[Tuesday's Trope is a weekly department highlighting an amusing video game trope from TVTropes. Aggrogate is not affiliated with TVTropes.org in any way. All trope examples come from TVTropes and are shared via the Creative Commons license.]

Boss fights don't have to make sense. Sure, sometimes you'll fight a crime lord, an alien overlord, or an evil wizard that fits in with the narrative of the game you're playing, but just as often you're probably going to run across a mutant cake, a robot dinosaur, or a Giant Space Flea from Nowhere.

What is the Giant Space Flea from Nowhere? It's supposed to be the embodiment of all evil in the world. Some say its father was the main character's long-lost friend. Nobody believed it was real. Nobody ever saw it or knew anybody that ever worked directly for it, but to hear the cutscene tell it, anybody could have worked for it. You never knew. That was its power. The greatest trick the GSFN ever pulled was convincing the world it didn't exist. And like that, poof. It's gone.

The GSFN is any boss that just doesn't make sense. It appears out of nowhere, forces you to fight it, and then vanishes without a word. In some games, it turns out to be the final boss, just because the guy you were chasing the entire game didn't seem big or interesting enough. It just shows up, looking for a fight.

Examples of Giant Space Fleas from Nowhere include:

• Dark Force, the final boss of Phantasy Star, was initially one of these, but was retconned into having an expanded role in the Phantasy Star mythos in later games. You can say that he "graduated" from Space Flea status.
• Dragon Quest in general is terrible about doing this to the final boss of the game. Even the very first one, the original text had the Dragonlord's pet superdragon come out of nowhere after you beat him (although the first translation changed this to his "true form" to help make the fight climactic and continuous.)
• Skies Of Arcadia has quite a few of these. An overweight, acid-spewing rabbit, a giant robotic penguin with a death-ray, a floating tortoise that could make itself invincible, and a cockatrice-esque giant bird all appeared suddenly, were dispatched by the heroes, and died without comment from anyone.
• Chernabog from Kingdom Hearts. He literally appears out of nowhere, after you've jumped through the hole in "The End of the World". You don't know who he is, Sora makes no comment about him whatsoever, it's never explained if he's a Heartless, what connection he's got to Xehanort or why he's even there, he's the only boss who doesn't get an entry in Jiminy Cricket's journal and he's never mentioned again. It's as though the developers just thought it would be a disservice not to include one of the most impressive Disney creations, even if they had to just drop it in without so much as a single word of context. It's just plain Rule Of Cool (and copious Rule Of Scary).
• Chrono Cross and the Time Devourer. Sure, Lavos is mentioned a couple times in passing if you go out of your way to read side documents near the end. Schala isn't. But the game already gave two 'final' bosses before this, one at the end of a long dungeon and the prior requiring a long attunement and the entire game having built up to it. But then you fight this giant space eating glowing thing that merged with Schala somehow and defeat it with The Power Of Rock? What the hell? Dropping Magus in would have made about as much sense. Hell, Chrono, Marle and a zombie Lucca would have made about as much sense. And what was with Miguel? Why was he a superpowered philosophical fisherman?
• The ending of No More Heroes has got to be a parody of this, with a long stream of nonsensical boss fights and totally non-foreshadowed plot twists which push Travis to break the Fourth Wall and complain that the developers are just making this up as they go along.
• After defeating the Big Bad Plutonium Boss of Blaster Master, a strange cyborg knight with a plasma whip appears out of nowhere to challenge you.
• The video game The Matrix: Path of Neo more or less proceeded with the plot of the three Matrix movies. Until the very end, when instead all of the Smiths morphed into one giant "Mega-Smith" to fight Neo. Atari-esque avatars of the Wachowski Brothers stopped the plot at that point to explain how the metaphorical ending of the movies didn't translate well into a video game. This may be true, but it did feel like they were making fun of the player. ("Have fun... and enjoy enlightenment!" [Both laugh])
• Metal Slug 3's first four and a half levels are a fight against a human army (and the odd Giant Enemy Crab)... until you defeat the commander. At that point, an alien springs from his body, and the last half of the last level is a war against the invading aliens known as the Mars People. The series takes Refuge In Audacity, though, so most players's reactions are "Oh, cool!"
• Castle Crashers also does this in the final level. Even though the Cyclops and Black Knight are both encountered in earlier levels, on the final level you fight a guy with a toolbox for a head that draws bad flash animation.
• The final boss from Mega Man 2 would certainly count as this. Right as you reach the end of the caves underneath Wily Fortress, you meet up with Dr. Wily, expecting a battle against one of his mechas... But, for some reason, he literally levitates out of the Wily Saucer and transforms into what looks like some sort of space alien... Not only that, but the room becomes filled with stars and darkness, again without any prior lead-up. After you destroy this "true form" of Wily, it turns out to just be his Holograph Projector, and, as the room returns to normal, you see that Wily was just behind a console, operating the green-shooty-alien-holograph-thingie.

[Tuesday's Trope is a weekly department highlighting an amusing video game trope from TVTropes. Aggrogate is not affiliated with TVTropes.org in any way. All trope examples come from TVTropes and are shared via the Creative Commons license.]

Almost every fighting game has a character nobody wants to play because he's too weak, too strange, or too useless. That same character inevitably turns out to be completely unstoppable in the right hands. They might be extremely difficult to master, but once you figure out how to take advantage of their unique abilities they're absolute monsters in the ring. They are Lethal Joke Characters.

Tournament fighters aren't the only games to have lethal joke characters. Many RPGs feature seldom-used characters that can be grinded or equipped properly to turn them into invincible killing machines. Blue mages in Final Fantasy games are often lethal joke characters, because it's so difficult to get their best abilities. If you can expose them to just the right magics, though, they easily become the most powerful members of your party.

Examples of lethal joke characters include:

• Voldo in Soul Calibur, or as we like to call him, Mr. Freaky Guy, is either useless or invincible. A good portion of his "Special Moves" are simply to change his physical orientation to his opponent, backwards crab walk FTW.
• Speaking of Capcom versus games, Roll in Tatsunoko vs. Capcom has been improved upon. She still has a low stamina (with Karas being the lowest), but she is tiny, has a disjointed hitbox thanks to her broom, and has a fast air-dash. Her ground combos can lead to her Roll Sweep-Sweep special move, which can hit a grounded foe and CANNOT BE ESCAPED! She has a LEVEL 1 hyper move that recovers her health decently too! Her attacks also deal good amount of damage!
• Pokemon has a few characters that work like this, the most famous being Wobbuffet. When it was first introduced in Pokémon Gold and Silver, its gimmick of only being able to counterattack and a tiny movepool of only 4 moves left it quite difficult to use without prediction. However, with the advent of its ability Shadow Tag, which prevents the opponent from switching out against it, and expanding its movepool ever so slightly (by 3, but only one of them is really needed), it made the huge jump from never-used tier to the uber tier. As it is now nearly impossible to take one out without losing a Pokémon. People are even considering placing it in a tier of its own.
• In Tekken 3, we got Gon... which despite being a bit slow and short (or due to being short), cannot be attacked by high attacks, cannot be thrown, and has unblockable projectiles.
• Cait Sith from Final Fantasy VII. When you first get him, it's hate hate hate hate. Then he gets his final Limit Break, which has the possibility of ending the battle. Period. Get the best result on his "Slots" Limit, and you win. Against anything. Even Bosses. Even the Final Boss. Even the Bonus Bosses. (Still, hate hate hate)
• Quina, the Blue Mage from Final Fantasy IX looks really goofy and probably seems pretty useless to most new players. However, he has several attacks that are devastating in the right hands and can be obtained early in the game. For example, L5 Death instantly kills certain enemies (including dragons in the first disc who are supposed to be too powerful to beat) and Limit Glove is guaranteed to do 9999 damage (as long as Quina is at 1 HP).
• Shingo Yabuki of The King of Fighters '97, who is less effective in terms of technique but still has lots of damage potential in him, thanks to his ability to do random critical hits. Basically, it's a bit hard to have him hit you, but when he does hit, he'll break your defenses more than once. Yeowch.
• Mortal Kombat's Nightwolf was originally a parody of Thunder Hawk from Street Fighter. Except that he could run faster than a character was being thrown, and he had a fast recovery time, so you could set up a throw combo. He's still pretty good even in subsequent games, but no unblockable 100% combos.
• Speaking of T.Hawk and throwing, he almost epitomizes this trope in Super Street Fighter II Turbo. He's laughably bad and has nearly unwinnable matchups against half the cast, and at a disadvantage against another quarter. However, if at any time, he achieves a knockdown in the corner, he can start a loop of safe-jumping (attacking with his jumping weak punch, which strikes on a blocking opponent, but whiffs and allows him to land against somebody attempting to reverse him), and following this with a negative-edge (button-released) Typhoon throw. This pattern allows him to do a completely unbreakable sequence of throwing somebody over and over again in the corner until they die, making him the only character in any iteration of Street Fighter II with an instant-win tactic, provided he can set it up.
• Carl Clover from Blaz Blue seems like a pretty terrible character at first, with a difficult style of play (you have to simultaneously control two characters, or else play as one character who's notably weaker than each other one in the game) and little in the way of obvious strengths. He also has the game's only infinite loop, which, while difficult to master, can easily win a match. Carl currently sits 4th or 5th (out of 12) on the game's tier lists, having initially been consigned to bottom-tier status.

[Tuesday's Trope is a weekly department highlighting an amusing video game trope from TVTropes. Aggrogate is not affiliated with TVTropes.org in any way. All trope examples come from TVTropes and are shared via the Creative Commons license.]

Congratulations, you just destroyed the world. You spent hours looking for the pieces of a crystal you thought would help fight the evil emperor, but it turns out that crystal has a dark god inside that's the real threat! The path to hell is paved with good intentions, and when you step down that road during a video game, you're likely to hear "Nice job breaking it, hero."

Examples of Nice Job Breaking It Hero include:

• In Ocarina of Time, Link follows Zelda's instructions and manages to gather up all of the spiritual stones, the ocarina, and the Song of Time and then pop open the Door of Time... allowing Ganondorf to waltz in and plunder the Golden Land. Actually, you should really blame this one on the Master Sword, for not letting a kid be the Hero of Time and instead sealing him away for seven years while Ganondorf became King of Evil. Nice job breaking it, sword.
• In the game Metroid Fusion, the Metroids — a species of highly dangerous alien animals — have been virtually eliminated from their homeworld by the protagonist; it turns out that the Metroids were keeping a terrible shape-shifting parasite in check, and now it's overrun the planet, forcing the protagonist to deal with it. Whoops.
• The Ultima series in general is one big string of these moments, to the point where by Ultima 9, it looks like Britannia, and indeed, the entire multiverse, would have been a lot better off if you had just stayed home, due to the Guardian, the Big Bad of Ultima 7 through 9, having been brought into being by you completing the quest of the Avatar from way back in Ultima 4, the only game in the general series that appeared to buck this particular trend.
• Happens twice in Drakengard 2. First the destruction of the Knights and their seals unleash a red dragon that intends to destroy the world. And then, when you kill the red dragon, it turns out that it was a seal for the dark gods that control the world. And the sky explodes. Whoops indeed.
• Final Fantasy I: Killing Garland in the beginning allows him to take control of the four elemental forces and create the time loop.
• Final Fantasy VI: Gaining the Espers' trust and bringing them to Thamasa for a supposed reconciliation with The Empire just allows Kefka to massacre them all and become more powerful.
• The ultimate focus of the game Brave Fencer Musashi: you spend the game running around collecting the scrolls that the original Brave Fencer Musashi used to seal a dark wizard with the sword Lumina. You do this to power up the sword in the hopes of stopping Thirstquencher Empire's bid for world dominance, only to find out that the original Brave Fencer Musashi didn't seal the dark wizard with the sword, but in the sword, who was then released. Pat yourself on the back, Musashi, you earned it.
• Two of the four possible endings of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night involve an underinformed Alucard eliminating the Belmont bloodline by beating the stuffing out of one extremely possessed Richter. Seeing as the Belmonts are humanity's best and perhaps only hope in the fight against Alucard's infamous father... Oops.
• Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia does this too, doubling as a Non Standard Game Over: if the player hasn't rescued all of the villagers before defeating Albus, Shanoa completes the Dominus glyphs and uses them on Dracula's seal, only to unwittingly kill herself and RELEASE Dracula, rather than destroy him. Whoops.
• Subverted in the final battle of Eternal Darkness. The player has to use the Villain's giant Circle of Power (which he had used to unseal his Canned Evil, Big Bad Elder God) to summon the Canned Evil God that trumps him/her/them/it, stalling the first one and letting the heroine deal with the villain himself. Upon offing him, she realizes that the god she had summoned is just as Big, just as Bad, and just as in need of resealing, at which point the grandfather (also controlled by the player at this point) finishes the job.
• Chrono Cross. Not only was it bad enough in the main game to get The Grand List Of Console Role Playing Game Cliches entry named after it, it retroactively did this to the first game's ending. It turns out that the Chrono Trigger heroes, by meddling in the Zeal Kingdom's time line, caused princess Schala to be absorbed by Lavos, becoming an entity that would eventually evolve into the Time Devourer, a being that would then proceed to consume all of time and space. The CC heroes will have to break a lot of things on their own to fix this one.
• In the finale of Diablo, the hero takes the soulstone containing Diablo's spirit of pure evil and jams it into his own forehead, intending to contain the spirit within him. He fails spectacularly as Diablo consumes his soul, takes over his body, ravages the town of Tristram that the hero spent all of Diablo trying to save, and becomes the villain of Diablo II.
• Terranigma has a few of these - you start off the game by opening Pandora's Box, for crying out loud. You then resurrect the continents, plants, birds, animals, humans, and usher in a golden age of free trade and genius thinking... only to resurrect Beruga, a mad scientist who proceeds to wipe out the city of Neotokio with a supervirus and try to take over the world. It then turns out that this was the entire reason your old village elder sent you topside, so he could completely destroy it via Beruga. This isn't the Nice Job Breaking It Hero. No, what is is that to fix all that, you get back to the underside and defeat the village elder... Who turns out to be the god of your own world and the thing keeping it and everything in it in existence. You've just destroyed your entire world, killed all your friends and destroyed yourself. Nice Job Breaking It Hero, even if you did it Because Destiny Says So.
• In the first System Shock, SHODAN's ethical constraints were removed by the player character. Whoops. It gets better too. In the second game, you find out the fate of the virus-infested grove that the Hacker jettisoned in the first game, where SHODAN was developing an experimental mutagen. Upon crash landing on Tau Ceti V, the mutants evolved into the collective alien hive mind known as The Many, the main antagonists in the second game. Additionally, ejecting the grove also allowed a portion of SHODAN's AI to survive. This version of SHODAN nearly succeeded in using the ship's warp drive to assimilate reality into cyberspace, after the player character spent a great deal of effort helping her gain control of it. Whoops indeed.
• Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. First invoked when Starkiller, having rounded up discontents within the Empire and founding the Rebel Alliance, is suddenly attacked at the first meeting of said Alliance by his own master, Darth Vader, who reveals the whole plan to form the Alliance was a Xanatos Gambit by him and the Emperor to weed out their last remaining foes. Canonically, this is then Inverted when Starkiller , or Galen by now, valiantly sacrifices himself against the Emperor to buy time for the Alliance leaders to escape...thus providing the Alliance with a martyr to rally around, inspiring them. The Emperor and Vader realize this...which means that, yes, the entire original trilogy was a direct result of a failed Xanatos Gambit by the Big Bad! Nice Job Fixing It Villain!

[Tuesday's Trope is a weekly department highlighting an amusing video game trope from TVTropes. Aggrogate is not affiliated with TVTropes.org in any way. All trope examples come from TVTropes and are shared via the Creative Commons license.]

Just because you've finished a game doesn't mean you're done with it. Sometimes it helps to start all over again, with all the experience and equipment you built up or a few extra items you can't even find in your first playthrough. This ability to start again while carrying over things from your previous game is called New Game Plus, and it's become a popular feature in many games. Chrono Trigger wasn't necessarily the first game to do this, but it pioneered the concept and gave it its name. This is actually one of the few video game tropes with its own Wikipedia page!

Examples of New Game Plus include:

• Naturally, Chrono Trigger, as listed above. You get to keep anything that's not a key item in the new game, so you can fight the final boss almost anytime, required to get the various endings. Also, Chrono Cross not only has the mode, but it's the only way to get all of the Loads And Loads Of Characters at once. Cross also gives you two extra items: one lets you switch Serge for another character in battle, and one lets you speed up or slow down the game speed, which is a godsend.
• Once you have won the game once, Mass Effect lets you start a new game with the same character, inventory, and experience, so you aren't forced to use a new character when playing on the newly-unlocked Hardcore difficulty. The game even increases the level cap from 50 to 60 for both old and new characters. Similarly, winning again on Hardcore unlocks the Insanity difficulty, with the same ability to play using an old character. Furthermore, some unlockable bonuses let you use an ability or weapon on a new character, even if that character cannot usually use that ability or weapon.
• In Metal Gear Solid, after completing the game, depending on which of the two ending story paths you chose, you could start over with one of two super-items: A headband that grants unlimited ammo, or an optical camouflage suit that grants invisibility. Get both endings, and you can play through the game the third time in a tuxedo, plus keep both special items.
• After completing each game in the Ratchet And Clank series, players are presented with the option to begin a new game on the same save file, and are allowed to keep their ultra-powerful weapons and ammo. Considering how much currency the average player accumulates over the course of the average game (and subsequently spends on weapons and ammunition), this is pretty much the only feasible way for most players to get the first game's Infinity Plus One Gun, the RYNO.
• Most Resident Evil games allow you to start with an extremely powerful gun once you unlock it, usually by clearing the game really fast, with a very high score. And of course, you get a closet that fills up with spiffy new outfits.
• Some Nippon Ichi games, such as Disgaea and Makai Kingdom, have "New Game Plus" options that allow players to keep all of the characters they've created up to that point, along with all of the awesome weapons they've collected. Almost a necessity, as these games are always rife with extra dungeons, bonus bosses and multiple endings.
• The Front Mission DS remake allows you to New Game + yourself into either easier or harder difficulties, as easy as 0.5x normal to as hard as 20.0x!
• The World Ends With You has a version of New Game Plus that's even better than most: once you've beaten the final boss, you can jump to any chapter of the story at any point, even if you're in the middle of a different chapter, with your level, your items, your pins, your friendship levels, and so forth intact. Want to fight some Noise that only appear in chapter seven, but don't want to play through chapters one through six? No problem!
• In Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, you can start a new game while retaining all of your previous levels. The first few bosses only take a few hits to die.

[Tuesday's Trope is a weekly department highlighting an amusing video game trope from TVTropes. Aggrogate is not affiliated with TVTropes.org in any way. All trope examples come from TVTropes and are shared via the Creative Commons license.]

Most of us American gamers only understand English, and that means developers can have a bit of fun while keeping their jokes hidden. Many games use different languages for dialogue, narration, and even names, and if you understand those other languages, you can get a lot of great information that will fly over English-only gamers' heads. Sometimes the language isn't even real, and the game counts on the player to decipher it himself. Either way, this is the Bilingual Bonus.

Examples of the Bilingual Bonus include:

• Super Mario has Waluigi, which may seem like a dumb name, but in Japanese it's a pun. "Waru" means bad, thus "Wario" by combining Mario and Waru, Waluigi seems to be the same, but with L-R conversion, it's "waru iji" which is "ijiwaru (mean person)" backwards. Crosses over with Incredibly Lame Pun.
• The arcade game Metal Slug 2 starts out in a Middle-Eastern desert town filled with Arabic signs. At the end of the level, where the first boss is fought, two massive banners dominate the street in the background, stating (in Arabic) "I have diarrhea" and "I need medicine."
• In Crysis, on higher difficulty levels all the in-game enemy dialogue is spoken in Korean, which provides a handy advantage to players who happen to be fluent in the language. On lower difficulties, all enemy battle calls are spoken in English while the standard enemy chatter remains in Korean.
• The Commander Keen computer games featured a language named the "Standard Galactic Alphabet" that was just coded symbols corresponding to English letters. In the first game, you'd run across signs that, when decoded, said things like "This is neat" and "Behold the holy pogo stick". The coded alphabet remained consistent throughout the entire series.
• Final Fantasy X contains an entire language, Al Bhed, that is represented by a simple substitution cipher. The "translation" for the language is hidden throughout the game, one letter at a time. This gives the game a good replay value, as the translation can be retained. It is also possible for an enterprising player to successfully decipher the code well before actually receiving all 26 letter translations.
• Hitman: Blood Money has newspapers reporting on your deeds after each level, many in foreign languages. The foreign ones are full of jokes. For instance, in Spanish one says "No tengo ninguna pista que ha escrito", which is incorrect grammar for "I have no clue what I've written." (It should be "que he escrito".) Another, oddly, says "Read a book or play outside; to play a game will only make you dumber."
• Thanks to its setting, the Monkey Island series is rife with this. Just to give an example, one of the central antagonists in Tales Of Monkey Island is named Marquis De Singe ('singe' being French for 'monkey', which Guybrush lampshades by calling him Monkeyman in the 4th episode).
• The third generation of Pokemon had several legendary pokemon only accessible by following instructions written in visual braille.

[Tuesday's Trope is a weekly department highlighting an amusing video game trope from TVTropes. Aggrogate is not affiliated with TVTropes.org in any way. All trope examples come from TVTropes and are shared via the Creative Commons license.]

You don't need big guns to take down the enemy. Sometimes you just need to swarm them with your weakest, cheapest units to erode their defenses and crush them in a spectacularly humiliating manner. This is called the Zerg Rush, and it's been a common trope in video games since before it got its name from the original Starcraft. Sometimes it's another player rushing, sometimes it's the computer, sometimes it's the underlying mechanic of the game. Just keep throwing guys at your target until it goes down.

It's interesting to note that the Zerg Rush in Starcraft is actually a slightly different and much more specific technique than the trope. The Starcraft Zerg Rush is the rapid building of zergling units with intent to quickly overcome the enemy before any defenses can be built. The broader Zerg Rush trope includes any sort of swarming tactic using cheap, disposable units.

Examples of the Zerg Rush include:

• Named for the Zerg in Starcraft, whose main tactic is pretty much this in a nutshell — overwhelming numbers of cheap, disposable troops. (Memetic Mutation follows usage of this term with "Kekeke", the Korean equivalent of "hahaha.") Though as mentioned above, the meaning of the name in Star Craft is rather different than the above description.
• In Warcraft 2: The Tides of Darkness, it was a common (and much cursed) strategy of the Orcs to use a "Grunt Rush" to win battles — the father of the Zerg Rush. (Unlike Starcraft, you started with only 5 workers and no buildings. The thought was to build a Town Hall with the gold the game started you with to get an economy going. Some players, however, build a barracks instead and used whatever gold left to make basic fighting units and go attack the enemy, who would be lucky to even have a barracks started, much less have any units to defend with.)
• Kingdom Hearts has this with The Heartless. The section in the second game where you have to fight off one thousand Mooks springs to mind.
• Dynasty Warriors. Any enemy faction against the player character.
• For most Fire Emblem games, this is a favored tactic of the AI opponents; they'll typically field armies that are anywhere between twice to four times the size of your party and, unless they're on the defensive, will send units to attack you in large numbers. This is offset somewhat by the player units having better stats, better equipment and the benefit of support relationships, so a properly-leveled party will take little/no damage from the resulting Rush. Hard/Maniac Modes, however...
• The Russians in Age Of Empires III. Their light infantry is weak and has low HP, but they're built by tens and are the cheapest units in the game.
• Overlord, definitely. Your "Minions" are extremely expendable, and quite often, the easiest way to handle any given encounter, is to just keep throwing minions at it 'till it breaks. Sure, there are probably more elegant ways to do it, but...
• The Brotherhood of Nod in Command And Conquer makes use of this at lower tech levels, able to produce huge numbers of cheap, expendable militia troops, as well as light, fast attack bikes, buggies, and tanks.
• Rise Of Nations has the Terra Cotta Army wonder, a Zerg Rush kit, basically. Every thirty seconds (initially; it goes up by half a second for every infantry you control), you get a free basic infantry unit. Read that again.
• Scout rushes are a frequently-suggested (if rarely-executed with more than 3 Scouts) strategy in Team Fortress 2—Scouts can reach the objective before any other class and have twice the capturing power at the cost of lower firepower and health.
• One of the Event Matches in Super Smash Bros Melee is called "Super Mario 128", where 128 smaller, weaker Marios swarm the field and you have to defeat every one of them.
• Left 4 Dead has this for the regular zombies. Whether the AI Director summons them or if a player gets vomited on by a Boomer, a huge swarm of zombies will all rush after the team, surround them, and proceed to beat the crap out of them. In VS mode, infected players may adopt the rush strategy by either having everyone attacking at once or rushing in after a Boomer player does his job.

[Tuesday's Trope is a weekly department highlighting an amusing video game trope from TVTropes. Aggrogate is not affiliated with TVTropes.org in any way. All trope examples come from TVTropes and are shared via the Creative Commons license.]

It's not enough to save the world. You have to collect tons of crap while you do it. Gems, coins, medals, weird shiny things. They're everywhere. It might not be vital to your mission, but if you bring in enough odds and ends you'll probably get a nice reward. This is one of the most common kinds of sidequests in video games: the Collection Sidequest.

There are X number of doodad in the world. The more you collect, the more items you get. When you collect all X, you get a really sweet reward and bragging rights (or sometimes just bragging rights). It's necessary for a 100% run of the game, and it sends you out to the farthest reaches of the world.

Examples of Collection Sidequests include:

• Mini-Medals in most of the Dragon Quest games.
• Golden Skulltula tokens in The Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina Of Time.
• Dalmatian puppies in the first Kingdom Hearts game, 99 in all. (the two parents are already home at the start of the game to account for all 101). You also find the puppies in sets of three, meaning there are really only 33 chests that contain them.
• The thirteen Stellazio coins in Final Fantasy IX.
• In Okami, you can collect 100 Stray Beads throughout the course of the game. Collecting them all gives you the game's Infinity Plus One Accessory, but it's really really hard. This makes them an utterly worthless collectible for at least the first time you play, and probably several subsequent playthroughs, as well.
• In Grand Theft Auto, you collect packages of what's assumed to be Spank, the drug du jour of Liberty City. Each 10 packages (of 100) grants you an additional weapon at your safehouse.
• The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion has this in form of a Nirnroot (a semi-rare plant only found near or in bodies of water) sidequest which has you collect 100 of these, and if you're really bored, it's definitely possible to collect every single piece of playable armor and weapons in the game, just for showing them off... to yourself.
• Metal Gear Solid 2 had dog tags, which you got by holding up enemy soldiers and which serve no in-game purpose at all.
• Psychonauts has a bunch of these, including Mental Cobwebs, Emotional Baggage, and even a literal Scavenger Hunt. Due to the game's otherwise-unique nature, the game was dinged by a few review sources for having stooped to this.
• Assassins Creed. Hope you like hunting down hundreds of flags and dozens of Knights Templar for no appreciable reward.
• Anachronox had a few of these. Taking pictures of little nonentities that appear in obscure places for extremely short times with long times between appearances, and collecting TACOs. TACOs are given a long in-game explanation that amounts to something much like beanie babies, where someone noticed something was popular, created them, people started collecting them madly, then the market collapsed and nobody wanted them anymore, which now makes them rare. They are a small box with a rotating radar dish on top, and "TACO" on the side. TACO stands for Totally Arbitrary Collectible Object.

[Tuesday's Trope is a weekly department highlighting an amusing video game trope from TVTropes. Aggrogate is not affiliated with TVTropes.org in any way. All trope examples come from TVTropes and are shared via the Creative Commons license.]

Chekov's Gun is a narrative tool in which an object is displayed early in a story and then used in an important event later in the story. When you have a completely controlled narrative, like a novel or a movie, it's very easy to do. When you put control of the story in the hands of a player in a video game, however, it can get tricky. Free will can really throw a wrench in a story, unless it simply doesn't matter. If you pull the trigger, the chamber is empty. If you don't fire, there was a bullet in the gun. Whether you choose the right door or the left door, that's the one with the ambush. Until the choice is made, the outcome is in a state of flux.

This is Schroedinger's Gun, a tool that keeps the story of a game on-track, regardless of the player's choices. Not only does the direct outcome change due to a choice, but the very nature of the world changes. You don't know what's going to happen until you make the choice, and neither does the game. In a way, this is a much more subtle, powerful version of But Thou Must.

Examples of Schroedinger's Gun include:

• Sierra Adventure Games. If the programmers can't kill your character off with something because you noticed it, they may not bother with it at all. Your car only has a fault if you don't perform the safety inspection. (Police Quest 1). The policeman's only there if you're indecent. (Leisure Suit Larry). There's only a car coming if you don't look at the street. (The Dagger of Amon Ra). The biggest example is in the latter: giving the wrong item to a speakeasy doorman would make the game Unwinnable, so it also causes a completely random person to walk in from offscreen and stab the protagonist to death. The game then quotes knife crime statistics.
• Used extensively in Illusion Of Gaia, due to Will's ability to guess any question correctly. It is demonstrated at the beginning of the game, where Will is asked to pick a card. No matter what the player picks, it is the right one. It resurfaces much later for a Wire Dilemma, where the player simply has to remember that Will is psychic and make a decision quickly. Amazingly, used at the end of the game to win a game of Russian Roulette.
• In Tactics Ogre, there's a Road Cone at the end of the first chapter of the game. You have to choose whether to kill a group of prisoners in order to frame the Big Bad. (It's complicated and political). If you choose to kill the prisoners, your best friend will reveal himself to be incredibly noble and oppose you and all governments, and throughout the game form La Resistance until you become The Atoner. If you choose not to kill the prisoners, your best friend will reveal himself to be the biggest asshole ever and side with the killers just to gain power.
• In Knights of the Old Republic II, you can answer various questions about past events, such as Revan's fate in the first game and the color of the lightsaber the Jedi Council took away from you, and the answers retroactively determine what happened.
• The "It's War" chapter of Conkers Bad Fur Day has a pair of levers near a soldier strapped to an electric chair. The first level Conker pulls will electrocute the soldier. The second lever he pulls opens a door.
• In Cave Story, choosing to avoid speaking to an injured old man A) determines whether or not his injuries are fatal (they are only fatal if you talk to him) and also B) determines whether or not there is a vitally important rope among the junk on the floor of a room entered later, which appears to have been sealed for many years. (The rope is only there if you didn't talk to the old man.)
• Apparently one puzzle in Space Quest 4 is about finding the two halves of a code and inputting them. Whichever order you first use to combine them is the wrong one. There's no detriment or danger, the programmers just hate you.
• Baldur's Gate II has a sidequest where one of your companions returns home to find his sister has been murdered, and an investigation is still in progress. His father is convinced it was a hit from a rival and tells you to kill him in revenge. If you kill the rival, you later find out that he was innocent; if you spare him, he was guilty all along.
• An experience while playing Deja Vu seemed like a literal Schrodinger's Gun: trying to shoot the gun-toting mugger resulted in him firing first for a game over. Restarting and giving in to his demands the next time around let him escape while claiming that the gun wasn't even loaded.
• inFamous employs this to make its Sadistic Choice even worse. Your girlfriend Trish is always on the tower you didn't save, regardless of what the Big Bad says.
• In the beginning of Mass Effect 2, you are asked whether Udina or Anderson became Councilor as part of a 'memory test' since you've been in a coma for 2 years. Whoever became Councilor (and hence, who you can meet later) depends solely on your answer.

[Tuesday's Trope is a weekly department highlighting an amusing video game trope from TVTropes. Aggrogate is not affiliated with TVTropes.org in any way. All trope examples come from TVTropes and are shared via the Creative Commons license.]

It's almost a forgotten art these days, but there's still a certain cachet to having the biggest, fastest, most expensive, most powerful computer around. However, raw numbers and benchmark results can only get you so far. To really impress your friends, you need a computer that can run games others can't, and run them smooth as silk. That's what Tech Demo Games are for.

Tech Demo Games can be good or bad, but what matters is that on PCs, they require a ridiculous amount of processing power to run. When they're released, generally only top-tier hardware can display the games a decent framerate. Of course, a year or two later, both the games and the hardware necessary to run them seem downright quaint. Technology is a harsh and fickle mistress.

Console Tech Demo Games are a bit different; since consoles generally have the same capabilities besides minor variations, console tech demos simply focus on showing off every new trick the platform can offer. Remember how much the Super Nintendo hyped Mode 7? Welcome to the world of console Tech Demo Games.

Examples of Tech Demo Games include:

• Crysis is regarded by a lot of people to be a tech demo in the disguise of a game. When released, only a handful of computers could actually handle the "High" setting at 1280x800. Even fewer could run the "Very High" setting at 1280x800 above 10FPS.
• Supreme Commander is a tech demo game at the fact that the more cores you have in your processor, the better the game runs.
• Doom 3 was pretty much a stress test for video cards at the time due to its reliance on complex lighting.
• Unreal was basically an advertisement for video cards.
• Serious Sam is simply a tech demo for the engine with some game elements tacked on (there's even a built-in tech map, accessible from the menu, which is literally a gallery of the engine's graphic effects.)
• Name any first-generation Super Nintendo game. These games would show off the Mode 7 capabilities of the system. Some notable examples would be Super Mario World, F-Zero, and Super Castlevania IV.
• Final Fantasy VII was Square's first game on the Playstation, as well as a Killer App for the console. Square really took the opportunity to show off some of the stuff they couldn't do on the SNES, like polygons and pre-rendered cutscenes.
• The original Donkey Kong Country was an effort to prove the aging SNES was capable of high-quality graphics.
• Wii Sports and Wii Play show off the Wii Remote's motion abilities. Wii Sports Resort shows off Wii Motion+

[Tuesday's Trope is a weekly department highlighting an amusing video game trope from TVTropes. Aggrogate is not affiliated with TVTropes.org in any way. All trope examples come from TVTropes and are shared via the Creative Commons license.]

Sometimes the game isn't enough for real fans of a series. Sometimes you want something more, something tangible, something you're willing to spend even more cash on to get closer to the franchise you love. Fortunately, publishers are often eager to oblige you, offering collector's editions, limited editions, special editions, and other editions that can tack anything from $10 to $100 onto the price of the game. These are the Limited Special Collector's Ultimate Editions.

These editions can be either amazingly awesome or heart-breakingly disappointing. At their best, they'll include replicas of items from the game, additional content in the game, a soundtrack, and a handful of other knick-knacks. At their worst, they'll include an art book and a making-of DVD and call it a day.

Examples of the Limited Special Collector's Ultimate Edition include:

• Halo 3 came in three editions: the normal edition for $60, the limited edition for $70, and the "legendary" edition for $130, complete with a Master Chief helmet.
• The console version of Street Fighter IV has a Collector's Edition that comes with the game, an art book, an OVA and a figurine (C. Viper for Xbox 360 and Ryu for PS 3)
• Working Designs used to make a living doing this. Their deluxe version of Lunar II: Eternal Blue Story Complete came with a soundtrack, little character stands, a cloth map of the game's world, and even a wearable replica of the game's endgame MacGuffin.
• The Tom Clancy franchise games (Rainbow Six, Ghost Recon and Splinter Cell) have been released in collector's editions. They contain the original games and their expansions, clothing (a hat, shirt and belt), a messenger bag, and an "exclusive" extra (SC mousepad, RS book, GR making-of DVD).
• When Mother 3 was first released, it came in both the standard game-only edition, as well as a Deluxe Box: it contained the game, a limited edition Game Boy Micro, and a replica of the Franklin Badge. Unfortunately, since this is Mother 3 we're talking about, guess who doesn't get to release it!
• Fallout 3 has the special edition with a lunchbox and a Vault Tech Bobblehead.
• Record of Agarest War had, for the North American 360 release, the standard version, and the "Really Naughty Limited Edition", which added in the OST, a pillowcase, and (this is likely the 'Really Naughty' part) a oppai mousepad (it's only 'naughty' instead of 'perverted' due to the fact that the character on the pad is wearing clothes).
• The Beatles Rock Band initially had a $250 "Limited Edition Premium Bundle," which in addition to the game, had playable replicas of Paul McCartney's Hofner bass and Ringo Starr's Ludwig drums, a microphone with a stand, and eight postcards
• Modern Warfare 2 has the Hardened Edition, which has an art book and a redemption code for a downloadable Xbox 360/Playstation 3 version of the first Call Of Duty game, and the Prestige Edition, which retails for 150$ and includes functional Night Vision Goggles and a head stand along with the above..