and what would that accomplish..?

[Unia]

In at least one of the older Tomb Raider games (#3 iirc), when you held the walk button while vaulting to a ledge Lara would do a handstand rather than simply climb up. I could not for the life of me think of a practical application to that stunt. I assume it was just fan service.

In many of the 2D Worms games there was a move called prod, which did just that. You crawled next to someone and poked them. It might move them back a tiny bit if even that. Turn well spent!

Can you think of other examples of moves with no clear purpose to exist? Want to explain why they totally have a use? Do tell!

 

[Unia]

In many of the 2D Worms games there was a move called prod, which did just that. You crawled next to someone and poked them. It might move them back a tiny bit if even that. Turn well spent!

I used that so often to push people into the water! It's like knifing snipers in a FPS. You could just shoot them, but knifing/prodding them is just so much more humiliating...

I prefered the baseball bat for the fanfare . Not to mention prod might fail if there was a tiny bumb in the landscape.

 

[Erana]

Its been years, but I believe that the handstand did something to do with jumping... I think my dad would use it to align himself parallel to an edge before executing a close jump.
But he was realllly bad at video games, so he may have done it accident a lot, too.

But Lara just thinks she's a circus.

 

[Scrustle]

The point of the prod is pretty obvious. It's the ultimate taunt! And it's hilarious! Like Danyal says, there's nothing sweeter than to foil someone's carefully thought out tactics and trajectory by simply giving them a little poke into a watery grave. One of my favourite weapons in the game.

 

[FalloutJack]

Shit, man. I can't think of any reason for Topman to exist in Megaman 3. His power is entirely useless until Gamma, and it's entirely stupid that that even WORKS.

 

[zerohour1974]

It was like killing people with the spiked gauntlets gave you a Humilation award in Quake III. It was totally pointless but fun if you managed to pull it off.

 

[Pink Gregory]

Climbable archer towers in Dynasty Warriors 7; no archers are ever atop them, and the omnipresent bow of the earlier games is no longer present.

But there are still climbable archer towers, no function in the gameplay whatsoever.

 

[DoPo]

In many of the 2D Worms games there was a move called prod, which did just that. You crawled next to someone and poked them. It might move them back a tiny bit if even that. Turn well spent!

Yup, as other people said, prod can be useful. Push somebody on a mine/over a ledge/in the water. Sure, you can do the same with a baseball bat or a shotgun or whatever but 1. sometimes you are out of ammunition or you'll want to conserve them. 2. sometimes, prod is the best thing yo use - everything else will push the worm too far 3. It's just the most humiliating.

Arguing prod is "useless" is like saying the battleaxe is a waste of space, because a shotgun does the same if not more or that a mine is a unneeded, since the grenade is better. Situations matter.

Other than that, in Guilty Gear X Faust has a move in which he stands on top of his giant scalpel, which unlocks other moves instead of the regular attacks. One of them is him sprouting a flower from his head.That's it - several attacks and a flower from the head. I haven't played enough, but I think it does no damage at all. The only purpose I can think of is to remain on the scalpel a bit more.