Yet Another Stupid Death: Difference between revisions

 

 

 

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}}

* ''[[Scorched Earth]]'' - firing a superweapon (or napalm) at just the right angle...and 0 power.

* The first ''[[Command and Conquer]]'' game has a good reason why you should NEVER group soldiers together if they're all carrying Flamethrowers.

** 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).

* "[[Pure Pwnage|Your pony died because it wasn't pretty enough? NOOOO!]]"

** 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.

*** 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]].

* Fire Emblem's healers. Probably true of a lot of Tactical [[RPG|RPGs]], but in a lot of circumstances they will go down with one hit (or two, but that's generally only one enemy attack since their speed isn't very good). There's a lot of ways to accidentally leave them in range of one or two enemies, usually involving planning something out ahead of time, moving your healer, changing your plan without thinking about the healer, moving around other guys that were originally protecting (or were about to protect) the healer, and... [[Final Death|oops]]. They're usually very valuable too.

** 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.

** Finally, 30 worms + 1 Holy hand grenade + 1 freakishly high tower = Atmospheric point of view as you watch the tiny dots with name labels fly past the skybox.

** 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.

* In ''[[X-COM (Video Game)|X-COM]]'', poor preparation can cause all sorts of stupidly funny, yet avoidable deaths:

** 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!

* In ''[[SaGa]] Frontier'', you can fall off the Cygnus ship in the part where Red has to run across the pathway of the bridge, while on the outside. Which is required to go to the engine room. And, at a later date in the game, when you are forced to fight enemies and a possible [[Big Bad]]. Which in turn kills you, bringing you back to the title screen.

** The entire Zork saga has a plethora of these. Special mention must go to wandering around without a light source in any Zork game (the game even warns you first!), jumping in the Bottomless Pit in Zork: Grand Inquisitor, or staying in the same room with the plastic explosive in Zork II and waiting for it to go off.

* ''[[The Neverhood]]'': The only possible way to die is pretty obvious: falling down a bottomless pit. What makes it so obvious, you may ask? Oh, I don't know, maybe those whose signposts right next to it that read [[Schmuck Bait|"DANGER!", "Don't jump in the drain!" and "You will die!"]] respectively?

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

** If you're playing with only [[Minimalist Run|3HP]], have fun dying from enemies and their unpredictable acting<ref> Gaudi... just... Gaudi</ref>.

* 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.

** One of the stupidest and most avoidable death traps happens early on in the game. In Boletaria Palace 1-1, there's an obvious pit in the floor surrounded by enemies. Nobody would DREAM of jumping into that, right? It's actually a very common occurrence due to the fact that there are swirly blue glowing things in the middle of the abyss. Countless players have thought that it was some sort of portal to another area, or that there was an item down below, only to step boldly in and turn themselves into a red stain at the bottom of the pit three stories below. YASD indeed.

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

* In the ''[[Runescape]]'' Dungeoneering skill, you can actually win awards by dying like this. Fortunately, they do not affect gameplay at all.

* ''[[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!

* Jurassic Park: [[Trespasser]] is a first person shooter which introduced a number of innovative features, notably modelling a full player body in the game world which included a fully articulated and very awkward to control arm. This resulted in some of the most amusingly stupid ways to kill oneself including beating oneself to death with a baseball bat and flailing a loaded shotgun against a wall in a vain attempt to point it towards an oncoming raptor, only to have it go off in ones fac'e.

* [[Soul Series|Soul Calibur III]]: In the event match against the Colossus, the entire match is fought hacking at the enemy's ankles, as he's much larger than you. If you win, he finally falls. ''Forward''. Don't just stand there.

** You also get achievements for dying in the tutorial, dying to a Diggle (the [[Mascot Mook]] / [[The Goomba|Goomba]] of the game), and also dying to a Thrusty, whose only form of attack is...pelvic thrusting. Interestingly enough, you also get an achievement if ''the game itself'' dies a stupid death (that is, the game crashes).

* The early [[Tomb Raider]] series offers more than enough opportunities to die horribly and/or embarrassingly, such as hanging out on subway tracks, touching electrified fences despite signs and other warnings and stepping on a giant disembodied hand in a level named after King Midas. Or you could skip the middleman and just dive head first onto solid ground and break your neck. If you haven't already accidentally stumbled off of a ledge and died on impact.

* In Time Gal, when Time Stop is active, you have to choose the correct answer before time runs out. {{spoiler|Let's take one of the levels for example. If you use Time Stop, you have three choices; Pray God, Jump into the ocean, or Jump to the ship. Two of them are incorrect answers; you can't select "Jump to the ship," because Reika will not make it. You cannot select "Pray God," either, because Reika will end up going to heaven after the plane blows up, so the right answer is "Jump into the ocean."}}

* 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.