Topical Tuesday: In-Game Death

[SilentHunter7]

Way back in 2001, me and my cousin were pulling an all-nighter playing co-op Halo. We were playing on the library level, and we were coming across the flood carriers (for those not in the know, they're big fat enemies that explode). Now an interesting glitch in the game caused the carriers to be effectively immortal. Once they got enough damage they'd just fall over and explode, but otherwise they won't die until they hit the ground and pop. Well my cousin fired a rocket at a group of them, and the explosion sent them flying.

Now the sight of 500 pound blobs flying is amusing enough. But what really made this memorable was what happened later. One of them went flying right into me. I couldn't back away because I was in a corner at the time. So the thing explodes right in my face. Now normally all that would do is just take your shields down. But I happened to be standing on a weapon cache. The explosion cooked off a handful of grenades, and the grenades cooked off the 8 grenades I dropped upon dying. Thanks to a pre-Havok physics engine, the resultant explosion sent my body flying down the hall at Mach 3. It happened so fast and so unexpectedly that we couldn't help but bust out laughing. I was literally in tears.

About 3 minutes after re-spawning we found my battered corpse hanging from some architecture on the ceiling. Cue even more riotous laughter. That was about 10 years ago, and it's still one of the most hysterical things I've ever had happen in a game.

I've died a lot of weird ways in many games over the years, but that one takes the cake. I only wish Bungie had recordable replays back then.

 

[Pist0l 07]

I have another halo death. I was playing co-op with my friend on two betrayals and at this point we both had banshees. I was speeding towards the next point in the level which involves going through a tunnel with some flood, one of which has a rocket launcher. He told me not to go in because of the rocket flood, but I ignored him, turned the corner and bam! rocket to the face as if he had already fired before I turned the corner. So my friend strarts to fly up this plateau so I can spawn and grab another banshee. Literally a meter before he reachs the top of the plateau, his banshee scraps the cliff face, I spawn on his banshee and for no reason he is kicked out and we both fell to our death. 5 seconds later the banshee hits our corpses all three prongs sticking straight into the ground and our squishy corpses. We laughed for several minutes afterwords.

 

[Fensfield]

Dark Void. Don't engage flight mode in an enclosed space, however much you think you can make it.

 

[Oliver Pink]

Mine was a Team Fortress 2 demise... and it was an epic moment for the enemy in question. I was playing as a Heavy, and had just been Kritz'd. I waltzed out, spraying death into the enemy - and then I saw an enemy Spy coming at me from the side, so I turned to obliterate him. He jumped Over my stream of bullets, landing on a tiny boulder on the floor - JUST high enough to let him leap Onto my head and head-stab me, killing me in one shot.

Treacherous rogue.

 

[X10J]

Quite a few from MW2 alone.

Karachi - My target runs in front of me I open up with my supressed pp2000, weakening him, he turns a corner, I follow just in time for him to see a randomly thrown semtex stick to my face and explode.

Crash - Guy brushes into me doesn't even notice, I lunge with my knife but come up short, he still doesn't notice, guys an idiot (apparently), he runs into a building I lunge with my knife only to be killed by his claymore.

 

[runedeadthA]

Two moments for me, 1 MP, 1 SP.

For SP it happened yesterday I was playing Crysis warhead and came out of a cave where a alien mecha picks up and APC and throws it at you, I narrowly dodge and then for some reason I get hit with a random rocket (still no idea where it came from). Anyway, I re-spawn and decide to hide in the cave just to easily dodge the flying APC. Sure enough it gets thrown at the cave and bounces odd the low entrance, HOWEVER it then bangs into a pile of ammo crates and sends one bouncing into the cave, and *smack* right between the eyes.

MP was in Bad company 2, it was more a series of deaths. One sniper had managed to get close to our base and was hiding in a crater (with nearby smoke semi-obscuring it. Atacama -Rush btw) and by himself he managed to hold off our WHOLE team for more than 10 minutes. Amazingly none of our vehicles bothered with him, they just went off and got slaughter because they had no backup. But this sniper had a perfect view of our bumbling infantry as we crested the ridge of our base, taking us down one by one.
Then I Carl-Gustav'd the bastard.

 

[adam5396]

Anytime in L4D or L4D2's Versus when the enemy gets us all at once. Just knowing that the people on the other end are actually talking to each other and thinking about how to take us down is just, good.

However, for specific moments. It would have to be in any GMod TTT game. Basiclly, some player become traitors and have to kill the normal people without them finding out. BUt if the traitors convince you that everyone is still alive. (You need to search the bodies to add them ot the list of dead people) It can be a great moment when you get backstabbed because the 3 people you thought were ok were all actually traitors.

 

[CronoDAS]

Anyone here ever played Nethack? It's hard to top Nethack for crazy deaths.

There's even a song about it! [http://www.thefump.com/lyrics.php?id=93]

Skippy sank in lava, Corwin turned to slime,
They could both see what was coming but they couldn't pray in time.
Pinky fought a soldier ant that crawled out of his backpack
They were all in love with dyin', they were doing it in NetHack.
Bertha swung Mjollnir like a Valkyrie in the rain
Then she lost her mind in Sokoban; a flayer ate her brain.
They were all in love with dyin', usin' every keyboard function,
As they tried to find the Amulet, somewhere in the dungeon.

I don't mind the text sometimes, the images it shows.
Running from the Ds and Ls, and killing all the Os.
Faded prints and subtle hints and fortune cookie lies.
You never ID all your stuff, until your @ sign dies.

In NetHack, you play an @ symbol in a randomly-generated dungeon, fighting every vicious letter of the alphabet, upper AND lower case. And several very nasty punctuation marks.

Some will die in hot pursuit, fleeing from a shop,
Some will eat a rubber hose, wielded by a Kop.
Some will stand there paralyzed,
Some will go down punchin'
As they try to find the Amulet, somewhere in the dungeon.

I don't mind the text sometimes, the images it shows.
Running from the Ds and Ls, and killing all the Os.
Faded prints and subtle hints and fortune cookie lies.
You never ID all your stuff, until your @ sign dies.

I've played since the eighties! I've seen more dungeons than Torquemada! I've killed more explorers than malaria! I've kicked in more doors than the LAPD and I've opened more chests than a M*A*S*H unit! Crom help me, I have ascended a Tourist.

Arthur tamed a jabberwock but died when it went feral.
Zack wielded a cockatrice, he fell down in a stairwell.
Theseus was butchered when he misspelled 'Elbereth,'
Carmen ate Medusa, yet another stupid death.
Chauncey fought the Oracle, he knew that it was chancey,
Cause you ASCII stupid question and you'll get a stupid ANSI.
They were all in love with dyin', they were perilously plungin'
As they tried to find the Amulet, somewhere in the dungeon.

I don't mind the text sometimes, the images it shows.
Running from the Ds and Ls, and killing all the Os.
Faded prints and subtle hints and fortune cookie lies.
You never ID all your stuff, until your @ sign dies.

You eat the fortune cookie.
There is a scrap of paper inside.
It says, "You will choke to death on a fortune cookie."
Identify your possessions? Y/N

 

[The Journey]

Best for me in recent memory would have to be a moment in Battlefield Bad Company 2, playing rush on... some map, I am terrible with names. A jungle map.

After dying on the enemy defenses once again, me and my squad mates (a small group of four of us, conveniently) decided to hang back and fly a C4 laden UAV into the objective. Three of us had C4 and were standing around sticking it on the UAV, enough to blow up two or three objectives after a few seconds.

Then suddenly out of nowhere an RPG hits me in the face and detonates all of our C4 and the UAV and killing all of us in one fell swoop. We were all stunned for a moment before roaring with laughter at the ridiculousness of it all.

We then hunted down all the engineers on the opposing team before we lost the match.

Good times!

 

[MeTheMe]

I think my favorite death came not from an FPS, but from Super Smash Brothers Brawl. I was MetaKnight and my brother was Pit. He knocked me off the platform we were on, and made my way back. I was juuust short of the edge, so I start my horizontal drill attack right at him. He uses his shield to reflect it, and cause to drill right off into my own death!

 

[Kazasu]

My best death.. Is probably when I was playing a spy for tf2 on a map which I don't remember the name of. It was capture the intel.

Long story short, I make an impossible jump, kill a scout mid air, get called out as a hacker, then die a horrible horrible death due to fall damage.

This is why you be sure to check if you have 10 health before jumping into the faces of scouts and side stabbing them.

 

[chowderface]

Lies. All lies. Clearly I'm the only one who remembers how it all went down.

I was doing a Let's Play of The Sims 2 on a friend's forum (they've since switched to a different service, so I'm not sure you'd be able to find it, but if you can, it had some good moments); thusly, all the PCs were based on members of the thread. It was in the college expansion, right after a final exam. Completely on a whim, I decided it was time for a streaker party, so I ordered all the characters to strip down and run around like loons (no really. There's a "streak" option when they go to college). This they did, and after showing off their nethers to some of their dormmates, they found better things to do. Except for one, which I lost track of for a bit-when I found her again, nine game-hours later, she was still going. Her hunger stat was completely in the red, if she didn't get something to eat, and fast, she was done for. Her AI noticed this, and put it's clothes back on to go get some dinner. She grabbed a bowl of macaroni and cheese, sat down at the table, and then STOOD UP AGAIN so that she could fall over and die of starvation. No one came to her rescue, so in her place was a funeral urn (which the game told me I could sell for about $150. So much for the value of human life).

This isn't the end of the story. That's right. My best death is, in fact, more than one death.

Anyone who's played the Sims games knows that if you keep the urn/headstone that appears after someone dies, after a couple of days the dead Sim's ghost will start to haunt the building it's gravesite is in. This happened per usual. As I'm going about my LP business, I notice something odd going on upstairs. It's the ghost, and she's leapt out and scared one of the other players. Scared him to death, in fact. Remembering the lack of response to the ghost's death, this time someone is ordered to save him; they win the gamble, Death is disappointed, and he comes back to life. And I venture off elsewhere to see what other shenanigans are going on. When suddenly his portrait disappears from the lineup again. The ghost scared him to death again.

 

[Azure Sky]

A singleplayer moment:

Fighting the final (secret) boss of Cave Story, the enemy is initially in human(oid) form. His attack pattern isn't too complex, but a bit of a nightmare if it's the first time you've got there. I narrowly beat it, and he staggers, then flies up off the top of the screen.

SMAAAASH, down he comes again, this time as a giant, monstrous, grinning sphere. Right on top of my head. "You have died. Do you want to try again?" I think my jaw physically dropped there and then, and my hands went limp, dropping the controller to my lap. Just too ridiculous to handle at that moment - it comes after a solid 5/10 minute Platform Hell experience, INCLUDING another boss, without any save points! Essentially, I was awed by the designer's amazingly cheap shot that I should've seen coming.

Omg that boss is a nightmare.
To think he has TWO MORE FORMS after that one.

Man Cave Story is win, Hard as hell, but win.

[Edit] It seems I fail at quoting today...

 

[SecretSmoke]

This one isn't actually *mine* but one I saw. I was watching my lil' brother play COD: MW, which I enjoyed doing because he was just so damn *good* at FPS's. He was playing in a desert level (go figure) and one of the spots in the level was a large brownish brick building that had an exposed rooftop, with stairs leading up to it. He had placed C4 at a few points on the stairs, and was using the spot to snipe. As he was firing, he heard an enemy come, and looked up to see a guy do a SPINNING JUMP and knife him directly in the face. We sat there and watched the kill cam, both of us saying "what the fuck was that?" in hushed tones, as if we had just witnessed some kind of miracle, he wasn't even mad that he had died lmao

 

[monalith]

in ARMA2 (the Bohemia one) while i was playing multiplayer i fired a SMAW at an approaching black shark helicopter. i managed to hit it and the damn thing crashed on top of me, many lols were had on both teams.

 

[Sentox6]

Resident Evil 4. Getting my head chainsawed off for the first time. It was a real "whoa..." moment.

 

[diego_2112]

I'm going to have to say in the HALO: Reach BETA, I was in the level with the bridges (I cant remember the name of it), running for the grav lift, got assassinated RIGHT as I got to the grav lift, and my body just floated up and down the lift for about 90-120 seconds. It was epic!

I THINK I have the video in my fileshare... Never can remember this stuff. Ah well.

 

[Estarc]

My most memorable death occurred in Resistance: Fall of Man for PlayStation 3. My best friend and I were playing the split-screen co-op campaign, a feature I wish more games had. During one portion of the game, as we were fighting our way up through the debris laden streets, I stopped to take cover behind a solid concrete barrier while my health regenerated. The concrete faithfully protected me from our enemies plasma bullets and hedgehog grenades. So one enterprising Chimera ran up to the other side of the concrete, and hit me with the butt of his gun THROUGH the damn wall! I died instantly, and my friend and I sat there mouthing "What the fuck?" and laughing. It was hilarious and awesome.