Video Game Cruelty Potential - Television Tropes & Idioms

Leo from VG Cats is a cruel god.

"As a Pyro, you can often set enemies on fire and retreat, leaving them to die from the burning."

— Team Fortress 2 Player Tip

"The most exhilarating moment I got out of this game was when I hit a seagull with an RGB6 grenade for the first time."
— Muni Shinobu on Metal Gear Solid 2

Cherry Tapping is great fun, but it can be hard to pull off either through Level Grinding or hours of practice. What's a sadistic player to do? How ever can the sadistic thirst for virtual suffering be sated (or at least, releasing rage in a non-destructive way)? Why, with games with a high Video Game Cruelty Potential!

This is the potential a video game has for the player to do awful, horrible things to enemies or even friendly and neutral NPCs. It can be knee shots causing screaming, telekinesis to literally play catch with guards, punching out scientists, or many, many other things. Something Awful has dubbed two specific variations of video game cruelty as Asshole Physics and Asshole AI.

Some games specifically cater to this, and usually skip out on a Karma Meter for obvious reasons. Not so obviously, this trope can be the carrot along the path to The Dark Side for players in a game with a Karma Meter.

Whenever someone makes the case for New Media Are Evil and video games brainwashing the youth into little sociopaths, this trope will probably be cited as argument the first. (The likelier explanation is more along the lines that these games keep the potential serial killers off the streets and out of the gene pool... as the PS1 Grand Theft Auto did, according to research done by the FBI). As a result, games with graphic Video Game Cruelty Potential are forbidden to be advertised in countries like Germany.

The severity of this trope varies from game to game. Some games only let you be cruel to your enemies, and give harmless NPCs immunity. (Harmless enemies will still be fair game.) Other games let you torment random NPCs you meet along the way. And still other games give you absolute, unchecked control over your subjects. Remember, though: Just because a game lets you do something, that doesn't always make it a good idea.

Contrast Video Game Caring Potential. Of course, sometimes helping your little drones means doing horrible things to their enemies...

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Examples:

Cruel God

Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis is a goldmine for this trope. This troper often raises large parks, then copies them into separate game files just to let all the dinosaurs loose to eat tourists. Tourist casualties can get your park shut down, but a way around this is to make sure the emergency alarm is sounded, but take away the shelters so the tourists can't get away. As long as the emergency alarm is on, the game doesn't fault you for people dying.
- And it's especially fun that the tourists just keep coming. You can watch gleefully as they aimlessly wander your evil amusement park. Some don't even get eaten by dinosaurs; they die of starvation and exposure.
Rolling over hapless medieval nations with tanks in Civilization. Of course, karma comes back to bite you when they actually win.
- Speaking of Karma, how about nuking Mahatma Gandhi?
  - Hey! That bastard declared war on me first! Of course I'm justified.
  - When this troper played Civilization for the first time, Gandhi nuked him for no reason. Gandhi is a dick.
  - Similarly, try being nice to captured citizens when you're in a republican government. Even if you want to be nice, a lot of those stupid, stupid enemy citizens you capture (when you generously choose not to raze to the ground) will insist on rioting continuously unless more than half the city is turned into entertainers to pacify them. This troper inadvertently starved Babylon, a city of size 12 (several million) down to 4 this way. Freaking FOUR. Well, they chose to riot rather than farm!
  - Which is why whenever I play Civilization (pick a number), it's SOP to level any captured cities. The extra population is simply not worth the hassle. Besides, the area is already developed, so plonking down a new city of your own (always named New <name of razed city here> will quickly grow to rival the old city in size.
  - The best government style in the game actually seems to be a dictatorship since other, more enlightened government types seemed to consistently find ways to screw you over.
- Ignoring the pleas for peace from the pathetic weaklings as your unstoppable armies crush all in their path. "Oh, won't you please make peace with us?" "NO! We shall fight to the end!" It's that much more fun when it was the other guy's idea to go to war in the first place.
  - This Troper is always attacked by Alexander, Tokugawa, or Queen Isabella if they spawn in his game. Naturally, when that happens, his perfectly-mature response is to burn the entire civilization to the ground and build new cities atop the ruins with names like "New Athens."
  - A glitch causes a variation in the English PC port of Romance Of The Three Kingdoms XI — accepting ceasefires causes the program to crash, so you kind of have to keep going with any conflict.
- This requires cheating but if you want someone who just doesn't want to be your friend to be one, just summon anything barbarian (my favorite being any corporate executive) on their place and it instantly takes over. Then just summon your mechanized infantry outside, take it over and give it back to the original owner for a relationship boost. Yes, in effect, false flagging them.
  - More fun with the World Editor - changing a large city's surrounding tiles from verdant farmland to irradiated desert (useful if you want a "realistic" nuclear apocalypse), building a ring of mountains or impassible ice around your opponent, or giving the barbarians nukes.
- The espionage improvements in Beyond the Sword also open up possibilities for jackassery - you can, say, poison your enemies' (and allies') water supply, incite their populations to revolt, sabotage bomb shelters just before your opening missile salvo...
- This troper once reduced the population of Kiev from 24 to 6 (and it had been at 30+ before the Russians were destroyed by Germany). Also, after the 2050 year time limit has passed, it is very amusing to send the world into a nuclear war and watch as every one of the civilizations that have been developing beside yours for several thousand years are reduced to radioactive waste lands. It's also possible to nuke your own troops and cities.
- Civ 4 opens up the possibility of hurting other nations with Emancipation, a small labor civic that nonetheless actually gives unhappiness penalties to any civ without emancipation. Make yourself have all the tech from the tree and then laugh as the other civs try and get off the ground when they have one worker riots when they first build their cities.
- Waging war in Sid Meiers Alpha Centauri can be just as cruel. In addition to nukes, you can also order your terraforming units to lower the elevation of a city, sinking the entire population into the sea. There's a player out there who's conceived a Self Imposed Challenge wherein you must wipe everyone out in this method. It's aptly named "the Bond villain victory".
  - Not to mention mind control, nerve gas, nerve stapling your discontents, using psychic nightmare attacks, and the obvious "Planet Buster" nuke. SMAC has a TON of abstracted cruelty.
  - This troper's favorite tactic (against AI) in SMAC is to blockade every tile of an enemy city and starve the enemy city until it was down to 1 or 2 population so that the city could be destroyed without any negative Karma. Truth In Television, however, as this was a favorite tactic in mediaeval eras as well. Why penetrate the walls when you can just keep them from eating? Even so, it's quite cruel to the population.
- This troper saw that the barbarians in Civilization IV had built up an expansive civilization, with farms and windmills and all. So, to be nice, he just sent over an exploratory unit—and immediately the barbarians mistook it for a conquistador and attacked. Nuking ensued, of course.
- This troper was playing a "friendly" game with some colleagues and AIs. One of the AIs managed to get ahead of all the humans, and hence had to be beaten down. While the other human players began massing conventional forces, this one developed the Manhattan Project and devoted every city in his civilization to the construction of nuclear missiles. Result: 20% of the globe ended up glowing orange.
- Forced labour (i.e. buying things with population units) is awesome, especially in Civilization IV (with slavery). It's this troper's favourite solution for overpopulation, poor health and unhappiness; it's both highly effective if planned properly and very gloat-worthy, as you're basically sending all the arbitrarily-determined excess population off to work themselves to death building temples, aqueducts or even something entirely irrelevant to any problems at hand.
In one of my favourite Adventure Quest games, your character is killed many multiple times by various monsters (until 1 hp), only to be brought back to life by Death over and infinite times, no matter how you have to repeat the same quest. Isn't that a tad sadistic? Also in AQ Worlds, if you are in a group (and get knocked out by a monster) - if you get 'Summoned', you literally become Dead Star Walking (with 0 hp and yet everyone on the computer can STILL see you walk around)- o.0
The Sims. While it's perfectly possible to play the game as the "everyday life simulator" that Will Wright intended, and many do indeed play it this way, other players delight in warping the world around their Sims in order to kill them in the most creative ways possible (wall them into a small area and watch them slowly starve, take the ladder out of a pool while they're swimming and make them tread water until they get tired and drown, etc.)
- This troper once created a family of clowns and then killed them in a fire, simply so that he could have a house haunted by ghost clowns.
- This troper played, made friends, got bored, and murdered the entire neighborhood by inviting them over before the kill.
- The Sims 2 lampshades the favourite murder method of most Sims-classic players. The Broke family in Pleasantville is fatherless, having lost Mr. Broke to "a suspicious pool ladder accident".
- This Troper built a graveyard Community Lot because the mounting death toll was leading to a few too many haunted houses in the neighborhood. For added comedy value, he placed a try-on-clothing booth in the graveyard so Sims could have public Woohoo among the dead.
- It's just fun to have Sims turn into something supernatural like vampires or werewolves, then have the virus spread.
- This sort of thing is common in other Sim games. For instance, SimCity 2000 allowed the player to toggle as many disasters as he wanted; great fun could be had by loading up a pre-made city (such as, say, New York), triggering a couple of fires, and watching a massive firestorm build up and consume all in its path.
  - In addition Sim City 4 lets you pinpoint exactly where you want the disaster to hit. 4 even lampshades this one by putting a news bit that says "Yo, are you busy twitching your finger on the Disaster button?" every time you get way too much fires.
  - Put several nuke plants in your city, make them go Chernobyl, and watch as the entire population dies from radiation poisoning.
  - An interview about Sim City 4 revealed the plane crash was removed because...well, you know.
  - September 11th, right?
- And there's SimEarth. The player is given control over a number of ecological and biological factors, ostensibly to allow him to build the ideal world for life and, ultimately, civilization to evolve. However, as in the above example, some people prefer to load up a preexisting world (such as the Earth 2000 scenario) and, for instance, trigger a new Ice Age or obliterate North America with cataclysmic asteroids.
  - This Troper even found it to be rather enlightening on why mother nature can be such a birch. After it takes you millennia to unlock those adorable ducks and dolphins, leaving for lunch only to come back and see those slimy evolved octopi driving them to extinction? Well, let's just say setting the planet on fire with excess O2 by adjusting photosynthesis levels is quite cathartic.
  - This troper, after seeing his civilization kill themselves for the tenth time in a row for no reason, adjusted the solar impact and drove the entire planet into an ice age. Then, he readjusted the sun and boiled the oceans over. And he did it again, and again, and again...oh, yessssss.
  - You can poke Gaia in the eye, repeatedly.
- SimLife even came with a mission where the pre-existing plant life had been hacked to look like buildings in a large city. Your stated goal? Create Godzilla.
  - In either Sim Life or Sim Earth (this troper cannot remember which), this troper remembers trying to create a plant-dominated eco-system and being increasingly frustrated with his favoured plant life being eaten away by the flying squirrel population. So when walking carnivorous willow trees evolved one can imagine the glee that accompanied their rapid success at world domination.
  - In Sim Earth, you can create a planet of robots if you nuke a high-tech city. You can do practically whatever you want to the planet and the robots will still live...increase CO 2 levels to insane heights, make the planet unbearably hot, whatever...
- If the player chooses to use cheats, or to modify or create objects, or use those made by other players, the sadistic possibility of The Sims increases. This troper once designed a "Comfy Chair", covered in spikes, for her unfortunate Sims. Thanks to an object-modding program, said chair was quite unpleasant for Sims who used it.
  - "Not...the Comfy Chair!"
- This troper also loves to create "Houses from Hell" in The Sims. One house in particular was inspired by UNLV and the hideous architecture around. You had to go all around the house to get to the front door, had to go outside and across a bridge to get up to the second floor, then when the sims were up there they had to run around a hall wrapping around the floor to get to the bathrooms, then go downstairs to get to the showers, then walk around a hall of mirrors and up the stairs, then cross a third-floor deck to get around, and go up to the third floor in the bathroom....
- This troper used to build beautiful trellised parks full of wildlife in Sim Park. And then set them on fire or cover them with kudzu because she liked watching them burn. Also, she was nine.
  - This troper's sister also would do that. There was a file called "die little children die!" and when he opened it, he found a bunch of flammable plants and kudzu on an island with a bunch of kid stuff and naturally, she would start fires and burn the kids up.
  - Plus, this troper also accidentally wound up putting a slide right in front of the water so the kids would get stuck. This troper's sadistic sister also would put bridges ins the water and then bulldoze them.
- This troper played Sim Safari as a kid. He loved the animals, but he also loved making the humans suffer. So, he would build up a large and prosperous resort and local African village, and then hit the 'fire' button repeatedly. This would come back and bite him in the arse later, when the park's forests also caught on fire.
- Instead of killing them, this troper prefers to send them into aspiration failure, cackling with delight when a Family sim tries to cuddle a sack of flour, and laughing at the pathetic, miserable shell of Simish existence they have become. Mwahaha...!
  - The Aspiration Failure animations are all different and funny - such as talking to a Dixie cup.
  - You, sir or madame, are a diabolical genius of epic proportions, and I tip my hat to you; I'd never previously thought of torturing my Sims psychologically as well as physically. Bravissimi!
- Don't forget about Sim Ant, which lets you eat the enemy's babies (and the level editor lets you starve your ants or run them through mazes just to get food)
  - Even better, you can feed your enemy's babies to ant lions. You can also completely surround the enemy queen with rocks and she'll slowly starve to death. There's also a setting that allows ants and the spider to talk. If you get a mob of ants to go after a spider, you can watch it freak out.
- In the original Sims, it is quite hilarious to make a family of only children. They can only eat the crappy snacks from the fridge and will eventually be kicked out their house because they can't pay the bills. Sweet!
  - You could get an easel and sell paintings. Just don't go to school, it's a waste of time.
- There is no mention of Sim Copter yet? There was a mode that would apparently make people jump up into the helicopter blades and somewhat of a controversy about these people being gay. But this wasn't the height of it...you could throw people out of the helicopter. This troper once took control of the mouse when his sister was playing and noticed the policewoman was making a funny face. But then his sister (Same one who would kill kids in Sim Park) dove for the mouse and then he dropped the policewoman out of the helicopter.
  - IN fact if they survive the fall they can even create a medical evacuation, and ironically this Troper has done that on top of a hospital.
  - Dropping tear gas randomly, anyone?
  - This troper also once accidentally killed a sim with the bambi bucket.
  - That's nothing. Unlock the Apache attack helicopter, attack a nuclear power plant, behold the devastation.
- This Troper just does the standard stuff involving blowing up towns in Sim City, and killing my Sims in The Sims. But Seanbaby took it to a whole new level with his new Cracked Article.
- This troper once met someone who would play the game normally, setting up a happy, prosperous family. He would also make a secret room in their house, with no doors or windows, just the furniture necessary for survival. He would leave one inhabitant in the secret room FOREVER while the rest of the family obliviously went about their lives.
- Sim Golf, anyone? Building a hole with nothing but bunkers and an impossible shot. It's fun, no matter WHAT YOU SAY!
Both Black And White and its sequel allow for a considerable amount of cruelty, as the player is a literal god. Mortals can be violently thrown, telekinetically battered, or dropped into the sea. While Fire and Bolt miracles are the most obviously violent, even Water can be used sadistically against your own mortals, or opposing factions. Many objects can be ignited and used as projectiles. Additionally, humans can be sacrificed, and torture chambers can be constructed.
- Then there's your pet, which is Kaiju-sized and is probably the smartest AI ever put into a video game (it once learned something during a demonstration that stunned its programmers). It doesn't just learn from your actions, it learns from your Karma Meter. That's right, you can turn it evil.
  - Objection. This troper found the AI to be a pretty dumb if-then script. Despite being a cruel god and killing many humans in sight of the creature, it still believed that this troper was a benevolent god. Also, the log showed that it learned how to use the depot and farms, but it just didn't use that knowledge and starved to death every time when this troper did not give it food directly. Pretty dumb, isn't it?
  - Benevolent towards the creature, not people
  - In fact, the outcome of one of the early challenges depends on whether or not your creature has a taste for villagers.
  - And for an extra laugh? Try to teach your creature to eat its own poop.
- There's even a strategy, in the official guide, that's pure twisted cruelty. On the second land, there's a village with a poisoned food supply that's slowly killing everyone. You can convert the village by removing the poisoned food and replacing it with something fresh. The game expects you to just throw the tainted food away, but you can hang onto it and kill off enemy villages, leaving the buildings free for your people to move in. Of course, this is a strategy for evil gods only.
- This troper discovered 2 ways of being evil and gameplay-effective at the same time. One is using the ability to reach outside your area of influence for a short time to grab enemy humans and sacrifice them for energy. The other is starting a familiars' duel in the middle of the enemy village for massive collateral damage.
- There's also one villager who can't be killed, so you can throw him around to your heart's content.
  - You actually get the games equivalent to money for doing so in Black And White 2, the further you throw him, the more you get.
  - Or send him on a short trip through your pet's digestive system.
  - Set him on fire.
- This Troper had fun with the Water miracle. Good use? Surprise rainfall to increase crop growth hooray! Evil use? Keep making the rain fall.
This troper often enjoys playing Real Time Strategy games in sandbox mode when available, particularly Rise of Nations. Of course, you eventually get to a point where you've done, invented and built everything possible, all over the map. What do you do then? Stop playing...or commence the culling. You can't actually target your own troops, of course...but since the nuclear missiles in the game can be launched at an area of terrain instead of a unit, there's a way around that.
- Similarly, the Sandbox mode in Age of Empires III. Watch your opponents build this lovely, peaceful colony, and then send in the Falconets.
  - Seriously, Age Of Empires encourages this sort of thing. Your opponents won't surrender even if you kill their entire military. The only option is to slaughter enough of their villagers until they give up. The third game is the worst in this respect, since there is no Wonder victory, meaning that the only way to win is to kill everybody else.
The wife of one of This Troper's friends has announced her intent to play Spore... with the goal of recreating the Flood from Halo.
- Since the Spore Creature Creator's release, thousands of videos on You Tube have been cropping up of horrible, useless creatures made in Spore. This troper made a delightful creature that he calls "The Depressing Stick."
- That's not even getting into what you can do to other factions, like using your terraforming tools to transform a planet into a volcanic wasteland, or use your planet buster to simply reduce it to asteroids.
- The kicker: You can find Earth in Spore...And use the Planet Buster on it. You'll even get an award for doing so!
- When a species of aliens kept continuously stealing my planets, I got reasonably frustrated. I mean, as soon as I colonized, my planets would get taken over within minutes. So to vent my frustration, I went over to one of the enemy planets, hovered over the city, and used the abduction beam to pick up a bunch of civilians at once, and then fling them around and throw them as far as possible.
  - "Dropping creatures from high altitudes kills them. Please beam them down gently." Make me.
  - Given height and force, you can practically put things into orbit. This editor noticed this after accidentally flinging a citizen off somewhere. Thinking they'd fall nearby and forgetting about it, this editor was started when several minutes later, the creature flies by in high orbit still flailing and screaming.
  - What's also fun is to drop them into the ocean and watch them drown to death.
  - Or strand them on a habitable, but deserted, planet. If they're not attacked by wild animals, they'll build a campfire and huddle around it.
- Before my old laptop crashed, I had recreated the Dalek Empire in Spore. Favorite strategies? Planet Busters, removing the oxygen from a planet or simply releasing the Epics.
- This troper found out that "supersizing" a creature and releasing it on an empire (well, actually, bringing the creature next to a city before supersizing it) doesn't seem to affect your relationship with the empire in question, even though you've basically just sicced a giant monster on them. Cue maniacal laughter and Godzilla re-enactments. Even more fun on planets still in civilization phase. Repercussion-free mayhem is fun.
- This troper likes creating alliances with alien empires prior to conquering them. Also, it can be cheaper to Uplift and then conquer a species on a planet than to develop the planet yourself...
- Spore is a game with truly incredible potential for the player to be a dick. This Troper has a species designed around that exact premise, who got progressively nastier as he discovered new ways to be nasty. The original goal was simply to kill everything they met. Then it evolved to allying and then destroying, because treachery is more fun than outright slaughter. They even allied the Grox for the express purpose of pissing off everyone in the galaxy at once, and then betrayed the Grox. But my favorite dick move? Terraforming a planet to T3, using a monolith to turn it into a space faring empire, and then using Fanatical Frenzy to instantly conquer the fledgling empire as soon as it sends the "thank you for uplifting us" message. Bam, instant purple spice homeworld.
Creatures may be second only to The Sims in pure, unadulterated cruelty potential. For the uninitiated, it's a game where you raise and take care of a collection of cute, cuddly little creatures called Norns, Ettins, and Grendels—fairly normal, except that said creatures have an extremely complex artificial biology. There's tons of ways to hurt them without doing deep hacking—torment them with nasty creatures, feed them poison, drop them from a great height and watch them injure themselves, train one or two to go around smacking the daylights out of each other, and starve them/bore them to death, among others. If you're clever and/or patient enough, however, you can alter their virtual genetics, turning them into adorable little masochists who love nothing more than being tortured—by having them receive pleasure from pain, having them feed off poison, or have deadly diseases turn them near immortal. They're fun little guys to mess around with.
- The "deadly disease turns them near immortal" variant was actually used in an official (buyable) breed: the Toxic Norns. On the flip side, these critters were harmed by medicines and by not being infected with anything. Breeding them with "normal" creatures (especially the fragile Treehugger Norns) could have interesting results...
- One site dedicated to the abuse of Norns, creatively named "Tortured Norns" and run by a fellow who answered to the name AntiNorn, was at the center of a decent-sized Flame War, with the webmaster receiving a substantial amount of hate mail and death threats. As AntiNorn put it in his interview with WiredNews, "The primary thing I've learned is that the majority of so-called "loving" Creatures players are vindictive, hateful people who lack a firm grip on reality."
This game. Sure, you can toss the little guy baseballs to catch, tickle him, lead him around, or squirt him with a hose. You can also toss him grenades to catch, set him on fire, make the screen randomly explode, and hit him with all manner of dangerous and painful objects.
- Heh...Did anyone else besides this troper set it to low gravity, give him a mass of rubber balls, threw a few grenades, then set the whole thing up with Molotov cocktails? All to the tune of Beethoven's 9th?
  - Just found explode at mouse...Muahahahaha!!!!
  - You're doing it wrong. Pelt the buddy with a bunch of infants, set a few infants on fire. Then use Strong Gravity Vortex to light everyone on fire, while having the infants beat the crap out of your buddy. Let everyone chill for a bit, except for the buddy running around aflame. Then pull out a hose, at least wide nozzle to quickly put out the flaming buddy...only to be lit on fire by one of the flaming infants he is running over. If you time it wrong, just pull out the SGV again. Best part is, you get loads of money every time he catches on fire again!
  - The programming engine you can unlock has the most potential for abuse. You can program for a certain kind of object to be constantly thrown at the dude. Cue nonstop torrent of fireballs. Oh, and did I mention Gravity Shifter (draws the buddy towards it) plus holding the stun gun in the middle equals constant tasing of the dude?
Master of Orion 2. Sure, you could win the game by being beloved by every other civilization and elected leader of the galaxy. You could also betray your allies, blow up planets, commit systematic xenocide and use biological weapons against civilian populations. For extra fun, you could goad the rest of the galaxy into war against your larger, more advanced empire!
- Or just wait a bit, on the higher difficulty levels. Really, though, the original also allowed you to really screw with the opponents, albeit without the Stellar Converter of MoO2. This Troper hasn't managed to finish a MoO3 game the "right" way yet, so he couldn't say about doing things the ~~psychotic~~ fun way.
  - I didn't even bother with the "right" way. I maxed forced labor, enslaved one planet from every race, then wiped out every other planet they owned. It's not as fun as it sounds.
  - Wait enslaved labor? I just shipped everyone off into space (basically killed them as their was no where for them to go) and replaced them all with super productive industrial robots. Why do you need slaves :)
Viva Pinata. Yes, Viva Pinata..
- This Troper (in a similar vein to the above) forced her Swanana (nicknamed 'Goldigga', and 'Bastard bird') to eat the sweets of its Pigxie offspring, when a Sour Mallowolf broke it open. She then let the same bird get eaten by a Sour Cocoadile, and viewed both events as a Laser-guided Karmic Death. Any other Swananas that come into her garden are also treated similarly, such being left sick for the longest time before Darstardos comes, and smashing their home when they're all inside it.
Rollercoaster Tycoon allows quite a bit of this. You can build roller coasters to nowhere and still run them — causing the car to fly off the track and explode spectacularly, creating a very nice death toll. You can mess with settings to rig prebuilt rides to fail similarly. Both of the above cut into your revenues. However, another option for cruelty is both fun and profitable! Give soft drinks away for free, then charge $6 for each use of the bathrooms.
- This troper enjoyed making a custom go cart course as long as possible, setting the ride to free, but the laps to the maximum amount (I THINK there was one). Then look at the riders' thoughts: "I wanna get off."
- This troper enjoyed making a roller coaster go as high as possible, descend as fast as possible, and then immediately go into an unending series of sharp turns at the bottom. The lateral Gs would reach 8 or 9, giving the ride a rating of "Ultra Extreme." No one ever rode the ride after the rating came up.
- This Troper and her brother made a hobby out of being mean to the guests in this game as a kid. On the rollercoasters, you can make a track so the coasters are slowly pulled up as high as they will go... and then it just ends, leaving the cars to drop off one by one. You can make them so that they will be stuck on the track until another coaster comes along and gives them a push - or a crash. It's pretty easy to rig up the "Pokey Park" game so that the guests have to go on every ride, in order, before they can leave.
- This troper once built a pier-based park over a lake, and a bug in the AI caused everyone to forget how to leave the pier, so everybody thought that the park was too crowded, and consequently the park's approval rating went down. How did I fix this problem? Remove the pier and let hundreds of park guests slowly drown.
  - You can also drown people by simply picking them up with the tweezers and dropping them into a convenient body of water. This seems to have no real consequences, making it an easy way to deal with the occasional stubborn bastard who never seems to be happy no matter what you do.
  - Another variation of the yanking-paths-out-from-under-them trick happened to this troper by accident (I swear!) when he tried to delete an indoor food court, only to remember too late that it was "indoors" because it was in a man-made cave, technically underground. (You can't construct hollow buildings in the original.) Thus, guests were left to literally fall through open space until they eventually just vanished, presumably into Hell.
  - This troper's brother discovered that putting the exit to a ride with no path leading from it and water below it was a very efficient way to eliminate guests.
- This troper used to put a handful of guests (and occasionally an Entertainer) on a couple vertical columns of land in the middle of a lake, and then slowly lower them into the water.
- This trope combined with ragdoll physics is pretty much one of the few reasons why people are still playing Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 nowadays.
- Don't forget to put a "No Entry" sign at the entrance/exit of your park, that way even if all your guests hate you because your a horrible murderer who didn't build any bathrooms, they can't escape the park and just wander around waiting to die.
- The fact that you can charge your guest insane amounts for anything...
- This troper had what she liked to call "The Island of DOOM", a random island with a circular path and usually an insanely expensive restroom. It was fun to drop guests in and watch them slowly break down.
Zoo Tycoon allows you to be cruel to both humans AND animals, satisfying all of your abusive needs. This troper and her friends find great joy in creating one of every animal and setting them loose in a zoo (which has an electric fence around the entrance) full of guests. After they virtually kill all of the guests in the zoo, they start killing each other. Last one left standing is the winner.
- Guest obstacle courses are also fun.
- The winning combo: setting the T-Rex (any dino, but the Shout Out is only really funny with a T-Rex) loose. The dinosaur expansion pack allowed the big ones to rampage through buildings, reducing them to rubble. What happens when he smashes through the bathroom? Exactly what you would think.
- This troper liked to put one of every animal in an exhibit(on pause) and watch the fun. Extra fun was had when she got a hold of the marine animal expansion, since you could put usually land animals in a tank and watch the sharks eat them. It always bugged her that there was always just a couple that wouldn't kill each other. She also liked to renovate her zoo - but without a convenient "close park" that she could find, what was she to do? Well, either deal with idiot guests whining that "that animal looks unhappy" while she worked on the habitat, or set every carnivore loose in her zoo through the "get money, lose fences" cheat. Money AND watching those guests scream! Bonus points for blocking the guests into the zoo and waiting till the T-Rexes ate every last one. She wasn't a total monster, she put the herbivores on plateaus they couldn't escape, with some water till it was done. The method of clearing out gave rise to a "suicide cult" joke among some friends - how else to explain why whole groups of guests run screaming at Rexy?
- I loved to get my most successful dinosaur zoo, cut off the gates out with electric fencing and let the dinosaurs eat the guests and each other. The only ones left by the end were the T-Rexes....
- Unfortunately the sequel makes it harder to get the animals to eat people, because if they're stuck in a cage they just vanish. On a lighter note, if you let the animals out of the cages the guests might try to interact with them, and you can see them get their butts handed to them by a gazelle up close and personal. And they thought they had to worry about the tigers.
- This troper and her little sister both found sadistic enjoyment in feeding disgruntled guests to the raptors. Being raptor fans, we always had a pack of them, and since they breed almost as fast as the lions do, there were always lots of littly bitty fang-lined mouths to feed... Her favorite part is the messages in the guest thought-boxes: "Help! Velociraptor 39 is attacking me!"
- It's also possible to drown your male guests by dumping them in the water and building walls around them. Strangely, the women and children teleport to land.
  - Watch Titanic. That's why.
You can be pretty cruel to your NPC allies or enemies in Bioware games. I wanted to beat Jade Empire on Closed Fist, so I spiritually enslaved my entire team then later killed them. I felt pretty bad.
This troper finds it near impossible to follow the evil path in any game involving a Karma Meter. Being a complete bastard is harder than it looks.
- Similarly, this troper finds the starkness of good versus evil repulsive in such games. You literally have to go all out to be as petty, malicious, and vile as you can, often to the point that you couldn't get away with it, in order to get any significant evil ratings. For an example, Kot OR 1, specifically the mugging sequence on Taris and the numerous plagues and deathtraps that you can choose to set off instead. It was so incredibly pointless one became "Good: Because Evil Was Being A Jerkass."
- This troper played through Spore on Herbivore her first time for exactly this reason. Then she got to the Space stage, and got stuck. Her new creature... well, let's just say it has spikes on it.
World Of Warcraft tries to avoid this trope by barring you from harming children in any way (even when they're following you and you run them through lava, they don't burn or anything)... But like most MM Os, puts no penalty on corpse-camping or varied other ways of screwing with other players. Sadly, this literally draws Squee from some people. (Meanwhile, a guy who only messed with Trade chat via strange comments gets banned. wtb Zellurs)
One wonders how Dungeon Keeper and its excellent sequel haven't made this list after so long. The sheer variety of tortures you can inflict include: Slapping your creatures (and any unfortunate enemies who you've captured) with your omnipresent hand, dropping ANY creature (including captured enemies) into a torture room once you've built it (though the Mistress creature enjoys that a little too much) where they'll either convert to your cause or die after (presumably) long hours on a rack or electric chair, leaving creatures to rot in your prison to later rise as a skeleton, intentionally locking creatures away from food or rest, building a stone bridge over lava and then selling it out from under a creature (though this doesn't work on flyers or heat-resistant beings), and casting your damaging spells indiscriminately — including on your own creatures.
- The above troper forgets that the game encourages 'Pour encourager les autres'. Imps working slowly? Fireflies slacking? Put them all in a room with a locked door, pick one, and slap it to death. The survivors will work ever so much better for a while.
- There is an exquisitely cruel detail in how torture works. An enemy creature is usually brought to the prison after having having had its ass owned by the player's creatures, and so being rather lacking in health. Torture will always, eventually, convert enemy creatures to your side, but will slowly decrease their health during the process. Hence, if the creature has enough health it'll convert (some random time variables are thrown in), otherwise it'll die. The solution is to give your enemies the Guantanamo Bay treatment: nurse the creatures back to health while torturing them, by feeding them or healing them through magic.
The "Nuke" button in Lemmings is there for three reasons — 1. a shortcut to get rid of leftover Blockers at the end of a level; 2. a handy and cathartic Rocks Fall Everyone Dies when you've built a bridge a millimetre too short; 3. to make you laugh guiltily when they clutch their heads,shout,"Oh no!" and explode.
- This troper actually perfected a technique he called The Lemming Comet. Place two Blockers immediately on either side of the trapdoor (so that all the lemmings were crowded together) on some kind of combustible terrain, let all the lemmings fall out, then hit Nuke. The end result looks remarkably like a comet with lemming-debris as its trail.
- The sequel adds physics to this so they get blown about the level like ragdolls and stunned,all whilst popping like machine-gunned balloons. If they then drop off the edge of the screen,they perish instantly with a little cry. You can't help but grin at the sound effects: POPOPOPOPPOPOWOWOWOWOWOWAH!AH!AH!AH!AH!. Watch that "Lemmings Saved" counter go!
- Sometimes the simple ways are best: watching every single one of your lemmings drop off a cliff can be immensely satisfying.
  - There's even a level (Cascade) where this is the expected solution - save 10 lemmings out of 80 and let the rest splat. The less sadistic players may try saving the whole tribe instead.
- Not to mention the various traps.
Roller Coaster Tycoon isn't the first that let you send folks flying. In a more innocent phase, I'd tried setting up an interesting rollercoaster ride in Theme Park. Result: full coaster leaves, EMPTY coaster returns, and patrons walking back from the far undeveloped corners of the park. After that, I considered it less a side effect and more a moral obligation to fling them.
- And also, in the spirit of the Roller Coaster Tycoon drinks trick above, there was the Theme Park equivalent: cheap, very salty fries stand next to icy, very expensive drinks stand.
- Here's another fun thing to do in Roller Coaster Tycoon: get the Shuttle Loop ride, and increase the speed. Then sit back and watch cars full of passengers fly off the end of the track and explode. This troper also had fun picking people up and dropping them into a lake to drown.
Any game that lets you edit levels belongs here. Excitebike? Horrible courses with no rhythm and jumps that almost always lead to wrecks. Same with its N64 sequel (which let me design some pieces—sawteeth never looked so good!). And one of the first things I did with Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2's editor was ... a skatepark filled EXCLUSIVELY with punji stakes. It was interesting to see it try to end a two-minute skate session when the act of spawning dumped the skater into spiky death. This ultimately leads to Platform Hell, of course. On a bullet train.
Great fun can be had in Empire Earth by nuking peacefully grazing elephants. There Is No Kill Like Overkill.
Oregon Trail. Letting your characters suffer from diseases...overhunting and angering the natives, tipping the wagon on purpose...
- Not to mention the Worst Aid you can administer. Friend bitten by a snake? Advise them to get plenty of excercise. They die within two days. lolz.
- Iliza on Last comic standing actually had a routine about how she played Oregon trail. She mentioned that she would just send the family out with nothing and a bunch of bacon. "Johnny's been bitten by a rattlesnake! What should we do?"

"I don't know, give him bacon."

Amazon Trail also allowed you to be cruel to your character by letting them get sick horribly or crashing into all the rocks and debris in the amazon and fishing...oh the fishing. You could catch electric eels and sting rays and get stung by them or catch sharks (Which had a lot of food) but you'd always get an "OOOOOWWWW!" from your characters and a message from your partner to say "throw it back."
Nintendogs. Sure, you can feed it and walk it and love it and all that, but sometimes that gets a little old. So you spice things up by oh, say, not feeding or cleaning it for a week. Or ramming it repeatedly with a Mario Kart. Or "accidentally" tripping it up with the Jump Rope. Or scaring it with the toy military chopper (with "Flight of the Valkyries" as background music!). Or throwing a Moai Statue at it. Or ignoring it for hours on end and watching/listening to its shrill barking and whining as it wanders where you've gone to. And that's not even getting into the OTHER things you can do to it: the kind that'll change your dog's personality from a sweet-natured pup into an aggressive, snarling hellhound that bites you if you dare to pet it.
- You can actually use the "hit your dog with the statue" thing to teach your dog a trick. First, you call your dog. When it comes to you, deploy the statue and hit it. It should get knocked off its feet. While it's recovering, quickly repackage the statue, go back to the Home Screen and click on your dog's picture to zoom in on it. There should be a lightbulb there (If it isn't, you weren't quick enough). Click on it, and teach your dog the trick of falling on its ass. Repeat until the trick is learned. I call mine "So clumsy!" It does wonders at the Obedience Trial, since it counts as a top-screen trick :D.
In the main Pokemon games you can IV breed and EV train. However, while this doesn't seem all that bad, think about how the Pokemon feel when you release them due to them not being the "correct" nature. Talk about a self esteem buster.
- Also, breeding. So much breeding.
  - This troper is the only person among his friends to have a Ditto, so he has used it to breed since Pearl/Diamond came out. What started as level 20 is now level 80. Among this troper's very mentally unstable friends, it has become a joke that my Ditto is probably infected with the Pokemon equivalent to several ST Ds.
- Oh gee thanks... now I feel like such a jerk.
  - This was played with at least once in the anime, where one character only cared about of getting the most out of his Pokemon in battle instead of legitimately caring for them like normal animals.
Due to the very physical nature of the game, Dance Dance Revolution's Edit Mode can be used for very literal sadistic/masochistic cruelty for both yourself and your unsuspecting friends. And let's not even get started on programs like Stepmania...
Freeware "get the train across the flooded ravine" game Bridge Builder has endless possibility for killing all the poor passengers in a variety of amusing ways, particularly using the scenario editor mode... and there's even a downloadable example pack of highly creative "funny bridges" - some lethal, some survivable, all ultimately terrifying to the passengers - which places it somewhere between Rollercoaster Tycoon, Lemmings and GTA.
The iPod Touch/iPhone game app "Pocket God" makes you the god of a tiny island nation. You can either give them gifts (coconots and fish) and make them dance... or you can maim/kill them in one of a dozen or more ways: drowning, lightning electrocution, hurricane, fire ants, magnifying glass, vampire attack, shark feeding, manipulating gravity, volcano eruption, meteor crush, earthquake, and more to come.
Dwarf Fortress allows you to get very creative with the titular dwarves' fates, including but not limited to locking them in a room with no food, drowning them, dropping them from great heights and flooding their bedrooms with lava.
- Possibly more fun is doing the same to the enemies that periodically attack your fortress, as you actually gain some benefit doing this. This troper had a great deal of fun creating large entrance chambers to his fortress, filled with engravings of horrible scenes of murder... and hidden buzzsaw traps. Goblins check in, they don't check out. Other players have even more creative ways, such as giant towers that collapse inward, giant Goblin catapults, and labyrinthian mazes that fill up with magma when a dwarf presses a button.
- Even more fun with the older version was setting up Elephant Traps — that is, creating channels full of water in such a way that elephants would path around them instead of through them. The gotcha was that the Elephants were forced to path through trapped hallways at the same time. Due to the game's system of respawning random critters such as Elephants, this quickly generated thousands of pounds of Elephant Meat, Bones, and Skin. Given that Elephants were stupidly aggressive and near impossible to kill in that version, this was doubly handy.
- This troper recalls one Dwarf Fortress player describing how he had created a fortress of insular dwarves who never went outside, and dealt with invasions by creating a giant entrance arena into which the invaders would pile before they were killed by the timely release of magma. When asked how friendly immigrants or traders got inside, he responded "You don't consider that an invasion situation?" And let's not even get started on Project: Fuck The World of Boatmurdered.
  - For those who actually want to know what it is, it two sets of levers. Pulling both would flood the countryside with lava, leveling everything in its path.
- Since Game Modding Dwarf Fortress is very easy (just editing some text file), and the game simulates lots of details, there are lots of bizarre (and hilarious) ways to kill your drawfs. For example:
  1. Breed up a bunch of cats to hunt down vermin.
  2. Edit the game files so that cats have a body temperature more than three times the surface temperature of the Sun.
  3. Watch the cats all explode into mushroom clouds of fiery death and destruction which kill all the dwarfs and lay waste to the countryside.
- Since nobles who come to your fortress mostly spend their time ordering people to make things and complaining that their rooms aren't good enough, players have come up with some very interesting ways of getting rid of them. In addition to the old standards like drowning them, dousing them in magma, and locking them in a room with nothing but a trap, it's also possible to make them release an incredibly angry wild animal into their bedroom, stand in the middle of a ballista firing range, or drop themselves into a bottomless pit.
- You can (and, in fact, it's probably in your best interest to) butcher kittens.
- All sorts of things can be used as really spectacularly unpleasant traps. Drawbridges (commonly called the Dwarven Atomsmasher) can pulverize anything at all out of existence, for instance, and it's not very difficult to arrange some inconvient pressure plates so that anyone trying to make it into your fortress will have the ground collapse from under them, a cave-in smack them down through about 12 floors, and then a bridge drop on them. And, as a final indignity, after their corpses have rotted you can send in yout minions to loot their stuff and use their bones to decorate coffee mugs.
- To provide even more fun, there's the "humane" alternative to cramming 10 metal circular saws onto a single mechanism: the cage trap. Which instantly catches one, count 'em one, hapless goblin, frogman, or hydra. The big question then is, what do you do with them? Do you put them in a room specifically designed to fill up with water, then pull the "cage release/open floodgate connected to water supply" lever and drown them? Do you build a dwarven arena, then let your hero-level dwarves grind them to powder in the quest for loot and experience? Do you try out your brand new Degrinchinator-brand maker of goblin-flavoured popsicles? Do you hurl them down a Bottomless Pit? Or do you turn into Jigsaw and promise to let them go if they can find their way out of the unbelievably complicated maze of atomsmashers, seven-pump tidal waves unleashed by pressure plates, suddenly-disappearing bridges over five-storey drops onto a wall of rotating knives, and circular saws dropping from the ceiling at chokepoints? For extra entertainment, link some of the traps that are less likely to be triggered to levers, and have bored dwarves who are betting on a Total Party Kill run up and down pulling random levers (because by then you've forgotten which lever does what) and noting their effects from which bridges randomly slam up and down, which supports (and the floors on top) simply disappear, and which floodgates open to unleash a high-pressure jet of water. And, if you're canny enough, you can have them do this naked because all their clothes have been taken off them by your dwarves, thrown in the dump, and reclaimed to flog to passing merchants. It's like Castle Heterodyne, with added nudity.
Due to the nature of the game, Scribblenauts may be a cross between Cruel God and Unchecked Player Rampage.
NationStates allows you to decide on issues such that your nation becomes a "Psychotic Dictatorship" in which you have absolute rule over your people. An excerpt from this troper's nation summary:
"Poets and writers are regularly rounded up and shot for entertainment, the government is cracking down on subversive groups, the religious lobby has the power of veto over health initiatives, and school uniforms are compulsory."

Close Cruel God

Enemy-Only Killing

Baten Kaitos: Origins allows players to choose whether certain enemies should be saved or cruelly impaled on their swords (though letting them live opens extra scenes at the end of the game).
How could we miss Kirby. Sure he's a heroic puffball and looks cute. However he's the biggest E-rated sadists ever. He eats his enemies alive, a lot of which are cute, for power or fun. I like to go into the cave, round up those adorable Waddle Dees, and then eat them. Aww, such sweet candy coated bloodless violence.
Crysis lets you kill soldiers by throwing animals at them which suffer very violent deaths. Playing soldier bowling, that is killing multiple soldiers by throwing one at them could count too.
- Or you can kill them by throwing barrels at them. Hell, get good at that game and you're basically the Predator.
- "Maximum Strength" *punch*.
Dark Sector. Glaive-Cam view of limb-detachment, decapitation, incineration and electrocution - and of course, the always-impressive 'Finishers'. One of the most frequently-seen of those involves grabbing a guy by the hand that holds his weapon, then cutting off his arm at the elbow, and finally beating his skull in with his own weapon.
Destroy All Humans allows you to telekinetically toss people around like ragdolls, smack them into walls, floors and each other, and continue to do this to their corpse after they die. You can also forcibly brainwash and then take over their bodies, the process of which slowly kills them.
- And drown them! You can hold someone under the water with telekinesis and them will eventually die. And then there's the zombie gun...
- And how could we have forgotten about the ANAL PROBE? The anal probe that shoots a burst of sizzling green fluid up the unsuspecting arse of a human being, who then goes dashing off, unable to stop shitting himself until his brain explodes?
- The training level commands you to kill cows with telekinesis. It is possible to beat one cow to death with another cow.
Penny Arcade notices the particular cruelty potential inherent in The Force Unleashed's gameplay...
- The game seems to reward this behavior, especially when you Force Grab some hapless schmuck and toss him into the air, whereupon the camera will shift to follow their terrible trajectory.
  - This troper attempted to instruct a fellow ~~sadist~~ player to do just this, but instead of flinging the stormtrooper up, he threw him down. Hard. On a plasteel floor. Repeatedly. With sickening crunches. Our response? Laughter.
- It gets better. There's a part in the Light Side ending path where you can actually grab some stormtroopers and hold them up INSIDE THE DEATH STAR'S LASER CHANNEL DURING THE COUNTDOWN.
- Lifting a storm trooper, or other suitable enemy off the ground, and placing them in the path of an on coming Fighter. Bonus points if you can have them holding someone. More points if they were just fighting that someone.
- This troper was rather fond of Force Gripping one of the Whiphid warriors in the Bespin mission (Wii version) and dangling him in front of the friendly Wing Guards as they repeatedly shot him with their weak blasters. For several minutes straight. He actually started to feel sorry for the furball after a while and just choked him to death.
- Why bother fighting the enemy when on occasion you can just pick them up with the force and fling them into laser gates that instantly disintegrate them?
In Heavenly Sword, apart from the special attacks our main heroine uses which look mighty painful and often go for the groin, players can get a lot of pleasure from the archery levels with Kai. Not only do you take minute control of your arrows to make sure they hit your target but the soldier will react differently depending where you hit them: head, back, chest, leg, groin, bottom
Also, of course, John Woo Presents 'Stranglehold' , where the 'Precision Aim' ability allows you to create rotating-camera shots of the enemy's agonized expression right after you shot his balls off - or his eye out, or his stomach through, if you get bored of that.
Manhunt requires the player to kill his enemies in brutal, bloody, torturous ways. He can hold his attack for a short time, making it even more sadistic.
In Perfect Dark, shooting a guard in the groin results in them clutching at it for a few seconds. Killing a guard with a groin shot results in them lying on the ground with hands to their crotch permanently.
- Also in that game, if you manage to disarm a guard and hold a gun to his head, he will begin begging for his life: "I'm only doing my job!" "I have a family!" And so on. A guard who falls into this will not bother you for the rest of the level, so...
The German soldiers in the first Medal Of Honor game also grab their crotches when you shoot them there.
The Ultor guards from Red Faction sometimes run away screaming "I don't deserve to die!". However, instead of becoming harmless, they revert to their usual "You Rebel Scum!" comments a few seconds later and start shooting at you once again.
- This troper got endless hours of fun out of throwing C4 onto guards in the early levels. Altogether now - "Ah AAAAAH! Ah AAAAAAH!"
The appearance of the droids in Portal was accompanied by the suggestion of dealing with them by dropping a Weighted Companion Cube on them, disabling them. This troper much preferred walking up behind them, picking them up, carrying them to the edge of a bottomless pit, and casually dropping them off.
- Pick them up, align them very carefully infront of a clear bulletproof glass wall. Then walk to the other side of the wall. As they're impotently trying to blast you move from one end of the line of turrets to the other and watch them kill each other. Ow ow ow ow ow ow!
- This troper's favorite was picking them up and carrying them casually through the particle field at the end.
Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy encourages the player to make his enemies' heads slowly explode. They scream incoherently while being mercilessly tortured and killed. One type of enemy must be set on fire before he can be killed in this manner. And that's just the start of ways to torture the meat puppets:
- Using Telekinesis to hold them against electrified objects burned them to death.
- Using TK to drop/Hold them between slowly docking platforms and walls would squish out the organs in a fountain.
- You could literally burn mooks alive by holding other burned/ing mooks against them long enough.
- Mind control also let you force them to commit suicide, and not just by jumping off tall structures, but by "eating" their gun. Or get them to shoot their squishy scientist friends, who will shout things like "Why are you doing this? I even made you lunch!"
- You could also use TK to throw mooks into ~~cremation furnaces~~ medical waste incinerator and hear their anguished screaming.
  - Oh, way to go.
  - RE: Above correct: Better?
- This editor took great pleasure picking them up and painting the walls a pretty crimson color.
The Punisher game marketed itself on being able to interrogate mooks with the environment then kill them in horrific ways after they give it to you. It fits with the Anti Hero origins however.
- Though, perhaps surprisingly, the game punished you for actually killing enemies with the torture techniques. High scores (which mattered for some reason that I can't remember) were achieved by interrogating all the important mooks without going too far and killing them. Killing them immediately afterward by other means was A-okay, though.
  - Sometimes, with the same means. This troper had a lot of fun with that level with the giant fan.
  - You can use the points you earn for a variaty of upgrades, such as body armor, longer slaughter mode, or regain health when you kill. You also earn medals, bonus content (such as comics), and levels where you can get more points to upgrade, so there's even more incentive to gun for the high score.
Soldier Of Fortune 1 and 2 are based entirely on this trope. All body parts are separate objects and can be dismembered, causing the enemies to spout blood and scream in horror as they die.
- It should be noted that, at least in the first game, the one body part that would always kill any mook in a single shot, regardless of armor and helmets they were wearing, was the groin.
- It was also possible to disarm enemies by shooting their weapons out of their hands, and if you so chose, execute them as they knelt defenceless in front of you. Allies and innocent NP Cs however, were completely off limits, and killing one would cause instant level-failure. Except the civilians in the Arab street market...
- "All body parts" is a bit vague, so let's clear it up: you can actually shoot little chunks off, say, a skull with your Uzi, and completely destroy torsos (and heads, and hands, and legs...) with a close-up shotgun blast.
- Some levels required you to kill all enemies, which ruined this tropers enjoyment of the game, since he felt bad shooting unarmed enemies who had already surrendered.
The Turok games have a weapon called the cerebral bore, which homes in on enemies and makes their heads explode after draining the blood and brains all over the floor. In one of the games, it even lets the player control the enemy for a few seconds before they die.
- Turok: Evolution has the poison bow-and-arrow and a scope. You can snipe enemies from a distance, then watch them puke out their guts and die.
Wild 9 is built entirely around the concept. Your basic attack is a telekinesis beam, which you normally use to simply pound enemies repeatedly into the ground, but you can also use various parts of the level for satisfyingly gory deaths (toss them into flame jets, drop them into pools of acid, grind them between oversized gears, etc). In fact, throwing enemies into various death traps is the major method of puzzle-solving throughout the game.
- Even more: at the end of each level, your cruelty in dealing with enemies is tallied up: being cruel enough is rewarded with continues.
Garry's Mod for Half Life 2 lets you do some pretty interesting things with people who either are or are not dead.
- Ever wanted to see Alyx rape Zoey from Left 4 Dead? Someone did...squick.
- This troper liked to spawn Barnacles in Garry's Mod and feed all sorts of NP Cs to them. There's just something hilarious about watching Alyx's pathetic corpse get pulled up to the ceiling by a long, dangling tongue and getting swallowed whole by a voracious alien...thing.
- The actual game lets you kill zombies in a conventional way; i.e., shooting them. No big deal. Or you can save ammo by using the gravity gun to shoot oxygen canisters at them, setting them aflame and causing them to scream in extraordinary agony.
  - Or you can toss a ~~sawblade~~ parasite victim bisection device at them to cut them in half. Sometimes, this does not stop them.
  - One room has a zombie locked in a cage hooked up to a canister of gas and a spark button, just begging to be ignited.
  - This troper found that while not in a particularly sadistic mood. He then turned the dial to see what it did. And then had to guiltily look on as a presumably-sedated person woke up to find that not only did they still have a Faceful Of Alien Wing Wong, but they were also on fire.
- Another creative way to use the gravity gun: If your foe happens to be taking cover behind a large movable object such as a car, you can gravity-punt it into them.
- One level has a usable industrial crane equipped with an electromagnet. And shipping containers. And enemies. You can do the math from there.
  - The electromagnet is absolutely necessary to pick up a container, to knock down a hinged bridge, leading to where the enemies happen to be. Whether or not they're already dead when you come across them is up to you.
- The crossbow, the Half-Life series' answer to a sniper rifle, can pin enemy ragdolls to walls in Half-Life 2. In that game, the player finds it for the first time on a vantage point located a few hundred metres before a soldier conveniently placed in front of a billboard.
  - In the X Box 360 and PC versions, this is how you get the "Targetted Advertising" achievement.
  - This editor has grown fond of using an infinite-ammunition code to nail most of his victims to nearby surfaces by every extremity, usually in absurd poses.
- Since bodies never disappear and are subject to ragdoll physics, one amusing (though somewhat macabre) pastime is to beat a dead... well, anything with the crowbar and watch the limbs flop around. "Dance, ragdoll! Dance!"
- Try sticking one of their hands or feet to the floor, then using the Gravity Gun to just...spin them. And spin them. They flop drunkenly and whiz around in extremely undignified ways. It is one of the funniest things you will ever see.
In the Call Of Duty series, wounded enemy soldiers will sometimes crawl around on the ground, feebly trying to escape or reach cover before dying, or desperately shooting at you with their sidearms. It's possible to shoot these troops dead as they're struggling, and in Modern Warfare you can even execute these wounded enemy troops with your knife.
- Executing a crawling soldier with the knife was an achievement in the Xbox version: "No Rest for the Weary" is the official name, a friend of this troper called it the "Kicking puppies" achievement.
  - Not on Veteran mode, where they frustratingly 2-shot you a couple of seconds after going down.
- In Call of Duty 4, there are achievements for finishing off people by hitting them directly with grenades (stun/flash/frag/smoke). This troper finds it easiest to do it with someone during their land stand, as they lay on the ground, also hilarious.
- World At War allows players to set enemies ablaze with the flamethrower or Molotov cocktails, causing them to scream and writhe in agony until they collapse to the floor in a crumpled, charred heap. The execution feature from Modern Warfare also makes a comeback, with the added bonus of being able to perform it with a bayonet as well as a knife. The animation for the former actually looks as if your character is twisting the blade inside the guy's body.
  - Not to mention the improved gore effects and animations, which allow you to blow enemies' hands, legs or heads with certain high-power weapons, then watch them writhe and stare at disbelief and horror at the bleeding stump that were formerly their hands or legs. Especially satisfying on legs, where you can blow both of them out. The animation for this resembles childbirth.
Oddly enough, the standard side-scrolling platformer Ultimate Spiderman for the GBA. You can:
Knock enemies to their death, complete with an "Urghh!" sound effect.
Punch them into flames in a burning building, instantly killing them.
Likewise, knock them into a Laser Hallway; one assumes they are sliced up.
Throw them into a running electric current between broken wires.
And as Venom, the whole point is to eat your weakened opponents.
- And then there's Spider Man 2 on the PS 2. You have to go out of your way to do it, but it's possible to take a street-level mook, sling him over your shoulder, swing up to the highest building in Manhattan, and just toss him off. This editor likes to dive down and try and catch him before he hits the ground.
  - There's also hanging a thug from a lamppost for extended punching, drowning thugs in nearby bodies of water, seeing them run over by cars, using physics-defying combos to elevate a thug so high the zoom map has to flip upside down before letting fall, and (my personal favorite) pile drivers off the Empire State Building.
  - Hell, taking advantage of gravity sucking was the easiest way to beat the first Spider Man movie game's first level. Jump on head, wait until thug runs over to edge, use flip button, laugh maniacally as goon plummets to his death.
Bio Shock gives you so many options. This troper's personal favorite is to hit someone with the Insect Swarm plasmid and watch them run around in circles as hundreds of bees slowly sting them to death.
- Their frantic shouts of "No, NOT THE BEES!" make it even more satisfying.
- This troper, instead of wasting precious ammo on annoying Splicers, prefers to either set them on fire and just hide in a corner until they burn to death, freeze them and smash them to pieces with a wrench, or lure them into some water and fry them!
  - In fact, in the Xbox version, you can get an achievement for doing the latter. Nothing better than being rewarded for murder.
A tank-vs-tank warfare game might not seem like a good example of this, but this editor shed a lot of anger in his team years playing Scorched Earth against the computer. Set max CPU tanks at stupidest setting (they can't even aim), turn off "computers buy", set money to max, and you've just set up a game where it's you against 11 tanks which will only hit you on accident with piss-weak bullets. You, on the other hand, have the precision guided nuclear weapons.
Star Wars: Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast and Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy allows you to Force Grip people and choke them to death - but for extra kicks, carry the victim to over a bottomless pit before they die and let go. You can also Force Push them off, or if there's a small enough bottomless pit between you and the victim, Force Pull them in.
- Hell, This Troper got through Jedi Academy almost entirely on the premise of tossing enemies over cliffs, into pits and, on the occasional levels where there are neither, just slamming them into walls, floors and ceilings. I love you, Level 3 Force Grip.
  - Ironically, during the first tier and Hoth levels, Level 3 Force Grip is the only way to engage in the Jedi-like tactic of disarming one's opponents. Dark-side power, indeed.
- You can also Force Grip, point upwards, Force Push and then Force Lightning to the now briefly able to fly enemy (In fact if I remember correctly, even ally)
- Little known trick: Using a cheat you can clone yourself multiple times. Said clones will attack enemies for you. I guess the developers weren't too extensive checking on the cheats, because your clones can kill people during cutscenes. Evil Jedi Monoluguing? Spawn clones and watch them swarm them to death. You can also spawn enemies for fun, making batles much easier once you spawn a rancor and jump to a far off point to watch the carnage.
- At one point, you can open an airlock and watch 'em all get sucked out. They go screaming, the whole roomful of 'em.
- The ne plus ultra of this trope for that game would have to be the cheat mode "g_SaberRealisticCombat 1". You can hack off any enemy body part. At all. And each severed body part spends about fifteen seconds independently writhing in agony. This troper seriously questions his own mental health for enjoying that cheat code so much.
  - It gets even better with the addition of Blood Mods (mods that make people bleed buckets whenever they lose a limb) and mods that exchange lightsabers for swords.
  - Oddly, if while using said cheat you kill an enemy with an overhead strike, instead of getting vertically bisected, their head and all their limbs come off. Whether this is disturbingly odd or hilariously silly depends on your perspective.
  - This troper enjoys using that dismembement feature in multiplayer bot battles, where you can only cut one part per dead victim but get to use custom skins in turn; he especially relishes at the chance of sadistically cutting that damn Sephiroth's head.
- Another fun thing: Force Jump over enemies and Force Pull for a lesson in stormtrooper aviation. Also works in the sequel.
- In G4's Arena, one team was deadly in the Jedi Academy matches with a technique the announced dubbed the "Force Pinata": Use Force Choke to hold a lone target still, while your partner goes to town with the Lightsaber.
GoldenEye allowed for some cruelty in this area, too - Effectively torturing soldiers with shots to limbs (or groin) and watching them stagger and clutch those limbs for several seconds. Most harsh was the throat shot - Watch a guard clutch at his throat with one hand and pound at it with the other, slowly sinking to the ground and dying. The whole sequence lasted about ten seconds.
- This troper liked shooting their hats clean off.
  - You MONSTER!
  - You bastard!
- Running people over with the tank is constant amusement for this particular troper. There's a reason that the majority of the time when this troper finishes Runway, the Weapon of Choice in the debriefing is "Tank."
The Command And Conquer: Red Alert series has you play the Soviet side. When Stalin orders you to kill everyone in the village and burn it to the ground, you get the idea that Stalin isn't very nice.
In the original Medieval: Total War, you could take prisoners during battle in order to ransom them back for money... or you could simply have them executed on the field. While there are often pragmatic reasons for doing so (especially if you're losing the battle, since in that case all captured enemy soldiers are immediately free), there was nothing stopping you from simply doing it because you can. In fact, the game actually rewarded the commanding general with a special trait if you executed more than one thousand prisoners in a single battle.
- The sequel one-ups this: while you cannot execute prisoners mid-battle anymore (understandable since your soldiers are, you know, currently busy beating the tar out of their comrades), a post-battle pop-up window asks whether you want to kill, ransom or free your new friends. Hovering the mouse cursor over the different options yields different soundbites of the soldiers pleading with you. "No, no, no-no pleeeaaaase, you won't gain anything if *SBLURKCH*". Cue Evil Laugh.
  - A similar situation happens when you conquer an enemy city;you can choose merely to occupy it (few deaths, a little loot), ransack it (some deaths, a lot of loot), or slaughter most of the inhabitants, accompanied by an extended *SBLURKCH*. Do it enough times and with other evil actions and you are apparently so evil even the bravest soul quakes in fear at your presence and you can get the 'exterminator' trait, as someone who enjoys wiping out entire populations. Good times.
- You could also force your faction's princesses to marry their own fathers or brothers in Medieval:Total War 1,often resulting in inbred princes with...interesting traits. Assuming the resulting inbred princes later got daughters of their own,you could technically keep doing this for generations, turning your wonderful dynasty into a sad bunch of genetical abominations.
- In Shogun: Total War, one has the option to assassinate enemy generals and emissaries using ninjas, in which a very cool cutscene plays of your ninja doing the business.
  - This is nothing. In Medieval: Total War II you can get the Pope assassinated. Continuously. And the cut-scene is so satisfying to some...
In Fire Emblem, members of your army often have close relationships with an enemy, recruitable or not, and if said enemy is a boss you'll get a different conversation than normal. Some of these confrontations have the potential to be sadistic to both parties.
- As an example, it's possible to force Jill to kill her own father in FE 9.
- It's interesting to note that FE 11, a remake of the original game, has several "Gaiden" chapters that can only be reached if you have a maximum of 15 characters in your entire army. The only way to achieve this goal is to kill off a good majority of the game's many playable characters.
Halo. Grunts. 'nuff said.
- This troper killed off the gunner on his Warthog in a very cruel way. The Warthog got stuck on an edge of a cliff and any attempt to get it back on solid ground would make it fall over the edge. This troper got out and punched the Warthog off the cliff with the gunner still on it and watched them fall into the abyss as the gunner screamed.
- There's one room full of sleeping (g)runts where you can stealth melee every single one of them and the elites.
- Plasma grenades.
- Allow an enemy or ally to be mutated by an Infection Form in part 3. Warning, Body Horror alert!
- A melee option + aliens with unlimited amounts of blood = PAINT THE GROUND PURPLE.
Odd example: in the original Zork, the player infamously meets a vicious troll, but fortunately has a sword. If you disarm him he will drop to his knees, "pathetically babbling" for you to spare him. This troper didn't want to kill him, but didn't trust him, so he tried to knock him out. Instant kill. Whoops. Sorry, troll.
Among many other things you can do in Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan War to complete your missions and make money, you can also attack "yellow" targets (not related to Yellow Squadron from Ace Combat 04), so called because they show up with a neutral yellow IFF on your transponder and radar. These yellow targets are generally civilian in nature, being structures that are only considered for destruction because the enemy might use them, but sometimes are actually damaged or disabled aircraft—either done at your hands, your wingman's, or as a scripted event. In addition to sliding more toward the "Mercenary" part of the Karma Meter, other aces (including your wingman) will have various reactions and things to say about you depending on your position on the Karma Meter, and being a mercenary tends to result in a lot of very nasty things being said by the enemy.
Far Cry 2's Enemy Chatter gives it a good dose of this trope. Taking down your enemies, especially from stealth and at range, will cause them to actually start freaking out in terror. It is a very, very satisfying thing to hear. And, of course, there's the ground-stabbing. And the burning.
Much like Psi Ops, the suspense-oriented game Second Sight featured wonderful psychic abilities that you can use to obliterate whole armies. However, the funniest moment in a very grim and eerie game is in the first level, when you have the opportunity to trap two security guards in the isolation cell you just left. As they try and fail to open the door, they quickly realise that neither of them has a working radio; after a few minutes, the tension grows too much for the two guards, and an argument very quickly spirals into a violent brawl to the death- while you sit back and watch the carnage.
Gears Of War delights in this trope. An entire aspect of the game, executions, revolve around shooting a person until they are bleeding to death, then taking the time to finish them off in a paticularly gruesome manner. Sure, you can just shoot them some more, but who would settle for that when you can smash their head in with your foot, punch them to death, stick a live grenade to them, or many other possiblities. This troper's favorite? Grabbing them as a shield, and letting them get shot up until they are missing limbs and bleeding everywhere. Then snapping their neck.
Dead Space has some by way of Action Commands, only activated when the enemy is violating your personal space, but what Isaac does in retaliation should count. You punt babies for crying out loud!
- Particularly memorable for This Troper was (after the babies, which, by the way, are punted so hard they literally fall to pieces) the spindly things with the tongue attacks. They wrap their tongues around your throat, you shake them off, and throw their tongue back into their mouth. Doesn't sound so bad? Well, it's hard enough to knock the bugger of its feet, and if it's particularly weak, the head will come right off.
  - What Necromorph are you talking about? This troper doesn't remember any with that sort of attack. The only thing that sounds close is the Infector (the bat-thing that turns corpses into Advanced Slashers), and it doesn't get its tongue thrown back into its mouth. That would be merciful. With that Necromorph, Isacc pummels it with his fist, then stamps on it and pins it to the ground with his foot so he can tear that tongue/stinger of theirs clean out of their head.
  - The tongue thing is the divider; the guy who, after he takes enough damage, will fall apart, but his skull and limbs will continue to attack you.
One of the enemy-specific attacks in God Of War has Kratos literally Kick The Dog. When I first did it, I laughed. And then did it again.
Killzone 2 has turned out to be pretty sweet on this trope with some of the weapons. In particular, there's the VC1 Flamethrower, which sets your foes ablaze and screaming; the VC5 Electricity Gun, a weapon sadly only found in one mission that electrocutes your enemies in a most hilarious manner, and the VC21 Bolt Gun, which just pins enemies to things...and then blows them up.
In Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Nobunaga's Ambition, this troper has executed scores of enemy generals at once, sometimes laughing at those who were a huge pain in the previous campaign.
In Fallout 3 the head, legs, and arms of foes have a tendency to...detach. It's funny when a railroad spike nails someone in the forehead and sticks into a nearby wall. It's a little more gruesome when you hack at the body of an already dead foe, removing the arms, legs, and head. It's still more cruel when you realize that all of those parts (including the now attachmentless torso) can be picked up and tossed around. Or piled up, into macabre sculpture.
- Use a Chinese Assault Rifle for a headshot and their body will do an amazingly balletic pirouette through the air while their head lands some fifty feet away.
Similar to the Golden Eye example listed above, there's this video of Metal Gear Solid 2. Raiden isolates a guard on the helipad in Strut A (I think), shoots out his radio so he can't call for backup and injures his firing arm and one of his legs. The result is that the poor soldier is trying to limp away to the door at the bottom of the helipad, unable to fire his weapon, move quickly or call for backup. It's awesome.
The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past actually revealed this trope within the game itself, when you're told that you can freeze enemies with the Ice Rod and then shatter them with the Magic Hammer to get free refills to your magic meter. It's very helpful, but keep in mind you're essentially using one of Sub-Zero's Fatalities on them. Yikes.

Close Enemy-Only Killing

Plot Aided Bastardry

Baldurs Gate II features a section near the end where the player and his party are disguised as Drow and forced to infiltrate Ust Natha, their largest city, at the behest of a Silver Dragon to rescue her eggs. Throughout the course of the story, the player can siddle up to the Matriarch, her Dark Is Not Evil right hand man, and/or her power-hungry, treacherous daughter. The latter proposes a double cross when her mother reveals she plans to use the dragon eggs as a sacrifice to an arch-fiend, replacing them with fakes. The not-evil sheriff, having grown a conscience, provides you with a second set of fake eggs to double cross the daughter with. In the end, the player can arrange things such that the Matriarch offers the first set of fake eggs to the arch-fiend and is killed, then the daughter offers the second set of fakes, and realizes what you've done just before the demon kills her. For the piece d' resistance, the player can goad/allow the demon to raze the city, or send it back to the abyss. Just try saying "no." If the game had a Meta Plot impact on the setting, it would literally mean the near-end of all Drow presence above and below the surface, with the ruling house destroyed and their capitol city in flames.
- Did we mention that you can, naturally, after performing this epic double-cross hand over the Dragon's eggs anyway?
  - Above troper is wrong. Dead wrong. It's more like a quadruple-cross.
- The best part about this is that this is what you're actually supposed to do, especially if you're aligned Good and wish to play the part (though technically Drow are bad anyhow). Being the Son/Daughter of Murder sure does has its perks.
- In another example, cited on the Lawful Stupid page, you can find that the wife of your paladin Keldorn has been cheating on him, because she's lonely and she needs some support to help feed the kids. The good solution is to talk to the lover-boy, persuade him to step down, and let Keldorn get back to life with his family. The lawful solution, however, is to turn the adulterous wife over to the authorities, resulting in her incarceration, her lover's execution, and Keldorn's daughters hating him forever. It's wonderful just how evil the Law can be.
  - Not to mention letting a lynch mob burn a female drow is the lawful thing to do, while freeing her causes a reputation loss.
Bioshock forces you to choose between killing the possessed "Little Sisters" (girls about seven years old) and saving them by curing their possession. But if you kill them, you get a lot more "Adam", the substance that lets you upgrade your character's powers. While there are other benefits to saving the little girls instead of killing them, they take some time to become evident, time you probably don't have to waste on the harder settings.
- The killing is hidden by a flash of white light. The killing was originally going to be shown but the ESRB said "Hell no."
The whole point of being the Hidden in The Hidden is to try to make your opponents crap their pants in sheer terror.
One of the earlier stages in Tecmo's Deception... hell, Tecmo's Decpetion in general, which has you setting up traps to capture or kill various adventurers. Naturally, the only things you can do with a captured victim is kill them or steal their souls. In one stage, a couple enters to find a means of curing their sick daughter. Once you're through with them, the game then switches to the poor girl crying out for her parents. You Bastard.
Fallout 3 has many examples in the 'Tranquility Lane' segment, where the more obvious means of progressing the story is to visit torment on each of it's residents, sometimes offering a variety of creative methods to achieve this.
- And 'Tenpenny Tower' gives an opportunity for surrogate bastardry; in getting the tenants' association to agree, you may deliver a love letter for a mistress to a wife, who will produce a gun to blow away her husband then his lover, but not before shooting his corpse again for good measure, then wander off into the wasteland to spend the rest of her days in forlorn wretchedness.
- The 'reverse pickpocketing explosives' could also be mentioned, while it's not strictly plot aided, it's encouraged with formal recognition of Psychotic Prankster and a score-keeping tally for 'Exploding Pants'.
Final Fantasy X lets the player be a bit of a bastard in the final battle against Seymour. Since Even Bad Men Love Their Mamas, summoning Anima to fight him is one of the cruelest things you can do to the guy. The game even has an extra scene if that happens:
Seymour: You would oppose me as well? Then so be it!
- Considering Seymour was using her as an unwilling Person Of Mass Destruction anyway this troper considers siccing Anima on him to be Poetic Justice.
- This troper always summons Anima to the fight for the lulz, but can't help feeling a little bad for doing it.
Really the whole point of Stubbs the Zombie in: Rebel Without a Pulse is to eat the brains of every citizen you could get your teeth onto, turning them into a zombie minion which you could control to a certain degree. Each converted zombie could then then be told to chase and eat the brains of other citizens, exponentially expanding your very own Zombie Horde which you could then direct to rampage through crowds of people, eating and zombifying. (There was a limit to the number of zombies in your horde, but that was easily fixed by attacking police officers. Your horde are relatively weak, guaranteeing a constant attrition of your horde, requiring more brain-eating and more zombification.) The best part was that as you eat peoples' brains, there would be a short cut-scene style animation as you crunched through their head, blood and gibs flying, as they would hilariously scream some horrified plea to not be eaten.
- In some scenarios it was much more fun trying to hunt down and eat every single NPC in the area before completing the level.
- Your zombie mooks would Zombie Gait their way to the closest citizen, the only word they were capable of saying being "Braaaaaains." If your zombie mooks got shot or attacked, they could easily lose arms, legs or get cut in half. If they lost legs or got cut in half, the top half would still drag themselves towards the nearest victim. If they got their arms shot off they would frequently topple over and kick helplessly on the ground.
- At one point in the game you get attacked by a Barbershop Quartet wearing jetpacks. (So Yeah...) When you kill them, they scream in harmony.
In the Star Fox games, your idiot wing men will constantly get in trouble and request you to bail them out. The game provides incentives to keep them alive (their kills actually count in the original SNES version, shooting some enemies you might miss, and you won't get a medal in Star Fox 64 if they're shot down) but this troper wouldn't be surprised if a lot of players just let their wing men get their asses kicked, especially after they cuss you out for not helping them when you might have all you can handle trying to stay alive. It's especially irritating when you're trying to complete the mission requirements and then all of a sudden Slippy needs you to drop everything and go help him...again.

Close Plot Aided Bastardry

Unchecked Player Rampage

In Snatcher Handsome Lech Gillian Seed can flirt with almost every woman in the game, walk in on Jean Jack Gibson's daughter while she is showering (and she was 14 in the original JP version of the game, chances are her raised age in Western countries was due to how Squicky the scene could be.), force a Robot Buddy to watch a porn movie, and go to a strip club. The problem? Gilliam is married.
- Gillian has nothing on his Spiritual Successor, Jonathan Ingram, from Policenauts. Gillian can hit on every woman. Jonathan can outright molest every single woman in the game, including fondling the breasts of every single female character. The remake for the Sega Saturn actually upped the amount of Fan Service "due to popular demand".
In The Godfather, your character is capable of a wide variety of sadistic acts, including throwing people into ovens.
- And you get a special bonus, a fairly nice amount of money, for managing to fill out the entire list of execution styles.
  - The assassination sub missions also have this, as you a great deal more money and points for killing the targets in specific ways. This troper's favourite was the one where you were asked to kill a man but first shoot him in the knee, shoulder and throat, in that order, and watch as he crumbled up before your final blow.
God Of War is perhaps the king of this trope, as you can kill your enemies in ways that don't bear repeating, hell one of the basic moves is to rip enemies to shreds with your bare hands. In fact, if you don't do horrible things voluntarily, the game will make you do them.
- There's a very specific scene early on in Athens with Ares attacking the city proper and citizens fleeing around chaotically. The game rewards you for killing them with health.
- In Pandora's Temple, one puzzle is solved by you lowering a suspended cage holding a soldier and, instead of freeing him, pushing him uphill to a machine that incinerates him. He pleads with you and shouts for help the whole trip, of course.
  - Whoever did the PAL localization for the game must have thought this to be too horrific even for this game, and thus the soldier [[Bowdlerization was replaced by a regular zombie enemy]].
- There's also one section where you're on one side of a chasm, and the only way across is to pull the lever on the other side and activate a bridge. Naturally, there's a civilian who'd be all too happy to pull said lever, but he's too terrified of all the monsters on your side. Pop quiz: how do you get across? Answer: Zap the civilian with lightning. His dead body will fall on the lever and allow you to cross.
- And don't forget the sequel, where—not once, but twice—you must drag a helpless and protesting old scholar towards a book so that he can read it for you. Once you get him there, you brutalize him until he does what you want, then kill him. The real cruelty here lies in the fact that the game uses Quick Time events (i.e., button-mashing) to literally force the player to put some real physical effort into this act of elder abuse.
Hitman Blood Money allows many, many ways to kill people. This troper's favorite, in "A New Life," involves using lighter fluid on a grill and waiting for the wife of your target to start it and go up like a Roman candle.
- Dude. Garden Shears.
  - You're doing it wrong: Rigged pyrotechnic display + Tank filled with oh-so-cooling water. And a shark.
Metal Gear Solid as a series had several of these but the worst was Metal Gear Solid 2. It allowed you to do plenty of awful stuff, from shooting harmless animals to knocking over then lying on top of to feel up the The Woobie's sister you're supposed to be rescuing. Although doing those things does piss off your Voice With An Internet Connection along with several other NPCs.
- The most fun this editor had, though, was holding up a guard and then ball-tapping them with a punch.
- And then of course, there's the classic move of delivering anal "surprise sex" to unconscious guards...
  - Jungle Boogie! Get it on.
  - This troper realized she missed a golden chance to do it to to fucking Ocelot after he was knocked out. It's only fair, considering what he does to everyone.
  - The worst part is he'd probably enjoy it.
- You can even be a sadistic monster to your own player character, at multiple points - in the most egregious example, you're given the opportunity to stand Raiden under a constant stream of urine, if you don't feel like distracting the guard mid-flow, and there's no penalty for doing so. Or you can goad Snake into killing you by running into him enough times.
- Of course, you can also plant C4 on the backs of unaware guards, and detonate them when appropriate.
- Metal Gear Solid 3 had a higher cruelty potential than 2. You could hold a soldier hostage and slit his throat while he begs for mercy, for example. Other ways to mess with them are throw snakes and scorpions on them, feed them rotting/poisonous food, play Predator, and this editor's favorite, shoot their arms and legs and watch them try to hobble away. Also, knocking Eva unconscious actually makes the last area easier to get across. The games get more cruel every time a new one comes out.
- And in the extension of 3, Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence, you can also throw up on guards to make them freak out.
- Let us not forget that you can kill a man, let a vulture eat him to fatten the vulture up, then kill the vulture and eat it. Doing this results in the men you ate with vultures on their shoulders appearing in the Sorrow's river of people you killed. And they will groan "You ate me!" as they pass you.
- The Nikita! Remote-controlled Rocket, with a camera you can switch into. So you can not only get to aim one of those babies right into some Mook's (or Boss, if you're REALLY good at working the controls) face, and immediately switch into First-Rocket-View to see the Oh Crap Reaction. BOOM baby! Muwhahhaha!
- Metal Gear Solid 3 also reverses the trope by inflicting emotional cruelty on the player in its last moments. In the endgame, the player is tasked with killing The Boss, the player's lifelong mentor and mother figure, only to learn in the end that it was all an act on her behalf to be framed as a traitor to her country. The game even makes you pull the trigger on her, for chrissakes!
- This troper enjoys dragging Emma through the bugs in front of the Shell 2 elevator instead of clearing them away for her, and always gets a laugh out of planting C4 on the ground, putting a magazine over it and detonating the explosive when a guard stops to look at the magazine (even better if they lean down to look at it rather than sit on the ground).
- Favorite death, done by a friend: Tranq a guard, then while he's sleeping, crotch-shot.
  - The tranq provided some serious cruelty potential. It was generally the best way to take out guards, because if you missed a headshot with a handgun, the enemies would be alerted to your presence, but if you missed a headshot with the tranq, they'd just take a moment longer to fall asleep. And if you shoot and kill a guy, and another guard finds him before you can hide the body, alert mode again. If you tranqed him? Just wakes him up. So it's just much safer to use the tranq than any other gun. However there is still one problem: the guy isn't actually DEAD, so he will wake up eventually and start causing problems for you, and who wants that, right? So you're gonna want to murder him in his sleep. Often the most efficient way of dealing with this in Metal Gear Solid 3 was, after tranqing a guard and dragging him off to some secluded spot, maybe in some tall grass, to take out the hunting knife. Crouch over the guard and go into first person view and carve that poor bastard up until the Z's indicating sleep stop coming off his head — the tranquilizers are thankfully strong enough that he won't wake up screaming as you're stabbing him, because it does take multiple swipes to kill. Particularly disturbing in the heavily fortified areas with few hiding places that appear later in the game, so you end up piling five or more corpses in the same spot. This troper felt like a serial killer on more than one occasion.
- The fourth games gives you the option of frisking enemies. This plays out as a quick time minigame, with icons popping up. Hit the button at the right time, and an item pops out. The last button press is always as Snake's searching the crotch, and pressing the button here makes Snake grab and twist. It's an instant knock out on any male enemies.
  - Of course, it causes Snake to get slapped if he does it to a female enemy.
- And let's not forget the extended dialogue you're forced to go through if you piss off Rose enough and then contact her to save your game, which includes telling her that "you won't make her save."
- From the same troper who gave you the Nikita Head-shot, I give to you the pointlessly cruel but hilarious act of dropping beehives down on a guard every chance possible. Cue Yakety Sax.
- The troper once tossed a "One fly" (somewhat rotten) snake at a guard, he eat it but instead of yelling and dying - the guard just kept on puking and puking his guts out while moaning how awful he felt - HILARIOUS!
- In one of the very first areas in Metal Gear Solid 4 you get your first chance to try out the thermal vision and end up in a room full to bursting with unconscious wounded friendly units. They had just introduced you to the tactic of knifing unconscious enemies and no one makes a point of telling you not to kill all the helpless people in the room. This Troper's friend said that I was a monster when he came back into the room and saw that I had knifed a dozen soldiers. The last couple were calling feebly for help. Hee hee hee.
- In Metal Gear Solid 3, upon obtaining the Raikov disguise, you are actually encouraged by the other characters in the game to run around punching people in the face, or stalking scientists, or whatever. Because of the kind of person Raikov is, Snake can get away with it. It's one of the most memorable, satisfying portions of the game.
Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney may not seem like this at first. But consider: in his quest to clear various clients, Phoenix drives several witnesses to tears. Including an eight-year-old boy.
- Ten years old technically, but it's made even juicier by the fact you do so by crushing his greatest childhood dream. Oh that Phoenix, he's such a rascal!
You can be an evil bastard in Planescape Torment. Especially to Dakkon. "Oh hey, this chick is suffering but can't commit suicide and you're their culture's euthanasist? And you swore a life debt to me? Torture her to death."
- Or you could always constantly remind him of that debt. In every conversation you have with him, no less.
- Or to Morte whom you had once pulled from the Pillar of Skulls, and get an in-game opportunity to put him back in exchange for information you can pay for in other (much less evil) ways.
- The same can be done to other party members. Including your current love interest.
- Or by selling Fall-From-Grace back into slavery.
  - You technically can't do that one. Well, you can try, but she refuses. You can sell Morte, Nordom, or Dakkon into slavery... the last one being particularly cruel because his entire civilization and belief system is centered around the idea of never being slaves again.
- And that's just a sample of the evil things you can do to the NP Cs you can control.
  - In fact, the game actually encourages this kind of personal, soul-crushing malevolence over random violence. If you start just killing at random, the Lady of Pain will show up shortly to inform you that you are not top dog in her city, but there is no major penalty for ruining other's lives with just words. Go right ahead!
In the Oddworld series, you can kill and/or beat the creatures you're supposed to save or the ones you possess in a myriad of ways. But the probably cruellest of them is presented in Oddworld: Abe's Exoddus. Follow the steps:
Step 1: Find a depressive Mudokon
Step 2: Slap him
Step 3: Watch him kill himself by tapping his forehead
Step 4: Karma Meter goes all way down
- Other suggested forms of play:
  - Line up ten Mudokons in a row. Slap the Mudokon on the left of the line. Escape to the right of the line of Mudokons. The first Mudokon will get angry and swing his arm in your direction... hitting another Mudokon, who gets angry, and slaps the first Mudokon back, as well as the other Mudokon standing on the other side of him. This continues until everyone's hitting each other. Suddenly, one of the Mudokons falls down dead. Cue all the depressed Mudokons slapping themselves in the head until they die.
  - Ask many Mudokons to follow you. Tell them to wait. Walk behind an electric barrier that has been turned off. Turn it on. Tell the Mudokons to follow. Enjoy several cries of "Aaaaaaahhhh!!!" before Abe says "Whoops..."
  - Ask a blind Mudokon to follow you. He will continue walking in that direction until you tell him to stop. Enjoy watching him bounce painfully off of walls a few times before leading him to a meat grinder.
- This isn't even mentioning pulling the various levers in the first level without getting the hapless Mudokon cleaner to move first.
- Possess a Slig, then after using it to do whatever has to be done, stand with its back to a drop and just hold down the fire control until recoil pushes it over the edge. It'll be dead, and you'll be glad.
Quite a lot of games allow you to beat up harmless animals and NPCs. For example, in Rayman 3: Hoodlum Havoc, you can beat up tortoises (who yell or make cranky reproaches) and rats (who giggle and say things like "Ooh, harder!" and "Don't hold back!").
Subverted in The Legend Of Zelda series: you can't kill the chickens. In fact, in most cases they kill you. (No, Hyrule isn't in Soviet Russia, but the chickens are imported from there.)
- Tip: Link's Awakening chickens are vulnerable to magic powder, and fire. Time for revenge! This works on the dogs in that game as well. That's right: you can immolate your neighbors' pet dogs.
  - They look more like foxes to me.
- In Ocarina of Time you could ride your horse over the chickens on Lon Lon Ranch. Since you couldn't be damaged while on horseback, a flock of chickens would fly behind you waiting for you to get off.
- Don't forget about the fairies and how you're essentially imprisoning them in little glass jars against their will. In Windwaker, their expression when bottled is clearly visible, and pitifully sad.
  - See this comic from VG Cats.
  - Also in Wind Waker, the pigs can kill you. Especially on Windfall Island where there are so many of them, if you attack one long enough, ALL of them will turn red, surround you, and literally attack and try to kill you. This troper wasted two fairies trying to get into the water which will make them non-deadly again, but that's hard considering you're surrounded on all four sides.
  - Not to mention that later on in the game, there's a GIANT BLACK PIG in Link's home island which if you piss it off, it can do 3 hearts of damage! That's more than any boss, including the final boss himself.
- Violence against cuccos (chickens) has actually become a staple of any longtime fan's playing experience, mainly because the retribution eventually inflicted upon you has become a running gag in the series, one that reached its logical conclusion in the Oracle games, where if you bothered the cuccos enough, a giant cucco twice the size of Link himself would show up to kill him.
  - And then there's in Link's Awakening, where you can eventually get Marin to cheer you on as you slaughter her cuccos.
- Kakariko's cursed family in Ocarina of Time, unlike most friendly NP Cs, will register sword hits. You can't actually kill them, but you can make them scream in agony repeatedly.
- No mention of Twilight Princess?
  - Beating Cuccos lets you take control of their bodies, and you can make them jump into lakes or off tall structures.
  - If you spot a pair of boar riders aimed at a cliff - and the game helpfully spawns some every time you enter Hyrule Field - shoot the boar. It will scream in pain and sprint cleanly off the cliff, dragging its panicked riders with it.
Deus Ex allowed you you to take people out non-lethally and abuse the unconscious bodies in all manner of ways until they finally exploded into giblets. Or, for that matter, just sticking them with slow-acting tranquilizers and watching them run in circles until they fell over. This troper tended to drop them off high places, feed them to wild animals, or collect them into piles arranged in neat rows or spelling out short messages visible from above. You can also withhold food for a homeless child in Battery Park, walk into a women's washroom at UNATCO (making the female worker in there insult you), and freak civilians out by shooting near them. Great fun for the whole family!
- While not particularly cruel, at least compared to some of the other things described here, this video is certainly amusingly brutal.
- Does it count as cruelty if you try to wound the enemies until they are low on HP by shooting them several times with a handgun, before using up one of the precious tranq needles? It works, but it is kind of conscience panging, seeing them run around like idiots, but at least they've stopped shooting you.
- It's rarely obvious, but if you set something on fire with the flamethrower, it will set any mooks it touches on fire as well. Most enemies move too slowly and are spaced too far apart for this to come into effect. This Troper has a habit of spawning lots and lots and lots of those horrible little fast-moving demon reptile alien things, setting one on fire, and then pointing and laughing at the ensuing chain reaction.
- In the sequel, there's a secret one-of-a-kind sniper dart gun that, rather than knocking them out, once their health drops below half, sets them on fire. You can do this to the children in a school.
In Psychonauts, you can set fire to squirrels with your mind. And then eat them.
- You can also toss the squirrels against walls and stuff and they break apart into various pieces. You can't eat them afterwards though. You can also set fire to birds and seagulls for no advantage. But you do get to hear Raz comment "Oops", "I meant to do that", and "I'll See You In Hell."
- I distinctly remember being able to eat birds too after I set them on fire.
- You can also try out your many psychic powers on your campmates, who react differently to each and every different power used on them. Yes, you can even try to set them on fire. While they never actually catch flame, they do start to smoke a little bit.
- There's also a level in which you're (relatively) a titanic behemoth, allowing you to smash civilization and burn down puppy orphanages.
  - I always felt a fuzzy, warm feeling inside as I watched Raz squish tiny, scared lungfish. They flatten! And turn red!
- Your Exposition Fairy, Ford, actually encourages you to be as creative as possible when fighting Censors. Since they're very weak Mooks who can be killed by almost anything, you can have a lot of fun with them.
As might be expected, Knights Of The Old Republic has a number of these if you choose to follow The Dark Side. This troper's favorites include destroying a personal assistance droid on Dantooine in the first game, then telling its distraught owner that it's still out there somewhere. Then there was the whole Sandral-Matale feud, which, depending on how you played it, could have a happy ending. Depending on how you played it.
- The Sandral-Matale sequence may very well be the funniest The Dark Side sequence ever implemented in a video game.
- The ultimate example is near the end of the game if you choose to become evil. You get the opportunity to force Zaalbar to kill Mission.
  - KOTOR was ridiculously, hilariously cruel. This Troper's favourite moment was on the Sea planet Manaan, where you've been asked by a worried father, Shaelas, to find his young daughter. Depending on your actions on the quest, you'll be afforded the option to shake him down for extra credits for his information, before finally telling him "I killed your daughter, Shaelas. And I'll kill you if you tell anyone about this. Now give me those credits!"
  - Hell, let's go crazy. In the sequel, after you defeat Master Atris, you have the option of letting her live. Or killing her. Which, granted, is pretty standard in KOTOR. However, for the sake of sheer cruelty, locking her in a chamber with Sith Holocrons for the rest of her life, letting her go gradually insane is the recommended choice.
  - Her reaction to The Exile leaving is like a lit match to Nightmare Fuel.
  - Although this troper generally stuck to the path of righteousness, it was always impossible to resist the opportunity to play the thorough rogue on Korriban. The final test of the academy would leave the player character alone with the academy master, Uthar, and his assistant, Yuthura. If you suck up to Yuthura enough over the course of the academy's initial tests, she asks for your help in betraying her master during the final test. With him dead, the two of you will share power at the academy. You can accept, and then go rat her out to Uthar, who rewards you by advancing you further through the academy tests and gives you poison to plant on Yuthura, so that she will be weakened during the final tests. The fun part is going back to Yuthura, showing her the poison and telling her what happened. She will chide you for endangering the plan, but give you some poison of her own to use on the headmaster. The really fun part is going ahead and using the poison on both of them, leaving them to come to the slow and horrible realization during the final test that they've been triple crossed. Then you kill them.
- This troper never passes up the chance to ensure the untimely yet amusing demise of some thugs on Nar Shaddaa in the sequel, even while Light Side.
- This troper's ultimate moment of KOTOR cruelty had to be telling a sick man to kill himself right after trying(and failing)to help him. Kreia praises you for actions like this!
Especially prevalent in later Ultima games, as complexity increased so can the twistedness of clever players. One example that leaps to mind, in Ultima VII one can bake bread. Stay with me here, one of the ingredients is a bucket of water. For some odd reason the game lets you use buckets of blood as well. More twistedness, the first bucket of blood you can find is at a murder site, and the son of the murdered man can join your party. You can, without the game realizing the implications, feed this son bread baked with the blood of his murdered father.
- There are entire internet communities devoted to finding out the evil things you can do in Ultima.
  - This troper believes this is a backlash response to the fact that you cannot complete most games if you had so much as an unpaid parking ticket.
- Hmm, bread baked with blood...where have I heard that before?
- One of the few good things players had to say about the ninth installment was that little thing involving Lord British and the poisoned bread. Go Google it.
- One of this troper's favourite past-times in Ultima VII was to send my party 'away' (as some of them will object, and eventually attack you, for things that you do wrong) so that it was just me walking around on my own. Then I'd go around at night and quietly murder people in their sleep. Despite huge numbers of their citizens dying in such a mysterious manner, the authorities of Britannia never seemed to take any great measures to catch this serial killer that was picking them off one by one.... let alone suspect it was the Avatar all along! (cue Evil Laughter)
The PC and Amiga game Syndicate where evil corporations use squads of cyborg hitmen to duke it out in bloody campaigns of espionage and terrorism, and where plenty of innocent civilians would end up getting caught in the crossfire even if you weren't aiming for them on purpose (and let's be honest, you probably were. Maybe you even have brought the flamethrower for that reason.). And if that wasn't cruel enough, you could even use mind-control devices to round up herds of civilians and use them as meatshields.
- Why use them as mere meat-shields, when you could arm them all with miniguns, or - god forbid - gauss guns. (Of course, if you wanted to be really cruel to your mindless minions, you could lead them on to a train track or other soon-to-be fatal area.
- Is it a subversion that the persuadertron (the mind control device) would let you take over and own the enemy agents without firing a shot, provided you first took over a large enough number of civilians?
Even since Dune 2, RTS players have been running over infantry in tanks. The crunching sounds just encourage you.
- In a later game, Emperor: Battle for Dune, the Harkonnen light vehicle is the Buzzsaw. Unsurprisingly, it is good at destroying spice fields and infantry.
This features in Spaced: Tim is playing Tomb Raider after he gets a letter from his ex-girlfriend. He's not doing well: Laras keep drowning. Brian asks of the letter: "Did it make you feel better?" "No, it made me want to drown things!"
- If we're talking Tomb Raider,we can't forget the classic 'swan dive off a cliff into solid rock'. *crunch* Oooops :-)
  - Or catching on fire or falling into spikes or driving a vehicle off a cliff...
  - Even the game's creator gets some glee in killing Lara! In the commentary for Tomb Raider Anniversary, the creator comments that during the development time, it just wasn't a good day unless they impaled Lara on some spikes.
Mass Effect lets you be particularly cruel to some people. One option you have: come across an asari commando who was betrayed by the leader she was devoted to, fed to a giant sentient plant, and out of thanks for freeing her, she gives you the critical Plot Coupon you need to keep going? Nope, sorry, she's too dangerous to let live. Bullet to the brainpan.
- And yet, despite the killing, that was still nowhere near as satisfying as punching out an annoying reporter. On live galactic television.
- There's worse. This troper left one character Wrex behind in the initial section, then returned and had him join just before going to the planet where he questions your authority. Shot him to death first chance, of course. Now THAT is something you can't justify with I Did What I Had To Do.
- That fanboy who you mean in the Citidel? Wants to help you out. point a gun at him, so he'll piss his pants and run cring
  - This is also one of the correct solutions. Not being cruel enough or not being nice enough when dealing with him will end badly.
Some of the counter-attacks and combo kills in Assassins Creed look and sound painful. One attack involves kicking out a guard's leg, and then stabbing the sword down through his hip and out his crotch...
- Other such attacks include a counter kill option to break a guards legs with an audible crack. A short sword combo kill in which Altair grabs his victim in a sleeper hold before breaking their neck, again with an audible crack. And who can forget throwing your opponents into the merchant stands, causing the stands to collapse and killing both your opponent and the merchant. Bonus points if you catch civilians in the collapsing merchant stand.
  - For the above leg breaking and neck snapping, one combo kill combines both: Altair kicks a guard in the knee hard enough for it to bend backwards and break, to which the guard lets out a quick scream of horror and agony. Once the guard is bent over, Altair finishes him off by getting the man in a headlock and snapping his neck.
- Which is still nothing compared to finishing someone off with a normal attack and seeing them writhing in pain for twenty seconds before they finally die.
- Not to mention some of the "high profile" Assassination animations, one of which involves you walking up to a man from the front and stabbing him in the eye in broad daylight with your hidden blade.
- Considering how annoying some of the citizens are, especially the beggars, lepers, and drunks, its not surprising when one feels the urge to start stabbing and slashing. This troper's personal favorite targets are the street preachers, who are just plain noisy.
  - This troper started a 'glorious secular revolution' (in other words, making a Strawman Political out of himself) by purging the entire city of Damascus of street preachers. Multiple times. All while cackling madly.
- This troper remember that right before the fight with Roberre, a single guard that was left alive kneeled and put his hands in prayer for mercy. But this troper was aggressive and accidentally slashed him down.....
  - Sometimes if the guards have enough room and after you've killed enough of them, they'll panic and flee. You have two choices, chase after them (since you're faster) and kill em with the hidden blade, or simply toss some throwing knives in their direction...
- The approach to Jerusalem. A long,narrow path packed with at least a hundred civilians walking along, and you're on a horse. Its like the developers want you to maim them under your mighty steed's hooves....
- Though advertised as a stealth game, Assassin's Creed is much more fun, and things go much more smoothly, if one disregards this and plays it as a simple hack-and-slash kind of thing, even on the higher difficulty levels, although this troper can't quite recall (it's been the better part of a year since he's played and finished the game) if those were featured. (Difficulty levels, that is.) On an emotional level, well...Assassin's Creed can be rather frustrating, what with the storyline, and the frustratingly powerless and inarticulate protagonist, but if one makes like a psychopath, it's very visceral and satisfying. The version this troper played, and it may have been subsequently addressed, allowed one to grab the people one was fighting fairly easily and throw them to the ground; this troper got excellent results doing so, and then following up with the hidden knife. Barring the occasional screw-up, he could tear his way through whatever came his way with virtual impunity...this is something very satisfying.
  - Also, this troper noticed that when you complete the game, killing civilians no longer resulted in a syncronization loss, even on foot...
Grand Theft Auto: Everything from mowing down pedestrians in a high-speed bus to lighting a bunch of Hare Krishna's on fire with a flamethrower - and plenty more besides. Those games may have a central storyline and missions to play through - but we all know that they're basically one big, brutal sandbox.
- GOURANGA! bonus - well worth the instant 4-badge rating.
- "DEATH TO ICE CREAM VANS!", ie the bonus level in GTA 2. This troper nearly went postal after playing it.
- It's also worth noting that killing people will quickly spawn an ambulance, and setting things on fire will quickly spawn a firetruck - and you didn't really want to go all the way to the hospital/fire station to jack one of those, right?
  - Heh... my brother's favourite psycho-killer accented catchphrase from the heady days of 2D top-down GTA. "A... fire truck? But... it's not on fire?!" *hits truck with flamethrower, bazooka, tank etc* "Weeeeheeheehee! MUCH better!". (And I wholeheartedly agree)
- Not to mention the Postal series, which encourages its players by all means necessary (including its title) to go ballistic on the citizens of Paradise. Heck, they didn't put the ability to urinate into the game just so you could put out fires with your wee.
Crackdown: It's like Grand Theft Auto, except you're a superpowered cop bordering on the concept of Ubermensch. It is so easy to drive down the sidewalk screaming "I am the law!". After all, who is going to stop you? Well, the other police will try, but they don't have rocket launchers.
In Postal 2, in fact, it is conceivably possible to chop off a random bystander's arm, then chase them down and subdue them to self-wetting pain and terror with a taser attack, douse them with gasoline and burn them to a hideous char before dousing the flames with urine, step on the victim's back and "ride" them as they try to crawl, sobbing, away, and finally finish them off with a dose of anthrax...and then decapitate the body, kick the head around city streets like a soccer ball (sending other bystanders who see it into hysterics), before crushing the thing with a sledgehammer like a hellish Gallager, splattering brains all about. Yeah. And this is a game that, technically, you could complete without harming anyone.
In Total Overdose: A Gunslinger's Tale in Mexico, another driver/shooter, between missions during sandbox wandering, the player can pretty much commit any violence to civilians without consequence. When hijacking, the driver is pushed to the passenger's seat and remains in the vehicle, and will make panicked comments in Spanish when the player leaps from it while in motion. Since all vehicles are Made Of Explodium, even if it coasts to a halt to lightly tap an obstacle, it and the driver will immediately turn into a spectacular ball of flame.
- Also in sandbox mode, floating red skulls can be found while initiate the 'Day of the Dead' minigame, in which random hordes of Day of the Dead revelers dressed in skeleton costumes appear and assault the player with a subset of weapons (a good way to stock up on ammo). When the game times out, the celebrants fade back into normal civilians, dying from whatever weapon crosshair was on them at the time.
- Also in sandbox mode, the player can find chaingun turrets at random and implausible locations. Using one is the only time police will rally, and the gun's only purpose is to blast as many of them as possible for the largest kill streak. The weapon's power easily explodes police cars within a second of sustained fire, killing police inside and around the vehicle, and often triggering a chain reaction that guarantees collateral damage among civilians as well.
Scarface: The World Is Yours never allows you to directly target for killing innocent people when controlling Tony, but that won't stop players from shoving and smacking them with melee weapons to their heart's content. My favorite thing to do was call up a henchman to bring a car over, wait for him to get out, then push him and quickly press the taunt button to get results like "Get the fuck outta here!" *shove* Using explosives or running them over would also work, although these would never be fatal against civilians.
In La Pucelle you are encouraged to take the monsters that you purified, put into your party, and loved and nurtured to trust you...and sell them into eternal slavery to ~~Hell~~ the Dark World. You are encouraged to do this as ~~Hell~~ the Dark World will send you gifts for any accomplishments that monster does, such as working through the ranks to Demon Lord or Overlord. In addition, the process fuses any items they had together. Maybe there's a reason Prier is a Demon Overlord in the Disgaea games...
- Granted, that "loving and nurturing" you did involved stuff ranging from making them break blocks and do push ups to turning them into cyborgs and even shooting them (Granted, you have to build up their trust a number of times before they wouldn't quit over that last one).
In Kingdom Of Loathing, certain objects are defined as alive in their descriptions; destroying said objects seems especially cruel. Two ways of destroying objects is Smashing personal equipment, and having a Comma Chameleon eat familiar equipment. "Living" equipment includes: A (talking) miniature dormouse; Rhesus Monkey; Turtles (who are used as helmets)
PAIN is about firing people at buildings and billboards with a giant slingshot. Cruelty and well, pain are the entire point.
Arcanum offers lots of cruelty options, especially to the talented mystic. One particularly glorious possibility involves charming a wolf or bear, then walking to the nearest town, entering an occupied house, and releasing your control over the wild animal (but not before leaving the house and Magelocking the doors and windows). Other fun activities include using Force Walls and Walls of Fire to trap and burn the clothes off passersby and tricking NP Cs into picking up and equipping armor that deals continual poison damage.
- If you're really set on playing the game as an evil bastard, one of the required quests becomes to slaughter the entire population of an Elven village. One of the endings you can get even involves you and the Big Bad killing every living thing on the planet.
  - Admitedly in game the bigbad is correct in his belif that the afterlife is more pleasant than life going by a conversation with a resurrected Virgil.
Fallout also contains some amusing possibilities for the vicious Vault Dweller, such as planting timed explosives on random NP Cs or - in one scenario I'm simultaneously proud and ashamed of - murdering an unarmed flower child with a single, well-aimed thrown rock to the back of the head. Let's face it: This series really goes out of its way to let the player be one evil, sadistic son of a bitch.
- Fallout 2 has it even better. The best example would be when you force a conman, at gunpoint, to dig-up a grave where he has buried loot. Half-way through he sheepishly removes a booby-trapped landmine and hands it to you. A popular choice is to wait until he's finished digging, and...
  Chosen One: Hey Lloyd! CATCH!
  - In Modoc, you can persuade a guy cut off his finger as a way of settling a deal. You can, of course, change your mind about taking part in the deal afterwards.
- Annoyed by all those kids who pickpocket you? Get revenge by arming the explosives in your inventory, then reverse-stealing them in their inventory.
  - In Fallout 3, there is an achievement for sticking a live grenade in someone's pocket and the game keeps track of how many times you do it with the "Pants Exploded" stat.
- Seducing a hillbilly son or daughter results in a shotgun marriage, unless you're a smooth talker. This hillbilly husband/wife will be entirely useless, and cannot be removed from the party. You can get a quickie divorce in New Reno... or you can sell them into slavery instead for a quick buck.
  - You can also get back to Grisham and tell him that his son/daughter disappeared if you had a divorce or sold him/her to slavery. A heart atack will kill him. This troper loves to sell Miria to slavery only so he can kill Grisham in a incredible sadistic way.
- Selling party members to slavers not enough for you? Join the slavers yourself and help enslave tribal savages. The fact that you're a tribal yourself won't bother boss Metzger, though the other tribals will be.... less than happy about your new career.
- Give Cassidy some Jet. Order him to shoot up. Watch him have a literal heart attack. When he told you his ticker wasn't so good, he wasn't kidding.
- Murder nearly every living creature in the game, be they man, woman, child, friendly, hostile, or unawares. There is nothing stopping you.
- This troper discovered there were special ways ou could sneakily assassinate the heads of the crime families in New Reno - some rather sadistic. To whit: Re-arm Bishop's safe with explosives, then change the combination. BOOM. Give one of the youngest Wright kids a loaded gun, which results in him shooting his own dad. Give Big Jesus Mordino any kind of chem, even a Nuka-Cola, and watch him suffer a heart attack. Steal mr Salvatore's oxygen tank, then enjoy the floating text as he slowly, so slowly, choke to death.
  - Not to mention you probably got the combination to Bishop's safe by sleeping with his Wife. You can also sleep with his daughter, and if you don't have a condom in your inventory, she'll get pregnant. Yep, you can really screw that family over.
- Some of the death animations when killing foes were pure Squee as well. How about turning the foe's insides into bloody gibbage with burst fire, blowing a football-sized hole in their gut with a single bullet, slicing them apart with laser, melting them into a puddle of goo with plasma, or crisp them with electricity - turn 'em into a neat pile of ash. And, of course, the flamer... set 'em on fire, watch them run around in flames before collapsing. Lovely.
  - Oh dear god, please tell me you meant to say Squick instead of Squee.
  - You forgot grenades. This troper once nailed a bad guy with a point-blank grenade when he was standing behind a building. Somehow it becomes infinitely more hilarious when you don't see the explosion, just the bits of meat flying out from behind the scenery.
- In Fallout 3, you can walk out of the Vault, and arm a nuclear bomb in the middle of a major quest hub within five minutes. And get paid, well, for doing so. Big boom.
  - In a later mission, the leader of a "Matrix"-style simulation of 1950's Americana has gone nuts and begun torturing the other residents. The player is given the choice to help torture them or mercy-kill them.
- You can't kill children. The game won't stop you from, say, laughing at a kid you just orphaned, or sentencing another kid to certain death, abandoned and the only human in an entire town in the Wasteland.
- You can find, and turn in to be enslaved or destroyed, a synthetic human who intentionally had his mind wiped. If you do things right, he'll even beg. And you get a Perk for doing so.
  - Sounds like it was stolen straight out of C.J. Cherryh's "Downbelow Station".
- THIS is probably the most fundamentally evil thing this troper has seen in a video game, bar none. Oh, and guess what it is for some people? Have fun getting to sleep tonight, kids!
- This Troper has seen someone during the tutorial just beating the ever-living crap out of everyone. The funniest bit? After getting the BB gun the Kid keeps shooting daddy, who passes out just when the celebratory picture is taken.
The survival adventure game Raw Danger allows you control of several characters, each of whom get multiple opportunities to be a giant prick, from insulting people to out-and-out Murder One.
Mega Man Zero, Zero can raise cute little "Cyber-Elves" and feed them crystals to power them up. He can also fuse with them, essentially killing a sentient being for a power-up. While there are bonuses for either doing so or not doing so, creepily no one seems to mind; although you do lose mission points.
In the game Carmageddon, you have to race on a very limited timer. The only ways of increasing your time is to go past checkpoints, destroy your competitors, or kill civilians. You would get bonus time if you killed them creatively (splatter bonus, anyone?). On top of that was winning the race casually nearly impossible, because The Computer Is A Cheating Bastard.
- There are three ways to actually win a Carmageddon race - either finish the laps first (boring/impossible), destroy every single competitor's car (what 99% of victories consist of), or run over every single pedestrian on the map. Keep in mind that these maps are the rough equivalent of four square miles and there are several hundred pedestrians. During a race when the one other racer left managed to get hopelessly stuck between two concrete barricades, this troper could have rammed the car loose - but spent the next ''two hours'' doing something else...
- Despite the stated goals for the level, Carmageddon may quickly become a sandbox once the player gets the hang of the basics or gives in an uses the built in cheats. Some examples of cruelty include the following
  - Carmageddon 2 onward includes not only pedestrians, but also wildlife. Repeatedly crash through an elephant until the recorded crash sequence includes the sounds of metal tearing, flesh and bone crushing, and elephant trumpeting overlaying each other for an amazing noise. Execute this from an airborne, tumbling trajectory to produce a video with which you may impress and entertain your friends.
  - Pedestrians do not always explode on impact. If the pedestrian is not struck with enough force, it may lose a single limb, or even simply fall down with briefly spray a bit of blood around. Such hits are apparently cumulative. This Troper's observed, but not achieved, record for hits without limb loss was seven for Carmageddon 2.
    "Gen-tle"
    <screams and car motor noises in the background>
  - Fill one of the hangers on the Airport Level with random, inanimate objects such as boarding ladders, sound barriers, private jets and helicopters. Use the forklift, of course. Bait a competitor into pursuit in the direction of the hangar entrance. Make a clever turn or use the repair reset to get out of the competitor's way and activate the Pinball Physics special. Frame-rate dropping, error clipping, bouncing, exploding Hilarity Ensues.
  - Locate or otherwise gain the Suicidal Pedestrian special on a particularly pedestrian-heavy level. Hold very still, watch, and listen while the crazy fools charge the player's car and throw themselves against it while blood, limbs, and torsos fly. If the pedestrian is unfortunate enough to end up on top of the car, they will appear to hump the car until their bloody, limbless demise.
The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction. Considering that the main protagonist is the embodiment of Bruce Banner's suppressed rage, it's no surprise that the player gets to do some pretty mean things. Players can pick up policemen, soldiers and absolutely defenseless civilians alike and beat them up, throw them from buildings, into the sea or traffic. Speaking of which, all cars, clearly driven by mere passers-by, can be picked up, destroyed, thrown or crushed into metal gloves, whereas buses can be crushed and used as surfboards. Several buildings can be destroyed, different destructible objects piled up for bigger explosions, lampposts can be turned into clubs... In fact, there are several side-quest minigames that make a pronounced point out of cruelty. One particularly noteworthy example is using a metal girder to bat soldiers away for distance records. On top of all of that, one unlockable changes the Hulk into his gray "Mr. Fixit" incarnation, who gleefully throws out one-liners about the suffering he causes.
- The Hulk actually has two special moves he can use only use when holding civilians. One has him putting the civilian down and patting them on the head. The other has the Hulk flick the civilian and send him flying. You can also do a dramatic elbow drop while holding someone. While it doesn't hurt them, it seems cruel to basically piledrive some random person off the tallest skyscraper there is.
- Or if you're this troper, you can ensue on a stomach-churning half-hour sprint up, down, and over every skyscraper in town, turbo-stomping from the really big skyscrapers whenever possible, while plowing through anything that could be plowed through. On occasion, the pedestrian was treated to punches in the face and being thrown into parked cars free of charge. At the end of it all, the pedestrian was set free into the ocean for a nice swim using any remaining legs he may have had. (And all I asked in return was 30 minutes of constant screaming in terror.)
- This guy prefers the sadistic choice of unleashing Critical moves on populated areas. Watch those civilians and cars fly! Or even better, grab a civilian and gently put him on a roof. Watch as he commits suicide by running off the building.
- For once this trope is justified until the last two missions by the character of Devil Hulk, a being in Banner's mind who compels the Hulk to wreck even more chaos than usual; one of the goals of the game is to fetch the parts for a machine that will allow Banner to enter his own mind and deliver a smackdown to the Devil.
It is possible to kill every last NPC on the entire island in Morrowind. This troper does not know if that can be done in Oblivion.
- Plot-important NPCs in Oblivion are marked as unkillable, so it's not possible to kill everyone in that game (at least, not without editing the game's .ini file or adding a plug-in to remove the unkillable flags, which can only be done on the PC version).
- But why just kill people yourself when you can get them to kill each other? The Frenzy effect causes the target to go berserk and attack the nearest person. Because it doesn't count as an attack, you can use it in the presence of guards without committing a crime. Riots are fun.
  - This is one of the best ways to "accidentally" start a Guard vs. Townsperson brawl that can result in every non-essential NPC in the town being ruthlessly slaughtered by the very guards that are supposed to defend them.
- Poisoned Apples (which you get in the Assassins Guild quests) are a good source of fun. If you see an NPC sit down and eat, just put one on his plate. Ten seconds after they eat it and their poor, lifeless, limp body will be hanging from the chair.
- In the Shivering Isles expansion to Oblivion, part of the main quest requires you to reactivate a dungeon used to "greet" newcomers to the Isles. After you reactivate it, you see a group of adventurers come into the dungeon and enter 3 rooms. In each of these rooms, you get to hit one of two buttons to decide on the adventurers' fates. One of the buttons will brutally get them killed, while the other drives them insane.
The original Syphon Filter isn't on here yet? The Air Taser, when used on enemies, would shock the living bejeezus out of them. And you could hold them in this state until they CAUGHT ON FIRE. Did I mention they would often scream horrifically the whole time? Also, this weapon is available from the very beginning, costs no ammunition to use, and counts as a STEALTH weapon. Yeah...this troper had a blast with it. ^_^
- Not to mention that it has infinite range. No scope, but it can literally hit at ANY distance as long as you aim accurately. Super sniper flame-taser with infinite ammo...so much fun...
Fable allows you to slaughter practically every single person in the game, save for the first city (the laws prevent you from pulling out your weapon, but you can still pound away at innocents with your fists until they're unconscious), and if you're in a city, all you get as punishment is a high fine and a banishment from the area for a couple of in-game hours. In fact, in order to get one of the best weapons in the game, you need to sacrifice an innocent to an evil god at a certain time of night.
- But why stop at killing? The game also lets you be an evil jerkass with business sense by permitting you to slaughter an entire village, buy up all the newly vacated property, and lease it to new tenants for cash. Murder for profit in the most literal sense.
- This troper points out that it is indeed possible to kill people in Bowerstone, the city with the weapon prohibition. All you need to do is get the guards shooting at you with their crossbows and wait for some unfortunate collateral damage...
  - Why wait for the guards to do the dirty work when you can hire an armed mercenary who's inside the same city who is more than capable of killing NP Cs?
- Fable 2 takes his kind of thinking mans violence to new heights. The game has a semirealistic economy that functions as a result of how people are feeling. In short? rampage through town to sink the economy, buy up all the property and jack the rent up to sink it lower AND make money faster, and then buy goods off your abused tennants at a hilariously low price!
  - Nobody's mentioned the sacrifices? In Fable 2, there's even the Wheel Of Misfortune, which kills the sacrifice in a number of ways. There's one non-fatal fate that this troper has seen: the victim is transformed into the opposite gender. (Which is, of course, hilarious.) As well, to get a special weapon that deals damage to "good" creatures, you need to sacrifice a spouse.
  - As well, you can also sell people into slavery, rob stores, extort civilians for money, abuse spouses and your dog, carry out assassinations for quick cash and help drive at least one person to commit suicide.
- Fable 2 also introduced subtargeting to the series. Yes, shooting people in the crotch or BLASTING THEIR HEADS CLEAN OFF THEIR SHOULDERS are perfectly viable tactics.
The game Evil Genius encouraged players to torture enemies that came on to your island, often with a variety of interesting devices, including slamming bookshelves together with them in between, mixing them in a giant mixer, putting them on a sniper range and forcing them to dodge the bullets, and using almost any of the scientific equipment. Players could also torture their own minions, which would raise loyalty in both the minion and onlookers. In addition, for a quick stat boost, the Evil Genius can kill a minion in plain view of everyone.
In Predator Concrete Jungle you can sneak on mooks and civilians alike and kill them in at least a dozen ways, from crushing their heads to tearing them in half with your bare hands.
It might be wrong to enjoy the screams of terror that erupt when the Prince rolls up living beings in Katamari Damacy... but if so, I don't want to be right.
- KATAMARI DO YOUR BEST!
- In We Love Katamari there's a series of levels where a sumo wrestler replaces the Katamari. Sucking people into his belly was... fantastic.
The surgery simulator Life and Death allowed the player to attempt an appendectomy or aortic aneurysm repair without turning on the anaesthetic gas first. This troper didn't know it was possible until the first time her sister played it, and a blood-curdling electronic scream erupted from the computer room...
Caleb in Blood 2 can regain lost health by killing hapless civilians (who uselessly shield themselves with their arms and beg you to spare their lives even as you hack at them with your knife) and harvesting their life force.
Contact allows you to kill and attack just about everything you come across, from civilians to hapless livestock. You'll lose karma, though.
You're not supposed to be killing people in SWAT 4 (as the name implies, you are a cop) but there's no restriction on non-lethal weapons, so nothing's stopping you from hitting people again and again with beanbags fired from shotguns, pepper spray balls fired from paintball guns, tasers, flashbangs, stingers (grenades filled with hard plastic spheres instead of shrapnel), tear gas...
- Alternately you can just set the game to the minimum difficulty level, which allows you to advance to the next level with a score of 0. The only thing that gets your score below 0 is deliberately killing civilians. Shooting every bad guy in flagrant disregard of the rules of engagement? Hell, murdering suspects after they've already been handcuffed? No problem!
Since Mitadake High is an online roleplaying game, it's possible to do some incredibly cruel things to other people's characters. This editor once caught a round where he found a Death Note in an air vent, and also happened to have the Shinigami Eyes as a random spawn chance. He also had picked up a girl earlier in the round with a promise to protect her after Kira offed the character she was teamed up with. He then spent the rest of the round messing with the original Kira while using the Death Note to kill the people he left guarding the girl while making himself look innocent, thereby slowly breaking her brain and casting all the suspicion onto her. His final masterstroke was to write her name in the Note, in front of her, and happily explaining to her exactly what he did and how the Death Note worked.
In Half Life and it’s expansions you can kill helpful NPC’s for the hell of it, or in the case of Barney (and in HL:OF the military NPC’s) kill them just to get the extra ammo when they refuse to go another step. “Don’t shoot, I’m a scientist” is just begging for it really.
Both Little Big Adventure games pretty much allow the player to attack anyone. Some of the NP Cs can even be killed (only to come back later once you leave the area), and some of them will fight back.
In Blood Omen: Legacy Of Kain, you end up traveling through several towns and villages, and are free to slice up anybody you see and suck their blood. The game has a day/night cycle, which means you can break into people's beds and kill them in their sleep. And that's not even going into the items you can use, which include shurikens which instantly flay the flesh from enemies bones, and an orb which forms a mini black hole centralized in your target, crunching them into the size of a marble. Kain himself describes that last item as "the cruelest" of the powers he employs.
- Not to mention, the game's equivalent of shops are fonts where you sacrifice some of your blood for items. Later in the game, you get the power to mind control other people, and bleeding them to death for items is a highly beneficient. "Nobody says it is Kain's blood that has to be sacrificed."
Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction lends itself to this. Especially when you unlock the aptly-named Cheat Crate and discover within...the portable airstrike. Ever wanted to level significant chunks of North Korea? Or indeed any concentration of life and architecture?
- This troper is particularly fond of slapping C4 onto a car, ditching it at high speeds into a concentration of enemy soldiers, and then pressing the switch.
Professional Wrestling games can get this way too, until I feel sorry for the victims of the rampage. But get a no-DQ match in, the ultimately-buffed character, some poor jobber, and inflict pain in a very customisable manner. Especially if you lost the prior match to disqualification, too—remember no-DQ? Remember how the referees of late actually appear in the ring?
- Is it wrong to put the Great Khali against Candice Michelle? Is it so wrong?
  - Not when Candice is kicking Khali's ass.
- A couple of months after the Chris Benoit murder-suicide, This Troper and two friends spent a whole day just doing 3-on-1 hardcore matches against Benoit on WWE Day of Reckoning 2. It felt incredibly cathartic. If one looks, one can also find Create-A-Wrestlers of folks like Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein — incredibly useful for this purpose.
  - Don't forget about Hitler.
- This troper once got pissed off at the Undertaker for some storyline reason, and immediately fired up Smackdown vs. Raw 2007 and changed his default moveset to Candice Michelle's. Forcing him to dance around with a pink fairy wand for his entrance. And LAUGHED for a long period of time about it.
  - In Smackdown Shut Your Mouth, This Troper liked to play 3 on 3 matches. He made Hulk Hogan, Triple H, and The Undertaker into a tag team called "Jobbers", and gave them the grocery-cart riding entrance and the dinky Wild Westesque theme song. Nothing beats watching Triple H get launched flying over the ring.
- Some normal moves have a cruelty potential all their own, especially when replicating ''certain'' matches...
A variation to the pro wrestling example can be found in the UFC 2009: Undisputed video game — since the match can go to a decision, and the crowd doesn't get a vote, why not drag out a horribly unbalanced match-up? Example, fifteen or twenty-five minutes of Lyoto Machida leg kicking James Irvin (no offense to the real James Irvin)...
Using your vehicle's laser gun, you can shoot at friendly boats and airships in the bay in Beyond Good And Evil. They'll shout funny things at you (one of them is even a friend of your family who calls you out on being a jerk) until they get really annoyed, at which point they call the cops. The cops will fine you... if you don't evade them and escape first.
- You can also use your Disc Launcher to kill the green spiders in certain areas, which are otherwise completely and totally harmless. But they spit out money!
The Darkness gives you the possibility to go around being a dog-kicking Jerk Ass slaughtering civilians, and the only thing that changes peoples reaction to you is whether or not you're in Darkness mode... which is to say, random people in the subway will always be nice to you even if you've killed most of New York City in incredibly brutal ways, as long as you don't have Combat Tentacles sprouting from your back and shoulders. Which may in fact be accurate.
In Soul Nomad And The World Eaters, the game allows, and sometimes even encourages, you to do things to the various NP Cs in towns and villages, such as stealing from them, beating them up, kicking them in the face, or forcibly conscripting them into your army. And let this troper remind you that this is all menu-based, meaning the game is basically suggesting to kick people for no good reason. And let's not get into the Demon path, which basically calls you a wuss for all that.
This troper cannot be the only one who would start a New Game + in Chrono Trigger just to take three hyper-powerful characters into Guardia Forest and unleash hell on some poor unsuspecting imps. Triple Techs, particularly Omega Flare, is a little bit of overkill on a critter with 30 hit points, but it's still somehow very satisfying to drop the equivalent of a magical nuke on some harmless little green thing.
An exceptional amount of ~~psychopathic tendencies~~ fun can be had with the chickens and cows in Resident Evil 4 your first time through the village and its farm, if you have a couple of grenades handy. The infinite ammo rocket launcher packs a lot more punch, but you'll likely be causing wanton destruction to everything in sight at that point.
- Damage the cows enough and they'll damn near kill you.
Some of the older NASCAR titles had this. Especially the ones that let you turn around and drive backwards until you catch up to the field. Or just the ones that let you ram intentionally. And repeatedly.
Mad World: You HAVE to be cruel.
In the Paper Mario games, there's the Whacka, an absolutely adorable little guy and a member of an endangered species. If you hit him with your hammer, you get the Whacka's Bump, which is a fantastic healing item. Go back and do it enough times, and you'll eventually have killed the last Whacka, you freak.
- The game literally asks you: "How do you sleep at night?" However, you need at least two of them to get Hundred Percent Completion.
Metroid Prime features a room with Space Pirates studying Metroids. You have two options here: go down to shoot the Pirates yourself, or kill the power to the room, releasing the Metroids and having a balcony seat as the Pirates start screaming and futilely try to fight off the galaxy's ultimate predator.
Final Fantasy Tactics Advance can be like this if you leave a character KO'd in a Jagd, which they will die afterward. People who aim to have the best optimized team will quickly kill off Montblanc as soon as they enter their first Jagd battle since he can't be booted from the clan and most "pro" players hate him for having poor magic stats compared to others.
Final Fantasy XII: This troper had hours of sadistic entertainment by grabbing weak enemies with Stop and messing with their statuses. When their HP got critical, he would cast Curaja on them.
- This game also lets you kill your allies... and not just your little roaming NPC 'friends' either. However, this troper much prefers the fact that for full completion, you MUST kill helpless little bunny rabbits that heal you.
  - Which in turn kicks in Video Game Cruelty Punishment. Especially when the higher forms of the bunny monsters start to unleash their stronger attacks on you.
In Valkyria Chronicles, you can either let your troopers rush towards the enemy for a suicidal (and admittedly, stupid) move, or sock a rocket right in the enemy's face. Your choice.
In Unreal Tournament 3, it is entirely possible to staple an opponent's corpse to a wall with the Chaingun. especially fun is stapling them with a shard in the stomach, and firing a shard into their head, making their neck the length of their body.
Trapt, a game which consists of setting a complex series of traps to kill enemies. Said traps are rather cruel, especially 'Dark Illusions', environmental traps which require a bit of set-up, which can, for example send someone through the clockwork of a music box, complete with bone crunching sounds.
The Soul series allows you to continue wailing on a character after KO'ing him or her. Made even more cruel by the KO'd character letting out a death scream for every hit after his or her death. In fact, in Soul Calibur III 's Legend mode and Soul Calibur IV 's Arcade mode, you get an "Overkill" bonus for doing this as much as possible.
In Thief: The Dark Project and Thief: The Metal Age, you can potentially kill every single last person on almost any level. Granted, you can't be playing on the higher difficulty settings (as those make killing innocents, or on the highest difficulty setting, killing anyone, a "mission fail" condition. Also, some levels are pure stealth missions and auto-fail if you kill anyone on any difficulty setting.) Since your character is relatively physically weak, you're encouraged to use ambushes and sniping. Still, this troper can and has rendered entire sections of The City devoid of human life.
- Or, you can knock people unconscious with your blackjack or gas arrows, then drag the unconscious NPC to the nearest body of water and throw them in. Not only will they drown, you will actually get to hear them choking and gasping frantically for breath as they expire.
- On some levels, you can throw their unconscious bodies into lava!
Far Cry 2 was already mentioned in the enemy-killing section, but let's not forget that there are plenty of wild animals running around. Hmm, a herd of zebras, and me with a jeep, landmines, and a flamethrower... The possibilities!
Chrono Trigger's New Game Plus does not adjust your enemies' levels. Cue your guys as Anthropomorphic Personification of There Is No Kill Like Overkill.
- Now here's cruelty: accidentally heading to Lavos at the earliest possible moment on this troper's first time through New Game Plus. And then curbstomping him with just Crono and Marle.
  - That's the second earliest moment. The very earliest has Crono only.
The second Jak And Daxter game gives you free roam. Because for most of the game you're a Phlebotinum Rebel with a thing for guns and a Superpowered Evil Side that isn't actually much worse than your normal side, you can do whatever you want as long as it isn't actually outside the game physics. Knocking civilians into the water to drown? Check. Reducing vast numbers of cars to burning shrapnel with the Peace Maker? Check. Beating everyone within a significant area to death with your bare hands? Big ol' check. An especially entertaining one is to steal one of the sturdier vehicles and piss off the Krimzon Guard...then brake at the exact right time so that the Guard on a bike who's following you careens into the back of your car and dies. It's fun when your enemies are Too Dumb To Live.
- This troper just loves to participate in the 8 man races and reduce it to 1, while attempting to beat records.
Life and Death and its sequel, Life and Death II: The Brain are surgery simulators. Needless to say, you can do quite a bit of damage to a patient if you're not careful or you're feeling sadistic. For example, you can start cutting before you turn on the anesthetic gas, at which point the game will play an audio clip of a bloodcurling scream, and you will be taken out of the operating room and given a lecture by the doctor in charge.
Officially, the point of JFK Reloaded is to see if you can replicate the Kennedy assassination with a mouse. Unofficially, it's generally used simply to see how many people you can slaughter and how much of the ragdoll physics you can enjoy. And, of course, there's killing JFK by sniping out the Innocent Bystander driving the car in front of him, then scaring JFK's driver with a few rounds, then taking him out just as the car speeds up. Presidential car slams into the back of the stopped bystander car. Secret service agent sprints into the back of the car, almost certainly ruining his chances of ever breeding. It's also possible, should you hit the driver at the exact right time, to end with the Presidential car embedding itself in a distant wall.
In some of the Ratchet And Clank games, you can achieve rewards for shooting down enough cars. Not that bad? Try the stage in the second game where you have to take on a Thugs 4 Less boss as Giant Clank on a small, heavily urbanised moon. You can knock down every single friggin' building if you take your time, and even be rewarded for it with health and ammo. And you're supposed to be the good guy.
While not a videogame, it's an inherent risk of running neutral or evil parties in Dungeons And Dragons. In the case of evil parties, this is arguably the point.
You can complete the Bukamatsu (Ninja) Chapter of Live A Live by either doing a Pacifist Run and avoiding unnecessary kills (I.E everyone except the undead creatures and monsters you encounter. Bosses fall into said categories) or becoming death incarnate and murdering every NPC in the level, including women and harmless merchants. Either way will reward you with a powerful weapon for you to use in the final chapter.
The video game adaptation of X-Men Origins: Wolverine is MADE of this trope. You're dealing with a man who has indestructible metal claws. People are going to be dismembered. Not to mention quick kills, environmental kills, and the VAST majority of ways you can literally tear people apart. It's a very satisfying game for that reason.
In Saints Row 2, you were offered the hilarious option of satchel charges that attached themselves to people. The developers even went so far as to code the targets with the same animation that they have when on fire. You could do this to literally anybody, leading to hilarious moments where everyone in your crib would explode in quick succession.
- For added fun: Set people alight with the flamethrower. Blow a train off it's tracks with a well placed rocket. Throw grenades into crowded clubs. Mow down entire crowds of people in a pick-up truck. Use the pimp-slap weapon to send people flying through the air. Take some people hostage and drive the car straight into the sea.
Cole McGrath, protagonist of inFAMOUS, if gifted with electricity-based superpowers, but he can only manipulate it, not generate it. One possible option for recharching the metaphorical batteries? Suck the electrical charge out of people. One imagines this isn't good for the morality meter.
- Another option is demonstrated in this Penny Arcade strip. A God Am I anyone?
Although you might not think it, Railroad Tycoon 2 has the potential for cruelty in the form of payback. As an alternate way of adding worth, you can purchase the various resources on the map (mines, mills, factories, etc.). This Troper had a small supply line from an iron mine to a steel mill and the returns were great on that. However a rival railroad company bought the mill much to his dismay. Thus, he proceeded to find another mill that was close enough (or rather along the same route that was beyond the old mill), bought that, bought the mine, and completely bypassed the first iron mill. This made the one the rival company purchased go from "Lucrative" to "You've just wasted your money" in a matter of minutes.
You can ransack and pillage handfuls of towns in Sid Meier's Pirates!
So much in Prototype (Well, it is the Spiritual Successor to the aforementionned Hulk: Ultimate Destruction...). Some of the "consume" animations are obscenely vicious, and there's a lot of nasty things you can do to enemies or innocent bystanders even beyond that. Actually justified, for a change — one of the nodes you can unlock in the "Web of Intrigue" notes that the protagonist is a sociopath, very nearly in so many words.
- As Zero Puntuation gladly noted.

"Eat an old man, take his appearance, run all the way up the tallest building, then elbow-drop 200 stories onto his confused and frightened wife! Then sneak up behind two soldiers and eat one without his friend noticing, and when the two of you get back to base, accuse your friend of being you in disguise! Then when all the other soldiers are distracted shooting him, eat them, too! If only Jeffery Dalmer had had this game to blow off steam with, a lot of young milwaukee gay boys would be walking around uncannibalized!"

There's also the fact that he's not even human, but instead an avatar of the Blacklight Virus.

Go ahead, try to find someone who hasn't shot those poor animals a single time in Boom Blox. Its sequel even has achievements for hitting them a number of times.
Avernum. If you register, you can up your army until they are super powerful...and cheerfully wipe out the majority of the towns if you so desire. Even the super powerful guards cannot stop you! You can also set the days far in advance and not bother killing off the plagues of monsters. Townies will DIE if you do this! Having her husband killed by monsters makes the blacksmith lady very sad.
Dwarf Fortress adventurer mode. Not only can you indiscriminately kill (although the guard will come down heavily on you for that one), but there's a fun way to kill people without getting into trouble:
- 1. Find a dwarf, elf, human, or other friendly standing next to a tree.
  2. Set the tree on fire.
  3. Friendly dies, because DF is very, very bad when it comes to fire (unless you're after the laughs, in which case it handles fire perfectly).
Bully. You can beat up anyone you want, and unless they're cops you'll probably win. More importantly, no matter how many members of a specific faction you attack, missions are the only way to decrease your standing with any of them.

Close Unchecked Player Rampage

Aversions

The Sims is well-known for the cruelty which players may inflict on their little computer people. My Sims, on the other hand, avoids all that. Eating and drinking is merely recreational, the toilet is a place to read the newspaper, there's nowhere to drown in, and if you could so generously give them an item that separates them from the door, they'd just teleport through it. The cruelest thing you can do is Be Mean, which chooses from a random set of mean actions (yell at, stomp on foot, throw water balloon at, breathe bad breath at, start a fight, pop an inflated paper bag...), and that doesn't even reduce your relationship below "Acquaintance", like repeatedly being nice raises it up to "Best Friend".
Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines makes it very possible to have a bloody rampage, slicing hobos to bits with a fire axe, snapping the necks of club kids, and eating hookers for a late night snack, but discourages this in two ways. One, killing innocents (as in, anyone not trying to kill you,) even when feeding reduces your Humanity, the game's Karma Meter. Having a low Humanity makes you more likely to frenzy, where you lose control of your character and try to drain any nearby juicebags dry. Also, any use of obvious supernatural powers or feeding when people are watching results in a Masquerade Violation, which results in Vampire Hunters following you around. Also, if your Humanity drops to zero, or you stack up five Masquerade Violations, it's an instant game over. However, there are limited opportunities to regain both Humanity and redeem your Masquerade Violations, so you can get away with this to a point. Plus there are enough opportunities for plot assisted cruelty as well: sending a hapless TV Show Host to be devoured by a flesh-eating Vampire, enticing a naive thin blood to attempt to assassinate the president, and arranging for a young woman to have her blood slowly drained and sold to local Kindred are just a few of them. All of these due cause your Humanity to drop though, so it's a fine line.
Despite the appearance of its sequel above, the original Jak And Daxter game went so far as to make all the NP Cs invulnerable to avoid this. Of course, this was before Renegade sent it Darker And Edgier.

Close Aversions

Video Game Caring Potential

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