Because nobody wants to be scared every time they sit down and play a game.
You Don’t Know Jack: The only game that’s made me laugh consistently. Hell, I’d often answer wrong intentionally just to hear what the hell the announcer would say.
Go! Go! Hypergrind: It’s Spumco, ferchrissakes.
Space Quest series: Bloody hilarious, albeit a bit TOO easy to die in some places.
Leisure Suit Larry series: Al Lowe has the honor of making the first adult oriented game that ran under EGA that was actually worth playing.
Sam & Max Hit The Road: I’m playing through this one again. Thanks, scummvm!
And of course the Parodius series. Japan only. Take an experimentally high dose of benadryl, put on the Blue Velvet-style gas mask, then try playing Gradius. It won’t be as weird as Parodius.
The Monkey Island series of games, excluding the fairly disappointing fourth one. Three straight games of hilarious piratical brilliance, infused with the essence of monkey. The third game, The Curse of Monkey Island, features beautiful watercolor cartoon art to boot.
You Don’t Know Jack! is as good today as it ever was, and the graphics haven’t dated a bit thanks to its emphasis on pre-rendered sprites that smoothly flow into each other.
I still frequently say “The weed of crime bears bitter fruit – but it makes a great milkshake!”
Usually when serving up green milkshakes. looks around nervously
Duke Nukem 3D made me laugh a few times. “I’m going to rip off your head and shit down your neck” is not something I expected to hear from a cutscene back then.
Does Infocom’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy text adventure count, or is that cheating?
Another vote for NOLF2 (and the original as well).
I’ll add MDK 1 & 2, the first was the only game I have played where the enemies taunted you by shaking their asses toward your sniper scope. Grim Fandango and Armed & Dangerous were funny games from LucasArts, the former an adventure game and the latter a shooter.
Yeah, Sam & Max pretty much get the crown in my opinion, too. The second game on my personal list would be another LucasArts game, Maniac Mansion 2, mostly for the in-game dialogue. Specifically when you send the moronic teen back in time.
It didn’t strike me as over the top funny, until he actually does it at the end of the cutscene, going so far as to sit down with a newspaper on the stump of the bad guy’s neck.
Gonna go with any adventure game made by LucasGames (excluding maybe Loom since I never played it.) Maniac Mansion, Monkey Island, Full Throttle, Grim Fandango, Indiana Jones, and the oft mentioned Sam & Max.
Another LucasGames console game that was hilarious not for any dialog but for the situation was Zombie Ate My Neighbors!
Leisure Suit Larry series was great.
Definitely You Don’t Know Jack. Biggest laugh I had was in YDKJ vol 1, not knowing a Gibberish Question and typing in “Fck You" Cookie didn’t take kindly to that. "What did you just say? You think just because you’re a guest you can get away with that? Fck me? No no no. Fck you." And you lost $10,000. But then Cookie comes back…"Did I say 'fck you’? I meant F*CK YOU!” And there goes $100,000 making it impossible to come back.
Though most of the games I play only have funny ‘bits’ or ‘easter eggs’, I find. Like the *Baldur’s Gate * series, or Planescape : Torment.
Of course, there’re the funny voice clips in *StarCraft * and WarCraft.
Let’s see… Disgaea, for the PS2, is a riot if you’re an anime fan at all.
Duke Nukem 3D was already mentioned, but it’s pretty much the only first-person shooter game I will play, because of the plethora of humorous references.
You Don’t Know Jack, especially the Movie and TV versions, rock. Stay after the game for the funny commercial parodies.
Between LucasArts and Sierria, we saw a lot more hits than misses. I especially miss the old parser-based adventure games.
Other great ones:
–The Superhero League Of Hoboken (I still get a chuckle every time I travel to North Jersey, wondering if “Weehawken” is a euphemism)
–Spellcasting 101, 201 and (to a lesser extent) 301.
–A Xanth game with a name that escapes me right now.
On the modern side, the talk radio station in GTA3 and GTA:VS had me rolling.
I have high hopes, because Steve Purcell is a freakin’ genius.
“What are we going to do with these interlopers, Max?”
“Let’s shave them bald and tattoo garish wrestling masks on their faces!”
(from the comic, natch)
And while it’s not quite in the vein of the OP, I’d like to nominate the instruction manual for Epyx’s old Crush, Crumble, and Chomp! Page after page after page of deadpan, dry humor, all to describe how to play a game with a fifty-foot-tall monster rampaging a major metropolitan city.
“Arachnis grew up a child of the streets, but could never achieve brilliance on the basketball courts because he could not master the necessary twenty-eight handslaps.”
“Scenario: Goshilla vs. the Smog Monster. No, there aren’t two monsters in this game – just Goshilla, as far as the eye can see. (That’s the problem; you can’t see Tokyo)”
“You mind if I drive?”
“Not if you don’t mind me clutching at the dashboard and screaming like a cheerleader.”
Nothin’ beats Sam & Max.
Utterly useless trivia: the voice actor they got to play Sam sounds exactly like my uncle. Who, as it happens, is a dead ringer for Gary Sinise. Which means, obviously, that Gary Sinise was the voice of Sam. Or something.
Holy crap. Someone else has played Superhero League of Hoboken?
That was a funny game. It’s a swirling tempest of cliches: Superhero cliches, post-apocalyptic cliches, RPG cliches (you get the two most ungodly powerful characters right at the last chapter). Also: Dick Clark still hasn’t aged.
