Yet Another Stupid Death: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

 

{{quote|''"YOU JUMPED INTO A SWORD. YOU RETARD!"''|''[[The Legend of Zelda (video game)|The Legend of Zelda]]'' section of ''[[I Wanna Be the Guy]]''}}

There are lots of ways to die in video games. One particular type of video game, the [[Roguelike]], has [[The Many Deaths of You|lots and lots of ways to die]]. Some of these deaths are just bad luck; the player got a raw deal. Or perhaps the player got overconfident. Then there are deaths that, in retrospect, were ''utterly avoidable''. Roguelike players tend to tell stories about these deaths, and their stories tend to have a title in common: '''Yet Another Stupid Death'''.

 

 

This will often overlap with [[Have a Nice Death]] if the game decides to mock you for your stupidity. When player stupidity wipes out an entire party in an MMORPG, it's also [[Total Party Kill]].

{{examples}}

* Killed by standing in fire in ''[[Diablo]]''. Another would be people killed by repeatedly attacking bosses with a damage reflecting shield up, because any time you have to hit yourself to death you deserve to die.

* ''[[World of Warcraft]]'': any game mechanic that can kill a player who is standing still is referred to as a "retard check", at least as long as there's some warning before it goes off.

** It's not at all rare for people putting a raid together to specify that you must be able to move out of the fire.

** Since the command "pick lock" caused you to use your lockpick to probe around inside a door lock, this was the logical result of the command "pick nose". However, death only resulted [[Critical Failure|if your skill at Pick Locks was too low]]; if you had sufficient skill, "pick nose" would just provide valuable practice with the tools. ("[[The Dev Team Thinks of Everything|Success! You now have an open nose.]]")

* Mainline ''[[Shin Megami Tensei]]'' games are also conducive to YASD, since it is necessary for the player to learn to exploit the battle system in order to get through battles while taking as little damage as possible. Fighting the right enemies with the wrong [[Mons]] is a great way to earn a [[Game Over]] screen.

* In one level of ''[[Ghost Trick]]'' you must save {{spoiler|Cabanela from being shot}} by {{spoiler|swapping the bullet with something of the same shape right after it's fired.}} The right object is {{spoiler|a soft knit hat}}, but you can also swap it with {{spoiler|a metal hard hat... which, since it's still traveling at bullet speeds, will kill Cabanela even more brutally than the bullet would.}}

** In an earlier level, you have to save a truck driver from {{spoiler|being incapacitated by a loud noise he hears from his headphones}} and crashing into a restaurant. If you end up in the truck while he's driving it,{{spoiler|at which point it's already too late to save him}} you might end up trying to manipulate {{spoiler|his recliner seat. This winds up with him flat on his back while the truck is still driving, you can't put it back up due to his weight and to top it all off, he falls backwards hard enough to actually tear off the steering wheel}}. He ends up crashing in the same way, just in a more ludicrous position.

* ''Infiniminer'': Find any good player that plays on servers that have lava in them and ask how many times they accidentally dug right under lava with no means of escape.

** Another common unintentional suicide is digging straight down and digging out a tile that has a 12-tile or more drop under it. for reference, you can take a fall of exactly 11 tiles and live when running an unmodified client. This does lead to some unusual traps, such as an 11-tile drop landing on a blue force field (which means blues can't survive the fall).

** Your first Goomba in 'New Super Mario Bros'' will probably do this all over again. Goombas now do little hops in time with the background music. If you head right as soon as you have control over Mario, the Goomba will hop just as you try to jump on it.

** Picking up a Poison Mushroom in SMB Japan / Lost Levels when you've played it before.

** In New Super Mario Bros Wii multiplayer, you can retreat into a bubble whenever you like, float past the hard stuff, and get someone to pop you out later on. This can lead to situations where you're playing with 4 players, and ''everyone'' decides at the same time "this part's too hard, [[It Seemed Like a Good Idea At the Time|time for the bubble!]]", resulting in four trapped players and a trip back to the last checkpoint.

*** The game itself [[Lampshade Hanging|hangs a lampshade]] on the stupidity of this death - if everyone is in the bubble, you get a special "level failed" music riff, instead of the normal tune if the players die in normal ways.

* After the 2nd mission in Just Cause 2, you are tasked with attaching Karl Blaine's car to a tractor and pulling it out of a trash heap. However, you can accidentally flip the car over, [[Nonstandard Game Over|resulting in an immediate game over]].

** There you are, doing a bit of stunt flying in a high speed jet, you exit the aircraft to start skydiving and BAM!. You get killed by the wing of your own plane.

** A weapon breaks, and the character auto-equips a [[Death or Glory Attack|Devil Axe]] they picked up earlier. When the next enemy attacks him, your character crits himself and dies.

** Hilariously, if the homing pigeon in ''Worms 3D'' can't find its target (which, most of the time if fired by a human player, it can't), it will execute a "return to sender" maneuver.

** Another one involves the graphics of the game. It is very possible to be blown by a missile to the edge of the lake, and survive despite being neck high in water. However any attempts at moving that worm will instantly kill him.

* Some deaths/endgames in the ''[[Nancy Drew (video game)|Nancy Drew]]'' games fall under this. Notable ones include repeatedly spraying pesticide into your face, deliberately lowering a suspended chandelier into your skull, and eating baking soda and jellyfish sandwiches.

** You don't actually lower the chandelier onto your head - you just smash it on the floor and get kicked out of the house for being a vandal. Still stupid, though.

** Ill-conceived use of [[A-Team Firing|full-auto mode]] in ''any'' area with [[Stuff Blowing Up|explosive world objects]], thanks to recruits being graduates of the [[Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy]].

* ''[[King's Quest VII]]'': had so many of these, and it took so much effort to find them, and the "Game Over" screens were so mercilessly (and hilariously) condescending, half of them might as well be Easter Eggs. In particular, there is a puzzle that involves a wandering ghost-traveler who died of thirst and now aimlessly meanders about the desert. Valanice can, with some puzzle solving, turn as salt water into fresh water as she likes, one clay potful at a time, but this first requires her to gain salt water as an inventory item. Giving the Far-Walker fresh water allows him to slake his thirst, but giving him salt water pisses him off. Doing it enough times makes him kill you.

* ''[[Spelunky]]''. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msKWy7A8onQ This playthrough] features a particularly ''nasty'' one a few minutes in.

** Forgetting to change to Kahpa (or at the very least back to Kirt from Maorin, who [[Super Drowning Skills|drowns quickly]] [as in less than one second after you submerge]) when going underwater.

** Switching to Caun when there's a mobile enemy anywhere near you. Super regeneration doesn't help when you're practically as fragile as glass!

* ''Warship Gunner'', Aegis System and Nukes and firing at it point blank... ouch.

* ''[[Cave Story]]''. "One touch means instant death!"

* You ''will'' suffer this in ''[[ADOM]]'' if you just [[Attack! Attack! Attack!]], but even veterans aren't immune to forgetting to equip a weapon after dropping it on an altar. Other YASDs: accidentally using Fireball on your vastly more powerful companion; fighting ghuls without paralyzation resistance; coming across a greater mimic and trying to melee it; stepping onto a chaotic altar when an intelligent chaotic monster is nearby and many, many more.

* ThunderDome MUD is full of these, among them: trying to kill Justice, an invincible NPC integral to the game's court mechanic, drinking gasoline (it's stupid enough keeping gasoline in the same container type as your water), jumping a bike across a river and pausing, speedwalking through a desert known to be trap-infested, and attacking what appears without close examination to be 'a guy' who turns out to be a [[Terminator|well-known self-reviving killing machine]].

** Same for ''[[Dark Souls]]''. Just because you've fought an enemy hundreds of times doesn't mean you can get sloppy.

* There's an elevator shaft in ''[[Metroid: Other M]]'' with an elevator that you need to drop on an enemy in order to proceed. [[Press X to Die|Hang from a ledge in the shaft and fire a missile at the cables and debris keeping it suspended. Makes one serving of dead Samus.]]

* ''[[Minecraft]]'' has plenty of these. The stupidest (and most avoidable) is digging straight up, especially when you're very deep underground, which often leads to gravel, sand, or water landing on your head, suffocating you. Or ''lava''. Another common death is digging straight down, either as an efficient way to mine or while working on some building project, and then you realize there's a gaping chasm below you... Ever since the "creep" mechanic was introduced (which allows you to stand on the very edge of something, making it easier to build bridges, etc.), death by falling has increased dramatically when people accidentally let up on the SHIFT key and go plummeting hundreds of feet to the ground!

** "Don't dig straight down" actually reached memetic status briefly on the official forums, just because it seemed to be happening so much.

* In [[Skyrim]] falling to your death. Its rare in this game for the player to be put into a position where falling to their death could be anybody else's fault. The Deathlords and Ulfric Stormcloak, pretty much the only enemies really capable of knocking you around are almost always encountered in enclosed areas.

* In [[Vampire Quest]], from www.vampyou.com, there are a good few of these that are rather fun. One of which, which unlocks a seperate little mini-mode, is purposely lighting four braziers that are bluntly said to only be lit if you want to turn yourself into a vampire. Since the goal is to defeat the vampires...it's acknowledged as ridiculously stupid. Each leads to a rather fun scene, generally.

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Video Game Difficulty Tropes]]