5 WTF Video Game Design Choices That (Somehow) Nobody Caught

The way the tripping mechanic works is as simple as it is misguided: Every time you move in the game, there is a chance you eat shit instead. See here, as a player using Link gets his own bomb knocked back at him by Princess Peach. Link wisely tries to get away from the bomb, but something in Nintendo's evil logic replaced 'defend' with 'banana peel.' Against the player's will, Link drops down to better expose his anus and perineum to the grenade.

These are characters we've watched bound across floating lava islands and ice conveyor belts for decades, and suddenly they move like drunken roller skate thieves? Even Sonic the Hedgehog can trip, and he probably got to this fistfight by running 70 mph through a corkscrew littered with hula hoops. If there was even a tiny chance that Sonic could trip, he would have been called Unexplainable Red Smear of Teeth and Needles in a Crater 20 years ago.

Let's be clear: This doesn't only happen to bad players. No matter who you are, when you take a step, there's always a 1-percent chance of the developers telling you to fuck yourself. Below, watch the face of one of the best players in the world as he's robbed of victory and thousands of dollars because of the most idiotic game mechanic possible.

The developers seem to have realized this mechanic was a colossal mistake, since they decided not to include it in the next game in the series. They even added a little wink to their own terrible decisions with the addition of a character who uses tripping as an attack.

Obviously, in a world with no consequences, many, many players tried to cut in line. But no amount of shoves or running starts can move another player's avatar, so horrible people simply bounced off of any tightly formed line. Eventually, order was established and everyone accepted their fate. They had spent $60 to stand still and wait their turn.

That's not to say those horrible people didn't find other ways to be horrible. Seconds after it was clear you could obstruct other people, ruining everyone's fun became the only activity for some players. Troublemakers could put their guy in a doorway and leave them there as an impenetrable wall of dickhead for as long as they wanted. It probably took the developers years to complete the animation and collision detection that allowed avatars to feel solid and do jumping jacks. And in all those years, not a single person thought, "Couldn't you use this to block a door? Like, forever?" On the other hand, every gamer figured it out in about three seconds.

For spreadsheet-loving nerds, having your own army is very satisfying. You can assign your prisoners to fight for you or research new explosives, and every one of them loves you. They even have a morale stat which shows exactly how much they love you. So how do you get a group of men you maimed and imprisoned to love you more? Well, there are two ways. The first is to run around your base for hours and let them salute you. But players quickly discovered a much faster way to raise morale...

Yes, beating the shit out of your men is how you increase staff morale. But this isn't like the friendly sparring sessions in Peace Walker. In MGSV, you ambush soldiers going about their business and annihilate them. None of them fight back -- in fact, they thank you for every IQ point you punch out of their brain. And if their mouth is too full of fist to tell you how much they love you, you can verify their happiness by watching their morale go up as they're beaten unconscious.

It gets weirder. If you don't spend enough time surprising your men with concussions, they get unhappy and unruly. If you're especially neglectful, it will trigger a cutscene in which your soldiers have gone crazy and started an underground fight club, trying to get the masochistic love you deny them. By the game's own logic, this should be the most glorious expression of brotherhood, but instead you break it up and give everyone a speech about how you should never use violence against your fellow soldiers. It comes across a little hypocritical when most of the listeners still have teeth lodged in the knuckles of your robot hand.

One of the most popular features in the NBA2K series is the career mode. To take it to the next level, they even hired Spike Lee to direct a high-production cinematic storyline for the game. It was an intolerable, indulgent pile of nonsense called Livin' Da Dream. For most players, career mode's appeal came from creating their own avatar and turning them into a basketball god. In Livin' Da Dream, you had the choice of one man. A man named Frequency Vibrations. Even if you change the name, everyone refers to you as FREQUENCY VIBRATIONS. It's definitely on a page of Corey Feldman's diary labeled "album ideas," and in NBA2K16, it was you, whether you liked it or not.

For hours of unskippable cutscenes, you are forced to watch the tale of Frequency Vibrations unfold, which is as boring as it is confusing. In the "story," you're hailed as the next coming of Michael Jordan, but in the "game," your coach only lets you play two minutes a quarter because you are objectively terrible at basketball. The main plot, other than you somehow being both awesome and hopeless at basketball, revolves around how your friend Vic Van Lier is a terrible influence on your life. The names Reginald Winthrop Drugburglar and Baron Von Problems presumably never occurred to the award-winning filmmaker as he slapped together his first video game cartoon. All he knew was that every gamer picking up the latest NBA2K title couldn't wait to get it home and experience a mostly non-interactive dramatic tale of idiots with stupid names failing at basketball.

Now, navigate carefully to where it says "Exit Memory." The game will then check if you meant to do that. Apparently, Assassin's Creed trusts you to shove your way into a bustling crowd and murder a target using 75 different weapons, but it always assumes you missed when you click a menu button.

Okay, that should do it! Well, not quite. Remember, you're in a DNA memory time travel simulation thing. We're only exiting that. And to get to the medical facility holding that simulation thing, it's going to take some loading. So this step is patiently waiting.

When it's done loading, you're given another menu, where you have to select "Exit Animus." You'll then watch yourself slowly get up from your neural device. You're back in your player's real world, and one step closer to getting back to your own personal real world!

Hold up. When the unskippable cutscene of you struggling to your feet finishes, you'll be able to continue to the next step.

When the game lets you, press escape another time to pause it another time. Feel free to scream or laugh, depending on how you deal with the absurd.

Congratulations! You're out of the game! Oh shit, wait.

At this point, you have to select your player profile from a list and wait for the game to inexplicably load it. And once it does, Assassin's Creed is pretty sure that after exiting the game twice, you might consider starting a new game. So it takes you to the main menu, where your options are NEW, CONTINUE, and EXIT. Hit CONTINUE if you'd like to restart the quitting process. Hit NEW if you have amnesia and aren't quite sure what's going on. Hit EXIT if, after all this time, you're still looking to quit.

Now, after passing through five menus and two layers of reality, the game will give you one final chance to take it back.

So there you have it: 11 steps to quit one game. Strangely enough, this was the same number of steps it took to get Assassin's Creed: Unity working. Next year will see the release of Assassin's Creed: Empire, and there's a rumor you can't even install it until the start menu's admission committee accepts your written essay and contacts all 10 of your character references. Good luck!

You can find Tiagosvn on twitter @Letiago.

For more messed up moments in games, check out 6 Hilarious Video Game Glitches You Have To See To Believe and 6 Video Game Endings That Are Clearly F#@%ing With Us.

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There are angels, and they are not beneficent or loving. Check out the first two books in Robert Brockway's Vicious Circuit series, and pre-order the third, Kill All Angels, available December 26th.