Infinite Flashlight: Difference between revisions

So it's the middle of the night, you're [[Silent Hill|being chased by mangled oversized toddlers with knives through a Kafkaesque take on a dark and twisted elementary school]], and you realize that in all the chaos you've completely forgotten to change the batteries in your flashlight. Sounds like a problem, right? Wrong!

 

 

Of course, many games don't take enough in-game time to complete for four D-cells of battery power to run out. But even if you can [[Take Your Time|take weeks or even months]] to complete the main plot, the flashlight will never run out. Definitely an [[Acceptable Breaks From Reality|Acceptable Break from Reality]]. Such things do exist in some form in real life, but typically require shaking to provide kinetic energy to charge a capacitor to power a feeble white LED (granted, you're probably shaking hard enough as it is because of the fiendish killer knife babies). More usefully, "survival" flashlights use a crank mechanism and generator to recharge a battery, which is [[Department of Redundancy Department|powerful enough to power medium-power]] LEDs.

 

{{examples}}

 

 

== Action Adventure ==

 

== Adventure Game ==

* In [[Colossal Cave|Adventure]] (the text game from 1976) your first set of flashlight batteries will run out fairly quickly. After you replace them, the fresh batteries last forever.

* Possibly justified in ''[[Rama]]'', which takes place in the distant future. Arthur C. Clarke did hope that we would tap into zero-point energy someday.

 

* ''[[Left 4 Dead]]''. So why do you have the ability to turn it on and off? Stealth. Sometimes it's easier to sneak past the Commons, and it always is in the Witch's case.

* ''[[Doom]] 3''. The in-game description even says that it has a static power source. It ''does'' get knocked out at one point in the game by some annoying electromagnetic pulses, but it's a temporary thing and it only happens twice, when you are not in immediate danger.

* ''[[The Chronicles of Riddick]]: Escape From Butcher Bay,'' at least before you get the titular character's 'eyeshine' ability.

* Averted in the first ''[[Halo]]'' game, where the flashlight can indeed run out. The flashlights in ''Halos 2 & 3'', however, are infinite, though this is handwaved as drawing power from your new suit's fusion core. It will however turn off on its own in lighted areas.

* In ''Vietcong'' the player has a flashlight that never runs out of power - mainly useful for the mission segments when you must traverse through the tunnel systems of your enemies. However, some players never actually realised they had a flashlight during those missions since they'd never used it previously and ended up negotiating the tunnels in near complete darkness. A case of read the manual in those cases.

* ''[[Metro 2033]]'' takes a surprisingly realistic approach: the flashlight runs on batteries that need to be periodically recharged by a crank mechanism. You can keep cranking [[Tim Taylor Technology|past 100% charge]] to temporarily make the light brighter.

* ''[[Painkiller]]'' and its expansion, ''Painkiller: Battle out of Hell'' both have infinite flashlights. In the first game it is literally a flashlight that emanates inexplicably from Daniel's chest (you never see the light itself, but it does flicker, make electrical noises and has a distortion in the center like a normal flashlight). in Battle out of Hell, the light has been replaced with a strange glowing yellow ball in the bottom left corner of the screen. Presumably, this is supposed to represent a lantern or candle instead of an electrical torch.

 

* The Pip-Boy 3000a wrist computer in ''[[Fallout 3]]'' can also be used as a lantern with an unlimited power supply. Justified by the prevalence of miniaturized nuclear and fusion power.

** Interestingly, it's not a flashlight ''per se''. The character just turns on the backlight for the screen.

* ''[[Mass Effect 3]]'' gives the crew muzzle flashlights, but it's plausible to presume they're run off whatever absurdly high-capacity battery is flinging minuscule slugs at absurd muzzle velocities all day out of the gun, and they're never on for very long anyway.

 

== Other ==

 

 

== Web Original ==

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Acceptable Breaks From Reality]]