Worst thing you've ever done in a video game? (That you didn't have to do)

The Game Room
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When it comes to video games, there’s a usual cycle of concern and hysteria over the horribleviolence™ in some new game or another, that the player has to do.

However, lately, I’m curious about the worst things—violent, immoral, unkind, unhygienic, violated the Geneva Convention, etc.—that other dopers have done in games that they WEREN’T required to do.

That is, acts that aren’t a required part of gameplay—you could complete the game without doing them—or that even penalize you or hinder your progress in the game.

For example?

•A fighting game. Beating up your opponent? Doesn’t count. Running into the stands and beating to death the cheering spectators? Counts.
•A FPS. Shooting enemies? Doesn’t count. Deliberately shooting helpless wounded, or civilians? Counts.
•A theme park simulator. Overcharging people on admissions and concessions? Doesn’t count. Mis-designing the roller coaster so it flings the cars into a tiger cage? Counts.

Stuff like that. Clear as mud?
Anyway, my personal examples, off the top of my head?

•Nuclear terrorism, genocide. (Civilization II)

I can actually defend (after a fashion) the nuclear attacks—I only ever deployed spies on nuclear suicide missions as part of wartime operations, usually as a prelude to invasion, or to destroy enemy nuclear stockpiles in a first strike. I never nuked a city just to undermine it’s civilization economically, or to sabotage construction of a wonder, or anything underhanded like that.

I did purposely starve and depopulate an enemy civilization once, though. AFTER I’d conquered it. When it would have been more profitable AND easier just to rebuild and reintegrate it into my own empire. Yeah.

What can I say? Senatus Populusque Romanus.

•Tested out weapons on civilian populations. (Flight simulators)

Probably doesn’t qualify, as most of the ones this happened in didn’t register damage or casualties on the ground, or even at all, aside from a smoke cloud and a smear on the terrain graphics.

But I’d feel remiss if I didn’t include something I’ve made a career out of.

•Misc. torture, experimentations. (The Sims)

Aside from the typical Sim-tormenting…it turns out that if two Sims are in love BEFORE you seal them in a lightless, filthy chamber with no toilet and little food, they’ll stick together for comfort and consolation through it all. But if the same two people are sealed in the same chamber after they’ve only just met, they’ll end up fighting and hating each other before half the floor is covered with garbage and waste.

That was a fun run, even if I could feel my soul wither like a fig while I did it.

•Damage/injury model testing on NPCs. (Postal 2)

…let’s just say that it turned out the townsfolk could absorb truly amazing varieties of cumulative injuries without dying. And that death came as a friend.
So…anyone else?

2

I made Zaalbar shoot Mission.

3

“No Russian”, I felt kinda ill after that.

4

In Skyrim you can murder a couple or a single parent, get their kid shipped off to the orphanarium, then adopt the kid. Kids are normally unkillable, but with mods… and apparently they did record death vocals for kids, possibly anticipating that.

Lots where you commit genocide, alien races and such. Fallout has a bunch. In the third, you can: right at the start detonate a thought-to-be-dormant nuke in the middle of a nice down, all because a rich guy thinks the town blocks his skyline. Later you can sell people into slavery, and poison the wasteland water supply, killing off the majority of “impure” humans, ghouls, and mutants. In these cases, the drawbacks are arguably greater, although slavery is maintainable as long as you don’t grab anyone important. In Fallout 2 though, becoming a slaver requires tattooing your forehead, making you a pariah (being evil or a childkiller gets similar negative reactions).

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In mech commander, after you destroy a mech, the pilot starts running for their lives or try to escape in an escape pod. The pod can be shot down, and if you run quick you can step on them while they are running. Also, you can clear a path through trees by shooting them and waiting for them to burn down. However, if you hit it in enough areas at the same time, you can make a12 alarm forest fire burn down every tree on the entire map.

In many of the original microprose xxx games (explore, expand, exterminate, such as civ, master of magic, master of Orion etc) the best strategy was to leave one opponent alive while you colonized the rest of the world. What i usually did was have 8-16 units surrounding their last city which also caused them to slowly starve to death.

I think the original exploit of this type was the original ultima 2 and 3 where you could lure lord British to water and kill him with cannons.

In the original wizardry series by sir tech, there was one monster type that would summon more monsters. In #1, they were greater demons. You could spend all day in a single battle getting millions of Xp by getting them to call their brothers to their doom.

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Question: is this distinct from 4X games (add eXploit into there)?

[quoteI think the original exploit of this type was the original ultima 2 and 3 where you could lure lord British to water and kill him with cannons.[/quote]

The best example was in Ultima 7. Lord British would go for a daily stroll, passing under an archway with a plaque at IIRC noon or so. If you click it at that time, it falls, beheading him. Needless to say that’s not canon.

Kinda hard to explain through text but: Vandal Hearts 2 was a turn-based strategy RPG, similar to Final Fantasy Tactics. Except on each turn, one of your random troops moved, then an enemy moved simultaneous. When starting, it becomes frustrating when you go to attack a stationary enemy, and he moves to another square at the same time (likely behind you if you didn’t move as well). Anyway, the game was full of secret items, but it wasn’t always possible to search during battle. However, if you kill all but one enemy, he only moves at the same time as your fastest guy. That means you lure him into a corner, dodging each time while the enemy attacks, keeping the rest of your party away. Not high cruelty, but it became kind of pitiful to see them flailing away.

Also: the old exploit in Rollercoaster Tycoon where you open a small park with a straight promenade, give out free balloons or something so that people come, close the exit so they don’t leave (or don’t build one). Finally, to top it off, build a rollercoaster that terminates in the cart flying off, bowling down the people below with their balloons.

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I have destroyed all life and all planets outside my home system in my quadrant of the galaxy. The stellar converter in Master of Orion II was a Death Star like weapon that physically destroyed a planet. I was playing a challenge where I never colonized beyond my own solar system, so I turned the rest of the galaxy into a barren wasteland.

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I had a lot of fun exploits in Madden '02 (or was it 03?)

If you were blowing out the computer opponent, about 80% of the fans would leave. If you saved the game and reloaded it where you left off, the fans would all come back. I would imagine that I tricked them into turning around, parking their cars again, and coming back into the stadium.

The cheapest contract when you signed a player was their first one. So, the best thing to do was sign them to 7 year contracts right off the bat. If they tried to renegotiate in the 2nd to last year, I would keep reloading the game until they didn’t. Slave labor!

The computer was terrible at substitutions. So, I would always call the long bomb play just to exhaust their defensive backs. I would estimate that during a single game, their guys ran maybe 10-20k yards.

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Oh another one with madden, there was an exploit where if you called the left shift on defense, the left defensive tackle would always sack the qb. My guys averaged like 20 sacks a game. I would usually cripple 4-5 qbs a season.

Might and magic 3 had an exploit where if you kept hitting the space bar, you could get free money but time would pass rapidly. I usually started a game with a party, aged them until they died, made new characters, etc. Usually at least 500 years would pass this way. Some of the Npcs were all decrepit because i did this, and some of them died immediately after you met them.

10

In Sims2, I often made a Sim of my son-in-law and moved him into a house with everything he’d ever want except a door to the outside and a toilet, and then I’d run it at full speed and laugh maniacally while he pissed himself and got killed by swarms of cockroaches.

For some reason I never got tired of doing that.

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Oh, oh man, my life was on track, I had it all, you know, nice house, nice car, everything looking up…then I got Super Mario Bros, and after getting such a rush out of jumping on pixellated shuffling mushroom things and turtles just for the broop sound and the points, and getting all excited about picking up magic mushrooms - shit, man, it was just downhill from there, I got arrested for jumping on a bunch of tourists trying to get coins to pop out of public arts works, I broke my leg trying to jump into a manhole, then I got busted for buying shrooms from an undercover cop, then they made it worse when I kept telling the judge it’s a me ah Mario! while trying to shoot fireballs.

On a serious note, I find video game violence cathartic, playing bf3 gets the aggression out. I am ashamed to admit I’ve done some dishonorable things on the plains outside of Whiterun. But in my defense I was not trying to steal the giants loot, I just wanted to see what giant keep in their chest.

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Zoo Tycoon 2:
[ol]
[li]Build an awesome zoo with dinosaurs[/li][li]Wait for people to come in droves to see the dinosaurs[/li][li]Block off the exit/entrance[/li][li]Remove fencing from dinosaur pens and fire the dinosaur containment teams[/li][li]Watch as rampaging dinosaurs eat visitors[/li][/ol]

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I once role-played, in Ultima 4, the Avatar suddenly being possessed by the evil in the Skull of Mondain, and went around killing everything and everybody with it. Lost my avatarhood too, natch, but Lord British was immune and killed me. I roleplayed it like a dream that the avatar had, of paths not taken…

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Fallout- shoot the two-headed brahmin, make a pass at Tandi, spend the night with Sinthia.

Civilization, all versions- raze enemy cities. It pisses off your own people and really pisses off that enemy, but sometimes the sons of bitches have it coming.

15

I got bored of a game of Galactic Civilization II I was winning by a mile. I may or may not have ended up blowing up every single star in the galaxy except for that of my home world. Induced supernovae are a hell of a drug.

16

Hitman Silent Assassin…my motto in that game was ‘Leave no witnesses’, even though I knew I wouldn’t get a ‘Silent Assassin’ rating. The only time I didn’t kill anything that moved was when I knew doing so would cause me to fail the mission.

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Let’s see… I’m usually at my very harshest in the Total War series games.

After the bad guys break and run, I routinely send my cavalry in to massacre the fleeing enemies. Kind of hard-hearted I suppose, but considering that they’ll regroup and pester me again, there’s a definite pragmatic aspect to unfairly killing as many of them as I can, even if they’re defensively fleeing.

Plus, it’s historically accurate.

I typically also assassinate or screw with my enemies incessantly- things like poisoning their water, framing them, etc…

18

On Madden 92 or 93 on the Sega I would often line up in goalline defense and blitz the strong safety right through the middle. He was generally unstoppable in this situation and I would often injure the quarterback. This was when they had the ambulance come out and pick up the injured QB and run everyone over when it left.

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Oh… I almost forgot!

Back in 1998 or so when “Ultima Online” had just come out, my friends and I decided that we wanted to role-play evil characters.

Which was kind of dicey because the difference between a dickhead PKer and some guys roleplaying highwaymen can be pretty fine.

What we did was have patsy characters that were legitimate, and we’d use them to ferry and sell stuff in the cities (our highwaymen were banned). One of the patsies was a tailor or something, and he could dye up cloth. So we basically took a screenshot of the backgrounds of where we’d hang around and got cloaks in the predominant color for camouflage, and we also had the “hide” skill.

We’d hop out of either side of the road and say “Your money or your life!” and 9/10 of the people would fight, and we’d generally slaughter them by fighting one-on-one, then having the second guy pop out behind them and attack from behind.

Then we’d loot the corpses, and (this is where it gets bad) dismember them, so that the players would have to go all the way to the shrine to resurrect. I think we tried to sell the “meat” in town, but that didn’t work.

The best haul was when some magic-user was out in the woods casting his spells to get practice, and we waited until his mana was down or whatever, and then we just waylaid him and stole all his reagents, etc…

Anyhow, the good townsfolk eventually got a posse together and got us, and then IIRC, Origin changed up the rules or something, because we quit playing not long after that.

20

In Assassin’s Creed 2, Brotherhood, and Revelations, you can throw money into the street, causing all surrounding civilians to run in and scoop up the coins.

You can also poison guards, which makes them draw their weapons and swing wildly before they die.

I like to do the latter, then immediately do to the former. The result is a gleeful blender effect where innocent civilians get slaughtered by the tens, but more civilians keep running in. It’s an orchestra of death and blood. The best part is, the game doesn’t recognize it as the player killing civilians, so you can do it without reservation and suffer absolutely no consequences.