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alt title(s): IWBTG
Okay; shouldn't be too hard.
In 1942, the Algerian philosopher Albert Camus stated that "there is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy." Ultimately, he found in favour of life. Now I offer you evidence to the contrary.
You are The Kid. You want to be The Guy. To do that, you have to kill The Guy.
And standing between you and — [SPLAT] GAME OVER - PRESS 'R' TO TRY AGAIN.
>R<
Crap. As I was saying, standing between you and The Guy are hordes of annoying, hard-to-kill monsters, downright — [SPLAT] GAME OVER - PRESS 'R' TO TRY AGAIN.
>R<
Dammit! To continue: this game also includes downright sadistic traps, nigh-impossible obstacle courses, and — [SPLAT] GAME OVER - PRESS 'R' TO TRY AGAIN.
>R<
Apples that fall up, and everything else that represents the worst — [SPLAT] GAME OVER - PRESS 'R' TO TRY AGAIN.
>R<
The fucking MOON!? Anyway, the Guy's defenses represent all the worst parts of 8- and 16-bit platform gaming.
All you have are a red cape, a small gun, and a Double Jump. You also have — [SPLAT] GAME OVER - PRESS 'R' TO TRY AGAIN.
>R<
Shit, I really should have seen that one coming! Anyway, you have infinite lives, and you will need every single one of them.
Get the game here , and — [SPLAT] GAME OVER - PRESS 'R' TO TRY AGAIN.
>R<
FUCKITTY FUCK-FUCK-FUCK! So, have fun dying!
See the discussion page for a list of tropers who have — [SPLAT] GAME OVER - PRESS 'R' TO TRY AGAIN.
>R<
What. The. Fuck. Was. THAT!? At any rate, there are in fact tropers who have become The Guy.
Also, apparently there is going to be a sequel. The creator said in his latest blog ( here, it's at the end) to "expect news about a new IWBTG project soon." According to info posted on the forum, the game's — [SPLAT] GAME OVER - PRESS 'R' TO TRY AGAIN.
>R<
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRGH! Anyhow, the new game will be called I Wanna Be The Guy: Gaiden.
This game contains examples of:
- Angrish: A side effect of players suffering repeated deaths.
- Background Boss: Mike Tyson
- Backtracking: Can be kept to a minimum if you choose the right paths, but there's a few parts you have to go through twice.
- Badass: Seems to be a requirement for The Guys. Just look at the Hall Of Former The Guys: Bowser, Ryu Hayabusa, Mike Hagger, etc.
- Badass Boast: "I have bested fruit, spike and moon!"
- And, for the players: "I beat it."
- Bait And Switch Boss: Near the end, the Moon that has been plaguing you appears all huge, as if ready to engage in a final showdown, then gets smacked aside in about two seconds by the dragon from Megaman 2. Especially misleading in that the Moon was high in the sky for the entire minecart ride beforehand, and the minecart section had "The Moon" from Ducktales playing as the background music.
- Beyond The Impossible: Really, it should be self-evident why this trope belongs here.
- Big In Japan
- Big No: You will say this many times throughout the game, and hear it many times throughout the Lets Play vids.
- Kayin, the creator of the game himself actually does this a few times in his own LP. Here's an example of him during the Dracula battle.
- After saying in the first of his LP videos that he isn't going to get mad/frustrated because he's [so good at it / immune to its frustrations by now].
- The Guy says one when he's well and truly pwned.
- Bilingual Bonus: If you have a non-English Windows installed, you may not fall for the fake Windows error message trick the game plays with you.
- People who are playing the game on Vista may also not fall for the error pop up killer, due to the message being in the style of Windows XP.
- Actually, the only people who may fall for this trick are the ones who have never seen an LP of it up to that point and if they use the Windows XP interface. Anyone who uses the Classic Windows interface on XP should be able to see through it immediately.
- Brick Joke: In one screen you can clearly see the moon. Several later, it falls and tries to flatten you.
- Brown Note: Many Lets Play gamers are said to have left after playing this game.
- Bullet Hell: The game flirts with this a few times. Dracula has an attack where he shoots a spiraly pattern of flaming Delicous Fruit; it's no Touhou pattern, though, as Kayin admits. Later on, the Vic Viper sequence shows Dracula how it's really done.
- Card Carrying Villain: See below. That save point has EVIL written on it instead of SAVE or WUSS.
- Chest Monster: At one point a save point attacks you. oddly enough, it's the only save point that appears on Impossible, which should clearly tell you it's a fake. However, killing it gives you a 1-frame window to save.
- Classic Video Game Screw Yous: Practically a thesaurus *
Why thesaurus? Because an encyclopedia is more in depth, and a dictionary is too short on each entry. And because it's funnier. of them.
- Clipped Wing Angel: Dracula's final form.
- Cluster F Bomb: ...on the lips of many of those who have played.
- Some LPers have gone beyond F-bombing into incomprehensible fury and gibberish (case in point: JMan, brain melted by constant death and explosion, can manage but 'hurdadurdledur'.)
JMan: "Lemme tell you about a porcupine's balls: they're small and they don't give a shit!" [ SPLAT] " LIKE THIS GAME!"
- More than one LPer has been reduced to sobbing and/or screaming incoherently. Not to mention that one guy had also admitted to punching a hole in his wall out of frustration of this game.
- Collision Damage
- Colon Cancer: The full title is I Wanna Be The Guy: The Movie: The Game. There's no movie.
- Hell, before you know it, there will be a live action movie called I Wanna Be the Guy: The Movie: The Game: The Movie. Not to mention a tie-in game for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii called I Wanna Be the Guy: The Movie: The Game: The Movie: The Game.
- Colony Drop: The moon falls out of the sky multiple times during the game.
- Cranium Ride... which then kills you.
- Crowning Moment Of Funny: Despite being really, really hard, the game has quite a bit of LOL-worthy moments, such as jumping into a sword (you retard), getting killed by a wine glass and giant Ryu from Street Fighter randomly leaping out of a wind tunnel to kill you..
- Let's not forget the fun to be had in introducing your friends to the game...
- Watching other people play the game is funny as a rule. As with most Platform Hell games really.
- Crowning Music Of Awesome: Given that the entire soundtrack is basically a collage of some of the best video game soundtracks out there, this isn't really surprising. Still, it helps with the torture. A little bit.
- Death Course: The whole game, basically.
- Death Is Cheap: Usually.
- Depth Perplexion: As in tradition to Platform Hell genre, it's intentional.
- Determinator: What you got to be to beat this game.
- DVD Commentary: Kayin's own Let's Play functions sort of as this)
- Ear Worm: GAME OVER - PRESS 'R' TO TRY AGAIN
- That, and the first few seconds of every song.
- Easter Egg: There are six hidden rooms with secret collectible items. One requires going through two screens full of small and completely invisible platforms in the wrong direction.
- And mind you, that one is the easiest one to get. Don't even ask about some of the others...
- Easy Mode Mockery: Few people wanted to play the game on Medium because the extra save points were marked "Wuss" and The Kid gains a cute red bow in his hair...
- The bow remains on the screen when you explode, too.
- Engrish: The scroll text near the end of the attract sequence, parodying the scroll text from The Legend of Zelda.
- Establishing Character Moment: the third story down on the first screen. After you've learned to avoid the huge spiked boards that shoot out of nowhere, they suddenly reverse their behavior.
- The other obvious route on the first screen (upwards) leads to the iconic moment of the game, mentioned in the page quote.
- Everything Trying To Kill You: There are maybe a few things that do not kill you. They include the floor, some water, some walls, the background, and the save points. Except one.
- Well, in the Kirby level, the floor does actively try to kill you. Freaking mobile spike pit!
- Kayin's Let's Play Commentary has him and his friends wonder if it would be possible to make the cursor kill you.
- The unrelated but equally hard fangame named... well, Fangame (seriously) does exactly that.
- At the very end of the ending, you wind up under a tree with Delicious Fruit. Take a wild frikkin' guess what happens if you don't move out the way. Yes, you can die in the ending.
- Excuse Plot
- Fake Difficulty: This is sort of the point of the game.
- Fake Platform
- Fan Sequel: Several are available on the official forums, the most famous being I Wanna Be The Fangame- made by one of the few people who have beaten IWBTG on Impossible. Unfortunately, thanks to the release of a Game Maker template, the forums are also swamped by everyone who's ever wanted to try their hand at game design. Sturgeon's Law ensues.
- That isn't to say they're all trash. Some of them are actually pretty good, notably I Wanna Be The Ultimatum, I Wanna Be The Tribute, I Wanna Be The GB, etc... Still, Your Mileage May Vary .
- Fission Mailed: The fake Windows XP error message, which drops down and squashes The Kid if you don't move him out of the way in time immediately after regaining control.
- Floating Platforms
- Frickin Laser Beams: There's a level which certainly deserves the Fan Nickname "The Room of Huge Fucking Laser Beams That Come Out Of Absolutely Fucking Nowhere".
- This is based on an ACTUAL STAGE of Megaman II. Quick Man is, indeed, kind of a dick. At least Megaman had the time-stopper, though. The Kid has no such mojo.
- Fundamentally Funny Fruit: Eggplants. Of course, they're trying to kill you just like everything else in this game.
- Gaiden Game: I Wanna Save The Kids, which combines the sadistic death-traps we all know and love with a Lemmings-style Escort Mission. It's pretty fecking hard. Unfortunately, Kayin has canceled it and moved on to other things.
- Game Over: Press 'R' to try again.
- Genre Savvy: Honestly? The game itself seems to be. It seems to possess intricate knowledge of how the platforming genre works, and will go along with it until you grow complacent, at which point it will gleefully subvert something in order to cause another death. And then when you think you're genre savvy about how I Wanna Be The Guy works, and expect an invisible platform or a breakaway wall, the game will immediately reverse its behavior and do something so unexpectedly mundane that you die again. It seems to have a sick sense of humor, actually.
- Goddamned Bats: Most of the enemies.
- Strangely enough, the bats are probably the only things in the game that actually don't kill you upon touch.
- Good Bad Bugs: Some bugs that benefit the player were actually kept in the game.
- What may very well be the most game-breaking "bug" is the fake save point on Impossible. Killing it makes a perfectly usable save point appear for exactly one frame on the screen. Killing it while having a bullet EXACTLY where the save point would appear allows you to save the game.
- Harder Than Hard: The difficulties start at "Medium" and go up.
- Note that the actual game itself is always the same no matter what level you're on. The only difference is the frequency of save points (and the Easy Mode Mockery on Medium.) There are zero real save points on Impossible. You're expected to win the entire game with one life. In all literal seriousness, Impossible mode is possible, but requires quite a bit of memorization and a fair degree of benevolence from the more random luck-requiring bosses. When somebody eventually beat it, the creator's official response was "holy crap your not serious are you".
- Impossible mode used to have one small solace - While you can't technically save, in older versions, dead bosses will remain dead if you restart. Newer versions removed this ability by booting you back to the load game screen.
- Have A Nice Death
- Heroic BSOD: Many LP'ers have experienced this while playing this game.
- High Pressure Blood
- Homage: Pretty much everything in the game is a recreation of or reference to some old famous game, including Tetris, Kirby's Dream Land, Ghosts 'n Goblins, Mega Man, Metroid, Castlevania, the Legend of Zelda, and more. Especially the harder parts. Most of the bosses are actually taken from other games, though made much harder.
- I Got Better: Every level save Impossible.
- Jump Physics: Including both the Double Jump and the Wall Jump.
- Kaizo Trap: In the cruelest way possible.
- Kid Hero: Literally. His name is The Kid.
- Leap Of Faith
- Lost Forever: If you don't grab the hidden item in the Metroid level the first time around, you can't get it on that play file, because the Metroid level is inaccessible after the Tourian System explodes.
- Ludicrous Gibs: Every time you die, and it's going to happen a lot.
- J-Man put it best: "If you so much as brush a spike, it's instant splodey-splode."
- Luke I Am Your Father The Guy is The Kid's father, complete with Star Wars dialogue.
- "Check your Inventory Screen, Kid. You know it to be true."
- This also leads to Mind Rape when The Guy says "Yes, I did have sex with your Mother"
- Make My Monster Grow: The Guy starts out as the smallest boss in the game (but still notably bigger than The Kid). He does this to himself partway through the battle.
- Malevolent Architecture: You might find yourself getting killed more often by the environment than by an actual living enemy.
- Masochists Meal: People eat Delicious Fruit. According to Kayin, they have to get them out of trees with sticks, in order to keep from getting gibbed, and then they have to boil them three times to remove all the poison. The bouncing fruity engine of death seen in the Breakout section is what happens when you only boil them twice. Delicious!
- Memetic Mutation: Slowbeef: Please Stop Let's Playing I Wanna Be The Guy!
- Metroidvania: To a small extent.
- Minecart Madness
- Musical Spoiler: Subverted! The Minecart Madness segment has "The Moon" from the Ducktales game playing as the background music. That, combined with the full moon high in the sky, makes you think that the boss guarding the Guy Fortress will be the Moon that has plagued you so much. When it does show up, however, it's swatted aside by the real boss, Wily Dragon.
- Narm: If you aren't cursing this game's very existence the first time you die, you'll be laughing so hard you'll start sobbing.
- The Kid's extremely high-pitched voice doing Richter Belmont's lines makes the "WHAT IS A MAN?!" speech from Symphony of the Night even more hilarious.
- Nintendo Near Bloody Impossible: Understatement of the freakin' century.
- One Bullet At A Time: In most parts, you can only have four bullets on the screen at a time, making it important to get as close to the bosses as possible.
- One Hit Point Wonder: Contact with most moving things (as well as several things that don't move) that are not platforms is instant death. If it doesn't outright kill you, it will likely bump you towards something that will.
- Orphaned Series: It seems that, sadly, I Wanna Save The Kids was canceled. Considering how hard this game is, that's probably a good thing.
- Painting The Fourth Wall: Like everything else in the game, used to create traps, like the Macromedia Fusion "error" in the Ryu Hayabusa room and the Evil Save Point.
- Perpetual Expression: For someone who's rarely more than a few seconds away from a bloody death, The Kid always seems remarkably happy. He spends the whole game going :D, even when he explodes.
- Platform Hell: Perhaps still an understatement.
- Press X To Die: This is the safest room in the game. Only Q can kill you.
- Press X To Not Die: No warnings, obviously, but there are a few apparent cutscenes that can kill you such as the start of the battle with Dracula when he throws the wineglass.
- Rain Of Blood: The Kid's death animation.
- And a little bouncing head, to add insult to injury.
- Recurring Boss: The Moon.
- Refuge In Audacity: Basically, this game is so unfair, so filled to the brim with Fake Difficulty, so freaking impossible. That it becomes fun.
- Running Gag: The Moon.
- The downward-, upward-, sideways-falling, targeted and homing
apples giant cherries Delicious Fruit.
- Scrappy Level: Geez, what to choose? The Ghosts 'n Goblins area, which a screen with spikes that move so quickly it's nearly impossible to jump through them? The Mega Man area, which features a screen that will make you long for Quick Man's level? A section where you need to get through several screens via
nearly perfect wall-jumping all the while avoiding killer apples and staying ahead of a wall of spikes? The question isn't what levels are scrappy, it's which ones are the most scrappy.
- Schmuck Bait: 'You jumped into a sword. You retard!'
- If we want to go Meta, the game itself is a fine contender.
- Selective Gravity: A rule of thumb is: if something can
reduce you to a crimson stain on the ground inconvenience you by falling upwards/sideways, it will do so.
- Sequential Boss: Pretty much every boss in the game.
- Shell Shocked Veteran: If you beat it on hard, I guarantee you jumped the minute you saw the apple fall on the Isaac Newton google logo. (Date- Jan 4, 2010).
- Shout Out: And how!
- Soft Water: At one point, you jump from a very high area, fall about 3 screens downwards, catch on fire like a meteor, and if you manage to land in the "conveniently" placed pool of water, you live.
- Spikes Of Doom: So many. So very, very many.
- Some of which LAUNCH SIDEWAYS. WHILE STILL POINTING DOWNWARDS.
- And at least one of them spits FRUIT at you.
- Stalactite Spite: Most commonly done with fruits or spikes (see above), but there are some genuine stalactites in there too.
- The Tetris Effect: Don't get surprised if you start expecting traps and surprise deaths in every other game you play. Or hell, in your way back from school!
- The Unfought: The Moon despite what you may think upon reaching the first boss of The Guy's castle.
- This Is Gonna Suck: What you think pretty much every time you reach a new screen.
- Title: The Adaptation: The full title is I Wanna Be the Guy: The Movie: The Game.
- Title Drop
The Kid: Former Grandfather The Guy! You killed him!
The Guy: Just as you will try to kill me, or be killed yourself!
The Kid: No! I WANNA BE THE GUY!
- To Be A Master
- Trial And Error Gameplay: If you look hard you might be able to find a room that doesn't do this.
- Ironic enough, the few screens that DON'T include this are extremely boring and you wish they had it.
- It is worth noting that the room seen in the screenshot at the top of this article is one of only about four or so in the entire game that lack out-of-nowhere surprises and are Exactly What It Says On The Tin. It's anything but boring.
- Turns Red: Clown Copter and The Guy do this (metaphorically)
- Unexpected Gameplay Change: The Breakout and Vic Viper sequences.
- Unexpected Shmup Level
- Unskippable Cutscenes: Thankfully averted. If you don't want to go nuts from having to watch Mike Tyson rise up every time you die, remember, the "S" key is your friend.
- Perhaps just as well, considering Dracula can kill you with his goblet during the cutscene before the fight with him.
- However, the lengthy intros to the Kraidgief and Bowser fights can't be skipped.
- For the former, this is actually good, as you can shoot his head for a bit once he roars, which wouldn't happen if you skipped it. For the latter, this is due to it being a three-part boss.
- Unsound Effect: In the Clown Copter battle, when you beat the first two pilots, the Copter spins off with a cartoon explosion reading "Bomb!"
- Unwinnable: This can occur at many MANY parts of the game where if you fall down and can't back up or something of the similar sort, you can't progress. Luckily, the game has a suicide button... which does you no good on Impossible, which screws you over for trying to restart by wiping all your progress on the run.
- Also, it's hard (almost to the point where it has to be deliberate) but possible to save in a way that you respawn directly above a spike pit, without the jumping power to get out.
- Respawning by that hand in the Ghosts n' Goblins section falls under this heading too.
- Significantly easier to do on Medium, where the "Wuss" save points were added on almost as an afterthought, and the game clearly was not designed around having them. Almost impossible to do on Hard and up. Which is actually somewhat ironic — Hard and up have significantly longer stretches between saves, therefore you'll die a lot more, and it really will be much, much harder, but you won't bork up your save.
- I Wanna Be The Fix
- Violation Of Common Sense, subverted at one point where jumping into a sword to pick it up kills you and the game notes you must be stupid to jump into a sword (several times bigger than you are). Of course,
it can be argued that playing this game in and of itself is a violation of common sense.
- Then there's the bit in the Ghosts and Goblins area where you have to jump into a cluster of three apples to make them fall sideways.
- Wasted Song: There's a ton of great 8-bit music in this game. The problem is that, with death so frequent, you'll inevitably only hear the first few bars on each life.
- Weird Moon: Which then falls on you. Repeatedly. And if it's not falling on you, Dracula is flinging it at you in lieu of those bigass black fireballs.
- Wrong Genre Savvy: Several of the traps rely on the player being this, most (in)famously the "YOU JUMPED INTO A SWORD, YOU RETARD!" screen.
- You Fail Physics Forever: If the distance signs are to be believed, the mine cart travels 10,000 kilometres in 78 seconds. That's 286,786 miles per hour, or 373 times the speed of sound.
- You're suggesting that's not AWESOME!?
- Kayin here, saying that this is probably the greatest random factoid I ever heard about the game!
- I believe one of your friends made hints about it during your LP of the game.
This Troper: Yes, this game is extremely hard; what gave you that ide— [SPLAT] Slowbeef: Please Stop Let's Playing I Wanna Be The Guy! GAME OVER - PRESS 'R' TO TRY AGAIN.
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