Awesomeness Meter

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Strong Bad knows he's awesome. And has a chart to prove it.

Sometimes video games say "Forget realism, let's go for awesome." This video game trope covers all instances where a game gives an award, even if it is just points or the simple spectacle, for creating a showy or flashy death for your enemies, striving to facilitate maximum awesome.

Such games often go to great lengths to allow such spectacles, making huge amounts of ways to kill and often include large numbers of Mooks that function as little more than punching bags to allow this. May be related to Kill Streaks, or enable a Score Multiplier.

Check out the subtrope Idiosyncratic Combo Levels, where the reward is a different name for the length of your combo, which is generally specific and special to the game itself.

Examples of games with some form of Awesomeness Meter

Action Adventure

• Too Human has a combo meter that increases as you kill things in awesome ways. It doubles as mana to power some abilities, making them fueled by the main character's sheer awesomeness. There's also a counter that keeps track of how many times in a row you've hit something, and gives progressively more benefits at higher values.
• Okami has a "Godhood" gauge that increases with consecutive attacks and Traveler's Charms (and decreases by taking damage and running away from battle). The higher the gauge, the more damage Ammy can take before it starts affecting her HP.

Action Game

• Devil May Cry gives its letter grades extended names: D(ull/eadly, etc.), C(ool/arnage, etc.), and so on, up to SSStylish. You build them up by continuously switching your tactics during battle. In the third game a well-placed taunt raises the meter (and changes depending on what rank is displayed).
• Bayonetta ranks you from Stone, Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum to Pure Platinum depending on combo score, how much damage taken, if items were used, if you fought every verse (basically Kill'Em All on the angels), and the number of halos obtained at the end of each chapter.
• MadWorld... oh, merciful mothers. Shoving a tire over someone's torso, ramming a street sign through their neck, and throwing them into a rotating fan is graded Routine. You want a higher score? Stick a couple more street signs through their temple before throwing them so that they take two or three friends with them.
• Each God of War game has a meter that fills up by killing enemies (or, more rarely, collecting gold orbs) and briefly grants Kratos invulnerability when used - Rage of the Gods (God of War), Rage of the Titans (God of War II') and Rage of Sparta (God of War III).

• Using a Demolition Shot in Gungrave: Overdose to take out enemies gives your character the "Jackpot" bonus, which not only affects how many skulls you'll get at the end of the stage/act, but will also refill the Shield and Vitality meters depending on how much Jackpot damage you caused (Ranging from "Cool!" to "Wicked!" to "Awesome!" and so on). Chaining normal attacks ("beats") in both games in rapid succession fills your Demolition Shot Gauge which in turn allows your character to launch an over-the-top, often screen-clearing special attack (which is, the aforementioned Demolition Shot).
• Batman: Arkham Asylum has the Freeform Combat that lets you seamlessly maim and knock down mooks in one free-flowing motion. By the time you're done demolishing 20 mooks in one continuous combo, you'll feel like the Goddamn Batman indeed.
• Viewtiful Joe also grades you on "missions". from D('oh!) to C(rappy!) to B(aaaad!) to A(wesome!), all the way to V(iewtiful!). Your grades on time (how fast you win), defense (how well you avoid getting hit) and V points(how many V points you got by doing combos and collecting medals). Top scores require you to be really stylish by evading attacks, pulling off insane slomo multipliers for your base combos, and doing it all fast. Getting all Vs earns you a Rainbow V ranking for the mission. Getting Rainbow V for all missions the chapter will get you Rainbow V for the Chapter, and getting Rainbow V for every chapter will unlock infinite VFX mode.

Adventure Game

• Strong Bads Cool Game for Attractive People (from Homestar Runner) does this to the title. Getting MAXIMUM AWESOMENESS makes you want to say Guide Dang It.

Beat'Em Up

• God Hand adjusts its Dynamic Difficulty by how well you do in battle. You get a lot more money for defeating foes on Level Die than Level 1.
• Ryu ga Gotoku. Oh man.

Driving Game

• Carmageddon gave an 'Extra Style Bonus!' for spattering a pedestrian with a handbrake turn.
• The Burnout series gives you extra boost points when you chain together dangerous stunts (drafting, near-misses, driving on the wrong side of the road, etc.)
  • Burnout Revenge actually places more importance on being awesome than winning. Each event has five stars available- up to four are awarded for filling the Awesomeness Meter, regardless of placing. Getting a Gold medal simply adds one more star to your haul.
• Project Gotham Racing doles out "Kudos" points, in a manner similar to the Burnout example above.
• Split/Second rewards your awesome driving (drifting, drafting, jumping, and getting way too close to explosions and surviving) with the ability to blow stuff up.

Fighting Game

• The first two Super Smash Bros.. games featured in-game achievements that were awarded after matches for doing certain things, like KOing a certain character with very low damage, taunting after a KO, having a come-from-behind victory, etc, etc. (A full list can be found here.) Taken out of Brawl because of the hair-tearing difficulty of earning all of them.
• Mortal Kombat.
• Marvel vs. Capcom lets you re-enable your controls for a few seconds after winning the match by hitting start as your point totals for the match appear. Just before your character's win quote is displayed, your current character's sprite freezes and flies to the middle of the screen in front of a space-like background. Catching characters in this frozen state in cool-looking poses will make a score bonus appear, with the hardest-to-get frames being worth up to a whopping 50,000 points. Admittedly, the only ones that could probably be pulled off consistently were only worth about 1000, and not all characters had super-huge pose bonuses.
  • The biggest points were awarded for Panty Shots - even the male version (as seen with Jin).

First-Person Shooter

• Soldier of Fortune, according to some.
• In Metroid Prime 3, you get friendship vouchers for killing certain enemies in a certain way, like making aerial Space Pirates have a crash landing.
• A Half Life mod known as The Opera based it's entire score system on awesome. As it was emulating Hong Kong Heroic Bloodshed films, the score that players received for a kill was based on how difficult it was to pull off and how awesome it looked.
  • Example: Shooting someone dead with a pistol while standing still = 200 points. Killing someone with a throwing knife that was thrown in mid-cartwheel = 1300 points.
• Bulletstorm rewards players with Skillshot Points every time they destroy an enemy in an outlandish, brutal way. This is one of the main draws of the game—without Skillshots, there's no way to purchase fresh ammo and weapons.
• The game Unreal Tournament award you with a background voice giving you various titles acording the number of players you have killed before being killed o the number of kills you have done in streak.
• House Of The Dead Overkill has a "Goregasm" mode unlocked by making enough hits in a row without missing, which gives you bonus points and is accompanied by a waving American flag in the background.

Hack and Slash

• Shadow of Rome (for which there's an awesome Let's Play here), has a meter representing crowd satisfaction in Gladiator matches. The higher it is, the better the weaponry the crowd will throw in for you. It goes up if you pull off impressive stunts and provide gory deaths for your foes.
• OneChanbara

MMORPGs

• Cabal Online focuses on its combo system and rewards chaining special attacks with extra experience points. Mooks of the recommended level are usually little more than punching bags to be gathered in vast numbers for longer combos.

Platform Game

• Sonic Adventure 2 added the concept of special bonuses for doing high-speed tricks off of jump ramps, destroying multiple enemies with the Homing Attack without touching the ground, and doing certain fanciful things, like jumping from rail to rail without screwing it up. Every time you did something that would reward a bonus, it would display a word ranking on screen, usually things like COOL or AWESOME; the highest was a rainbow-colored PERFECT.
  • When the bonus was done building and your score was awarded, the character would spout a one-liner in relation to the score. The best would have to be E-123 Omega's "Worthless consumer models!" in Sonic Heroes.
• Mega Man X 8 would reward you with a better score and a flashier attack sequence if you killed a boss with a tag-team attack.

Rhythm Game

• Guitar Hero and Rock Band have an awesome meter in the form of the Star Power meter, which fills as you hit star phrases. Activate Star Power to double your score multiplier!
  • Guitar Hero 5 has another meter that fills based on how well you're fulfilling the requirements for that song's challenge (although whammying as much as possible is not awesome, so this meter is exempt from this trope for those challenges)
• Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan and it's sequel both have the flames of a hot blooded manly cheering spirit rising up behind your troupé if you do good and flawless. They can, on some levels reach the upper screen of the NDS. One mistake though and you will be back to no flames at all.

Role-Playing Game

• The third installment of the Xenosaga series has a system where if an enemy is finished off with a special attack ("Finish Strike" will appear over them), extra skill points, experience, and money is awarded.
• In Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door performing flashy moves during combat fills your star meter faster. Some hammer attacks let you do entirely superfluous triple backflips, complete with confetti.
  • Sort of carried over into the sequel, where shaking the Wiimote after a Goomba Stomp will give you a few extra points.

Simulation Game

• Evil Genius gives you money whenever enemies fall victim to a particularly nasty series of traps.

Sports Game

• Backyard Skateboarding has the Juice Meter, which fills as you do awesome tricks.
• In NBA Jam, getting three baskets in a row will cause the announcer to call out "He's on fire!" - to which your character literally catches on fire and moves faster for a time.

Stealth Based Game

• Manhunt, though "awesomeness" might be not the accurate term in this case.

Tabletop Games

• Exalted gives you bonus dice based on how epic a stunt you describe is, and restores Essence if you succeed.

Third-Person Shooter

• Stranglehold's Style Points, which build up your Tequila Bomb meter and allow you to unleash Tequila Bomb attacks.
• Total Overdose
• Warhammer 40000 Space Marine gives you more Experience Points for headshots, long-ranged kills, revenge kills etc.

Wide Open Sandbox

• The Godfather: The Game has more than 40 different ways to "execute" enemies, including garroting people from behind, faking a traffic accident, and burning people alive in ovens. You get a bonus for completing every single execution and most hit contracts give you extra money for assassinating the target in the specified manner.
• No More Heroes
• Prototype has so many ways to kill Marines, infected, or just plain civilians, it's crazy. Punch a guy's head into pulp? Check. Cut him in half? Check. RIP him in half? Check. Throw a helicopter at another helicopter? Can do. Jump on a helicopter, rip off the door, throw one pilot out and crush the other one's head against cockpit glass? Squish. This game simply revels in the myriad ways you can kill someone and after you're done, it'll tell you exactly how many people you killed and how much damage you did just in case you want to gloat.
• The original Grand Theft Auto gave multiplied your points for killing someone with their own car, killing someone with a flamethrower or if you manipulate a cop into shooting someone. If you killed enough people at once you got a 'Psycho Bastard Bonus!'.
  • And the Gouranga for flattening an entire Hare Krishna procession with your car.
• Saints Row 2 pretty much scores every degenerate act that you can commit with bronze, silver then gold stars appearing next to the name of whatever it is that you were doing. Roof surfing, streaking, flashing, headshots, vehicle stunts, base jumping... the list goes on.
• Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2 have "credits" at the end of a campaign, listing off all the various statistics (accuracies, headshot percentage, fewest times revived, etc.) Although you're not outright GRADED, it can be fun to compare and/or trash talk with friends over who did the best. And of course the final line, "X zombies were killed in the making of this film."
• In the second movie-based Spider-Man game, you had a "style meter", which was depleted when you used Spider Reflexes. You refilled it by doing "cool" things—air tricks, not smacking into buildings, that sort of thing. The more "cool" things you did at once, the higher you refilled it.