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The Top 100 Video Game Clichés – 60-51

The Top 100 Video Game Clichés – 60-51

The Top 100 Video Game Clichés – 60-51!

60. Exploding Barrels, Boxes, and Crates

Mythbusters proved that shooting a gun into a tank of fuel is not enough to set it on fire or cause an explosion. Then why in the name of all the video game gods does every single red container blow up in a fiery blaze if I shoot it once or twice. What the heck do they keep in there, Nitroglycerin?

59. The Needlessly Complicated Lock

To progress, you must find the seven coins shaped like stars scattered around the world in order to put them in the slots in this door to enter the mansion. Of course, this can only be done after you unlock the gate by performing the magic ritual. Multi-part collection puzzles are just boring. Heck, at this point I’d just call a locksmith. It’s worth the fifty bucks. And seriously, Peach, what kind of princess installs star locks on every castle door?

58. The Minigame

Minigames are everywhere. You could be in the middle of your quest to save the world and then—bam!—you have to play a card minigame. Or perhaps you are slaughtering a cult of vampires and then—bam!—rhythm minigame. Or perhaps you are sneaking your way through a secret government complex and—bam!—hacking minigame. Or perhaps you are an angry Spartan on his way to murder the God of War and then—bam!—sex minigame. Yeah, they come in all shapes and sizes.

The Top 100 Video Game Clichés - 60-51

57. The Unwinnable Boss Battle

These really piss me off. You’re minding your own business, progressing through your favorite RPG, when suddenly you get into a battle that is way too hard. Your party is getting slaughtered, and you expend all of your items trying to survive this ludicrous difficulty spike. When you finally die, the game continues. Really? Now you’ve wasted all your items. Even worse, this makes you try less when you are confronted with hard bosses later in the game because you think they are also part of a cinematic boss encounter. But when you die in those instances, the game ends. Make up your mind, RPG developers!

56. The Brooding Protagonist

It’s the nineties and no one understands me. My life is crap, my girlfriend is evil, my best friend died in a war, and the only way I can express myself is by wearing a leather jacket, combing my hair over my face, and saving the world. Here’s a hint, emo kid: Your life doesn’t suck. You can throw fireballs from your bare hands and you get paid for slaughtering monsters for a living. I wish my life could be that awesome.

55. Flammable Peaceful Villages

Here’s a mathematic formula for you: E=PR+H. Essentially this means the total combustible energy (E) of any village in a video game is equal to its peacefulness (P) times how remote it is (R), plus how happy the main character is living there (H). A peaceful little village on the coast of an out-of-the-way continent could solve the world’s energy crisis with the fire that will eventually consume it. Simply put, the more ideal a town is, the more likely it is to be set on fire.

54. Coins

Coins are everywhere. Whether taking place in a sci-fi society or a medieval village, every game has its own form of coins. I don’t just mean currency; I mean actual metal objects. Heck, if you are in an RPG they don’t even do anything besides increasing your score. Every game has its own version of the coin. Sonic, you can’t fool me with your rings; they are coins and you know it!

53. Scattered Diaries

It’s kind of funny how people in the middle of a war, revolution, or zombie outbreak always seem to have time to record their thoughts and scatter their recordings to all the corners of the world. Maybe if they spent less time recording and more time running from zombies, they would still be alive.

The Top 100 Video Game Clichés - 60-51

52. Backtracking

Alright, so I’ve gotten the boots that let me fly. Now I need to use them to go all the way back to the first dungeon to get the amulet of fire, and that will burn down the tree blocking the door to the last dungeon I was in. Sigh. Metroid and Zelda fans know exactly what I am talking about. For some reason, it doesn’t count as an adventure unless you are forced to go all the way back to the beginning of the game just to open up a treasure chest that was slightly out of reach before you got your new spiffy jump boots.

51. Bright Red Flashing Weak Points

I find it interesting that giant battlecruisers always seem to have one part of the ship that is colored differently, and that always seems to be the part that has the weakest structural integrity. In fact, this is as strange as the fact that serums designed to make men into supersoldiers have a tendency to instead bring about horrible monstrosities with organs on the outside.

By Angelo M. D’Argenio
CCC Contributing Writer

*The views expressed within this article are solely the opinion of the author and do not express the views held by Cheat Code Central.*

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