My recent spell playing The Games: Summer Challenge confirmed something I already knew – in games, when people fall over, are thrown from something that’s moving, or just generally are involved in an accident, I find it very, very funny indeed.
Although I’ve always enjoyed the scripted humour of certain LucasArts adventures, for me, they haven’t provided me with too many laugh-out-loud moments. But get me on the Equestrian on Summer Challenge and I’ll be giggling childishly every time the horse refuses to jump and my rider ends up on the ground.
Epyx’s similarly-titled The Games: Summer Edition is also a bit of a laugh, especially the diving event, where you can send your blockily-rendered athlete flopping into the pool feet-first. I played it again recently and it sent me into a fit of giggles audible enough to prompt my girlfriend to come into the room to ask what was so funny. Imagine her dismay when she witnessed the jerky 16-colour spectacle lurching around on our new (relatively) expensively-acquired computer accompanied by an assortment of bleeps and squelches from the PC speaker.
Motorcycle games also provide some decent slapstick. The largely joyless experience of playing Road Rash was given a much-needed boost each and every time you decided to overtake on a hill and lost an argument with an oncoming taxi.
Recent trawling through bargain-bins saw me pay £1 for MotoGP 2 (which was apparently big-ish on XBox a few years ago) and that hasn’t disappointed in this regard – especially with me being quite crap at it.
Anyone else experience something similar? Any unscripted moments that have had you laughing out loud into a cold and empty room, or provoking housemates or family members to deride you as “a sad bastard”?
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Short of George Stobbart’s ‘Wanna check out my dirty, greasy tissue?’ or Gabriel Knight’s ‘All she wants to talk about is white sausage.’ I’m struggling to think of anything…
Weirdly, the only other thing that comes to mind is another Olympics style game, the name of which completely escapes me, which saw a hammer throwing athlete whiz off into the sky if you swung for too long.
September 10, 2008 @ 11:47 pm
Actually, that’s also in The Games: Summer Edition (above).
Yeah, if you didn’t release the hammer in time, you’d fly off into the air. Or if you got the timing wrong it would fly towards the monitor and ‘shatter’ it (that’s not so funny).
September 11, 2008 @ 9:42 am
I’ve got one. Dave Mirra Freestyle BMX 2 for Gamecube. When you bailed, you triggered ragdoll physics. A friend of mine and I discovered there was a button combo you could press to intentionally bail. They also had a level that took place on a highway interchange with heavy traffic. We spent hours purposely ramping in front of trucks and bailing so the truck would smash the ragdolled bastard.
April 13, 2014 @ 7:20 am
I just remembered my top moment of cracking up. In Skyrim you get a bunch of magical shouts. One of these, the famous Fus-Roh-Dah, starts out just briefly stunning enemies or knocking them on their ass. As the game progresses though it can be upgraded. When I got the full version I had no idea how powerful it was, until I unleashed it on a bear. And blasted the poor creature off the side of a mountain. I could see it tumbling over and over until it hit the ground. That’s the most a game has made me laugh in years.
Rik mentioned Road Rash; when your character gets knocked off the bike you automatically run back but can take manual control if you prefer. I remember once finding it very amusing to make the poor bastard do the rest of the race on foot.
April 14, 2014 @ 11:24 am
It does seem to me that the funniest moments are unintentional, or at least unscripted. For example, I find some of the vehicle crashes in the FlatOut games funny, but not the zany, deliberate, ‘crash your driver through the windscreen’ events.
Oh, and booting one of the ‘stranger danger’ orcs off the edge of a cliff in Dark Messiah of Might and Magic takes some beating.
April 14, 2014 @ 11:54 am