Top 10 Most Bizarre Ways to Die in a Video Game

There are a lot of ways to die in video games, that's a fact. There are even a lot of strange ways to die in video games.

We would be willing to bet though, that based upon some of the bizarre ways we have noted in our long term gaming history, that a lot of game studios must have people whose job it is to think up really strange ways to kill the player.

Do you suppose they offer a bonus to the code wizard who can come up with a really messed up killing method? I wouldn't bet against that.

The SuperCheats Bullpen is an exciting place (well, no, not really) that smells like Doritos (true that), and is filled with gamers who pride themselves on their memory and game skills (also true that).

Which is why, when we are batting around ideas for articles, sometimes we group think - and by group think we mean sit around eating Doritos and drinking Vanilla Coke and shouting ideas at each other.

Last Friday the theme of our group think session was “Most bizarre ways to die in a video game” and it is a pity that we can only use ten of them, because as it turns out, there are a LOT of bizarre ways to die in video games!

Once we had our list, we began the process of refining it, eliminating methods that - while bizarre - were not quite as bizarre as the remaining ones. We did this until we got the list down to ten in total, and now we present them to you, with background and in some cases our comments.

Top 10 Most Bizarre Ways to Die in a Video Game

10. Death by Pete (The Walking Dead)

The protagonist in the Walking Dead video game is named Lee, and he is a complex character to be sure.

In Episode Four Lee’s group is in the process of exploring an abandoned school, looking for food and supplies. In the process - naturally - you encounter some Walkers and need to escape by jumping across a rooftop and grabbing the hand of one of your companions. Simple enough, right?

If I might digress for a moment - remember that scene in the first Matrix Movie when Neo has finally been recruited, his connection to the Matrix has been severed, and he has been collected by the crew of the Nebuchadnezzar?

Morpheus takes him into a training program and the two are doing martial arts, when he suddenly decides that Neo is ready for his first test, and calls for the Jump Program? You know, another training program in which you are supposed to jump from one rooftop to the next?

Morpheus runs, jumps, and lands on the other roof. Neo follows but, halfway across, he falls, then bounces off of the concrete below. The crew, observing from the computer monitors, speculate and then, when Neo fails the jump, Cypher says “Everybody fails the first time...”

So back to The Walking Dead - in Part 4 the player is standing on the roof, the woman on the other roof calls him a chicken, and the player runs really fast and jumps - only to fall to their death in bone-cracking stereo!

Why? Because everybody fails that jump the first time. It is so common an experience it is almost a meme - in fact YouTube is full of videos that players have made of their Jump Fails! Because, yeah, nobody has reflexes fast enough to notice the hand being held out, and actually hitting the button.

The reason it makes our list is really simple: it is bizarre. Clearly it was intended to be like that - you were meant to die. Otherwise there would be dialogue like - “Jump and grab my hand!” or something like that. But there isn't.

The theory has been proposed that this sequence is one of the many intended-to-fail “Petes” - in gamer-speak a “Pete” (as in “Repeat”) is a part of a video game in which the game actually sets the player up to fail the first few tries, as a means of stretching the game play time.

The logic - or perhaps justification - for that is actually pretty simple. Game studios commonly mistake game length with game value. That is to say, they assume that the longer a game takes to beat, the more a player will feel they got value for their money.

The problem with that is that most Petes are tedious and annoying. And very few gamers like them. Just saying...

Posted: 1st Oct 2014 by CMBF
Tags:
Xbox 360, PlayStation 3,