Missingno. in Pokemon R/B was pretty WTFtastic.
Majora’s Mask was definitely a very WTF game. The first time I watched someone play it, it gave me nightmares!
The face of the moon, the wacked-out salesman, the giants with no bodies–the game is so surreal that many Zelda fans think that this game took place in Link’s head during the 7 years that he was sleeping in the Temple of Time, to prepare him to be a better hero.
There, is, though, a small clue that what happened might habe been real:
If you collect all the masks, the Skull Kid gives you the “Fierce Deity” Mask (which in Japanese was the Oni, or Devil/Demon/Monster, Mask) and says:
“Let’s play a game! You can be the bad guy!”
You put the mask on, and it transforms you into Adult Link, more or less.
So perhaps the Skull Kid resented Link for growing up. Or maybe I’m reading way too much into some incidental dialogue.
One time in Warcraft III as a joke I used one of the worst strategies I could think of. My partner and I built together in one base and surrounded it with a wall of lumber mills (useless if you have more than one) and towers. Once we finished our great wall, we built some of the game’s most useless units (gyrocopters and faerie dragons) to attack with.
Our opponents were so amazingly incompetent that we won. They continually sent land units at our wall. They’d get in a couple weak blows to the lumber mills before being shredded by the towers’ arrows. Whenever they attacked we sent our weak air units to go attack their base. They never built anti-air defenses. They never sent air units around our wall. They never used ranged seige units that could destroy our wall in 5 seconds. When asked what was wrong with them, they replied “u guys are fags! raiders are for real men!”.
All your base are belong to us?
Anything involving throwing vegetables in the Super Mario Series. Even as a kid that really blew my mind.
When the Burmecians (Freya’s kin) in FF IX started Riverdancing. That was weird. I mean, it was a bunch of anthropomorphic rats doing Lord of the Dance!
Any time Brother said anything in FF X or FF X-2.
Ghaleon’s famous ‘It’s time for my coming out party!’ quote from Lunar: SSSC. Only John Truitt could do that.
The cross-dressing dancer from FF IV.
When my friend got killed by a table in Prince of Persia: SoT. Yes, she went to destroy the table, and somehow it killed her.
Leen coming back from the dead in Grandia. I mean, just when Mullen is bitching about everything in the ending and looks like the sorriest sap on the planet, his chick comes back from the dead. O_o
I’m sure I’ll think of more later.
Especially if you caught him and then saved. “WTF is my save file all screwed up?”
WTF and quite amusing–Zidane’s “Ooh, soft” from FFIX.
Super Mario Brothers 2 (US)
What the hell was the deal with that? Game sucked…
Not half as much as the ending.
Apparently, this game is the Super Mario Bros’ version of a game that was only released in Japan, or something.
It definitely does make you wonder what the heck the game designers were smoking when they wrote this game.
My most memorable WTF? video game moment came while watching someone play Super Mario Bros. for the first time. He was in level 1-2 (the underground dungeon), had just hit a secret block, and started to climb the vine that came out of it. I was expecting him to simply climb back to the “surface”…
…and, instead, Mario ends up on top of the scrolling playfield, up next to the score and the timer! Then he proceeds to run to the right, past the exit pipe, and into the room with the secret warp pipes!
A video game had just broken the fourth wall. I had total cranial meltdown for five minutes afterwards.
Re: Super Mario Bros. 2
IIRC, the “original” SMB2 was some kind of arabian-themed side-scroller, hence the deserts and flying carpets. Nintendo figured the Japanese Super Mario Bros. 2 was way too hard for 'mericans, and rebranded that game instead for the States.
Chrono Trigger, when Dalton gets in the modified Epoch for the first time. Chrono’s theme starts playing, and he then yells to his henchmen to turn off the music!
The moment when Link first puts on the Goron mask, and his mouth gets all big scares the crap out of me. I have to close my eyes the first time that plays, and then skip the scene every time thereafter.
Nothing videogame-related shocked me too much even when I was a little kid, and I’m certainly not surprised by anything now. (When Konami has a T&A wrestling game and Namco has the most enjoyable racing game in ages, buddy, there are no rules.) Still, I can name more than a few really cool moments:
10 Yard Fight - Watching someone do the conversion (the easiest part of the game and automatic for pretty much everyone). The QB runs back…and keeps running back, on and on, all the way to his own goal line. The player finally kicks it, whereupon the ball goes up, then down…then back up, and down again (straight as an arrow all the way), continuing like this before splitting the uprights.
(I have no idea how he did this, BTW…I tried it three times with MAME, and never came close to succeeding.)
Ring King - Title fight against Blue Warker. Both men have taken a lot of shots and are hurting. The player lands a few good shots and looks like he’s on his way to winning this thing. Until…
- WHAM *
[Player goes flying out of the ring]
[About five seconds of dead silence]
[Game over screen]
Just glad it wasn’t me…I might have fainted.
Castlevania - Final battle against the Count. I try again and again, but just can’t get 16 hits on the fiend. Finally, I manage to catch a break. Both of us down to our last hit…and I get it! His head flies off, and his body bursts into pieces…
…revealing the REAL final enemy, with a fresh 16 bars. With the predictable outcome.
Throughout Konami’s history, I’ve usually either loved or loathed it. This was definitely one of the “loathe” moments.
(Never, ever beat him without codes, BTW.)
California Games - In the frisbee toss event, if you wait too long to make the throw, a Defender alien will come by and abduct the catcher, grinning as it takes off.
Kageki - Two words: Stage 8. The ball 'n chain guy, who just tossed six of your beaten opponents down a manhole. The last opponent before the gang leader. The second to last fight in the entire game. He starts by swinging his weapon menacingly while slowly shuffling back and forth.
Two possible outcomes to this fight:
- You hit him with one punch, which is pretty easy since he can’t duck and has no attacks whatsoever, whereupon he immediately goes down like a sack of bricks. Referee drags his unconscious butt away; you win.
- You do nothing, and he just does that stupid back-and-forth dance for a while. Then the ref grows impatient and runs in, stops the fight…and gives you the win!
Killer Instinct - Two bits of weirdness for the price of one.
First off, Orchid’s finishing move where she…uh, unzips her top and flashes her breasts. If there’s any competition with this for “dumbest finishing move ever”, I’m unaware of it.
And then there’s Eyedol’s ending, one of the greatest fighting game endings ever. Apparently the good folks at Rare didn’t know what to do with it…y’know, since he’s the boss and all…so they decided to go the route of pure weirdness.
It starts with Eyedol in an empty chamber, apparently basking in his victory. Suddenly, a voice from the back…a plain-looking woman calls out to him, calling him by a completely different name (“Billy”, IIRC). From her tone of voice, it’s clear that she thinks Eyedol’s his son. “Who are you calling Billy?”, he demands. Needing proof, the woman points out to a pair of bracelets that she gave her son for his birthday many years ago. Eyedol realizes the truth of her words, and, eyes fixed on hers, he tenderly…
[spoiler]…raises his club and smashes her brains out.
With the words “Somehow…we don’t think so.” emblazoned across the screen in red letters. Yeah…I didn’t either. 
[/spoiler]
Didn’t the Spanish actually do that IRL, minus the tanks?
Yeah, but they had certain technological and organizational advantages that their enemies didn’t.
Police Quest 4: Open Season. Its been like 10 years since this game out so I’m not too worried but just in case, ** I’m about to spoil the game.**
In this game you’re a detective who’s trying to catch a serial killer. To finally find the location of the killer (I’m hazy on the details, its been like 6 or 7 years since I played the game) you put a dog on the trail and let him DRAG you to the serial killer’s hide out. Then, the serial killer (a woman, BTW) captures you (after all, why would you want to kill the cop who’s going to arrest you when nobody would ever even know) by knocking you out with one punch. You wake up in her apartment, without your weapons. For some reason you’re able to go around her home, and you find a lighter, a DECAPITATED HUMAN HEAD (that scared the shit out of me, cause I was like 11 when I was playing this) and some hair gel, so you use the lighter and gel to make a torch, then when they killer comes home you set her on fire! Standard police work.
Police Quest 3: I played through hours of the game, getting close to the end. Then it turns out that I made a minor mistake very early in the game (not putting the time of day on a traffic ticket) which allows a speeder to get off. Because of this, you LOSE THE GAME and I had to load a save game from literally about 10 hours earlier in the game and replay the rest of that shitty, shitty game.
Police Quest SWAT: There were only 3 short, frustrating missions in this game, for 50 bucks! They just made you play them over and over again even after you had killed the perps.
Man, why did I keep buying these police quest games?
Oh, in Max Payne, there’s a comic strip part near the end where you read a note on a desk and Max actually realizes that he is just a character in a video game (or maybe it was that he was a character in a comic book.)
The entire first Leon part of RE2 is a WTF moment. What kind of Police station is like that. Come on!
Well, he doesn’t “realize” it… he’s just trippin’. I personally like the graphic novel panel with the Max Payne weapon selection icons and such…
And that’s why I love it so 
I wanna see another Earthbound! I want more of that weird sense of humor!
Another specific from that game I guess is first talking to those mole people. I can’t remember their names.
All right, that one really got to me. And I knew that the game did stuff like that beforehand!
Actually, for me it said look to the sequel, not the full game.
That game freaked me out so many times. It got me with the dead lady in the bathtub thing, even though it’s almost a cliche now.
Are those the ones where they are all the third strongest, for some reason I can’t figure out?