-Dew coma. But there's death by necessity, as a game mechanic, and then there's death as some sort of David Lynchian tool of bizarre metaphysical torture. Here are six more video game deaths that are trying to make some kind of statement, but all we really get is "Fuck you, buddy."
Kill A Character From Another Game In Metal Gear Solid 3 And Create A Time Paradox
From life-draining cigarettes, to enemies dying of old age, to a 60-foot man pretending to be a dinosaur taking you back to his love nest, Metal Gear games have always had a unique outlook on the "Game Over" screen. The strangest of all, however, is in Metal Gear Solid 3, a game whose confusing plot takes place several decades before the confusing plots of the other ones.
This is just an elaborate way to cover up the fact that Hideo Kojima can't count.
In MGS3, you run into a young man named Ocelot. He's only a lackey in this game, but he was/will be a boss in MGS1 and the puppet-master in MGS2 before becoming the main villain in MGS4 and indifferently reading Wikipedia articles in MGS5. Anyway, about an hour into the third game, you fight Ocelot and promptly knock him out:
At this point you're meant to leave him passed out on the floor and continue on with your mission while getting ambushed by half-hour long cutscenes. Some of those cutscenes, incidentally, feature Ocelot, who shows up every now and again to duel you, shoot your eye out, and molest women. So, what happens if you just kill the bastard while you can?
"We'll be there in an hour to collect your other MGS games and throw them in the garbage."
Yep, Ocelot is so integral to the plot of this franchise that by shooting him (or stabbing him eight times in the kidneys), you've ripped apart the timeline. Colonel Campbell, Snake's handler in the future, berates you through time and space -- and this isn't even a time-travel story. That's how badly you fucked up; you destroyed the very concept of cause and effect. You even get a different "Game Over" screen: Rather than the text "Snake Is Dead" transitioning into "Game Over," you get "Ocelot Is Dead," which morphs into "Time Paradox." On the HD re-releases, you also get an aptly named achievement for losing this way:
Of course, that isn't technically true, since Zero would still create the Patriots and ...
*descends into 20,000-word hypothesis of MGS sans Ocelot*
Every kid in the '90s had that friend, the one whose uncle worked for PlayStation and who totally knew how to see Lara Croft nude. All you had to do was boot up Tomb Raider II, take one step forward, one step backward, spin the camera three times, and do a somersault. Of course, you'd tell him he was full of shit ... then wait until your parents weren't home and give it a shot anyway, with a box of Kleenex within reachable distance. Just in case.
Then you'd try the trick and, to your surprise, something actually happened! Just not what you were expecting.
And thus was born a generation of boys with an inexplicable fireball fetish.
Lara would explode into a bunch of sexy pixels, thus ending your game and your hopes for ever finding out what her pyramidal nipples look like. Why would the developers be so inhumanly cruel? Well, while the game's creators definitely knew about all the "naked Lara" rumors, this wasn't originally intended as a way to prank horny teenagers -- it's just what happens when you try to input any legitimate cheat code from the first Tomb Raider into the second one. Remember, this was back when cheats were part of the main game and not microtransactions.
And GameFAQs was relevant.
The false code gained a new life thanks to trollish video game magazines, and many a teenager flew too close to the sun and ended up losing all unsaved progress to the joke. We also like to believe there was at least one guy who tentatively approached a cliff, thought the distance too far, took a step back, rotated the camera a couple of times to spot a different path, and just took a leap of faith only to end up supremely confused.
Why would you want to see her naked, anyway? Minecraft Steve is more reasonably proportioned.
Battlefield 3 simulates the life of a marine so devoted to duty that he will literally drop dead if he deviates even slightly from his orders (i.e., the plot of the game).
That U.S. military "kill-switch" technology is way more advanced than we thought.
Even by those standards, there's one death in the game that is remarkably absurd. It takes place in the mission "Uprising," wherein your American hero has to sneak through war-torn Iran to reach a safe point after an earthquake. At the start of the mission, you're crawling through a sewer, avoiding enemy soldiers, when you meet the biggest threat you've ever faced: a rat. No, not a traitor on your team. An actual rat.
"Help! This wasn't covered in basic!"
At this point you're instructed to press a button to stab the rat, because even crawling through a sewer has to have ACTION, and then you continue on, this stupid divergence never mentioned again. But what if you fail? Or if you're an animal lover?
"Tell them you shot me while I was doing something less embarrassing. Like masturbating or something."
An enemy soldier hears your pathetic struggle, and it's game over. It doesn't make sense: How did the soldier fail to hear the squeaking rat, the knife going through it, or the very audible knife hitting the concrete, but manage to hear your comparatively quieter gasp of pain, in a war zone, in the aftermath of an earthquake?
And, of course, our hero's last act before he shuffles off this mortal coil is to ... give the rat the finger.
A mature and sensible reaction for a mature and sensible situation.
Cause A Nuclear Explosion In Hitman: Absolution
The Hitman games are all about cosplaying as blue collar workers in order to sneak in and murder specific people in a variety of complex and entertaining ways, until a minor thing goes wrong and you murder the whole town instead. In Hitman: Absolution, you spend several missions infiltrating a weapons research center before you finally reach the complex's reception area (you could have just made an appointment, apparently). Like all companies, the lobby is filled with trophies and wares -- in this case, big guns, bigger guns, landmines, bombs, missiles, etc. It's enough to make Charlton Heston erect. And the crown jewel of their collection? A nuke.
"Next thing you'll tell me is that superweapon hanging precariously overhead is LIVE!"
As we all know, nuclear bombs are designed to survive plane crashes. They're perfectly safe. You even have characters standing directly beneath the nuke, discussing how there's never been an accident in this place; hell, they're probably two days away from retirement! You could probably shoot the damn thing and nothing would-
Whoops.
OK, so it turns out the nuke is armed, for some reason, and that the detonator is set to "errant bullet." But still, how bad could the damage be?
Well, that's not so b-
Oh dear.
So, your idle curiosity takes out half of New Mexico. After that, you get a "Game Over" message, as if that wasn't clear already. But, on the other hand: You won! You were asked to kill a guy, and there is no kill like overkill.
Get The Real Ending In The Witness
The Witness is game about hiking around a beautiful island while solving puzzles, kind of like the time your parents took you to Hawaii and you spent the whole time playing Game Boy. Much like your family vacation, we're about to spoil the hell out of the game, so avert your eyes if you don't want us to ruin the ending for you ... though you might end up thanking us if we do.
See, once you complete all the puzzles, you simply get in a magic floating elevator, watch the puzzles reset, and then do it all again. That's the game, forever and ever. Unless, of course, you stand on a specific place during your second go around and move the camera to line up the starting gate with the sun. Like so:
Then you ... go blind for staring at the sun like a moron?
Do that and the whole island transforms into a big house, inside of which you'll find one final, optional puzzle. Solve that and you're rewarded with a photorealistic depiction of a dude lying on a couch with a blanket on his face. (We're using the word "rewarded" loosely.)
It's like one of those roller coasters that takes a picture of you,
except in this case the game just put you to sleep.
At this point you might say, "Well, that's neat; now let's go back to the game" -- but you can't. When you try, you're instead presented with an eight-minute live-action video from the point of view of the man on the couch, during which it's implied that he's the one who's been playing the game all along and also that he/you were peeing yourself during some of those puzzles.
Or mainlining unlabeled bottles of lemonade; it's unclear which.
The player wanders the house in a daze, stroking objects in an almost fetishistic way.
Please, please don't let this be a pre-masturbation ritual.
We take it back. At least then someone would be enjoying themselves.
He plays drums with a spoon, eats a cookie, and throws money around (subtle!). He eventually makes it outside, and there we're hit with the big revelation. What is it? Has he been held hostage in a VR torture chamber? Is this all a delusion as his soul gets sucked into a black hole? Was it purgatory the whole time?
No, the great revelation is ... that his house could use some new siding.
WITNESS ... as he gets complaint letters from the homeowners association.
Don't think that is an out-of-context shot of a panning camera. He does this for 17 seconds. We counted. It would literally be more fun to watch paint dry, because we're actually watching fully dry paint here.
Eventually he sits on a bench, lies down, and ...
"Did ... did I win?"
... realizes he just wasted dozens of hours of his life playing The Witness.
Take Too Long To Finish Shenmue And The Bad Guy Gets Bored And Kills You
Shenmue, the beloved Sega Dreamcast game, had some crazy ideas about fun: A third of the game is spent working forklifts, and the last two hours are a hiking sim. While the plot supposedly centers on tracking down your father's killer, you can also waste countless hours playing anachronistic Sega Genesis games, rummaging through other people's sock drawers, or marveling at the exquisitely researched, historically accurate '80s Japan weather.
So it's a bit ironic that, if you spend too long exploring the elaborate world the developers went through extreme lengths to create, the bad guy shows up at your house and dick-punches you to death.
This would be like if halfway through Fallout another nuke fell and destroyed everything again.
The game begins in December 1986, and from then on it advances at a pace of one day per hour. The story isn't that long, so you'll probably finish the game around mid-January -- just in time to watch the Patrick Dempsey classic Meatballs III: Summer Job. However, the game is secretly on a time limit that ends on April 15, 1987. If you get distracted (or, more likely, repeatedly fail the mandatory, out of nowhere, poorly explained stealth sections), your father's killer, Lan Di, tracks you down and kills you. There's no warning beyond a vague dream where another character tells you, "When the cherry blossoms fall, the dragon shall descend on you."
The same thing happens in Shenmue II, which moves the "action" to Hong Kong. Waste too much time on arcade games or duck racing and Lan Di this time materializes behind you in an empty void and kills you. Then he kills your literal dream woman and steals her power, because the game goes full anime.
"Um, how long were you watching, because I was just in the middle of a dream about a woman ..."
Seriously, Lan Di, five months? You couldn't wait five months? Everyone who played Shenmue II has been sitting here for 15 years now, waiting for Ryo to get out of that bloody cave.
For more weird things that happen in video games, check out 7 Creepy Video Game Easter Eggs We Wish We Never Found and 6 Video Game Endings That Are Clearly F#@%ing With Us.
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