Well it’s a little vague (he certainly attempts suicide), but the very bottom of this file has a transcript.
I came in here to say Planescape: Torment but since it’s already been said, I will say I really liked the ending. It was the only ending that could have been, and it’s still one of my favorite games ever.
There’s a very good case for the ending of Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magick Obscura leaving the protaganist (ie, you) and companions stranded in another dimension from which there is supposedly no return- although it can be inferred from the ending narration that you do find a way back, depending how you look at it.
Well, if you are including alternate endings, at the end of the original Half Life if you (as Gordon Freeman) choose not to join with G-Man you find yourself teleported with no weapons into a room full of vortigaunts. Not much chance you’re surviving that one.
Have you seen the slightly different ending you get if you have the “excess violence” (or whatever it was called) option selected?
In Septerra Core:
Maya dies and turns into some kind of an angel at the end
Doom II, you beat the Cyberdeamon then pass into a teleport to hell…you don’t last.
The Woods has four possible paths/endings, each with their own “twist”:
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Join Jasper’s group. After a long and hard series of missions under his sadistic and maniacal command, you go insane and run off into the woods babbling incoherently. It’s at this point that the “twist” is realized - all the half-dressed, mumbling savages that you’ve been encountering throughout the game were once Jasper’s goons, and now you’ve become one of them.
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Join The Farmer’s group. After you’ve completed all of his missions and helped him take over the Greasers’ oil refinery and gas station, he finally rewards you by letting you hitch a ride on one of the planes that periodically land and take off from his airstrip. The “twist” is that once you’re in the air, you discover that the pilot is just planning to collect the reward for bringing you back to the police that you’ve been on the run from the whole time. The co-pilot slaps you in handcuffs, gags you, and you’re fucked.
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Join Beauchamp’s group. After proving yourself to be a capable employee, you eventually become his second-in-command, but gradually grow tired of having to take orders from him, and kill him by throwing him out of his office window. You basically take over his position, but it’s clear that all of his other guards are ambivalent about having you as their new boss. In the ending cutscene, you’re sitting at Beauchamp’s desk when all of a sudden three guys in suits walk through the door and approach you. (It’s clear from previous references that these are Beauchamp’s father and two brothers, who he directly reports to - the older of the three guys walks in with a limp, which Beauchamp had said his father had.) They stand right in front of your desk and the screen fades to black. (It’s implied that they have discovered your betrayal, and have come to kill you.)
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If you can sabotage the oil refinery, kill Faneuil (Jasper’s second in command), and use the dynamite to blow holes in The Farmer’s airstrip and disable it while working for The Farmer, you can set off a war between the three factions and they will all attack each other. If you can get to the Fire Tower, you can climb to the top and watch the ensuing battle which eventually sets the whole woods on fire. When it’s over, everyone else is dead - but you’re still stuck in the woods with no way out, and now you have nobody on your side at all.
All four of these endings are pretty negative, although only 3 explicitly states that you die.
I’m actually surprised this isn’t done more often. It’s a very workable concept, and the perfect way to justify bringing fresh blood to the front.
House of the Dead 4: So the AMS duo, James Taylor and Kate Green, have just finsihed a difficult fight against Star. He explodes, sending weird purple rays in all directions…one of which hits James. He drops to his knees, but says he’s fine.
He seems to be fine as the duo slugs it out through Goldman’s inner sanctum. Just a few yards to go. James falls to his knees again. But he gets up again. They demolish the rest of the opposition race into Goldman’s main office, just in time (okay, give or take a few seconds) to stop the nuke launch (er, don’t ask). Just one more big enemy to go, World.
Which turns out to be a lot harder than even the usual HotD final boss battle, as World can not only take an incredible pounding, it actually grows stronger after the AMS pair beats it the first time. Nevertheless, the almighty long-range effectiveness of their guns finally prevails…for a few moments, before the horror fully recovers again and attains its ultimate form.
And it gets worse. James is in a lot worse shape than he was letting on. He’s dying. Knowing that he won’t see another day no matter what, he brings in his final, desperate play against World…the nuclear device in his PDA.
Boooooooom.
Huge flaming crater, entire surrounding ground smashed (and Kate completely uninjured, curiously enough). Nothing left of James Taylor or World except a thin mist.
By far the most spectacular ending in a shooting game that I’ve ever remembered.
Do you happen to have a link to more information about this game? Wikipedia and google keep turning up stuff about Tiger Woods Golf Spectacular (or whatever). “The Woods” is hard to search for.
Betrayal at Krondor - Gorath gets skragged by Pug and Owen while trying to keep the enemy off the magical stone
Final Fantasy 7 - I don’t quite get the ending: Midgar is overgrown, Red XIII (presumably the last of his kind) runs around with others of his species, no sign of humans around - a hard reset for the sake of ecological balance?
Bioshock admittedly, you die several decades after the events in the game, but it doesn’t make you any more alive.
Infocom’s Infidel.
As you successfully grab the treasure and achieve maximum points, you also trigger a sand trap and die.
In an old game called Zub, from way back in the 8-bit days, The object of the game is to guide the character Zub (a genetically engineered lifeform built specifically for this purpose), traverse all levels and return home with an object called The Green Eye Of Zub. On completion, Zub presents the object to the emperor and the game is over - a screen of congratulatory narrative text appears, the very last sentence of which is “Zub was shot at dawn”.
OK, I just made the whole thing up. I was waiting for someone to call me on it.
In reality, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. has several possible endings, and two of them involve death for the protagonist. In one, he simply vanishes without a trace, and in the other he stupidly asks “I want to be rich” to the Wish Granter and the whole Chernobyl power plant collapses and kills him.
At the end of Dreamfall - The Longest Journey it seems like you die.
Okay, you don’t know exactly for certain.
[spoiler]At the start you see her laying asleep in bed, and it leads into the game as she talks to you telling you the story of how she came to be there (playing the game) only to return to the room at the end where she is in a coma/dying/dead and then she finds herself in the other Dream world again in a different place and starts to tell someone else the story of what happened.
So is she dead? Trapped in Dreams? You don’t know. [/spoiler]
And it drives me nuts that it left a cliffhanger. I kinda prefer neatly ended stories where there isn’t a cliffhangar, especially as I don’t update my computers that much and by the time the next one comes out I might not be able to play.
That non-ending angered me so much!
Tomb Raider.
I always thought it was strange that they made so many sequeals to a game that only lasts 3 minutes.
In the controversial game Harvester, if you make it through all the trials and puzzles to the end, you are presented with two unpleasant options:
[spoiler]1. You consent to join the Lodge, and agree to become a serial killer for them, or
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You refuse their offer, and die in a drug induced coma (although with happy dreams)
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Sorry, Opal. I know of no third option[/spoiler]
However, at least a few of the puzzles have alternative non-violent or non-destructive solutions, which led me to wonder if there may be some way to reach the end without any violence at all. If so, there may be a third option, although I have yet to find it anywhere.
I haven’t seen how the expansion starts, but in Neverwinter Nights 2, you are left for dead.
The original Half Life didn’t seem to end well for Gordon either.