Stuff Blowing Up / Video Games

• Act of War counts with a graphic engine capable to bring some impressive explosion effects, with everything so carefully designed to be as realistic as possible the game's stuff blowing up looks awesome, even after all these years it can go toe to toe with some other Real-Time Strategy games.
• The cannonball in Backyard Soccer, which explodes in the goal.
• This seems to be the motivation of the character Haggard of Battlefield: Bad Company for joining the US Army.
  • This is also a good reason to play the actual game, as most of the original environment is destructible, as advertised. It even gives you cosmetic awards for destroying enough walls and trees.
• Bill Nye the Science Guy: Stop the Rock! has a few examples:
  • This is explicitly the job of MAAX, the Meteoroid And Asteroid eXploder.
  • You can do this to a balloon by using the Nye Labs Pressure Chamber of Science! to expose it to a zero-pressure environment.
• With the name Blast Corps, you can't go wrong with the title.
  • Ironically, your job in the game is to prevent something from going boom: An out-of-control radioactive materials carrier that was en-route for disposal. It is now very unstable, and will explode if it hits anything. You stop it from exploding by destroying anything in it's way.
• The Bomberman franchise is all about Stuff Blowing Up. It's even in the name.
• This and Testosterone Poisoning are the central philosophy of Torgue in Borderlands 2. Everything the company manufactures involves explosions: their guns fire explosive gyrojet ammunition, and their shields are designed to counterattack enemies with explosive spikes or novas.
  Mr. Torgue: TORGUE MAKES THINGS EXPLODE! END OF SALES PITCH!
• A homebrew game for the Nintendo DS called Brix DS features sticks of dynamite grouped together as a single stick, set atop several grey and black bricks. The object of the game is to remove the grey bricks and to not let the dynamite fall onto the ground; the player must land it on the black bricks. The physics of the game are programmed well, and they become a huge factor after the first two level sets. Where does Stuff Blowing Up come in, then? If the dynamite touches the ground, it explodes, sending any remaining bricks flying off the screen. This can result in some amazingly laugh-out-loud losses. After level set five, bricks that explode on removal show up, which only ups the ante for the humor in losses, despite the increased difficulty.
• In Colobot, all robots and buildings explode when destroyed, as well as land mines that can be encountered in some levels.
• At the end of Comic Jumper: The Adventures of Captain Smiley, Captain Smiley seems to think this is the reason why his comic series is now a roaring success.
• The Command & Conquer series, everything explodes there, sometimes even infantry! from simple grenade explosion and RPG attacks to continental conflagrations capable to send energy signatures to alien civilizations and global altering missiles, trust me, you will enjoy it, in fact, is rated the reason number 1 in the TOP TEN of the series according to this video.
  • In Command & Conquer: Generals: Zero Hour, there is a general dedicated to everything in his army blowing up in one way or another. To illustrate: This general can get an upgrade where all of his buildings and units explode on command.
• The ending of Deadly Creatures. Redneck gas station owner George Striggs is trying to kill one of the protagonists, a scorpion which has repeatedly stung his crotch at this point, with a shotgun. He chases it outside the building and ends up getting spooked by a rattlesnake on top of one of the gas pumps (which is burning at this point). His first reaction is to shoot the snake, and hits the pump in the process. The whole station goes BOOM. You can hear fire engine and ambulance sirens during the credits.
• Crypto, the main protagonist of Destroy All Humans! makes it very clear that he likes to blow stuff. (Up! Blow stuff up!) So much so, that the DAH! games have more explosions in them than an action movie. "WHEN DO I GET TO BLOW STUFF UP?!" "Pox handles all the technical stuff, I just... blow stuff up." "They look so cool when they go boom and fall down!"
• The Disgaea series loves explosions. The Prinnies explode when thrown for rather flimsily justified reasons, and it's rare for stronger attacks to not produce an explosion of some sort. They also get bigger with each new installment in the series, the scale currently ranging from just the target of the attack to the entire galaxy.
• Dragon Quest:
  • Dragon Quest II: The Princess of Moonbrooke is your party's only member who learns the explosive spell Kaboom, and the first hero in the franchise to use a Blast type of spell.
  • Dragon Quest III: The Bang line of spells -learned by Mages and Sages- pounds the enemies with explosive force. Unlike Blaze, which is exclusively single target, or Fireball, which targets only a group of enemies and can thus be thrown off by funky enemy formations or heavily mixed groups, Bang will hit everything on the opposing side of the battlefield without exception.
  • Dragon Quest IV: Maya's speciality is blowing entire waves of enemies up.
  • Dragon Quest V:
    • Madchen learns the whole Bang line of explosive spells.
    • Kaboom is King Korol's main offensive spell.
  • Dragon Quest VIII: Jessica dominates the Bang-family class of explosive spells.
  • Dragon Quest IX: Sages' non-Zam offensive spells are all from the "Bang" family.
  • Dragon Quest XI: Mordegon can use the Boom-class spells.
  • Dragon Quest Heroes: The World Tree's Woe and The Blight Below: Nera's "Hubble Bubbles" can be set to detonate like miniature bombs. She also has "Bang", "Boom" & "Kaboom" as a set of spells. But to top that off, her Coup de Grace is "Big Banger", a powerful mega hubble bubble that erupts into a massive explosion after traveling a couple of yards ahead.
• In Exolon, destroying structures with grenades produced impressive showers of yellow ball-shaped debris.
• Flippin Kaktus: If you see something red with a skull on it, chances are good it'll explode if shot.
• Garden Gnome Carnage will fill your screen with nonstop crashing sleights, airstrikes, bricks, gold bricks which are even more explosive than regular bricks, and diamond bricks which blossom into huge explosions when they hit the ground.
  • The sequel Hyper Princess Pitch manages to have even more explosions, particularly when your summon the godess of explosions. More so when you find the cheat code 'excessive', and more so when you find the secret stage and unlock Pitch's ultimate move
• In the arcade version of G.I. Joe, the Joes use smart bombs, the villains use missiles, Every Jet Is A Pinto and every inanimate objet (and some villains) in-between are Made of Explodium.
• GoldenEye and Perfect Dark for the Nintendo 64 feature consoles, chairs, tables, plants — anything you can find from Office Depot — that blow up real good. In PD, a floating crate that explodes is an important plot element. Fortunately, if it is lost, you can use one of the EXPLODING GUNS to make it through the important point. Yes, one of the guns explodes.
• Halo Two words: Plasma Grenades! Plus fusion coils, the Grunts' explosive methane packs, etc.
• Harry Potter: Puzzles and Spells:
  • Bombs will destroy or reduce the counter on anything in a 3x3 square around them. Swapping two adjacent bombs creates a 5x5 blast.
  • The Reducto spell explodes large stone blocks on the board.
  • Hitting dragon eggs enough times will cause them to hatch. The baby dragon will then burn the shell, causing an explosion the same size as two bombs swapped together.
• In the 2003 game of The Hobbit, Bilbo can gain a power-up for his throwing stones that causes them to explode upon impact. Goblin Miners can throw explosive satchels of gunpowder at him. There are also barrels that, when struck, can cause explosions that lower bridges or set off chain reactions.
• In the Windows 95-era PC game Hot Wheels: Crash, you launch cars to destroy props for a movie shoot. The more stuff you blow up, the more points you earn. Typically, 100 points are attained by creating a Rube-Goldberg-Style series of explosions and destruction. These can be fun to watch, including, but not limited to: Sinking a cargo ship rigged with explosives, Blowing up oil tankers with a falling crane, and Destroying major airports.
• InfernoMOO has Grenades, miniature nuclear bombs, ACTUAL nuclear bombs, grenade launchers, flashbangs. . . bombs are plentiful in the post apocalypse.
• In the Hunt is a Shoot 'Em Up where your character is a submarine that only uses explosive torpedoes, Superior Firepower: Surface To Air Missiles and depth charges as its attacks. The enemies are mostly machines that use stuff like bombs and missiles on you. The only things that don't go boom are the three organic enemies in the game and environmental terrain.
• Depending on the player, rather common in Kerbal Space Program.
• This is practically the goal of Just Cause 2. You're overthrowing a corrupt island government using chaos, and the easiest way to make chaos is by Stuff Blowing Up. So lots of stuff will blow up.
• The Gummi ship levels in Kingdom Hearts II tend to be full of exploding objects, being shoot 'em ups. Once the ship is upgraded enough, the entire screen will fill up with explosions at the touch of a button.
• Left 4 Dead had propane tanks and oxygen tanks that would explode when shot at or set on fire and you could set off a big chain reaction if you made a cluster of them in a small area. The sequel ups the ante by including a grenade launcher.
  • The Sacrifice DLC introduces Explosive Barrels, combining the effects of an explosion and then spreading fire. Custom maps that have a cluster of these barrels are prone to heavy use of this trope.
• In The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, a bug you smoke out sets a fire in a bomb storage building. The results are... predictable.
  • Every enemy that's killed in Twilight Princess seem to explode as well.
  • In The Legend Of Zelda Oracle Of Seasons, you could use your fire item inside a house filled with bombs too. The results were a little different though.
    • Actually, if you had good enough timing, you could escape that fate. And it's hilarious.
    • Acutally its that you do it once it explodes, Do it twice the king moblin notices it was YOU doing it and have the moblins stun you leaving you to blow up, this also happens if you Stay in the building the first time.
• Lemmings. There's just something therapeutic about clicking the Nuke button after you fouled up a stage and watching your green-haired critters cutely explode en masse. There are also stages where you only get Bombers.
• This is easily possible in LittleBigPlanet's Level Editor thanks to the "Explosive" objects. Also when they're used in story levels such as "Boom Town" and "Bang for Buck".
• Jessica Philomele in Mana Khemia: Alchemists of Al-Revis carries a large purse containing all kinds of explosive alchemic concoctions, which she promptly proceeds to throw at her enemies during combat.
  • The game's Item Crafting system also offers a number of bombs that any character can use, ranging from a standard Fire, Ice, Lightning trio to bombs made of fruit that cause Status Effects. Most have larger variants that hit all enemies at once.
• Explosive rounds in Mass Effect.
  • Also the various exploding barrels/crates/canisters amongst the levels, some of which are strangely named. Fusion containment cells, fine. But a fire extinguisher explodes violently when shot?
  • From Lair of the Shadow Broker: Thane from ME2 has a highly detailed and lengthy method of taking down an enraged Krogan unarmed, but if that proves impossible/ineffective, plan B is a bomb.
• The sewer levels in The Matrix: Path of Neo have Det. Pack's you have to explode to get through doors and open up areas. Plus, there's the grenade launcher you get a level earlier that appears in the harder levels.
• Bomb Man and Grenade Man from the Mega Man series specialize in this department.
  • Crash Man and Napalm Man have to count for something too, considering both have bomb launchers for hands...with said explosives prominently displayed emerging from the weapon barrels.
• Metal Slug: as a general rule, the more explosions there are on the screen, the better you're doing.
• Minecraft has the famous Creeper, an enemy best described as a suicide-bombing leaf monster. On the players' side of things, it also features TNT blocks, which when placed in close proximity with one another (or triggered Creepers) can create chain reactions. Sufficiently large explosions have been known to crash the game and break the current world's save file.
  • Beds violently explode in a fiery ball when used in the two alternate dimensions.
• In Missile Command, you turn incoming missiles into Stuff Blowing Up so that the missiles don't turn your cities into Stuff Blowing Up.
• In MySims Kingdom, Dr. F's profile says that he wants to either send a rocket into space, or blow it up; he's not choosy. Indeed, as you arrive, the rocket they're trying to launch blows up. Later, Alexa practically has to restrain him from pressing the self-destruct button while it and its pilot (a human, this time) are in space.
• Neverwinter Nights has an "On Death, Explode" script that can be assigned to any custom creature in the game. There is also a lesser variant which produces a "stinking cloud" effect on death.
  • There are also fire traps, which range from "minor" to "deadly" (and beyond "deadly" to "epic"), in terms of the damage they do. Deadly and Epic traps will kill most characters if they aren't immune or highly resistant to fire damage.
• One of the most useful Brush powers in Ōkami involves drawing Cherrybombs to blow up an enemy Imp or two, gain access to secret caves, & fluster the natives. You get this power from Bakugami, a boar god.
• One Piece Mansion: The rooms of tenants that get too stressed out eventually explode.
• Half the appeal of Ratchet & Clank is getting to blow up hordes of enemies with progressively larger and more explosion-inducing BFGs. On top of that, practically every enemy in the game explodes when defeated. Even if you just beat them up with a wrench.
• In Robopon 2 this is taken to an art form. Almost everything blows up. Machines, people, floating fortresses, buildings, doors, even an entire town. The story has a total of 36 explosions, not counting battles.
• In Sonic Adventure 2, Prison Island explodes as the player characters are leaving it.
• As a Ninja in Shinobido you can use many explosive stuff, including bombs, mines, explosive toys and explosive sushi. If you use this one, Hilarity Ensues.
• The game Split/Second (2010) uses this trope as a gameplay mechanic. As you build your power bar, you don't use it to boost or turbo like other racing games. Instead, you activate a Power Play, which is a fancy way of saying you make things blow up. Be it a gas station or a airfield watchtower, it goes boom!
• 'Splosion Man, obviously. You play a manic Action Bomb trying to escape from an underground laboratory complex, causing many, many explosions along the way.
• The Star Fox series. Enemy fighters, bosses, the main villain's lair, and perhaps best of all... Enemy supply base when the fuel bunker is hit by a train.
• Any Star Wars game. Because, well, it's Star Wars. If nothing goes boom in a Star Wars game, there is something seriously wrong with it.
• The Super Smash Bros. games naturally love stuff going boom, with many character attacks using explosions (Snake's whole repertoire of moves is made up of C4, rocket launchers, landmines, and grenades), and several items that create pretty big bangs as well, such as Bomb-Ombs, Smart Bombs, motion-detecting mines, Electrode, and exploding crates and barrels. And then there's the Villager's Final Smash, where the Nooks build a house over the opponent... and then the house explodes, blowing the Nooks away and most likely fragging the occupant.
• In Superman 64 everything explodes. Everything, including things that logically shouldn't explode, like wooden pallets or cardboard boxes. If Superman can pick it up, it will explode. The one thing that doesn't explode? Boxes of guns and ammunition.
• Supreme Commander and to a lesser extent its spiritual source Total Annihilation, have all units and buildings explode on death, many of which do little damage, though some late game resources generators explode like a Nuke, and all air units do damage when crashing.
• The recurring Explosion spell in the Tales Series creates a massive one, as the name might imply. A lot of other fire spells create explosions in some of their incarnations, such as Meteor Storm and Ancient Nova.
• The Demoman and the Soldier from Team Fortress 2. The former is armed with a grenade launcher and a sticky grenade launcher. The latter is armed with what can only be described as a semi-automatic rocket launcher. When Valve decided to have an event that pitted the two classes against each other, several servers crashed because they couldn't handle the level of explosive ordinance that went flying across the battlefields.
  • The Engineer has some explosions as well. His sentry gun, when upgraded to level three, fires clusters of four rockets in addition to its dual chainguns. The sentry and his other buildings always explode when destroyed, even if by blunt force. This is just a visual effect, however.
  • There's also all Payload/Payload race maps, where the winning team triggers a large explosion; justified as it IS a bomb they are escorting. The explosion is so awesome that, while playing as BLU, even The Announcer (who is otherwise a cranky old lady) cackles with glee when the objective is about to be completed.
  • And the Bombinomicon allows anyone to automatically explode upon death, regardless of cause.
• The Time Crisis series steadily escalates on its explosions with each incarnation. Wild Dog dies in every game by an explosion.
• Touhou Project has this in spades, for good reason, considering the genre. Marisa, in particular, uses her Love Sign: Master Spark to solve all her problems, whether it be finding new spellbooks from other magic users, making new friends, or finding the real path through an illusionary maze.
• One of the main features of most Vehicular Combat games, e.g. the Twisted Metal series.
• World of Warcraft: Goblin Engineering. Honestly, there is only one thing there that doesn't blow up (Goblin Jumper Cables XL), and that can kill the user.
  • This actually ends up becoming almost a motto to the Goblin Engineers. One NPC somewhere says "It's not about making machines not blow up, it's about making them blow up in the right place."
  • There's a boss in the newest expansion who will happily declare: "Corpse go BOOM! Hahaha."
  • "Nothing says engineering like a 20% failure rate!"
  • To quote Bilgewater vendors: "Goblin products are built to blast!"
  • Meet Fargo Flintlocke, a dwarf who can give Goblins a real run for their money. One of his greetings is most telling, "Ah, scrap th' plan! Just blow somethin up!" He refuses to leave Stormwind unless he has explosives with him, he decides to shorten a plane flight by lighting all his fuel at once, and his method of downing a Horde zeppelin is firing the player out of a cannon onto it, then blowing it up.
• Infamous Unsurprisingly considering it's part of the superhero genre which involves fighting, killing, destruction which often causes explosions.
• Anything and everything explodes in Worms, up to and including the worms themselves.
  • And their graves, too, if you pummel them enough.
• Many, many older video games. Even when explosions aren't appropriate. Usually when boss dies, they send out numerous small explosions. Most bizarre examples include:
  • Moon Crystal where bosses, no matter if pirate captain or fake count.
  • Dinosaur Bosses in some versions of Joe & Mac.
  • The bosses in Adventure Island games, who are animals.

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