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Video Game Cruelty Potential
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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.
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... See also: What The Hell Player
To share your own stories of videogame cruelty, see Troper Tales.
Examples:
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Cruel God
- Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis is a goldmine for this trope. The player can create large parks, then unleash the dinosaurs, which will eat the tourists. The player can also prevent the park from getting shut down by turning on the emergency siren; as long as the alarm is sounded, the game does not fault you for tourist casualties. Removing the emergency shelters makes it so the tourists have no way of escaping, and casualties don't stop more tourists from coming.
- 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?
- Or nuking other people as Mahatma Gandhi.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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...
- 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".
- Note that Quantum planet busters also lower elevation quite nicely... Not that there's anything left of the base to sink afterwards. For an added challenge, try building as many busters as there are enemy bases and end the game on a happy nuking spree.
- Forced labour (i.e. buying things with population units) is awesome, especially in Civilization IV (with slavery). It is the best 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.
- 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.). Still other players go for "terrifyingly insane".
- 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".
- 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.
- It also had a cruelty-related Easter Egg. Once you have an airport, planes and choppers will fly around the city, often punctuated with "Sim Copter One Reporting Heavy Traffic!" But by using the Zoom function (which looks like a crosshair) on the chopper, the speech would change to "I'm hit! Mayday! Mayday!" and the chopper would crash.
- 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.
- That is one of few joys of playing Sim Copter; get an Apache helicopter (through either a cheat code or just an Air Force base) and blow up the nuclear plant, reducing most of the city to ash and ruins.
- And there's Sim Earth. 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.
- Sim Life 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 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 CO2 levels to insane heights, make the planet unbearably hot, whatever...
- 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 (No relation to Antlions). 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!
- 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.
- The fact that your people are Too Dumb To Live makes this a popular approach.
- Then there's your pet, which is Kaiju-sized and has some pretty nifty AI routines which let you encourage it to behave in certain ways. It doesn't just learn from your actions, it learns from your Karma Meter. That's right, you can turn it evil.
- 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.
- There's also one particularly villager who can't be killed, so you can throw him around to your heart's content (though you never get to permanently end his irritating existence).
- 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.
- Fun activity: Learning to skip rocks on the ocean. More fun activity: Using this skill to skip cows instead of rocks. Most fun activity: Doing this when your nation is starving to death. Of course, you could cut out the middle man and skip villagers, but cows are funnier and don't give as much bang for your sacrifice buck at the altar.
- The expansion to the sequel, Battle of the Gods, gives us a rather nasty way of using good. A new miracle turns all enemies into fluffy animals - hooray! No violence! Of couse, when one of the new items is an butcher. It gets worse when you realize that through the game's food mechanics that they turn into grain when processed.
- Since the Spore Creature Creator's release, thousands of videos on You Tube have been cropping up of horrible, useless creatures made in Spore. Such as the delightful "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!
- "Dropping creatures from high altitudes kills them. Please beam them down gently." Make me.
- 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."
- He also said that the majority of people who sent him hate mail are younger, and that it was "sad to see kids full of so much hate." Despite the fact that, you know, people of that age often don't have a terribly firm grip on reality. He may not be a monster, but he's very solidly a jerkass.
- 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.
- 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!
- Infants? Nah. Rubber balls. Small, bouncy, and flammable.
- 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.
- A game called Opening Night made by MECC of Oregon Trail fame allowed the players to create their own plays. You were in control of the script and the actions and the plots. Oh boy, the amounts of stuff you can do with this...you can make the characters gestures appear to be punching each other, kicking each other, murdering each other, throwing stuff, and with being able to make your own dialogue...well let's just say you can torture the on-screen characters by making them say ridiculous things, argue with alter egos, apparently die of poisonous gas, or make Zinedane Zidane replay itself when they're bowing. Oh the amounts of cruelty you can accomplish with it...For several people who own it, sometimes a prime source of comedy.
- Then American Girls continues the tradition with green-screened sprites running around, just like Opening Night. Oh great, now you can make Felicity headbutt her little sister to death!!! And this was in colonial times.
- Viva Pinata. Yes, Viva Pinata..
- Roller Coaster 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- While the roller coasters are attached to the track, the rubber raft rides are not. constructing a jump will cause your victims to fly off the and explode for some reason.
- Make a swan boat ride. Wait for people to ride. Then, delete it. I don't quite remember but there was both a way to leave people stuck in boats forever, and a way to simultaneously delete all the boats so everyone on the ride drowns
- Let the carousel break down, and don't repair it. Your guests will be stuck for hours on the ride, one that plays music off key and spins faster.
- Or make tunnels, and when the guests go inside them, delete the path, which takes the tunnel with it. It shows them falling through nothingness for a moment, then they disappear completely, never to be seen or heard from again. They even disappear from your guest list.
- Zoo Tycoon allows you to be cruel to both humans AND animals, satisfying all of your abusive needs. Create one of every animal and set 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.
- 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.
- Although not exactly violent, you can put the visitors in a camel exhibit and watch as they run in pure humiliation while the camels spit on them.
- 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 MMOs, 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)
- In terms of cruelty through Pv P, rogues are possibly the most Jerkass class in the game in terms of fighting casters, specifically healers. A rogue can almost always keep a healer locked down with all of their abilities. Open up on them? Sap for 10 seconds, after that, cheap shot for 2 seconds, build up combo points to full for a 5 second kidney shot. Not enough? Kick them while they're casting to lock them out of that particular casting school for 6 seconds. They're still alive? Gouge to incapacitate for 3.5 seconds to interrupt their casting again. Worst case scenario when they have a damage over time spell on you? Cloak of shadows, blind for 10 seconds and vanish out of combat and start the <entire process over again.
- Flagged people near cliffs, beware Shadow Priests! One moment you're happily strolling along, the next you're watching helplessly as the priest Mind Controls you and then jumps you off the cliff to your doom.
- In a similar vein, the Deeprun Tram and Tauren elevators are prime targets for abilities with Area of Effect knockbacks; blow people off at the top and watch them fall to their doom!
- In Dungeon Keeper 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 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 butt 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 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.
- 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.
- 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, fording the Green River (always results in Total Party Kill), starving your party to death, depriving them of sleep, crashing the raft on the Columbia River ...
- 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 butt. 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.
- 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.
- I built a bridge, and tried testing it. The bridge exploded while the train was still on it, the people in the train cars would have died from the g-forces and the train would have snapped in half. It just barely managed to get to the other side. Test success!
- 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. Create 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. Or 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.
- 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:
- Breed up a bunch of cats to hunt down vermin.
- Edit the game files so that cats have a body temperature more than three times the surface temperature of the Sun.
- 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 nearly anything at all out of existence, for instance, and it's not very difficult to arrange some inconvenient pressure plates so that anyone trying to make it into your fortress will have the ground collapse under them, a cave-in smack them down through about 12 floors, and then a bridge drop on them. And, as a final indignity you can send in your minions to engrave the walls about their hilarious demise.
- 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 lets you do pretty much anything to 'anything (in the dictionary). Poisons, devils, radioactive metals, chainsaws, shotguns, Cthulhu, zombies, lasers, buzzsaws, dinosaurs, and evil God can all meet "baby".
- Scribblenauts is awesome for this (as well as its opposite). Type "girl", and a little girl appears. Now, you could be nice - you COULD give her a doll, a puppy, and a cookie. You could also unleash Cthulhu! (no, really)
- Nation States allows you to decide on issues such that your nation becomes a "Psychotic Dictatorship" in which you have absolute rule over your people:
"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."
- Mission Force Cyber Storm is rife with this, since your Bioderms have limited lifespans, you are inticed to send them out on suicide runs with some weapons mean to turn Bioderms to living suicide bombers. Even the Unitech employees tell you that they are expendable, a good way to end their career is to send them in a HERC loaded with Jihads and self destruction and watch them die horribly
- The Total War series has peasant conscripts as available troops. They have no armor, carry what they used on their farm as weapons, and are all around useless. Unless you get inventive. One of my favorite tactics is to make 1/3 of my army peasants, and the rest of it my trained professional soldiers. I send my peasants to attack the enemy first. While the other army is busy butchering the poor peasants, my real soldiers are sent behind the enemy, and attack them from behind. Obviously, very few of my peasants survive, but are fortunately cheap to train, and are infinitely replaceable.
- That's kinda how it works in real life, actually. OK, not kinda. That's how it worked in real life.
- Nobody's mentioned Super Smash Bros. Brawl? The level editor allows you to do all sorts of fun things, like make a level consisting entirely of conveyor belts that drop your character onto a row of spikes just above the bottom of the level. Set this up carefully enough, and there's no margin for error—one false move, and you fall onto the spikes with no way to get back up. Which means that it's hilariously easy to die or send your opponent to his/her hilarious death. Why yes, I am a sadistic Brawl level designer—why do you ask?
- The Incredible Toon Machine. Just think of it as Looney Tunes on crack, with all the options for comedically mistreating cartoon animals you'd expect. Impaling cats and mice with needles, dropping pianos on them, barbecuing them with dragons, and so on, and so forth.
- Galactic Civilisations 2 gives you more points for a Conquest Victory than any other.
- Don't forget the expansion brings back the Terror Star, destroyer of, well, stars. Cue every solar system being wiped off the map. And also the spore weapon, instantly kills the population of a planet. Bye-bye 6-100 billion people.
- This is the whole point of the online game Pandemic II — build the deadliest virus you can and try to wipe out the entire population of Planet Earth. A tip — make sure you somehow hit Madagascar early or hope to hell you get Madagascar as the outbreak nation or the game is unwinnable.
- In the Petz computer games, you can use a few toyz, such as the Spray Bottle, to 'discipline' your Petz; you can basically use it as a torture tool if you're cruel enough.
Enemy-Only Killing
- Okay, so you don't kill people, but Batman Arkham Asylum has the Caped Crusader getting vicious on henchmen once he's leveled up enough. Throwing henchmen into their buddies, assorted takedowns, and all the ways you can use the gadgets to attack or screw with the henchmen. It gets really obvious in the challenge mode where you can use the upgrades from story mode, and you also have railings over bottomless pits in the beat-em up rooms.
- Some of the available tactics: Spray explosive paint on the ground and lure inmates into it. Descend from a gargoyle to suspend a hapless inmate by his ankle. Knock out a guy at the top of a ladder, boompaint his pants, then wait for someone to climb up to check on his vital signs. Blow up fragile walls to hit three or four goons with the shrapnel. Sneak up behind someone and knock them unconscious silently. Knock someone over, then grab him by the collar and SLAM his head against the wall. Hold off killing the last goon in an area until he finishes crapping his pants. Good Is Not Nice.
- And for those whose tastes run to psychological cruelty as opposed to just physical violence, hours of fun can be had by very slowly picking off a gang of heavily armed psychotic thugs one by one, and listening to them very gradually be reduced from Complete Monsters bragging about the atrocities they've already committed and intend on committing upon the Dark Knight to sniveling little cowards practically wetting themselves in terror over every little noise (bonus points go to the ones who fire off panicked bursts of machine gun fire at targets well away from you) and whimpering about how Batman's out there somewhere and that it's really not fair that that he's planning to beat the living crap out of them. It is so much fun being Batman.
- 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.
- 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 crapping 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.
- Fly over the crowd, abduct them and close the hatch as they shoot towards the saucer. A successful "Tonk" is ever so satisfying.
- The Dislocator, which fires fluorescent disks of energy that bounce people around like rubber balls, fun times ensue when the disk tries to force its way through a mesh fence, with the human still attached.
- 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.
- It gets better. There's a part near the end 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.
- 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?
- Force Gripping a stormtrooper, charging them with Force Lightening, then throwing them, which turns them into a human grenade. Can't get much better than that.
- 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.
- Use a sword on someone. You cut off their head, and can then throw it to distract/scare the shit out of their allies. If you try hard, you can bean them in the head with it.
- Okay, is it wrong that you've now got me giggling like a maniac...at work?
- 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.
- Throwing C4 onto guards in the early levels. Altogether now - "Ah AAAAAH! Ah AAAAAAH!"
- It works on unarmed civilians, too. Explosive dance party!
- Similarly, Red Faction Guerrilla, being a sandbox game where you can topple buildings with a sledgehammer, is a perfect way to be a true Space Asshole.
- 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 medical waste incinerator and hear their anguished screaming.
- 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 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.
- The Fifty-Cent video game (no, really) has interrogation and execution possibillities for hostages you have taken. It is fully possible to beat an enemy into spilling information, then shoot them through the brain mid-sentence.
- Area 51. One of the aliens is hooked up to an electrical machine. It's possible to fry him so many times he bursts into flame.
- 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 NPCs 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 required 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.
- And the Swarm Bore which, when fired, home in on the enemy, burrows into them and proceeds to sever their arms, then legs and blow up the head. The agonizing scream makes the process quite painful and fun to watch.
- No love for Seed Of Evil, the first Turok game to let you blow holes clean through your enemies chests (complete with dying gurgle as gore spills out and visible fragments of ribcage) or amputate legs, leaving your enemy rolling on the ground and screaming before they died? Or the rare occasion when you blew an enemy's upper body clean off, leaving a lower torso spasming on the floor and gushing blood?
- 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.
- One of the easiest ways to abuse Garry's Mod is to open up one of the basic sandbox levels, enable NPC AI, stick up some barnacles, spawn a bunch of mooks and civvies, then spawn an antlion. Hilarity Ensues.
- 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.
- There is at least one achievement on the 360 version for killing an enemy with a toilet, in a similar manner.
- 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.
- Consider for a moment that it's implied that the headcrabs' hosts are still capable of feeling pain ...
- When you light a zombie on fire and hear it scream in horrible pain, what you are hearing isn't the headcrab but the still conscious person whom the headcrab has taken over. They scream "WHYYYYYYYYYY?" down to the last second.
- 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".
- In Call of Duty 4, there are achievements for finishing off people by hitting them directly with grenades (stun/flash/frag/smoke).
- 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.
- Actually the twisting is functional; it stops the blade sticking inside the enemy, but still!
- 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. 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.
- There's also a downloadable plasmid called Sonic Boom that sends Splicers flying away and damages them even more with whatever they hit after being sent away.
- 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.
- Experts in Jedi Academy multiplayer can instantly kill anyone solely using Force Grip and kick, in moves called "gripkicking" or simply jumping up very high while gripping. They turn their mouse sensitivity very high, so when they grip, they begin spinning, so that you cannot possibly push them away, and they either kick you nonstop until you die, or jump up so high, let you go, and have you die upon impact with the ground. Sure makes most multiplayer fights short. And lame as hell.
- 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 Monologuing? Spawn clones and watch them swarm them to death. You can also spawn enemies for fun, making battles 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.
- 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.
- Also, you can keep hacking off bits after your victim's dead. Enjoy.
- Normally, it takes only one clean hit to send pieces flying, but for the lazy Jedi, just switch on your saber and casually bump into enemy mooks as their limbs and heads effortlessly sizzle off.
- 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.
- Averted in this case in single-player mode, as AI-controlled allies absolutely refuse to take part in this when you grip. As if they weren't annoying enough as it is.
- A smart Jedi in Jedi Academy can actually thrust the tip of the lightsaber through the body of an unarmed enemy when kneeling. The cruelest part is that this shishkebobbing of the enemy does not damage them at all, in spite of their groans as they writhe and burn.
- You can also hold enemies in Force Grip for so long that they die and just go limp, their bodies like they're draped over something like a pole or whatever.
- 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.
- The throat shot is in Wolfenstein too (melee attack using Kar 98+ Bayonet upgrade).
- 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.
- Executing enemy POWs results in different sounds depending on your army. If you've got just infantry and cavalry, you'll hear men screaming while being stabbed and hacked with swords and spears. If you've got siege equipment, you'll hear the machinery hammering while the enemy is massacred. If your troops have muskets or cannons, you'll get the pleasant sound of screams being drowned out by firing squads.
- 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 genetic 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...
- Medieval II allows you to fling rotting animal carcasses at enemy troops to break their morale. Of course, if you're sieging a castle and they've got noting left but broken troops rallying in the city center, there's nothing to stop your trebuchets from just flinging corpses at the enemy for giggles.
- 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.
- Or, even better, have her die in his presence. He is shaken by the sight.
- In some cases, the enemy character will even refuse to attack or even defend themselves against the characters on your side that they are close to. For example, in Radiant Dawn, Dheginsea will not attack Kurthnaga, his son, or Ena, his other son's pregnant wife, meaning the two of them can simply beat on him until he dies without even putting up a fight
- 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. The grunts are portrayed as comical, cowardly goofballs, making the act of gunning them down seem, at times, quite sadistic. With the melee attack you can splatter an unlimited amount of purple alien blood onto the floor. One room allows the player to execute an entire roomful of aliens in their sleep. The player can also easily kill off his own compatriots in a variety of amusing ways.
- Plasma grenades. Fun at the best of times, but if you stick one to a grunt, it goes running back to the other grunts just in time for the pretty blue fireworks.
- 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. Even if you just try to knock him out, you'll kill him.
- 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.
- Hunting down an assassination target? Why use a sniper rifle, machete or silenced weapon when you can throw a molotov cocktail directly at them and watch them run around and scream in agony?
- Have problems spotting all the guards in a base from distance? No worries. Wound an exposed guy with a sniper rifle, then snipe the poor bastard that comes to his aid.
- Set an enemy base on fire by throwing a molotov cocktail or shooting an Exploding Barrel, then let loose at the panicking enemies with your sniper rifle. Good times.
- Finishing off wounded enemies by starting a bush fire around them.
- 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. Like 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!
- 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.
- Borderlands, oh dear god borderlands, the status effect weapons give the player various sadistic options, blast weapons blow them up into gibby bits, flame weapons incinderate them, acid weapons dissolve them into a puddle of goo, and shock weapons electrocute them to the point that the skin and muscle is burnt off leaving the skull exposed, one eyeball expands while the other explodes, and their brain pops out of their skull. and in the case of the last 3 deaths they scream the entire time.
- 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.
- 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.
- Ever heard of DEFCON? An obscure real-time strategy game, in which the goal is complete annihilation of every other living person in the world using Nuclear Arms. It may lack that personal touch, but there's just something undeniable satisfying about seeing a small pop-up informing you "London: 7.5 million dead."
- Superpower 2 is good for this, too.
- Shadow President allows for similar hijinks. There is a gif of the United States launching all 7300 of its nukes...at Israel.
- Timesplitters Future Perfect featured, in the underground zombie lab level, a testing cell with a zombie inside. The computer next to the cell allowed you to do various fun things to the zombie inside - setting it on fire, electrocuting it, stretching it, squashing it, and so on. Then you go to the next cell, and there's a scientist hiding from the zombies in it, who begs you to let him out...but you can't actually let him out, which only leaves one option...
- In World Of Warcraft, there is an area in the Borean Tundra where someone is kidnapping gnomes and turning them into crazed robotic mechagnomes who will attack you. There is a cure for this condition that you use during a quest, but you can't keep the cure, forcing you to kill the mechagnomes whenever they attack afterward. What makes this situation disturbing is that engineers can re-loot dead mechanical monsters in this area after gathering the normal loot, which yields some engineering equipment and makes the corpse vanish. So you're, essentially, murdering sentient allies who have been changed into robots against their will and dismantling them for parts instead of, you know, taking them back to their base to be cured.
- In F.E.A.R., you gain access to a particle beam weapon, which reduces enemies to blackened skeletons on a direct hit, complete with horrified screaming from their skeletal bodies that dies away. You can also blow them in half, decapitate them, or reduce them into bloody chunks with the shotgun.
- Project Origin gives you incendiary grenades and a flamethrower, which makes even the most badass Replica soldier run around in circles screaming and trying to put out the flames. Too bad you only get a few flamethrowers in the game....
- There's also the pulse rifle, which turns everything in the general direction you fire it into screaming, collapsing skeletons.
- What about the Penetrator? Enemy Pin Cushion is fun, especially when enemies find their ways to pin themselves to ceilings.
- Oni. The various amount of fighting moves include the 'backbreaker', the neck-snapping 'running lariat', and several equally cruel throws and disarms.
- In the first two levels of Duke Nukem 3D, the top is very high up. Like, if you go up to the top with a jetpack, then shut it off, you fall so long, you actually stop screaming after a while. So, you do the cheat code to get all weapons, then float to the top(you may need God mode as well; I don't know how much fuel the jetpack has), and all the flying lizard guys will follow you up. Whip out the freeze-thrower, and ice the mother-fuckers. They'll fall all the way back to earth, and shatter on hitting the ground. You talk about fuuuuun shit!
- In the various Lego games, you could beat your enemies the old fashioned way. But, quite often, there's a handy bottomless pit, or better yet lava, that you can force them into(literally in the Star Wars games). Also, in some levels, you get to control a crane, which you can use to pick up your enemies, and drop them in the aforementioned pits.
- In Rise Of The Triad, a certain type of enemy would occasionally fall to his knees and beg for his life when reduced to low health. If the player doesn't kill him in cold blood, he'll collapse after a short while. Once the player leaves the area, however, he'll revive and hunt the player down.
- Similarly, there's a particular semi-Scrappy Level where there are spinning blades of death all over the friggin place and trampolines and traps on the ground and I think even some floaty mines. Thankfully for your sanity, they also work on the enemy soldiers. And if you got the Excalibat previously...
Plot Aided Bastardry
- Grim Fandango: Nothing's more fun than tormenting the souls of dead children with your bonesaw
- 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?
- 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 have 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.
- In Dragon Age, eventually you defeat Loghain and have the option to kill him for his crimes or force him to become a Grey Warden and join you. If you do the latter, Alistair becomes disgusted with your decision and tries to leave the party for good, at which point Queen Anora insists that he is executed for the threat he poses to her throne. You can call in your boon for helping her take the throne and convince her to let him go, or stand aside and allow him to be executed - much to his shocked disbelief. Especially cruel due to the fact that you can take this option even if you are romancing him and the two of you are in love.
- 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 Deception 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.
- Even better, the sequels — Kagero: Deception II, Deception III: Dark Delusion, and TRAPT — let you combo your traps together. Imagine dousing a man in oil from above, flinging him with a spring floor into a roaring fireplace, waiting for his flame-wreathed form to stagger out, nailing him with a flying buzzsaw that pins him to the opposite wall, and then dropping a spiked ball down a nearby flight of stairs and having it roll over him. Now start thinking of ways to expand upon that, fire up the games, and make it happen.
- 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 its 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 'Pants Exploded'.
- What about destroying the entire town of Megaton with a nuclear bomb?
- Fallout 2's myriad quest solutions always include at least 1 cruel ending for the discerning evil player (as opposed to the stupid evil player who just shoots everyone). You can walk across the wasteland snuffing out every last glimmer of hope and crushing every dream. There are more details in the rampage section below.
- 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:
- 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 it's easier just to let them 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.
- In one of the levels, you are relieving a beleaguered Cornerian outpost. There is no penalty for slaughtering your allies.
- Star Control allows you to sell your crew for plot-related items or for fuel to the Druuge, who will in turn be fed to their fusion reactors when needed. Also, you can load up your ship with empty fuel tanks and get your fuel to be incredibly low, then sell one of your MacGuffins to fully restock your ship. The max you can fill is 1610 fuel units, but anywhere in the lower 1600s will result in the Druuge trader screaming laments because by letting you scam him, he'll be fed to the atomic fires. He'll continue to have a very civil conservation with you despite this.
- One of the story paths in Way of the Samurai 2 focuses on a mute child that your character teaches to read and write. Before you can teach her, though, you must pay the Geisha that uses her to run errands for the time it would take. Of course, once you get the money and talk to the Geisha, one of the options is to instead blow the money on the Geisha herself. This is accompanied by a very short scene, before all the off-screen fun begins, of the child looking into the room, as if she knows what you just did.
- Rune Factory allows you to seduce someone else's wife.
- World of Warcraft has one quest in the game just stood out as a WTF moment: In the Borean Tundra you have captured an enemy mage, and the quest giver instructs you to extract information from him yourself, as his code of ethics won't allow him to personally perform the act. This involves repeatedly using an AgonyBeam while he cries out in pain. Even further, after completing the quest, you can ask for another of the AgonyBeams just to use it on him, for no in game gain.
- In Pokemon Mystery Dungeon One, Nintendo said you could play as any Pokemon you wanted. Astute players noted they couldn't recruit a Kecleon, so Ninetendo responded that you COULD, so long as you were willing to fight one. How do you fight one? You rob the Kecleon Brothers, who have been kind hearted supporters of you and your heroic partner since day one. You take all their expensive, hard to find items, and leave without paying. Then when they try to get their stuff back you beat them into a pulp until they give up. Mind you, these are the same Kecleon that defended your innocence to a criminal gang earlier and apologized profusely for not doing it sooner. Way to go, player.
- In the Mascot Fighter ''Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Smash Up, Casey Jones can deliver a brutal beat down with a hockey stick to his own girlfriend.
- That's nothing new. In Super Smash Bros, Mario can chuck fireballs at Peach, and she can wack him with a frying pan. Zelda fires giant fireballs at Link, while he sticks her full of arrows. And Snake gets to snap a pair of little kids' necks.
Unchecked Player Rampage
"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!"
- And nobody mentioned the Body Surf ability? The ability to not just deliver a flying kick to a person's body, but to follow through and ride their corpse in a trail of gore, knocking over anyone else in your path. For extra stunt-satisfaction, it is possible to palm-strike enemies into the air and do a flying body-surf on them as they come down. Of course, all of this is for when you don't feel like bisecting whole crowds with the whipfist, mashing them with thrown cars, gunning them down with a helicopter or driving over them in a tank... all while they run away screaming.
- 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.
- This is also doable earlier on with a highly skilled mage/cleric team combo. The mage summons monsters that do chip damage to guards, meanwhile the cleric continually summons higher level shades as meatshields and mobile obstacles. Made even simpler in the sequels due to simulacrum.
- 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.
- With the motor scooter you can win at the fair, you can even run over innocent schoolchildren, although you can't kill them. For added fun, this will make the teachers run after you to send you to detention, but they can't even come close to catching up to you.
- Scenario: untimed mission, like 'Christmas'. Stuff all nearby prefects in lockers (yes, you ARE allowed to do this!). Usually it takes two in the area to get this going, but once you have..everyone's a target, not just teen boys. Remember those annoying little kids who love to tell on you just because you're defending yourself against an ambush? Knee in the groin on a little boy will remind them. And since Everything Fades, you can do it again in a couple of minutes!
- In the aforementioned Perfect Dark, there is a way of making the scientists in the weapons training facility an actual needle pad by pushing one of the crates from the hangar all the way up to the training room, jam the door open with it, and then proceed to throw poisoned knives or shoot bolts at the NPC's. Whichever method you chose, you could turn them into living chunks of blood, and their heads would tilt towards every direction because of the effects of the poison in the bolts/knives. Take up "how many knives can you stick on the scientist before the first one disappears?" as a hobby.
- Mines also stick to people in Perfect Dark. Nothing could be more terrifying than having some secret agent stick a beeping Timed Mine onto your person, as you realise you've mere moments to live and there's nothing you can do to stop it!
- Even more fun is playing the multiplayer with bots. Summon one of the bots to you, give him a nice shiny coat of remote mines, and then send him on his way! You can either detonate him yourself after a time or wait for somebody to shoot him.
- Like the aforementioned Life or Death example, the Trauma Center series lends itself to certain abuses. While you can't make your patients scream in agony, there are an awful lot of intentional mistakes you can stack up before they die, like cutting fluffy bunny shapes into their pancreas or stitching "THIS TROPER WUZ HERE" across their brain. In fact, the easiest way to restart a mission that you know you're going to fail is equip the scalpel and tap the stylus/A button rapidly, racking up massive vital losses and death in mere seconds. There's also the perennial favorite of half-removing shards of glass and stabbing them in again, or the more passive method of simply watching the viruses go. Add this to the fact that a lot of your patients are kids and you start questioning whether the ESRB shouldn't have been a bit stricter with the rating...
- Project Eden main characters respawn very quickly if killed, they are also very dense after a while this tropper started punishing them by droping them into pits or walking them into hazards, some times because he couldn't be bothered to walk them back to the next check point.
- Okami. The videogame with the most caring potential ever also has a lot of ways to torture people. You start out being able to tackle people and bite them. By the time you get 100%, you can let off multiple bombs in your hometown, use Thunderbolt to strike the guy who taught you the move, freeze a cute mermaid girl with seashell stick-ons, and set fire to kittens. No seriously, you can set fire to kittens. Up to 9 times in a row.
- You may also headbutt those kittens off the cat tower to have them plunge to their deaths.
- Final Fantasy Adventure actually allows you to kill citizens when you're strong enough.
Citizen: Hello there! Welcome to Topple!
Boy: This is topple? Wow nice. Well where's Wendell?
Citizen: Hello young man, welcome to topple!
Boy: This isn't Wendell! Where can I find it?
Citizen: Hello young man! Welcome to topple!
Boy: YEEEAARRRGGGGHHHHH! *Goes Axe Crazy and repeatedly slashes the townsperson until he vanishes and dies*
Citizen's death quote: Hello Young man! Welcome to Topple!
- Killing Omochao in Sonic Adventure 2 is a pretty good example. Simply shoot him as Tails/Eggman (tricky to do, because you can only do it without the auto-aim), jump on him as Sonic/Shadow, or punch him as Knuckles/Rouge to knock him off a cliff (easier to do the later in the game you try this). He still shows up, but says things like, "I'm mad at you. I'm not going to help you out anymore!" Which, for most players, is a perk.
- If you REALLY feel like kicking the dog, go into the Chao gardens and beat on any of the cute, harmless, innocent Chao you're raising there. Eventually, it'll start shivering in fear. Pick on it long enough and it'll eventually start hiccuping and rubbing its eyes. Carry on still further, and it will openly cry. After that, the Chao will run away from the character you abused it with, and if you pick it up, it will squirm and cry (in a manner that sounds a lot like "No, no, no!" and "Put me down!").
- And you can do this with every single character. One after the other. And isolate your target chao in one of the three gardens. So the poor chao has been beaten up systematically by six people. Even Tails.
- There is one part of Zak Mc Kraken where you have to raise hell on an airplane to loot the crucial stuff you need from it. First off you plug the sink up with toilet paper and call the stewardess. She quickly shouts "Oh no!!!" and starts cleaning up the mess. Then in order to keep her completely distracted, you go to the microwave...set in an egg and then BOOM! The stewardess then asks what the awful smell is and notices the microwave on the airplane is a mess. "AAAAAIEEEEEE WHO DID THIS?!" Poor stewardess...Zak would end up on Notalwaysright for that!
- You can also kill animals in inventive ways (Bludgeoning a squirrel, running a fish named Sushi through a garbage disposal.) Unlike tormenting the stewardess, these are optional.
- In the evolution-based RPG E.V.O.: Search for Eden for the SNES, there is a point in the second chapter where you are actually able to kill and devour a pair of helpful amphibians (one of whom is a child whose father sacrificed himself to save his species). Doing so causes a horrified Gaia to ask what you're doing. If you eat the meat the two provide, you're instantly killed. (That's karma for you.)
- Any fighting game with fatalities could fall into this trope, but special mention has to be made for Samurai Shodown V Special. In all the games in the series, it is possible to "accidentally" kill an enemy by using the right attack on the right part of their sprite as a finisher, usually cutting them cleanly in half. Samurai Shodown IV introduced actual fatalities which were messier. In most games in the series, Nakoruru (the Nature-Loving Girl) and Rimururu (her younger sister) were immune to any death effects. In V Special, however, not only was it easier to kill an opponent, but these two characters were no longer death-exempt. There is something disturbing about chopping the twelve-year-old in half◊ or making her cute sister explode in a shower of blood and body parts◊.
- Countless Critters of several Warcraft games have met their bloody end at the hands of various troops, thanks to myself and others.
- In "AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! - A Reckless Disregard for Gravity" (a game which simulates BASE jumping from buildings suspended in air) the player can aim for, hit, and get bonus points off of seagulls. Attempting to do so to hovercars is not recommended.
- In California Games, flying seagulls were also a target during the Foot Bag contest. Hitting one landed you 1000 points. (Not a whole lot, but still, you were rewarded with some points and a funny message.)
- Final Fantasy VII has one part where you can be a total asshat to Red XIII. When the party reaches the beach town from Junon for the first time, Red XIII sits in the shade and notices how his tail loves to bat the soccer ball the kids are playing with. You can smash the ball to Red XIII and hit him in the face, causing him to growl, but that is it. Best part is you can do this endlessly and Red XIII won't be mad at you later.
- There is another part in the game where you get to be cruel and it's a part of the storyline! Around disc 3, after Tifa manages to escape from Shinra, Scarlett confronts Tifa and slaps her in the face. You then get to press O and slap Scarlett back over and over again until she gives up. Safe to assume that at least a few people made a separate save file just so they can go back and play the slapping mini game.
- No mention of the Tropico games, yet?
- In the original Tropico, the entire premise of the game is being a Dictator on a tropical island/Cuba Expy which can be anywhere from a Benevolent Dictatorship to one where you use the military to attempt to keep your poor peons in place with bad food, no real medicine, and so on. And of course various edicts you can slap down to see just how far you can push your poor citizens...
- Tropico 2 is still worse though, since at least in 1 your peons can leave, but in 2 you are the Pirate King of a Pirate Isle, and since the pirates under you only work as, well, pirates, or guards and overseers, all of your labor is provided by, well, slaves that you kidnap from settlements, including the prosti...er...wenches that you use to keep your pirates entertained. Plus the aforementioned edits. And the fact that one of the ways to keep your captives from revolting/escaping is by keeping them in abject terror...
- In The Simpsons Game, you can hurt any NPC, which makes them run away from you.
- Likewise, in Hit and Run, you can kick NP Cs until they fall over. You can then kick them into the road, and run them over in a car....repeatedly. Unfortunately, all this does fill up your Hit and Run meter, and can fill it up quite quickly...
- In New Super Mario Bros Wii, you can really dick over your fellow players. The down side is that they can dick you over just as much.
- In Indy Car Racing II you can put the damage-rate of your car in undestructable-mode. Then disable yellow flags and the pace car. Then go racing. Now you can push off all the other cars and make them crash horribly. Often they will remain on the track after crashing. Especially on ovals this has the wonderful and destructive result of other cars hitting them at full speed, causing massive, moving balls of wreckages that get hit over and over by other still functioning cars, scattering car parts all over the track (too bad they don't flip over). You can even turn around and take the track in reverse. If you time your head-on collisions well, you will launch the car you hit backwards. Often, it will then travel along the wall for a half to a full lap (going backwards) while totally ripping itself to pieces. Finally, it will come to a rest, or smash into some other cars that were still racing, causing more crashes. Then drive past all the wrecks until you're in the leading position. Now hit the race accellerator, and win the race!
- Playing Might and Magic 6? Going for Master Dark Magic? Head to Free Haven and cast Armageddon. Instant evil party~! Just make sure you hotfoot it to Paradise Valley before going to a castle...
- In Lego Batman (and assumedly the other Lego games) you can beat up your allies. Including Alfred. The temptation to wander around the Batcave beating up the various batfolks is almost overwhelming. The Batcave is also possibly the most dangerous area just because nothing has handrails and it's incredibly easy to either walk off the edge or 'accidentally' push someone off. And then you go to Arkham... and the fun noises the various rogues make when you beat them up - with other rogues. Plus of course, having Poison Ivy destroy every plant she can.
- You can beat allies up in other games. Die, Jar-Jar, die.
- And sometimes the game will even automatically add Batgirl to your party if you select Joker. What sick bastard approved that?
- In order to get the "Superhero" rating for the hero storyline, you have to get x number of studs per level. In order to that, you have to break things. Ergo, Heroism=Vandalism. Breaking things equals FIGHTING CRIME.
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.
- One part of a Nancy Drew game has the character's aunt ask her to make a sandwich to eat. The player can then make the most volatile sandwich ever (Peanut butter, tomatoes, ice cream, mayonnaise, jellyfish) and then either feed it to Nancy's aunt or have Nancy eat it herself. Unfortunately this causes a game over.
- In Stronghold Crusader one could seal the enemy in their own castle and fire diseased cows in over the walls or make a map where a load of enemy slaves are trapped within walls in rooms covered with pitch and then have your archers set the pitch on fire and sit back as the enemy burn without any water to help themselves.
In Fiction
Anime & Manga
- Digimon Adventure 02 has a villain who takes this to the extreme; it's quite clearly implied that he treats Digimon absolutely horribly... however, we then learn that he was under the impression that the Digital World was a video game all along.
- When confronted to the fact that it's real with no more possibility of escape or denial, he completely breaks down and later joins the good guys.
Literature
- In Animorphs, the Ketrans had a god game called Alien Civilizations. The Capasins wiped the Ketrans out because they caught their transmissions and thought it was real.
Live Action TV
- Spaced mentioned this in an episode where Tim is playing Tomb Raider. When Brian notes that Lara Croft is drowning and asks if that's the point, Tim replies that it "Depends what kind of mood you're in."
- The Star Trek holodeck gives the characters to plenty of chances to do horrible things to their in-universe fictional worlds.
- In one episode, half the command crew's brains gets integrated into Bashir's obvious James Bond homage. In order to buy time to allow the rest of the crew to get them out, Dr. Bashir pushed the "destroy the world" button, which submerged all but the tops of the highest mountains under water.
- In another episode, during an extradition hearing for war crimes against the Klingon Empire, the prosecutor brings up one of Worf's favourite Holodeck programs in an attempt to show he is a blood thirsty monster, where Worf, playing the commander, proceeds to order a city razed to the ground and everyone killed, even though this program is a first person documentary of a famous battle in Klingon history and that's what actually "happened".
- One Star Trek Voyager episode features Tuvok strangling a hologram of Neelix to death. Not quite as cruel as submerging most of the world, but oh so satisfying.
- In an episode of Deep Space Nine, Nog invites Jake Sisko to spend their day looting and pillaging a city in the holodeck.
- In the Voyager episode "Worst Case Scenario", Seska had a field day sabotaging Tuvok's program, so that the Holodeck became an Everything Trying To Kill You environment to Tuvok and Paris.
- In The Next Generation, after Data inexplicably experiences anger during a fight with a Borg drone, he creates a Holodeck program where he kills the drone repeatedly in an attempt to replicate the emotion.
Web Comics
Other
- This Cracked article. Read it, and you will laugh and cry for the future of humanity simultaneously.
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