An important rite in the passage to manhood is having your village burned down and your family killed.
I assumed Ol’ Kong was enforcing a restraining order against Stalker Mario.
Turtle shells can be lethal weapons.
Mushrooms are good for you.
“Colorful” mercenaries are quite common.
Barrels always contain goodies…apparently banks are overrated.
I’ve never heard it put quite that way before, but I love it. I’m tempted to use it as my sig line.
I’d be honored, HPL. 
Let’s face it. Some characters LIKE to be continually kidnapped. There’s no way Princess Toadstool could have been abducted this many times without secretly wanting to be. Any reasonable person would have been living in a fortress after abduction #2.
It’s possible to have perfect aim while jumping through the air and running around in circles.
You will always start out with the crappiest possible weapon, no matter what the circumstances are. You’re part of a special forces team send to bring down an evil dictator with a doomsday device? Good. Here’s a knife. Go get’em, tiger!
You will lose all of your weapons and ammo at least once and will have to work up from the crappest weapons once again.
If you start the game with teammates, You’ll lose them very soon. The time you spend with them is inversly porportional to their eliteness.
Common items that are required to pass a certain point will always be hard to find.
Sometimes an alarm going off will mean instant death. This is despite the fact that you’ve already killed several hundred guys, but apparently an alarm means you give up instantly.
There are only two kinds of religion in the world. The first worships a single God, and is always a lot like the Catholic Church in everything but name. This kind is almost always pure evil. Nobody good works for the church, and the church is always 1.) The pawn of an evil demon. 2.) Secretly plotting world domination 3.) Plotting to destory the world. 4.) A combination of 1-3.
The Second worships nature or several Gods. It is less organized, but people in this religion are usually peaceful and loving and trying to save the earth. It is very rare for this sort of religion to be evil.
It’s not unusal to be attacked by plants, herbavories or small cottages.
Dungeon layouts usally make no sense at all.
you can crash your car head on into all sorts of things at insane speeds over and over, as long as you run when it catches fire you will be fine.
snakes can kick,
the computer cheats like a #%@&* son of a *%#@@
you can carry 2 pistols but only if they are both 9mm,
frogs can out run (hop) cars on the freeway.
If your enemies so much as brush against you, you wil die an instant, horrible death.
Reincarnation exists, as long as you have cheat codes.
Even if you have to pee like a mother##^$, you will inevitably go to the fridge for a snack instead of the toilet. Then you’ll cry when you pee all over yourself.
Monkey butlers rule.
Once you’ve devoted countless hours and energy to saving your kingdom, you’ll have to do the whole damn thing over again. Only it’ll be even harder this time.
Your trusted hunting dog will mock you in a most emasculating manner if you miss that duck. Shoot him now.
Wookies can boogie down.
Peasants once given a task will repeat that task endlessly and without complaint night and day until they chop down every tree or the mine collapses
Aliens always want to exterminate mankind often for no reason.
Said aliens in spite of having powerful ships that cross galaxies rarely seem to just nuke the planet from orbit instead preferring hand to hand combat
Aliens don’t usually seem like something smart enough to build ships anyway instead they’re just teeth and claws and run straight at you when they see you.
The best military tactic is to wait on a hill until the enemy engages you then for you to do everything in your power to kill their leader.
No matter what the nationality or time period enemies pretty much use the same tactics on you over and over. Doesn’t matter if they’re Japanese, Medieval Europeans, Viking Raiders, or Roman conquerors.
Harvesting souls is hard work.
Harvesting souls is way too easy.
Prophets are bad news. 9 times out of 10 they’re the ones that are really behind everything.
When given moral choices they’re usually very clear cut. One good choice one evil choice. Not much grey in the world.
Nobody opens a portal into fluffy bunny world. It’s always a place filled with monsters that are going to attack you almost immediately.
Super Soldiers waking up with no idea who they are or where they are is a lot more common then I thought.
In the end, artistic elements kinda lose their impact when you’re always looking at the world through Night Vision Goggles.
Never underestimate the value of a hot meal, or a big turkey leg.
It turns out that lancers and/or pikemen really can defeat a Panzer assault.
For a good time, call Edna. (555-5235)
I build too many roads. I should remove some, and save on maintenance.
Under a communist government, you can completely terraform the entire sahara desert into lush farmland, while waging the semi-nuclear conquest of North America, within a century.
Gaia doesn’t like being poked in the eye.
Jed has died of dysentery.
Never think you can completely predict what a modder is going to come up with. No matter how bizarre, seemingly impossible, or totally against the spirit of the developers or the original game it is.
Doomsday weapons always come in one of four varietes: A big bomb, a virus, A giant laser, or some kind of super soldier.
Super Soldiers are big and mean, they can be defeated by one guy with an NRA membership. They are rarely worth the trouble it takes to create them.
Peasents are always stupid. They either say one thing all their life, or they starve themselves to death endlessly repeating a task. Now you can see why Mideveal rulers treated peasents like crap.
Every heavily guarded fortress has a secret entrance.
Monkeys are never up to any good. If you see a monkey, kill it.
One important good guy will die in any game. All other deaths are actually fake.
Bad guys are incredibly stupid. If they get the drop on you, they will always take you prisoner so you can escape later and kill them, now being inside their fortress.
Keycards almost always come in bright decorator colors and are utterly indestructible. You can blow the guy holding one of them with a rocket launcher or he can get viciously eviscerated by a demon that’s composed of more than 50% teeth and fangs, but the keycard will survive without a scratch. It’s a wonder bullet proof vests aren’t made of the same material.
The three civilizations facing each other off in the battle to end all battles and to decide the fate of the universe might come from different galaxies, or even dimensions, yet all three will use exactly the same two or three very finite resources for their armies and structures.
You can only have 200 soldiers in your army, no matter how huge your civilization. This does double for vast space-faring empires.
No, our world is the monsters’ Fluffy Bunny World.
No matter how many times you blow the planet up, no one is dead except a few dogs and you still need to save it from the white-haired bishie.
Hot guys are always bad-ass loners.
The guy who is meant to save the world usually looks like Meg Ryan. Said heroa always carries a weapon that by all logic should be ineffective against a rat, let alone whatever evil he is supossed to save the world from.
Scorpions are skinable and provide leather.
Even though an engineer wrote the recipe for how to make rocket fuel, you still need an alchemist to make it for you.
Whe faced with a room full of dragon eggs which will hatch and spawn whelps ready to attack you should you run too close, the appropriate tactic is to scream your name, run around the room while getting as close to as many eggs as possible and hope the casters can handle the job.
Sure, there’s a blue ghost, a pink ghost, and a yellow one. But for my money, it’s the red ghost that’ll get you every time. Not only does he spring free from the box immediately, but he’s the fastest-moving and most tenacious tracker…
Hey, I’m old school. Or maybe just old.
Killing several thousand people really isn’t that big a deal.
Amazing how almost 20 years down the line, we all remember that code, eh? It’s carved into my brain.
My only addition that I don’t think I saw: You can be shot hundreds of times without dying, but get punched twice by an enemy and you’re toast.
As a collary, Being a hero is all about killing things. It’s usally a good idea to kill everything that moves, regardless of how innocent it may look. As Stalin said “One death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic”
Keys are always colof-coded to the correct door.
Not necessarily. I’ve also seen a chemical catalyst which dehydrates a planet and an earthquake generator, and dimensional rifts of various sorts aren’t too uncommon either.
If keys aren’t color-coded, any key can open any lock, but each key can only be used once.
And all you ever need to do to pick up an item, and sometimes to use it, is to touch it. Kicking a rocket launcher as you walk past is enough to grab it, equip it, and arm it, safely stowing whatever other weapon you might have been carrying at the time in the process.