The Joys of Torturing Mooks



"Stormtrooper: Where's Bob? Other Stormtrooper: Oh, didn't you hear? Bob's dead. Jedi got 'im. You know those big crates we have downstairs? Stormtrooper: Those are so heavy. Other Stormtrooper: He threw one at Bob. Stormtrooper: Oh man. That's... Other Stormtrooper: I'm not done. Then, this guy pulled a TIE Fighter into the ship from space, through the window, and used it to crush Bob. Then he hit him with a lightsaber, and then he put some lightning on the saber, then... Stormtrooper: Oh, what the fuck."

- Penny Arcade, "A Life of Service", on Star Wars: The Force Unleashed

Or, what happens when What Measure Is a Mook? makes out with Video Game Cruelty Potential. Most Video Games don't flag character actions on the Karma Meter as being evil, as long as they're committed against evil characters. Most cool-looking moves look incredibly painful, and may even have Mooks crying out in agony. Mmm, the sadism.

Now, strictly speaking, you might not be allowed to kill the little buggers, but this is only a minor restriction when player actions include things like audibly breaking your enemy's bones. In other words, even if they're not dead, those pitiful mooks will be in horrible agony for the rest of their lives as a result of your vicious beatdown. Enjoy, sadistic player!

Action Game

 * Okay, so you don't kill people, but Batman: Arkham Asylum has the Caped Crusader getting vicious on henchmen once he's leveled up enough. Throwing henchmen into their buddies, assorted takedowns, and all the ways you can use the gadgets to attack or screw with the henchmen. It gets really obvious in the challenge mode where you can use the upgrades from story mode, and you also have railings over bottomless pits in the beat-em up rooms.
 * Some of the available tactics: Spray explosive paint on the ground and lure inmates into it. Descend from a gargoyle to suspend a hapless inmate by his ankle. Knock out a guy at the top of a ladder, boompaint his pants, then wait for someone to climb up to check on his vital signs. Blow up fragile walls to hit three or four goons with the shrapnel. Sneak up behind someone and knock them unconscious silently. Knock someone over, then grab him by the collar and SLAM his head against the wall. Hold off killing the last goon in an area until he finishes crapping his pants. Good Is Not Nice.
 * Even more fun is waiting til that one last goon is scared shitless, then just hopping down to the floor and following him around for a bit. When he inevitably turns around, instead of attacking you right away, he'll take a moment to freak the hell out first.
 * In Arkham City, using the Disruptor to jam the last henchman's gun, then dropping in front of him and slowly walking over to get him is cruelly satisfying.
 * Some (or heck, almost all) of the instant take-down moves are cringe-inducing. Most of which involves twisting a limb in a direction that it is not supposed to turn in, accompanied by a loud crack.
 * And for those whose tastes run to psychological cruelty as opposed to just physical violence, hours of fun can be had by very slowly picking off a gang of heavily armed psychotic thugs one by one, and listening to them very gradually be reduced from Complete Monsters bragging about the atrocities they've already committed and intend on committing upon the Dark Knight to sniveling little cowards practically wetting themselves in terror over every little noise (bonus points go to the ones who fire off panicked bursts of machine gun fire at targets well away from you) and whimpering about how Batman's out there somewhere and that it's really not fair that that he's planning to beat the living crap out of them. It is so much fun being Batman.
 * Oh, one of the nastiest things is the bone-breaker instant takedown move. Batman seems to have a thing for legs, especially.
 * At one part, you can cut the rope a mook was using to avoid the Joker's gas and let him fall. Though Batman does mention needing to save him.
 * A standard move for taking down a thug involves Batman kneeling over the thug and punching his face very hard. Occasionally, Batman gets flipped around during this animation, and ends up punching the thug very hard in a different, rather more wince inducing area.
 * The same "problem" happens with the other playable characters in Arkham City, leading to either being whacked with a metal pole, clawed by Catwoman, or electrocuted there. *wince*
 * Don't kill people? Well, unless you knock them unconscious and drop them face down in water. Or did you surreptitiously slip them a Bat-Snorkel?
 * In Gunstar Super Heroes, after the fight with Black, you can choose to either exit the level by walking into the beam... or you can choose to stay as long as you please and beat the everloving HELL out of Black, who is on his knees begging for mercy as you waste your fire on him.
 * In the original Gunstar Heroes, Black would try to kill you with an exploding gem after being defeated. You have to shoot him again to make him give up the real one, but he doesn't do so until you stop shooting him; until then, he'll just bounce back forever.
 * And just in case you saw it coming, in the sequel he drops THREE bombs before giving up the gem (on hard mode anyway). This means hitting him four times with your sword is required to progress.
 * The Punisher video game is this trope, allowing you to inflict the Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique on any mook in the game to regain health. Such torture methods range from holding a gun to their face or slamming their head repeatdly against the floor to dangling them over a hungry shark or threatening to impale them with an about-to-charge rhino. It's especially satisfying when you grab a random mook and interrogate him, at first he will try to sound tough and start trash-talking the vigilante, but after some more torture he'll start whimpering and begging for his life. Once you finally break him, it's time to find a kill spot (perhaps that hungry giant snake over there...)
 * Or show a case of The Batman style sparing where no mook is killed but all of them are left in rather cruel torture traps, left at the mercy of whatever deathtrap you placed them in. A Fate Worse Than Death if there is one.
 * Every mook in Bayonetta has at least one Torture Attack (specific brutal attack that you can inflict to increase your combo). The game further encourages you by having you mash a button or turn the control stick in conjunction with the action on screen. The attacks can range from pushing a foe into an iron maiden to the over the top premise of Seeing a platinum medal at the end of a bloodbath really gives incentive to do better, with style.
 * MadWorld basically takes this trope and makes a game around it; if you just kill mooks, you won't get enough points to fight the boss within the time limit, so you'll need to impale them with signposts, throw garbage cans over their heads, impale them on spiked fences, etc.
 * In Target: Terror, you can shoot Mooks in different parts of their bodies and they'll react differently. You can even shoot them in the head enough times to blow their heads off. Shooting them enough with the Shocker special weapon makes them explode. For the record, it only takes one shot to kill a Mook.
 * In Star Wars: The Force Unleashed's gameplay, as quoted above, Penny Arcade notices the particular cruelty potential...
 * The game seems to reward this behavior, especially when you Force Grab some hapless schmuck and toss him into the air, whereupon the camera will shift to follow their terrible trajectory.
 * And in Force Unleashed 2 the game explicitly rewards this behavior. There is an achievement for Force-grabbing a stormtrooper, then impaling him on your lightsaber, then hitting him with Force lightning, and then throwing him to his death. The achievement is even named "Poor Bob".
 * It gets better. There's a part near the end where you can actually grab some stormtroopers and.
 * Lifting a storm trooper, or other suitable enemy off the ground, and placing them in the path of an on coming Fighter. Bonus points if you can have them holding someone. More points if they were just fighting that someone.
 * Why bother fighting the enemy when on occasion you can just pick them up with the force and fling them into laser gates that instantly disintegrate them?
 * Force Gripping a stormtrooper, charging them with Force Lightning, then throwing them, which turns them into a human grenade. Can't get much better than that.
 * On one mission you have
 * It should also be noted that Jawas are apparently light enough that you can send them into orbit.
 * The Deception series gives you several varities of Death Traps to which to subject your hapless victims, among them lumber saws, wall spikes, electrified waterways, poison gas, and falling rocks. Games from Kagero on allow you to combo them together. You'd be surprised what the invaders can live through.

Adventure Game

 * Choice of the Dragon: after defeating your rival Axilmeus, one of the choices for "dealing" with him amounts to
 * In any of the Pokémon games, you can get helpless animals to bite, scratch, burn, electrocute, and do other horrid things to each other. A lot of parodies comment on that.

First-Person Shooter

 * Aliens vs. Predator, a game based around two of the greatest sci-fi movie monsters of all time, is high on Video Game Cruelty Potential of the mook torturing variety. Playing as both the Alien and as the Predator involves large amounts of stalking usually terrified humans and mutilating them in a variety of gornographic and invariably fatal ways, several of which deliberately evoke images of rape. Some of these include:
 * Decapitation involving serrated blades, sharp edges, or simply very firm pulling
 * Cranial puncturing, such as biting through victim's eye sockets or stabbing them in the face with serrated blades or the venomous stinger on an arthropodal tail
 * Destruction of the throat, neck, or lower face, including cutting a victim's throat with serrated blades, snapping through their windpipe with a powerful bite, or variously breaking or crushing their neck or lower jaw
 * And a wide variety of other bodily assaults including stabbing through the abdomen with serrated blades, snapping the spine or removing it from the thorax, and impaling through the thorax and anus, resulting in a gameplay which succeeds by bringing out the Ax Crazy in players.
 * Area 51. One of the aliens is hooked up to an electrical machine. It's possible to fry him so many times he bursts into flame.
 * Halo. The grunts are portrayed as comical, cowardly goofballs, making the act of gunning them down seem, at times, quite sadistic. With the melee attack you can splatter an unlimited amount of purple alien blood onto the floor. A number of opportunities are presented for the character to kill entire roomfuls of aliens in their sleep. Grunts occasionally cry out, "You killed my friend!" during combat. If you stick a plasma grenade to a grunt, it goes running back to the other grunts just in time for the pretty blue fireworks. Extra points for their anguished, terrified wails.
 * Time Splitters Future Perfect featured, in the underground zombie lab level, a testing cell with a zombie inside. The computer next to the cell allowed you to do various fun things to the zombie inside - setting it on fire, electrocuting it, stretching it, squashing it, and so on. Then you go to the next cell, and there's a scientist hiding from the zombies in it, who begs you to let him out... but you can't actually let him out, which only leaves one option...
 * The mutant strapped to the automated operating table a few levels later.
 * Deus Ex uses this trope liberally, to the point that it almost seems like the game is urging you to do this to enemy (and non-enemy) combatants. Aside from killing them, you can injure them enough to have them run around like headless chickens any time they come within eyesight of you, poison them (which accomplishes the same thing - except it makes them faint afterward), snipe one in the head and watch as his teammate loudly freaks out, hack security bots so that they pump thousands of rounds into everyone in the vicinity, cut them down with sentry guns, blow them to giblets with rocket launchers, blind them with pepper spray, drop heavy objects on them, convince other unkillable NPCs to do your work for you by luring the goons into their sights, chuck a couple of grenades into a closed room with an enemy inside (and prevent the door from opening when he tries to run away), etc.
 * One useful thing is to stick proximity mines on the wall near alarm panels, then back off and fire a gun or let the mooks see you. The mooks come after you, take a few shots, and then run to the alarm. The explosion takes out the alarm and the mooks. Kiting in this fashion is extremely useful when facing multiple foes in tight quarters, as any surviving enemies will likely be low on health.
 * Deus Ex Human Revolution has all that and can get even crueler when your enemies include honest cops just trying to do their job.
 * In Left 4 Dead its really fun to kill common infected in numerous methods, Like watching them run heedlessly to a pipe bomb then get blown up with their intestines flying like streamers, burning them with fire and watch them run around in agony, or watch them beat each other up when you slime them with boomer bile.
 * There's also an achievement on bopping a zombie clown's nose to make it honk.
 * Popping heads and shooting their crotches is one of the funnest way to kill zombies.
 * If you want to see the infected run off a building like undead lemmings, play the first map in the Dead Center campaign, go to a ledge outside the hotel, and then throw Boomer Bile to the ground below. Now watch the horde run off the 30 story hotel to their deaths.
 * If you are playing as a Tank, you can get some joy in smashing other zombies by just punching them. Common infected will go flying across the map and special infected will die in a single hit.
 * Interrogation sequences in Splinter Cell Conviction give the player a lot of... creativity.
 * Bulletstorm is entirely about this, forcing you to be creative with your kills each time you see an enemy. Points are required for buying fresh ammo and recharging weapons, and simply shooting enemies to death the standard way will not get you back the cost. Flinging them into the sky, shooting them with a flare to trigger a "Fireworks" skillshot, however, earns you significantly more. This is also encouraged in multiplayer, where you only progress if your entire team works together to finish off enemies as creatively as possible.
 * Borderlands. While using corrosive effects on mooks is fun enough, and shocking them to death has its perks, for sheer torture potential nothing beats good ol' fire. Most gun types have models that set enemies on fire - one character gains the ability to set enemies on fire simply by touching them - and the poor bandits and enemy soldiers react somewhat predictably - dropping what they're doing and screaming "AAAH I'M ON FIRE PUT ME OUT HEEEEELP!". Midgets and other non-verbal enemies will simply scream constantly. Inevitably, if they don't recover from the fire, they'll be completely consumed by the flames, burning up into nothing.
 * And while we're still talking about games beginning with B, BioShock (series). 2k games once held a contest for most inventive kill, (It seems pretty logical that the people working on Bulletstorm were inspired by it) advertising kills such as shooting someone with a rocket spear and having the spear light someone else on fire then explode.
 * Ladies and gentlemen, Brutal Doom:
 * Some weapons can leave low-tier enemies grievously wounded but not dead, like agonizing in the ground with the arm amputated, the guts out. Amputating an enemy's leg, will make it try to crawl away. The player can execute them, or if it has the Berserk Pack, grab and use them as human shields.
 * After the player finds a Berserk Pack and gains Super Strength, it can perform 3rd person executions in a Mortal Kombat Fatality style. In most of these executions, the Marine makes use of unnecessary ways to kill the enemy, to make it die in the most painful way as possible. The most notable examples is the Chaingun Commando execution. In this one, the Marine throws the enemy at the ground, stomps in his back to break his spine, and rip his arms off. This execution actually leaves the enemy still alive, but unable to move anything but his head due his broken spine, and with his arms ripped off, bleeding so much as it screams in anguish and extreme pain. The player can still choose to execute the enemy shooting it's head and put him out of it's misery, or just watch as he bleeds to death.
 * After executing any enemy with said Fatalities, the player will regenerate some lost health. This indicates that the Marine enjoyed the act, became entertained, and got a stress relief.
 * When a player is killed by close range by a Baron of Hell, the beast will grab the player by it's arms, and rip him apart. Even after the player is dead, he will continue ripping him until the torso becomes completely open until the waist.
 * Half-Life 2: setting zombies on fire. Some people find it frightening, others find it hilarious. Other fun things involve letting zombies (or Combine, if they're stupid enough) walk into barnacles, or having a barnacle attempt to eat an explosive barrel after you've set it on fire. There's also a part where you can use a crane to drop shipping containers on hapless Combine troops...
 * Dark Forces 2: Jedi Knight offered plenty of opportunities to pummel Mooks with Force-pulled objects. Or Force Lightning. Or snipe at some poor stormtrooper (or a civilian, if you were gunning for Dark Side points) with the time-delay mode of the railgun and watch them run haplessly around with the a-flashin', a-bleepin' charge stuck on them... Glee! Bonus points if they ran right into a group of their buddies before going "BOOM!".
 * Postal is all about this trope.
 * You can make somebody grievously wounded, and it will crawl away in an attempt to escape. You can keep kicking the person in the face, pissing over, or or jumping in its back. The victim keeps crying and asking Postal Dude to stop while you are doing this. You can also set the victim on fire using Fuel and a lighter, making the whole scene even more sick. With the Apocalypse Weekend expansion, you can amputate one's legs, and in some rare cases, rip it's whole torso, and the poor victim will still try to crawl away, leaving it's guts behind.
 * After chasing a person and beating/shooting it for a long time, if the person gets cornered, he/she will get on it's knees, and beg for mercy.

Platform Game
"Knock enemies to their death, complete with an "Urghh!" sound effect. Punch them into flames in a burning building, instantly killing them. Likewise, knock them into a Laser Hallway; one assumes they are sliced up. Throw them into a running electric current between broken wires. And as Venom, the whole point is to eat your weakened opponents.-"
 * There is a part in the 'It's War!' chapter of the game Conkers Bad Fur Day where you see a fellow squirrel grunt strapped to an electric chair. There are two levers next to the player character. One of them opens the door, and the other fries the grunt. The cutscene that follows when you activate the electric chair is so long that Conker actually gets bored and starts reading a magazine.
 * And at the end of all the torture and anguish, he is still alive, even though his eyeballs are fried out of their sockets.
 * And, to top it off, there's a catch here.
 * Oddly enough, the standard side-scrolling platformer Ultimate Spider-Man for the GBA. You can:


 * And then there's Spider-Man 2 on the PlayStation 2. You have to go out of your way to do it, but it's possible to take a street-level mook, sling him over your shoulder, swing up to the highest building in Manhattan, and just toss him off.
 * There's also hanging a thug from a lamppost for extended punching, drowning thugs in nearby bodies of water, seeing them run over by cars, using physics-defying combos to elevate a thug so high the zoom map has to flip upside down before letting fall, and (my personal favorite) pile drivers off the Empire State Building.
 * Hell, taking advantage of gravity sucking was the easiest way to beat the first Spider-Man movie game's first level. Jump on head, wait until thug runs over to edge, use flip button, laugh maniacally as goon plummets to his death.
 * The Instruction manual for the PS One Spider-man game actually encourages you to do this, "Especially in the furnace room."
 * This is the entire premise of obscure PS 1 action game Wild 9. You're armed with a tractor beam, and you use it to constantly fling enemies into hazards, or each other, or just smash them around on the terrain. Hazards you can use to kill things include: Lasers, bottomless pits, spike pits, fires, giant fans, land mines, electronic highway signs, circular saws, gigantic pistons, and machines that make more mooks.

Puzzle Game
"I don't want to kill you..."
 * Portal... Those poor little robots. It's possible to configure portals so they fall in one and out the other in an infinite loop, shooting wildly in a panic the entire time. You can also sneak up behind them and pick them up, while they scream "Please put me down! Who are you?" in their excessively cute voice.


 * With careful portal placement, you can have a turret shooting itself to death, while it begs itself to stop.
 * The sequel lets you roast them with deadly laser beams.

Role-Playing Game

 * Baten Kaitos: Origins allows players to choose whether certain enemies should be saved or cruelly impaled on their swords (though letting them live opens extra scenes at the end of the game).

Stealth Based Game

 * Metal Gear Solid as a series had several of these but the worst was Metal Gear Solid 2. It allowed you to do plenty of awful stuff, from shooting harmless animals to knocking over then lying on top of to feeling up the The Woobie's sister you're supposed to be rescuing. Although doing those things does piss off your Voice with an Internet Connection along with several other NPCs.
 * And then of course, there's the classic move of delivering anal "surprise sex" to unconscious guards...
 * Jungle Boogie! Get it on.
 * You can even be a sadistic monster to your own player character, at multiple points - in the most egregious example, you're given the opportunity to stand Raiden under a constant stream of urine, if you don't feel like distracting the guard mid-flow, and there's no penalty for doing so. Or you can goad Snake into killing you by running into him enough times.
 * Of course, you can also plant C4 on the backs of unaware guards, and detonate them when appropriate. For bonus points, plant the charges on them while they're busy taking a leak.
 * There's also the potential to make a tranq dart "hedgehog" out of guards, raising the question of at what dose the tranquilizer becomes lethal...
 * Alternatively, it's possible to shoot out the guards walkie-talkies and their limbs. Take out the walkie-talkie, then shoot out both hands and one leg, then just casually walk by and watch as they're too wounded to try and stop you, and unable to call for help, or walk fast enough to get help besides a slow moving limp.
 * Metal Gear Solid 3 had a higher cruelty potential than 2. You could hold a soldier hostage and slit his throat while he begs for mercy, for example. Other ways to mess with them are throw snakes and scorpions on them, feed them rotting/poisonous food, play Predator, and shoot their arms and legs and watch them try to hobble away. Also, knocking Eva unconscious actually makes the last area easier to get across. The games get more cruel every time a new one comes out.
 * In addition, any indirect method of killing guards (such as throwing a poisonous animals on them, electrocution, drowning, food poisoning, setting off the soldiers' own traps or dropping unconscious enemies off cliffs) does not count towards your final "kill" total
 * And in the extension of 3, Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence, you can also throw up on guards to make them freak out.
 * You can kill a man, let a vulture eat him to fatten the vulture up, then kill the vulture and eat it. Doing this results in
 * The Nikita! Remote-controlled Rocket, with a camera you can switch into. So you can not only get to aim one of those babies right into some Mook's (or Boss, if you're REALLY good at working the controls) face, and immediately switch into First-Rocket-View to see the Oh Crap Reaction. BOOM baby! Muwhahhaha!
 * Metal Gear Solid 3 also reverses the trope by inflicting emotional cruelty on the player in its last moments.
 * Try dragging Emma through the bugs in front of the Shell 2 elevator instead of clearing them away for her. Or planting C4 on the ground, putting a magazine over it and detonating the explosive when a guard stops to look at the magazine (even better if they lean down to look at it rather than sit on the ground).
 * The tranq provided some serious cruelty potential. It was generally the best way to take out guards, because if you missed a headshot with a handgun, the enemies would be alerted to your presence, but if you missed a headshot with the tranq, they'd just take a moment longer to fall asleep. And if you shoot and kill a guy, and another guard finds him before you can hide the body, alert mode again. If you tranqed him? Just wakes him up. So it's just much safer to use the tranq than any other gun. However there is still one problem: the guy isn't actually DEAD, so he will wake up eventually and start causing problems for you, and who wants that, right? So you're gonna want to murder him in his sleep. Often the most efficient way of dealing with this in Metal Gear Solid 3 was, after tranqing a guard and dragging him off to some secluded spot, maybe in some tall grass, to take out the hunting knife. Crouch over the guard and go into first person view and carve that poor bastard up until the Z's indicating sleep stop coming off his head—the tranquilizers are thankfully strong enough that he won't wake up screaming as you're stabbing him, because it does take multiple swipes to kill. Particularly disturbing in the heavily fortified areas with few hiding places that appear later in the game, so you end up piling five or more corpses in the same spot.
 * The fourth games gives you the option of frisking enemies. This plays out as a quick time minigame, with icons popping up. Hit the button at the right time, and an item pops out. The last button press is always as Snake's searching the crotch, and pressing the button here makes Snake grab and twist. It's an instant knock out on any male enemies. Of course, it causes Snake to get slapped if he does it to a female enemy.
 * You're forced to go through an extended dialogue if you piss off Rose enough and then contact her to save your game, which includes telling her that "you won't make her save."
 * In one of the very first areas in Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots you get your first chance to try out the thermal vision and end up in a room full to bursting with unconscious wounded friendly units. They had just introduced you to the tactic of knifing unconscious enemies and no one makes a point of telling you not to kill all the helpless people in the room.
 * In Metal Gear Solid 3, upon obtaining the Raikov disguise, you are actually encouraged by the other characters in the game to run around punching people in the face, or stalking scientists, or whatever. Because of the kind of person Raikov is, Snake can get away with it. It's one of the most memorable, satisfying portions of the game.
 * Also in Metal Gear Solid 3, there's so many fun things you can do with TNT. Consider this: Plant a TNT charge on the door of the locker you put Raikov in, then set a Claymore mine in front of it. Get somewhere you can see it, and then trigger the TNT. The locker door (with Raikov on top of it) falls outwards, triggering the Claymore which blows both of them back into the locker. Also, if you have the Invisibility Cloak item "Stealth Camo", try planting TNT on every person in an enclosed area (the Shagohod construction area is ideal) then bringing friends over and taking bets on who explodes next.
 * Metal Gear Solid has one of the worst: in one area, it's infested with wolves. You can shoot them to make it easier to get through. But if you call Otacon first, he'll tell you that those are Sniper Wolf's pets, and that he and she would feed them. Then he begs you not to kill them. Snake's response: "Gimme a break."
 * The End in Metal Gear Solid 3. You can snipe him while he's in his wheelchair so that you never end up having to face him. If you do choose to face him, you can either shoot or capture and eat his parrot, or save and wait an entire week before playing again to find that he dies of old age.
 * If you do decide to take a crack at The End while he's wheelchair-bound
 * Manhunt requires the player to kill his enemies in brutal, bloody, torturous ways. He can hold his attack for a short time, making it even more sadistic.
 * Use a sword on someone. You cut off their head, and can then throw it to distract/scare the shit out of their allies. If you try hard, you can bean them in the head with it.
 * One of the levels requires the player to perform different executions levels with different weapons in order to proceed.
 * As more sadistic the executions are during the game, more points the player earns at the end of a level.
 * The Assassin's Creed series features increasingly brutal and lovingly modeled execution animations with each successive game in the series. The animations vary based on what weapon you're using, whether you're attacking or countering, whether you're on a kill streak, and (out of Open Combat) whether you're in Subtle or High Profile mode. Some of the executions also invoke There Is No Kill Like Overkill, such as hook-stabbing a guy in the back of the head and then shooting him in the face. That's not even counting the other ways to kill mooks, such as poison darts, long-distance crossbow sniping, pushing them into water, throwing them into collapsing scaffolding, or (in Revelations) blowing them up with bombs. This makes for a game series where you are encouraged to seek out random mooks and murder them just for the sheer entertainment factor.
 * It's particularly funny to stab them with the poisoned blade. They'll start flailing around hilariously until they die, without any idea of what got them.
 * The Splinter Cell games give you all sorts of means to do nasty things to the mooks you run across. For instance, you could whistle at a guard so much he starts freaking out, to the point where he may run off screaming. Or, once you are done freaking him out, shoot him with a sticky shocker, watching him convulse before he falls unconscious, carry him over to a nearby railing and throw him over it, watching him fall thirty stories to his death.

Third-Person Shooter

 * Dark Sector. Glaive-Cam view of limb-detachment, decapitation, incineration and electrocution - and of course, the always-impressive 'Finishers'. One of the most frequently-seen of those involves grabbing a guy by the hand that holds his weapon, then cutting off his arm at the elbow, and finally beating his skull in with his own weapon.
 * Psi Ops the Mindgate Conspiracy encourages the player to make his enemies' heads slowly explode. They scream incoherently while being mercilessly tortured and killed. One type of enemy must be set on fire before he can be killed in this manner. And that's just the start of ways to torture the meat puppets:
 * Using Telekinesis to hold them against electrified objects burned them to death.
 * Using TK to drop/Hold them between slowly docking platforms and walls would squish out the organs in a fountain.
 * You could literally burn mooks alive by holding other burned/ing mooks against them long enough.
 * Mind control also let you force them to commit suicide, and not just by jumping off tall structures, but by "eating" their gun. Or get them to shoot their squishy scientist friends, who will shout things like "Why are you doing this? I even made you lunch!"
 * You could also use TK to throw mooks into the medical waste incinerator and hear their anguished screaming.
 * The kicker? The head-asploding power is Psi Drain, your main source of Psi.
 * Jet Force Gemini allows you to collect the severed heads of your foes (and the people you're supposed to be trying to rescue), and gives you rewards for every hundred heads collected. Bug soldiers typically flinch and squeal in pain when shot, so you can slowly shoot them until they die while they are helpless to defend themselves. Also, the Flamethrower and Shocker weapons seem tailor-made for this: neither is very powerful, but setting things on fire or slowly electrocuting them is just so much fun!
 * Gears of War has achievements and an entire multiplayer gametype based around this. Mortally wounded opponents drop to all fours, where they'll either bleed out or be rescued by a teammate. If an enemy gets in melee range of a downed character, he has the option to "execute" that character in hilarious violent ways. Gears of War 3 actually gives each weapon (except the basic pistol) an unlockable, unique execution, in addition to the basic curb stomp. The pre-unlock execution for each weapon (and permanent execution for said pistol) is probably the best example; the human characters punch the skull of their opponent as long as the player keeps tapping Y, gaining bonus XP for doing so, until the character eventually just smashes the downed foe's head like a melon. The Locust version is even worse, having the character rip off his foe's arm and bludgeon him with it. Like the human version, this can continue for up to 30 seconds and the player is rewarded with bonus XP.
 * The "Execution" gametype makes all downed characters invulnerable to bullets, meaning that players must use an execution in order to score a kill.

Turn-Based Strategy

 * Upon a level up spamming method of Final Fantasy Tactics. You can corner an enemy and spam attacks on it to near death, let it heal itself or you heal it, and then repeat the process. Poor yellow chocobo usually falls a victim to this due to its Choco Cure, which cures itself and anyone surrounding it.
 * If you are feeling really evil, corner an enemy with nothing but White Mages and have them whack the enemy to death with staves.
 * The above is a very common level grinding method also seen in Fire Emblem, but it's done with bosses... the term is referred to as Boss Abuse. The fourth game had a particularly cruel way of doing this, thru use of Broken Weapons. (Notable:... in the fourth game, if you were to trap two Healers and attempt to abuse them? They won't heal each other.)

Wide Open Sandbox

 * Destroy All Humans! allows you to telekinetically toss people around like ragdolls, smack them into walls, floors and each other, and continue to do this to their corpse after they die. You can also forcibly brainwash and then take over their bodies, the process of which slowly kills them.
 * And there is the joy of having some actual mook ('cause they live longer than common townsfolk), stuck in the floor, some glitch that happens in DAH 2, you can push them, pull them, and they will remain stuck, in which looks like excruciating pain, for as long as you have them in TK grasp. You just have to drag them all over the floor for a bit until you find the right spot. You can even hit them with cars while stuck, if you're fast enough to do it before they unstuck themselves by getting up.
 * Also, there is nothing more cathartic than slamming ninjas against the floor, then electrocuting them while they're down, that'll teach them to stay put, the nimble bastards.
 * And drown them! You can hold someone under the water with telekinesis and them will eventually die. And then there's the zombie gun...
 * And how could we have forgotten about the ANAL PROBE? The anal probe that shoots a burst of sizzling green fluid up the unsuspecting arse of a human being, who then goes dashing off, unable to stop crapping himself until his brain explodes?
 * The training level commands you to kill cows with telekinesis. It is possible to beat one cow to death with another cow.
 * Fly over the crowd, abduct them and close the hatch as they shoot towards the saucer. A successful "Tonk" is ever so satisfying.
 * The Dislocator, which fires fluorescent disks of energy that bounce people around like rubber balls, fun times ensue when the disk tries to force its way through a mesh fence, with the human still attached.
 * Oh, and the brain extraction. Just jump on some house's roof, wait for it to be surrounded with policemen, MI Bs and Soldiers, then begin the head popping.
 * Jaws Unleashed has this in spades, primarily because you play as the shark. Chomp on a scuba diver and rocket through the water at blinding speed while he's helplessly stuck and screaming in terror...then tear him to bloody bits. They're using shark cages against you? Smash them open, then brutalize the divers inside. Now they're in boats? Leap out of the water, arcing high above the boat, and bodyslam it into splinters, sending the screaming occupants flying in all directions. Grab hapless swimmers, get up to a good swimming speed, then launch them through the air to splatter dozens of yards inland.
 * Thanks to the grappling hook, Just Cause 2 has plenty of chances for this. Want to end a car chase early by hooking the front of the chasing car to the road, making it flip over? Or hook the driver to the ground, yanking him out of the car at 100 kph? Hang a mook from the ceiling and beat him to death like a pinata? Attach a mook to the back of a car and drag him along with you at high speeds? Attach him to a jumbo jet, planesurf the jet into a military base, and parachute away just before the plane crashes into all the other mooks and explosive fuel tanks? All these are possible, and some of them even give you achievements.
 * If you feel like adding (further) insult to injury, you can kill mooks using only the grapple, either by hooking the mook towards the edge of a skyscraper so he falls to his death, hooking him into the ground in front of him so he gets catapulted into the ground, or by hooking one mook to another mook and smashing them into each other. When that gets boring, you can go back to hooking mooks to gas tanks and detonating them.
 * If you're on a skyscraper, you can hook a mook onto an elevator, and watch as they go soaring into the big blue. From here, you have several options. You can undo the hook and watch them fall all the way back to the ground, you can let them bounce off the walls of the building as they go skyward, or you can hook them onto an elevator going down, and watch as the elevator pulls them helplessly down to their doom.
 * Prototype. Good Lord, Prototype. One of your standard moves, unlocked from the very start of the game, is a one-hit kill which involves pulverising anyone soldier you've got your hands on into tiny bits of flesh, which you then absorb in order to regain health. If that doesn't take your fancy, you can just run up to the top of any skyscraper in the city, gripping the poor unfortunate soul you've just grabbed by the face, dangle him over the edge for a while, then hurl him full pelt into the skyscraper opposite, all for the pleasure of watching his corpse ragdoll down to the streets below. Or if that sounds too convoluted, you can slice him in half with the Claw ability, or mulch them with burning helicopter, or drive a tank over him and everyone else behind them on the street, or...well, there's a lot to do. Nor is it limited to enemies.
 * If you ever get bored in Red Dead Redemption, all you have to do is ride around a bit. You're bound to run into somebody to torture. If you see those two random guys out in the middle of nowhere with what looks like a pile of TNT, just shoot in their general direction and watch the ragdolls fly. There's of course the general "shoot them in the limbs until they die" way of torturing, but then again, you could always lasso them and THEN shoot at their feet until they don't HAVE feet anymore! Or equip the Evans Repeater, go into Deadeye, and paint all 22 marks on their bodies and watch them jerk around as you pump lead into them so fast they do backflips. Lasso twenty men and put them on the traintracks! Lasso a guy(or gal) and drag them around behind you until they snap their necks! Or drag them into wolf or cougar-infested territory, and feed them to the animals! Lasso them, then set them on fire! Blow them up! Trample them with your horse! The possibilities are endless!
 * In Minecraft, a popular recreation method of gathering resources is to find or make a region where enemies will spawn in great numbers, then direct them by way of water flows and/or standing nearby to their death by drowning, lava, or gravity. Illustrated.
 * Creative mode and a Fishing Rod can let you send mobs flying high into the sky and plummet back down with a bone crunching sound effect on impact. Since Creative mode can let you fly at will, you can use the Fishing Rod to hook a mob to, fly high enough in the air (too much distance will break the line), and then reel the mob towards you. This will launch the mob upwards and fall back down to the ground. Won't work on mobs that float, like Chickens and Ghasts, and Slimes/Magma Cubs are immune to fall damage. You can still abuse gravity on mobs with the Fishing Rod in Survival mode, but you need to be on a cliff while the mob is below you.
 * Scarface the World Is Yours. Killing a drug dealer? Much badness. Blowing out his knee and having your driver finish him off? You get his cash and drugs and no punishment. Also, in many cut scenes Tony agrees to scare a mook but not kill him. However, severe beatings will be handed out. Finally, shooting an enemy is all well and good but wounding and taunting before killing? Provides much needed bonuses. Bonus finally; sometimes the enemies will be so focused on getting Tony they will not notice the oncoming truck...or trigger-happy police officer.
 * In Famous actually has a list of things to do, ranging from Goomba Stomping packs of enemies to shocking them while in the air to sticking grenades to them (which causes them to scream and brush desperately at the grenade) to knocking them into pits of water and electrocuting them...they love this so much that torturing mooks gets you trophies.
 * Saints Row, and how. One standard and effective melee attack in the third game is a thoroughly animated Groin Attack, and that's just for the uninventive.

MMORPGs

 * City of Heroes / City of Villains has several powersets, most notably the Mind Control set, that allow you to Confuse enemies, making them turn on their allies. By Confusing two enemies, you can force them to fight each other to the death. Even if you're a hero.

Tabletop Games

 * While this is not explicitly a part of 7th Sea, battles with Brutes often go this way. Brute squads are One-Hit-Point Wonder groups of up to six basic mooks. Game mechanics allow players to defeat up to six of them per action. 7th Sea also encourages the GM to reward players with "Drama Dice" (extra dice that can be used to improve a role or hoarded for bonus XP) for good roleplaying and spectacular descriptions. You can see where this is going.