6 Of The Funniest Ways Gamers Messed With NPCs
The life of the average video game character is pretty crappy. Most of them exist only to get stomped, stabbed, or ran over by you. As it turns out, those are the lucky ones. There's a special breed of player who will spend time and effort figuring out new, ridiculous ways of torturing the computer-generated nobodies who inhabit their games.
Mafia III -- Cram Hundreds Of Twitching Bodies Inside A Single Phone Booth
Mafia III is an open world game set in a dystopian land full of overt racism and violence -- AKA 1960s America. Since it's a period piece and all, it's full of things that young players might never have seen before, like indoor smoking or phone booths. Seriously, put yourself in the shoes of someone who's encountering this curious structure for the very first time:
"How the hell do you get the pee inside that handle?"
Is it a very small house? Or maybe some sort of storage space? Like, for people? That's exactly how YouTuber QuietGaming tried to use the booth ... and it worked fairly well. Dangerously well, even, considering how useful these storage spaces can be for members of the mafia.
Presumably, the river is already packed with corpses right up to the surface.
So, QuietGaming kept putting more and more dead people inside the booth, like a serial killer version of Doctor Who. Despite being packed beyond reason, the place held up surprisingly well, give or take the occasional corpse jitter.
It's stinkier on the inside.
Naturally, this pointless exercise soon became a challenge of finding out how many people he could fit inside. The answer: a whole shitload.
OK, mostly inside.
In the end, QuietGaming claims he was able to fit 100 dead policemen inside that damn phone booth (he could have probably gotten 1,000 had he opted for clowns). At this point, he did what any self-respecting criminal would do and blew his little art installation to pieces with explosives.
"Someone call the ... oh. Ohh."
Many other YouTubers soon followed in QuietGaming's footsteps. Watch this one patiently place over 50 corpses inside a booth, make it go boom, and then throw about a dozen more bodies to the somehow still rectangle-shaped pile. (Although one was a minor, so maybe that was cheating?)
Also, he apparently chopped off some of their heads to optimize space.
This other one confirmed that the phones are still usable in this state when a soon-to-be-dead witness tried to call the police in the booth/graveyard.
Meanwhile, your iPhone stops working if you drop it lightly on a table. They just don't make things like they used to.
Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain -- Turn Guards Into Your Unwitting Kamikaze Army
Phantom Pain is the final chapter in Konami's Metal Gear Solid series, which solves the franchise's ever-present problem with contrived plots and plot holes by having no plot whatsoever. The gameplay itself is pretty good, especially for players who enjoy being as nasty to other characters as the Konami executives were to the people who made this game.
For instance, want to destroy a helicopter but think rockets are too expensive? Glue some C4 to a poor guard, activate one of the hot air balloons ironically intended to extract soldiers safely, and send your new human missile flying toward the aircraft. Bomb voyage!
The military version of the "kick me" sign prank is a bit more extreme.
Is the soldier you've decided to torture taking cover behind a jeep? Simply lift up the vehicle with another handy balloon, gently push the guy underneath it, and wait for the Wile E. Coyote-esque action once the other guards shoot the balloon down.
Was he standing on quicksand?
Of course, this is supposed to be a game of stealth. Ideally, you should make all deaths look like innocent accidents -- such as that common one where a jeep lands on you out of nowhere. All you need is explosives, more of these incredibly durable vehicles, and good ol' video game physics.
As stealthy as it gets.
Just Cause 3 -- This Game Makes Animal Cruelty Way Too Much Fun
Just Cause is about the American dream of successfully freeing an island from the clutches of a totalitarian regime by sending in one guy equipped with a rope and a parachute. Unfortunately, it's not that rare that an overthrown dictator gets replaced by another vile monster ... in this case, you, the player.
Since the game gives you the chance to use all sorts of cool gadgets in order to overthrow the island's Castro knockoff, some players may end up deviating a bit from the objective. For instance, you can use your ropes to tie up enemies, turn them into a grappling hook ... or mix them with rocket science to fuck with other characters.
Rocket science, and some particularly potent chili.
But perhaps, torturing poor civilians who can barely resist is too much effort for you. In that case, how about some poor animals who don't even understand what the hell is happening? Behold, the island's famed Rocket Cow:
Probably not what Castro had in mind when he said he wanted to breed super cows.
You might even try to justify your sadistic tendencies by saying that it's all for the sake of scientific innovation. We present you an invention called the Cow-Rousel, which is pretty self-explanatory:
That's one way to make a milkshake, we guess.
When your reign of terror turns out to be even darker than the one originally supplied by the game, you may eventually decide to make things look more hopeful somehow. For example, creating an inverted Santa sleigh by hanging a bunch of cows from a plane:
Or it could be that afterburner seared steak is better than it sounds.
DayZ -- Frustrate Zombies By Rolling On The Floor In Front Of Them
Despite sounding like some sort of anti-narcolepsy medication, DayZ has been hailed as one of the most brutal, immersive zombie experiences on any media. This online game taught players to fear not only the undead, but also the barren, unforgivable landscape and, most of all, each other. It makes The Walking Dead look like Love Actually.
Too bad this one guy on YouTube made it impossible to take the game seriously ever again.
*Play for full effect*
YouTube user found out that DayZ zombies are even dumber than the average chunk of decomposing flesh. It turns out you don't need to make any stealth plans or be heavily equipped to avoid them. All you have to do is drop to the ground and roll over. It's almost like the game started as a "what to do if you catch on fire" simulator but then the developers decided to move it to a more profitable genre.
With a brief stop at "Tumbleweed Sim" before finally arriving at zombies.
See, video game characters have things called "hitboxes," which are ... boxes that can be hit. Invisible ones superimposed on the characters' body parts. It just so happens that when you're moving on the ground, your hitboxes remain completely out of the zombies' hitting range, which looks like a rather frustrating experience for them. NomadGaming eventually let his zombie pursuers catch up to him, and that's when things got really sad:
Apparently, the flies get extra annoying when you're a zombie.
Perhaps taking pity on his brain-eating enemies, NomadGaming moved on to something that looks more fun for all parties involved. He found that if his character kept crawling ahead and the zombie kept running after catching up to him, the game's collision mechanics could bring the pair of them up to cruising speed.
"Just drop me off on the next corner, Z-Dog."
FIFA 94 -- Avoid Red Cards Forever By Simply Running From The Referee
FIFA International Soccer (or FIFA 94) is the historic first game in a series that is somehow up to its 2017th installment by now. It included all the most popular features of the real-world sport of soccer. Feet, balls, and of course, players dramatically falling to the ground upon being lightly touched by other players.
Like this guy, who was lightly touched by a fast-traveling foot.
Unfortunately, the game also included soccer's least popular feature: The referee who would suspend your players if they were on the giving end of a maneuver like the one depicted above. Obviously, the presence of such a character in a game you bought to avoid the limitations of real life was something that had to be dealt with. It wasn't long until players found out they could avoid the referee by ... literally avoiding the referee.
Someone has already dubbed in "Yakety Sax".
For some reason, the game only awards players with yellow or red cards if the referee manages to catch up to the perpetrator. So, after committing a foul, all a player has to do is run away from the pissed off guy in black for as long as they are willing to waste the time of the friend they are playing with.
We like to believe there's still a referee out there, trying to catch the douchiest of midfielders after 23 years.
Note that, based on the various videos of this happening on YouTube, the game doesn't work by "tag" rules. The referee may touch you, but as long as you keep running, he still won't give you a card. You have to make a conscious decision to stop running in order to receive your punishment. So, yes, in theory, one could conceivably keep this up until the end of time.
This game was 1994's leading cause of hand cramps after Kimberly from the Power Rangers.
Skyrim -- Use Giants To Launch Other Characters Into The Stratosphere
Skyrim is that incredibly challenging dragon-slaying game where the dragons are kind enough to land on the ground so that you can easily bash their heads in. For those looking for a bigger challenge, though, there's always Giants -- basically, regular humans, but nakeder and gianter. Ever engaged in combat with one? It's fine if you haven't, as this is how it plays out most of the time:
It's unclear if your character gets killed by the impact or from thirst while in the air.
It was probably while considering the benefits of not being turned into a human baseball that some players made a startling conclusion: Watching other people not being able to kill Giants is way more fun than doing it yourself. Several players on YouTube realized they could lure non-player characters they don't like (or companions they like in a rough love kind of way) into the Giants' domain. The NPCs stand absolutely no chance, but you get to witness fantasy creatures helping medieval men get to the moon, which is as cool as it sounds.
"One massive leap for man ..."
Just make sure you enjoy the spectacle from a safe distance, lest you become part of it. And hey, if you stand far enough, you might even get to witness the landing up close!
"Hey baby, did it hurt when you ...? Dammit, it's another guy."
Oh, and in case you were wondering: Yes, it works on animals too.
This is actually how tiger rugs are manufactured.
When not trolling poor NPCs, Tiago Svn can be found trolling trolls on Twitter. Adam Koski wrote a fantasy book about fairies turning into monsters.
Also check out The 6 Most Mind-Blowing (and Pointless) Gaming Achievements and 6 People Who Beat Video Games In Hilarious Ways.
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