Cruel Player Character God: Difference between revisions
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{{trope}}
[[File:
A subtrope of [[Video Game Cruelty Potential]], this deals with games where the unseen God-like player character can manipulate the in-game universe in such a manner that those little digital souls suffer as much as virtually possible.
{{examples}}
* The Nintendo DS game ''[[Looney Tunes]]: [[Duck Amuck]]'' has the player commit all kinds of mischief on poor Daffy.Though they can "win" his mini-games, it is sometimes much more satisfying to make him utterly (and painfully) fail.
* ''[[Jurassic Park|Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis]]'' is a goldmine for this trope. The player can create large parks, then unleash the dinosaurs, which will eat the tourists. The player can also prevent the park from getting shut down by turning on the emergency siren; as long as the alarm is sounded, the game does not fault you for tourist casualties. Removing the emergency shelters makes it so the tourists have no way of escaping, and [[Too Dumb to Live|casualties don't stop more tourists from coming]].
* ''[[The Sims]]''. While it's perfectly possible to play the game as the "everyday life simulator" that Will Wright intended, and many do indeed play it this way, other players delight in warping the world around their Sims in order to kill them in the most creative ways possible (wall them into a small area and watch them slowly starve, take the ladder out of a pool while they're swimming and make them tread water until they get tired and drown, etc.). [http://www.cracked.com/blog/exploring-the-mysteries-of-the-mind-with-the-sims-3/ Still other players go for "terrifyingly insane".]
** ''[[The Sims 2]]'' [[Lampshade Hanging|lampshades]] the favourite murder method of most Sims-classic players. The Broke family in Pleasantville is fatherless, having lost Mr. Broke to "a suspicious pool ladder accident".
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*** There's a [http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,6720.0.html mod] available to let [[Zombie Apocalypse|zombies spread]] as well.
*** If you kill off all the Sims in a household, the game will remind you that it it is a '''life simulator''', not a '''death simulator'''.
** This [[Real Trailer, Fake Movie|trailer]] for [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMXME2pm83c The Sims] shows how [[Deconstruction|horrible]] this would be in real life.
** ''[[
* ''SimCity 2000'' allowed the player to toggle as many disasters as he wanted; great fun could be had by loading up a pre-made city (such as, say, New York), triggering a couple of fires, and watching a massive firestorm build up and consume all in its path.
** It also had a cruelty-related [[Easter Egg]]. Once you have an airport, planes and choppers will fly around the city, often punctuated with "Sim Copter One Reporting Heavy Traffic!" But by using the Zoom function (which looks like a crosshair) on the chopper, the speech would change to "I'm hit! Mayday! Mayday!" and the chopper would crash.
*** In addition ''[[
**** Put several nuke plants in your city, make them [[Going Critical|go Chernobyl]], and watch as the entire population dies from radiation poisoning.
* This is one of few joys of playing ''SimCopter''; get an Apache helicopter (through either a cheat code or just an Air Force base) and blow up the nuclear plant, reducing most of the city to ash and ruins.
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* In ''SimEarth'', the player is given control over a number of ecological and biological factors, ostensibly to allow him to build the ideal world for life and, ultimately, civilization to evolve. However some people prefer to load up a preexisting world (such as the Earth 2000 scenario) and, for instance, trigger a new Ice Age or obliterate North America with cataclysmic asteroids.
* ''SimLife'' came with a mission where the pre-existing plant life had been hacked to look like buildings in a large city. Your stated goal? Create [[Godzilla]].
* ''[[
** Even better, you can feed your enemy's babies to ant lions. You can also completely surround the enemy queen with rocks and she'll slowly starve to death. There's also a setting that allows ants and the spider to talk. If you get a mob of ants to go after a spider, you can watch it freak out.
* In ''Sid Meier's SimGolf'', why build a nice green fairway between the tee and the hole when you could build a giant sand trap, [[media:simgolf-
* Both ''[[Black and White]]'' and its sequel allow for a considerable amount of cruelty, as the player is a literal god. Mortals can be violently thrown, telekinetically battered, or dropped into the sea. While Fire and Bolt miracles are the most obviously violent, even Water can be used sadistically against your own mortals, or opposing factions. Many objects can be ignited and used as projectiles. Additionally, humans can be sacrificed, and torture chambers can be constructed.
** The fact that your people are [[Too Dumb to Live]] makes this a popular approach.
** Then there's your pet, which is Kaiju-sized and has some pretty nifty AI routines which let you encourage it to behave in certain ways. It doesn't just learn from your actions, it learns from your [[Karma Meter]]. That's right, you can turn it evil.
*** Take a Cow as your pet demigod creature. Tie it to a tree. [[Kick the Dog|Thrash it mercilessly.]] Force-feed it human subjects, until it starts to like the taste of meat. Set people and trees on fire while it watches, and throw them at targets; this teaches it to do the same. You now have a firey, angry cow deathgod that eats people, chucks burning corpses at its enemies, and is scared shitless of your dark hand.
** There's even a strategy, in the official guide, that's pure twisted cruelty. On the second land, there's a village with a poisoned food supply that's slowly killing everyone. You can convert the village by removing the poisoned food and replacing it with something fresh. The game expects you to just throw the tainted food away, but you can hang onto it and kill off enemy villages, leaving the buildings free for your people to move in. Of course, this is a strategy for evil gods only.
** There's also one particular villager who can't be killed, so you can throw him around to your heart's content (though you never get to permanently end his irritating existence).
*** Oh yes you can, though to do it, if you have any semblance of a heart (Which, considering half the people read this page for ideas, you don't) you'll wish you hadn't. {{spoiler|Sacrificing him to a mana alter results in his death cries and a small bonus to your mana. You jerk.}}
* Since the ''[[Spore]]'' Creature Creator's release, thousands of videos on [[YouTube]] have been cropping up of horrible, useless creatures made in Spore. Such as the delightful [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnHI_CkK27o "The Depressing Stick."]
** In addition to the comic shown above, [[VG Cats|Leo]] [http://www.vgcats.com/comics/?strip_id=198 has "fun" playing] ''[[Spore]]''.
* ''[[Creatures]]'' may be second only to ''[[The Sims]]'' in pure, unadulterated cruelty potential. For the uninitiated, it's a game where you raise and take care of a collection of cute, cuddly little creatures called Norns, Ettins, and
** The "deadly disease turns them near immortal" variant was actually used in an official (buyable) breed: the Toxic Norns. On the flip side, these critters were harmed by medicines and by ''not'' being infected with anything. Breeding them with "normal" creatures (especially the fragile Treehugger Norns) could have interesting results...
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20101206182600/http://www.addictinggames.com/interactivebuddy.html This game]. Sure, you can toss the little guy baseballs to catch, tickle him, lead him around, or squirt him with a hose. You can also toss him grenades to catch, set him on fire, make the screen randomly explode, and hit him with all manner of dangerous and painful objects.
** Pelt the buddy with a bunch of infants, set a few infants on fire. Then use Strong Gravity Vortex to light everyone on fire, while having the infants beat the crap out of your buddy. Let everyone chill for a bit, except for the buddy running around aflame. Then pull out a hose, at least wide nozzle to quickly put out the flaming buddy...only to be lit on fire by one of the flaming infants he is running over. If you time it wrong, just pull out the SGV again. Best part is, you get loads of money every time he catches on fire again!
*** The programming engine you can unlock has the most potential for abuse. You can program for a certain kind of object to be constantly thrown at the dude. Cue nonstop torrent of fireballs. Oh, and did I mention Gravity Shifter (draws the buddy towards it) plus holding the stun gun in the middle equals constant tasing of the dude?
**** The first time you chuck the buddy a grenade he picks it up and examines it with a ? above his head. Then it explodes in his face. Satisfying.
* ''[[Viva Pinata]]''. Yes, ''[http://www.vgcats.com/comics/?strip_id=227 Viva Pinata.]''.
* ''[[
** You can also drown people by simply picking them up with the tweezers and dropping them into a convenient body of water. This seems to have no real consequences, making it an easy way to deal with the occasional stubborn bastard who never seems to be happy no matter what you do.
** This trope combined with [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgXD11ivcFQ ragdoll physics] is pretty much one of the few reasons why people are still playing ''RollerCoaster Tycoon 3'' nowadays.
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** Let the carousel break down, and don't repair it. Your guests will be stuck for hours on the ride, one that plays music off key and spins faster.
** Make tunnels, and when the guests go inside them, delete the path, which takes the tunnel with it. It shows them falling through nothingness for a moment, then they disappear completely, never to be seen or heard from again. They even disappear from your guest list.
*** This is very likely to be exactly [
** It's also possible to make go-karts fail spectacularly in the first game. Start by building an upwards slope in one section of the track. Go back to the start of the track and build it backwards, connecting the first upward slope with another upward slope in the opposite direction, forming a cusp. The game registers this a complete circuit and allow the karts to run, but the karts consider the cusp as a discontinuity in the track. They will fly off it then explode when they hit the ground.
* ''[[Zoo Tycoon]]'' allows you to be cruel to both humans AND animals, satisfying all of your abusive needs. Create one of every animal and set them loose in a zoo (which has an electric fence around the entrance) full of guests. After they virtually kill all of the guests in the zoo, they start killing ''each other''. Last one left standing is the winner.
** The winning combo: setting the T-Rex (any dino, but the [[Shout
* In ''[[Dungeon Keeper]]'' the sheer variety of tortures you can inflict include: Slapping your creatures (and any unfortunate enemies who you've captured) with your omnipresent hand, dropping ANY creature (including captured enemies) into a torture room once you've built it (though the Mistress creature [[Too Kinky to Torture|enjoys that a little too much]]) where they'll either convert to your cause or die after (presumably) long hours on a rack or electric chair, leaving creatures to rot in your prison to later rise as a skeleton, intentionally locking creatures away from food or rest, building a stone bridge over lava and then '''selling''' it out from under a creature (though this doesn't work on flyers or heat-resistant beings), and casting your damaging spells
** The game encourages 'Pour encourager les autres'. Imps working slowly? Fireflies slacking? Put them all in a room with a locked door, pick one, and ''slap it to death''. The survivors will work ever so much better.
** There is an exquisitely cruel detail in how torture works. An enemy creature is usually brought to the prison after having having had its butt owned by the player's creatures, and so being rather lacking in health. Torture will ''always'', eventually, convert enemy creatures to your side, but will slowly decrease their health during the process. Hence, if the creature has enough health it'll convert (some random time variables are thrown in), otherwise it'll die. The solution is to nurse the creatures back to health ''while torturing them'', by feeding them or healing them through magic.
** And there's ''[[Evil Genius (
* ''[[Nintendogs]]''. Sure, you can feed it and walk it and love it and all that, but sometimes that gets a little old. So you spice things up by oh, say, not feeding or cleaning it for a week. Or ramming it repeatedly with a Mario Kart. Or "accidentally" tripping it up with the Jump Rope. Or scaring it with the toy military chopper (with "Flight of the Valkyries" as background music!). Or throwing a Moai Statue at it. Or ignoring it for hours on end and watching/listening to its shrill barking and whining as it wonders where you've gone to. And that's not even getting into the OTHER things you can do to it: the kind that'll change your dog's personality from a sweet-natured pup into an aggressive, snarling hellhound that bites you if you dare to pet it.
* The iPod Touch/iPhone game app ''[[Pocket God]]'' makes you the god of a tiny group of islands. You can either give them gifts (coconuts and fish) and make them dance... ''or'' you can maim/kill them in one of a dozen or more ways: drowning, lightning electrocution, hurricane, fire ants, [[Solar
* ''[[Dwarf Fortress]]'' allows you to get very creative with the dwarves' fates, including but not limited to locking them in a room with no food, drowning them, dropping them from great heights and flooding their bedrooms with lava.
** Since [[Game Mod
# Edit the game files so that cats have a body temperature more than three times the surface temperature of the Sun.
# Watch the cats all explode into mushroom clouds of fiery death and destruction which kill all the dwarves and lay waste to the countryside.
** Wait... why not just give dwarves the vermin tag?
*** More recent versions have hidden this particular bit of information in a rather <s>difficult to access without crashing the game</s> fun place, making this impossible. However, you ''can'' set the boiling point for, say, goblin fat at nearly absolute zero, causing them to explode into a cloud of pink mist the moment they walk onto the map.
** [[Screw You, Elves|No one likes elves]]. [[The Scrappy|No one]]. So in many cases, elven caravans arriving to trade at your depot will abruptly find that someone has inexplicably locked them in with floodgates and started filling the depot with water. And after they drown, you can steal their stuff.
** And, of course, there are the enemies. Sure, you can rig the outside of your fortress to turn invading goblins into [[Chunky Salsa Rule|a faint red smear]], but that's boring. Why do that when you can [[Pointless Doomsday Device|flood the planet]] [[Kill It
** If you can think of it, there's a Dwarf Fortress player out there thinking up ways to do it. This extends from "[[Video Game Caring Potential|build a mist-generator in your main room to make your dwarves deliriously happy]]" to "[http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=25967.0 figure out a way to trap and slaughter friendly merpeople because their bones are worth a lot of money.]"
*** Note that last one was considered so cruel the maker of the game dropped the value of mer bones in the next patch. For those unwilling to click the link, can you say {{spoiler|"Force-breeding merfolk to slaughter their mer-babies for valuable, valuable ivory?"}}
* ''The Incredible Toon Machine''. Just think of it as ''[[Looney Tunes]]'' [[This Is Your Premise
* ''[[
** In these games, (and possibly other RTS's) it is impossible to disband units. If a player wants ot get rid of units (most likely to free up supply), the only way to do so is to suicide the unit or attack them directly.
* ''Opening Night'', a game by MECC (Oregon Trail fame) in which you make your own plays. You can naturally guess what kinds of stuff you can do with it and what people probably did.
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* ''[[Doshin the Giant]]'' gives the player character a [[Super-Powered Evil Side]] primarily to allow the player to smash and torture the islanders to their heart's content.
* The mobile game ''X Construction'' sees you building bridges out of steel girders & support cables so that trains can cross a gorge. ...Or, you can deliberately build a bridge that will snap when the train is halfway across and laugh at the screams of the passengers as the train tumbles into the pit.
* ''[[Trainz Railroad Simulator]]'' is meant for railway enthusiasts to simulate managing and operating trains. However, some twisted people use the game solely for the purpose of doing things like derailing the trains, crashing the train when it crosses a turntable, and doing what [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDUOmzOrJ_4 this guy] did and initiating a huge crash at 1000
* In the ''[[Lightning Warrior Raidy]]'' games, losing against a floor boss will result in a scene with Raidy being sexually violated by said boss, followed by an endgame message about how she spent the rest of her life as a submissive sex slave. This being an eroge, most players will have Raidy lose at least once against each boss just to see this (and it is necessary to unlock the secret ending). Of course, if Raidy wins, ''she'' is the one who violates the boss in turn, so the player wins either way.
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[[Category:Video Game Cruelty Potential]]
[[Category:Videogame Culture]]
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