8 Video Games Where Everyone Loses

guys what's that time one more time jules with feeling guys hello all of you beautiful people jules here for whatculture.com back again with another episode of the awesomely named and awfully hosted choose your own adventure the weekly medieval theme format where i the crown jewels of whatculture.com take a list chosen by you yes you the person who's wearing a hat indoors again because the fact is that i thought that i plugged in my shaver to trim this nasty bush that i've got on my face and try and get rid of the uh hair follicles that i have remaining and decided that instead i'd plug in my toothbrush so yeah got a teeth nice and clean hair not feeling so green super grass i believe that was might have just changed the roads anyway yes you get to decide what list i dole out to you each and every week and this week we are going to be talking about video games where everybody loses which does seem to be a bit against the grain as it were because you're always playing video games to win so to find out that basically you've made everything worse or end the game thinking that there's a happy ending but a real downer one is coming around the corner well it can be a bit deflating to say the least that's not to say that these types of endings were hated or chastised but it's safe to say that few saw the grim and bleak closing moments of these titles coming and often left players spiraling in an existential crisis of their own so let's take a look at them as i'm jewels this is whatculture.com and these are eight video games where everybody loses and you know the drill by now say hi to me here in the live chat and put your suggestions for next week's episode down in the comment section below but with that in mind let's get on with this list shall we number eight black guys what's that i hear you cry you're putting a first-person shooter on a list about downer endings and you're not including spec ops the line what is this madness well my friends believe it or not we have played more than well five games six games we've played and the sixth one is black so let's talk about it told by protagonist jack keller in a military interrogation immediately after the events of the game black unfolds in a series of missions as black ops soldier keller and his team chased the seventh wave terrorist organization after the discovery that the former cia operative william lenox james just reading that aloud makes me realize it's not hard to write a good character name for a video game protagonist or npc or villain or whatever why the hell are so many video game characters just giving terrible names like what would you give as a name if you were a video game hero easy choice jules i'd call him egg yeah i knew asking you'd be a bad decision i'd be vivius lestrange see it's not that hard no off the top of my head that was it wasn't really i've got a book literally just filled with character names for d d purposes sad i know anyway keller defies orders to chase down this turn coat and put a stop to him once and for all cornering the villain in a disused gulag keller triggers an explosion that buries the last of the seventh wave and secures victory for the belied operatives hey we won guys we won like as we catch up to the present day however keller's status as definitive winner is stripped from him as it turns out the authorities had known about lennox all along using keller as a pawn to weed him out worse still is the news that lennox has survived the explosion looks like he's been taking lessons from wild dog from time crisis here and the new plan would be to fake keller's death and throw him in at the deep end all over again no more seventh wave keller's under the thumb suddenly at the end of black things are looking a little bit more like this take some of that take some of that number seven warhammer 40k space marine in the grim darkness of the far future there is only god i love 40k god i love war hammer in general i mean have you seen all the models that i've constantly got on that table behind me hook it to my veins anyway the warhammer 40k universe lives up to this pseudo motto with rather a sizable degree of commitment as whatever faction you choose to align yourself with there's going to be a fair amount of law giving you a glimpse as to how miserable a world the future has become and taking no exception in the realm of video games space marine sees you playing as captain titus of the aforementioned beefed up super soldiers tasked with reclaiming a forged world from invading orcs all the while securing military supply lines for the authoritarian imperium now what follows is a beautiful cocktail of orcs getting blended by your chainsaw power fist and thunder hammer as you jet pack around shoot in there cockney faces for leather like oh right there [Music] i'm actually a fungus not a band so this isn't a huge amount of manslaughter it's fungus slaughter the 40k universe is rather weird uh and then you've got chaos demons as well coming out to be like oh my eyes are going fancy advantages [Music] we can't actually kill me because technically i'm a demon so i'm just going back to the back of the queue in the warp and i'll be back again put dramatic reenactment under that because that's the entire game titus barely escapes from this conflict with his life now any other shooter would have called it a day there but true to form titus is instead sold out by his comrade and tried for heresy his unexpected resistance to the evil chaos energy raising suspicions that he may have become corrupted to serve the dark lords so the forge world is back under imperium control but uh you are like i say being tried for heresy and um if you've read even a tiny bit of the 40k law that's not a good thing people don't tend to come back from something like that and if they do they usually is mindless robots sick number six the legend of zelda skyward sword here we are the game that in the legend of zelda universe started it all the legend of zelda's most mildly received 3d outing has an ending which on the surface is a very clear victory over evil however when you pull your lens of truth back and take a look at the wider timeline the cracks in this rosy finale start to appear and it's all because of the fact that this game is according to all of the legends and sources set at the very beginning of the timeline and that is why it becomes problematic because everything after that all the evil that arises from it has to stem from somewhere so your victory over evil is very temporary to say the least because having saved zelda and forging the master sword link faces the demon king in a one-on-one showdown ultimately emerging victorious but being the demon king however we see that in his dying breath demise declares that an incarnation of his hatred shall forever follow them dooming them to wander a blood-soaked sea of darkness for all of time now who do we know in the zelda universe that could be counted as being evil incarnate and who appears time and time again i'm pretty stumped james do you have any answers here tingle even i know that's wrong of course it's ganon of course it's canon the big ham head number five near automata potato potato so riddle me this one batman if your game has 26 different endings how is not one of them actually considered to be the winning ending yoko taro you've done it again following tarot's decision to make drakengard's most bonkers ending its canonical one near and its subtitled sequel tell the story of a world plagued by disease doomed by sentient androids and then invaded by aliens there's a lot more going on here but it would take another list to explain what the hell the timeline is here just take my word for it it's a simplified version but that's where we are and here in near automata potato potato we follow androids 2b9s and a2 as they continue this seemingly endless proxy war with the machine army brought to earth by the aforementioned aliens following several false endings it's revealed that humanity and the aliens have actually long since perished and that the war is doomed to repeat eternally the canonical ending of the game not the one where you die by eating a fish has the machine intelligence launching an arc of its memories into space hoping to find a home whilst the deceased remnants of the trio are reconstructed by the support droids and then just when you think you've got an ending here near automata potato potato decides to smash the fourth wall entirely and ask you to delete your save game data in order to help out another player who's struggling with the final boss which happens to be the credits it is a mad game and i love it it is a brilliant bit of meta-narrative philosophy but as your brain turns to soup looking back at the restarted title screen you've got to wonder if a winner of this war was ever really possible number four the seventh saga oh baby getting to talk about the seventh saga today ah christ this this plotline here i'm reading it out it makes no sense to read out it made less sense to play it bear with me guys so this title was pretty groundbreaking for its time square enix's the seventh saga contained an appropriate seven different character storylines intertwining across a grand quest to gather seven rooms and prevent the resurrection of the evil entity gorsia set on this quest by the 100 year old lamel in a mid-game twist it's revealed that guardia had killed lamel and had been masquerading as him all along yes but having foreseen his death gauzier traveled from 5 000 years in the past to reclaim his lost power from the ruins and rules supreme yes with all seven runes in his possession gaussian regains his lost power and zaps the player back to his time so so far it kind of all makes sense right well hold on to your hats as it's about to get wild because here gauzier decides to finish what he started and travel back to confront the player in his own time oh why this unsurprisingly turns out to be a stupid idea as the player now has access to the undestroyed seven runes sure enough gauzia is then defeated but manages to strike one last fatal blow on the player in his death throws 4 900 years later the player is resurrected and given a new name and that name is lamel what what why what you died 4 900 years in the past and get resurrected as the man who gets killed who couldn't stop gaussia but then there's another part you travel back in time to kill gauzier but you become that man yes that's right in the last twist of a basically spiralized story it turns out that the whole thing is one massive time loop with the player and gauzia doomed to repeat this cycle of death and resurrection for all of eternity wonderful number three dead space god damn it james why can't isaac clark have nice things eh don't even answer i'm too angry arriving on the usg ishimura to find his girlfriend nicole isaac is instead greeted with hordes of horrifying monsters known as the necromorphs former humans driven mad and mutated into inhuman abominations turning the adrift mining ship into a setting that makes event horizon look like the bloody magic school bus as isaac travels through the ishimura trying to find a way out and uncovering the truth of the situation with help from nicole he discovers the red marker an alien artifact transmitting the signal that drove the crew insane before mutating them into necromorphs realizing that the marker has to be destroyed isaac returns it to its original burial site defeating the colossal hive mind final boss and putting an end to the infection way we've done it boys we pushed back the alien menace and saved everyone except for the crew of the issue they were they're pretty good wait the victory is bittersweet however as isaac discovers that the nicole that had been helping him throughout the journey was nothing but a hallucination with nicole having committed suicide before the events of the game to escape the chaos on board as his ship departs and he sits back to reflect on the horrors that he's just witnessed this nicole appears to him once more but is returned as an aggressive apparition lunging violently at isaac as the screen cuts to black now obviously we know he survives into dead space two and three but still at this moment in time there was no greater loss than basically just going we got you we we got you you're an absolute mug and by the way jump scare number two grand theft auto iv so one of the many many criticisms that has been leveled at gta over the years was the fact that it seemed to be kind of like glamorizing the criminal lifestyle and rockstar took this message they looked at it long and hard and said okay fine we'll make a game that is so utterly gritty that surely no one will want to be a criminal ever ever again and boy howdy was this thing gritty i'm speaking of course about grand theft auto 4 or grit auto grit theft for grit what am i doing following recent immigrant nico bellick who comes to america to escape his criminal past the game plunges nico deep into america's own illegal underworld as he attempts to make it in the new world and search for the man who betrayed his unit in a war 10 years prior joined by his bowling enthusiast and navi level irritant cousin roman after a cavalcade of crossed paths betrayals and multicultural nerdwells nico gains closure and finds himself with a final choice at the behest of italian don jimmy he must either help with an extremely lucrative heroin deal involving the treacherous dmitry raskolov or pursue his new personal vendetta and kill the russian mobster now whichever choice the player makes it's unfortunately the wrong one because on the day of roman's wedding you either get a hitman sent by dimitri or by the mob and they mow down well admittedly one of the choices is worse than the other i mean they killed roman in one of them not saying i greatly miss him calling me up in time but the other side you lose your girlfriend that is sad that is genuinely sad pick the one where she's she stays alive that's all i'm saying long story short there is no sense of victory to be gained here as this cyclical whirlwind of violence and revenge claims yet another bystander in its path and number one the warhammer vermintide franchise oh james got you good here didn't i mate you always think to yourself oh jules is going to be responsible this week and only do one entry per franchise well boo to you my friend i love warhammer that much that i put on another entry from the franchise it's my show i can do what i want i've got mad with power jules if you're gonna be like that i'm off [Music] anyway let's get a bit meta-narrative in our return to the warhammer universe but considering the first game is subtitled end times this should actually really come as no surprise taking the horde shooter mechanic that was popularized by the left for dead games vermintide throws the player into a horrendous world overrun with skaven a monstrous roden-like creatures fueled by blind hunger and dynamic ai designed to rush you and overwhelm you at every opportunity joined in the sequel by the disease and decay worshiping rotbloods vermintide is not short of a few bodies to hurl in the way of your blood-caked weaponry but as i've said before the first game carries with it the moniker of the end times and trust me when it comes to the warhammer fantasy universe this isn't a nice time to be alive in all of the chaos forces are coalescing on one spot sigmar has basically abandoned ship and just gone peace out everyone i i've got places to be keep worshiping me though i promise i'll be back in the age of sigmar but that was basically a hard reset on the entire timeline so basically every single hero every person that you knew at this point in time all of the glorious victories you've achieved actually mean nothing in the long run because like i said before age of sigmar is going to come along and wipe the slate clean ow hit my desk but i'm not recording that again and there we go my friends those were eight video games where everybody loses i hope that you enjoyed that and please let me know what you thought about it down in the comment section below as well as your suggestions for next week's episode if you want to chat to me further you can do so over on twitter at retroj with a zero or you can swing by live and let's dice where i do all of my streaming and whama battle reports i know i've pushed it very heavily this week but trust me you will come to love warhammer as much as i do by the end of my tenure with what culture it will happen you can bet your bottom dollar on it anyway before i go i just want to say one thing and that is even though today we focused a lot on situations that seem completely hopeless and indeed some of them even were you should never give up my friend never give up trying always keep persevering through the hard times because trust me things will get better and you can alleviate a lot of stress and strain on your lives by speaking to friends family and professional in the support industry because these people care about you they want you to do well and i want nothing but the best for you my friends so go out there and utterly smash it by treating yourself with love and respect as always i've been jules you've been awesome never forget that i'll speak to you soon bye

Channel: WhatCulture Gaming

Views: 300,599

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Id: uTfTxs_6Q1E

Length: 16min 51sec (1011 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 30 2021