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.

* In Bungie's ''[[Pathways into Darkness]]'', you only have five days to complete your mission before the [[Sealed Evil in a Can]] awakens to destroy ordered reality on earth, your flashlight can last for a week. Although there is a set of nightvision goggles necessary to get past evil creepy-crawlies that are attracted to your flashlight.

* ''[[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.

* ''[[Team Fortress Classic]]'' still has the flashlight from ''[[Half-Life (video game)|Half-Life 1]]'' in the code, but because the power gauge was removed it now shines indefinitely. If you're curious, you activate it by hitting the ~ key and typing: bind <key> "impulse 100"

* In ''[[The Nameless Mod]]'' using a (somewhat rare) augmentation upgrade on your default light enhancement results in this. As a ''[[Deus Ex]]'' mod (where gameplay pretty much required dark areas), this comes in handy.

* 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.

* ''[[Unreal]]'' has a powerful, permanent "searchlight" that you get far into the game (which makes you use a good number of [[Ten-Second Flashlight|disposable versions]] before that point), which is not in fact infinite. Its charge is so high no sane player is likely to run out of power for it, but if you take long enough to finish the game it's likely you'll see its charge bar diminish a fair bit before the end. Makes no difference in gameplay terms, though, so it counts as playing it straight.

== Other ==

 

 

== Web Original ==

 

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[[Category:Acceptable Breaks From Reality]]