Even “Game Over” Can be Entertaining: Great Moments in Game Death

GamesRadar has posted a cool article called “Unforgettable Scenes of Gaming Death.” It’s essentially a list of some games that had particularly memorable sequences for when your character died. It’s a pretty comprehensive list too, including game deaths that range from the classic (Metal Gear Solid’s “Snaaaaake!” death) to the humourous (Final Fight’s Hagar trying to blow out the dynamite fuse) to the downright weird (a girl in Night Trap getting a drill in the neck). But as with most lists of this nature, I started reading it with a few of my own favorite “Game Over” seqeunces in mind, which didn’t show up. So put together a list of my own — an expansion, if you will — of great moments in gaming death:

Fallout 1 and 2

I have a particular fondess for “Game Over” sequences that make you feel like you really screwed up big time. When I describe my favorite game deaths, the first one that pops to mind (well, after Metal Gear Solid’s classic deaths) is the Fallout death screen. If you die in the game — which is a gruesome affair by itself usually — you’re then treated to a screen of a skeleton wearing the shreds of your character’s clothing, while a voice over informs you that “Your bones are scraped clean by the desolate wind. Your Vault will now surely die, as you have,” or “The radiation has taken its toll. Your death was lingering and extremely painful. Your adventure is done.” Ouch. Fallout 2 has even more lines that straight up tell you that your failure has ensured the death of all mankind. Talk about rubbing it in.

You can also check out more Fallout death messages at this wiki page.

Tenchu

Before the series started to show its age the way a piece of fruit will show its age when left in a cave for two weeks, Tenchu offered up some death sequences that informed you of your failure through poignant poems. When Rikimaru bit the ninja star, the screen faded to black and displayed this:

“Darkness covers all I see and all I touch
No feeling of pain just sorrow
My hand loses grip of the sword I held
and I turn to become a true shadow”

Yeah, they were pretty much emo before emo existed. At least it gave you an extra incentive to not die, lest you have to see that again. When female ninja, Ayame, died however, it seems the developers gave up on the whole poem thing, but still wanted to send you a message:

Yep, you screw up, and your life is meaningless. Ouch.

Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story

This SNES/Genesis/Jaguar game may not have been all that great — just a series of fights that vaguely followed the movie — but when you used up all your lives, you were given one last chance for reincarnation. In the movie, Bruce Lee’s inner demons were represented by a scary samurai warrior. In the game, once you lost your last life, the hulking samurai appeared for you to fight. If you won, you got your lives back. It was a pretty cool deal with one major catch: the samurai was ridiculously hard. I never got far in the game, but I’ve been told the samurai was actually harder to beat than even the final boss.

Pretty Much Any Online FPS with Ragdoll Physics

In my opinion, ragdoll physics have revolutionized online shooters. From Counter-Strike: Source to Halo 3, more and more games have incorporated these physics to enhance the realism of the games some. It doesn’t always turn out looking all that realistic, but it does ensure that you go out in style. I’m annoyed when I die in an online match, but whenever I go out in a particularly ridiculous way, it takes away some of the sting. The other day on Halo 3, due to a poorly timed jump right over an enemy, I took a gravity hammer hit to the crotch and watched my character fly about a mile straight up. I was literally airborne for several seconds. I didn’t even care at that moment that I had just died; I just enjoyed watching myself sail trhough the air in a comical fashion. Same goes for Counter-Strike and the numerous times I’ve watched my corpse collapse and then roll down a flight of stairs.