Top Ten Video Game Parasites (Patreon Reward)

[Music] a fisherman says to an old man I'm going out in my boat to catch some bass you got worms asks the old man yeah says a fisherman but I'm going anyway that joke was horrible but so are parasites welcome again my fellow coordinates I'm your host the green scorpion and if you're squeamish you probably shouldn't watch this one my generous patron buzzsaw the righteous has a sickening topic for us today parasites disgusting but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't intrigued in biology parasitism is the relationship between two species where one life-form takes advantage of the other usually for a prolonged period of time they can live on or even inside their hosts and unlike symbiosis where two animals benefit from one another the parasite gives nothing in return besides maybe some crippling diseases it also shouldn't be confused for a carnivore parasites might use a host for food but won't usually immediately kill them though blood sucking creatures like ticks and vampires do qualify if the idea of something living inside you doesn't make your skin crawl I don't know what will parasites usually act for the purpose of survival sustenance or a way to reproduce and propagate but turn over to science fiction and both the ends and the means get much more horrifying writers love this twisted junk I don't really have a rubric for this one I'll just be choosing entries based on how memorable impactful creative or downright disturbing they can be and unlike top 10 zombies where I had fun looking for individual undead characters most of these entries will be overall species not just one specimen it was a tough list to compile but you'd be shocked how many examples there are you just have to dig deep real deep so grab a petri dish and for God's sake some gloves we're examining the top 10 parasites in video games and remember it's what's on the inside that counts [Music] before we start let's examine a few squashed bugs I really wanted to talk about the infection from hollow Knight a game I recently fell hopelessly in love with unfortunately while it does take over bodies and connect the bugs to a hive mind I couldn't find any evidence that the substance itself was alive so I can't make a case here same with the game prototype I know there's something called the parasite in it but from what I can tell it's what's infecting the enemies of the game and not the awesome venom like powers that alex is using and yeah it's skirting the line between parasite and virus so for now let's go for some vermin that have been around for years Pikmin the Pikmin series has been a hub for surprisingly horrid subtext for a while now you enslave an entire race the adorable peons are constantly dying and the pellets harvested from enemies are only there because they've previously eaten a whole bunch of Pikmin seeds meaning what you're carrying back is at best poop and at worst the monsters stomach Pikmin 2 gets particularly bizarre with its myriad of caves meaning more weird animals and more chances for death you might even encounter these weirdos the bald men they look like your standard enemy bulb orbs but have sprouts like Pikmin and if you can defeat the ringleader the smaller mites will obey you like any other men well that's strange orlimar you have any insight on this as a matter of fact the piccolo pedia states that bold men are actually a parasitic species of Pikmin that take over the beasts that eat them so the bulb orbs are just helpless grubs that snacked on the wrong thing I would be disgusted but they are incredibly useful they're thick hides protecting them from fire water electricity and poison given the glow around them I like to think of these as the green Pikmin the only downside is that they won't follow you back up to the surface world but that just makes them good candidates for the candy pop bug transformation supposedly they could do this to any host not just the bulb orbs which I always thought would have made a great feature in the future how about some very limited greens that you can use to recruit Bowl bears Wally wads maybe snag rats well they didn't even bring back the purples and the whites back for Pikmin 3 so there's no way that we're digging these little guys up still it's nice to start off the list with something friendly unless you're a bull barb poor guys [Music] Wow why did not expect to be talking about the last of us this early if anything let that show you just how much deeper the wormhole goes credit to the Last of Us though it gives us perhaps the most scientifically based entry on today's countdown the cordyceps brain infection there's a multitude of sci-fi parasites that zombify people but unlike most examples this isn't a bug it's a fungus originating from some bad crops in South America these McCobb mushrooms hit the u.s. like a ton of bricks quickly wiping out 60% of humanity normally the fungus need a dark damp place to spread but that's what the zombies are for victims go through a few stages first getting all ornery and mindless and biting people which zombify snoo hosts over time the fungus morphs evolving to better equip it zombie carrier in stage 2 heart fungal Armour grows over the skin to protect from bullets and blades by stage 3 the shrooms have overtaken the face and blinded the host but the cordyceps provide a form of echolocation so that the clickers can find a tasty snack if a zombie survives to stage 4 it grows stalks and waits to explode into more spores normally I'd say the creators outdid themselves but real world nature did most of the work this zombified genus is very very real specifically the real life opieop or deception a literalist species is known to take over ants brainwash them into leaving the hill and command them to hang on to a leaf or other nice spot for the next generation of fungus to grow this is also the basis for para sect who is currently our number 11 parasite in gaming luckily the infected ants don't attack other ants and we humans have no reason to fear but the fungal zombies in the last of us are the logical extreme of this kind of science they aren't just terrifying to fight in person they're terrifying in concept and visually tie into one of the game's core themes the designers wanted to show nature encroaching on humanity in the urban environments you see greenery and foliage reclaiming the world that people industrialized in the same way the cordyceps are just reclaiming humans reminding them that they're animals and pulling them back down from being evolutionary heights they thought they'd achieved well society we had a good run but it looks like this world now belongs to the mushrooms at least the giraffes can roam free again but in the Battle of zombie makers I have to give it up to the head craps from half-life 1 in honor where cordyceps go for an almost plausible scientific background head craps are 100% alien and probably inspired from the movies of the same name their facehuggers able to jump up to ten feet at a time and latch on to you they don't lay eggs in you though at least I think they don't instead they use their hidden beats to drill through your skull snuggle up to your brain and take over all of your motor functions they also release a chemical that biologically alters their Zombie host and different subspecies create different zombies while the standard crabs only elongate your fingers and give you some skin problems these finally Punk's will erode away all of your body fats turning you into a fast zombie and even worse a poisonous variant can create spawn and throw them at other humans whether attached or not they're extremely territorial and it's not like you can just remove them after a few minutes of wearing them hosts will hit the point of no return and will die if they're extracted which might be preferable to be honest and that's the real kicker in The Last of Us some characters kick around the idea that maybe the zombies still have some level of awareness but with headcrabs the host is 100% conscious from beginning to end this is why they're screaming all the time you've probably heard this already but if you reverse the sounds made by the standard zombies you can clearly hear the helpless human begging for death [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] and to think dr. kleiner keeps one of these bastards like a housecat we don't usually get to see a zombie for very long in this game but if half life opposing forces is to be believed it gets much much worse meet the groan remind me never to take a vacation in Zen while dangerous enough in the wild the combine has taken to weaponizing these little buggers loading them into payloads and launching them into cities to take over the populace and that's why we don't talk about Raven Hall except we totally do because it's like the best chapter ever it it sucked to have one of these hats on but they're a trip and a half to kill with your gravity gun so at least somebody's having fun okay I can't have a whole countdown like this we need some levity how about scroll girls they have a very different take on parasites in this world parasites are type of creature usually with human-like awareness that live inside people to grant them fantastic abilities so again it's more like symbiosis with each one having its own personality we see a few different hosts parasite relationships Leviathan is like the Medici family Butler and only inhabited squiggly to bring her back to life they're pretty much best friends Eliza on the other hand has nearly merged personalities with her parasites segments to the point where she controls it for the most literal parasite definition though and for our number seven spot we have Samson the ultimate bad hair day Samson has come to possess and control the hair of his host a girl by the name of philia the two can be cordial enough but it's clear from the get-go that Samson's the one calling the shots feely doesn't even remember anything about her life priest Samson it seems having him a fix on her scalp gave her a case of what was it again oh yeah amnesia so already Samson has an effect on her mental state but other than that Samson's just a lot stronger than philia and can pull her into whatever trouble he deems important philia has no real goals aside from regaining her memories and is too nice to seek out a fight but Samson likes violence so violence is what they're gonna yet growing his hair into all kinds of shapes especially blades and stretching tentacles hey get those hentai remarks out of the comments section behave yourselves and it's not like philia necessarily wants to be rid of Sampson she just kinda rather not with all this but as long as she's in a fight she'll throw the occasional kick and move around to get Sampson where he needs to be the two working together like a deranged banjo-kazooie you know the classic victory pose that Ryu doesn't street fighter where he stands with his arms crossed headband waving in the wind well philia is pretty much this game's for you so how do you think they pay homage to that maybe Sampson shapes himself like the headband nope Sampson forms the humanoid body crosses his hairy arms and let's feel a wave around like a flag at full mast that's their whole dynamic right there this hair whips her back and forth also with Samson's mouth being on the back of her head she bears resemblance to the food - coochie ona from Japanese myth not related to parasites but as long as we're talking about creepy things I thought I'd mention it Sampson does care about his host though and will do his best to protect her but that's kind of self-serving isn't it I mean that's more protecting your house than anything else but the plot thickens on the IndieGoGo site fans were able to vote on possible DLC characters and one of the choice was Sampson himself now in full monster mode with figlio reduced to a hollowed-out husks serving as little more than a hermit crab shell this is the Sampson that could have been though again our timeline Sampson is much tamer an unused ending in arcade mode even suggest that Sampson may be hiding filius past from her and that fee Liam may have commanded him to erase her memory in the first place could it have something to do with Billy I suppose it ties to the Medici mafia we may never know but on a list of bugs and spores it's fun to have an individual character on the list hats off to you big guy good job [Music] Samson is not the only standalone character on this list though meet Eve this might require a bit of context parasite eve is a japanese sci-fi horror novel written by Hideki Sena about a sentient parasitic life-form that has taken over the body of a young woman three years later after finishing Final Fantasy seven Squaresoft released the identically titled parasite II for the PlayStation 1 an innovative action horror game that works as a non canon sequel to the novel before spinning off into its own bizarre game trilogy the parasite is not a bug not a spore but actual mitochondria you know the powerhouse of the cell this entity has naturally evolved for eons and gained sentience in the body of Maya Brea twin sister to the main character aya Brea slowly replicating from cell to cell the life-form known as Eve doesn't yet have the power to fully control Maya so instead it influences her into driving into a lethal car crash why would Eve do this because Eve knows Maya is an organ donor and through a transplant Eve is put into the more suitable host of Melissa Pierce Eve messes with her insides enough to get Melissa to overdose on immunosuppressant drugs giving Eve the chance to finally take absolute control of the body and wreak major havoc now that may sound a little convoluted but believe it or not there is a precedent for this kind of body hopping in nature so prepare your stomachs for this one the skills to settle is solidus or bird tapeworm has a three body lifecycle laying its eggs in the bellies of birds so that they can poop the eggs into the water these eggs are eaten by tiny crustaceans called copepods in which the eggs hatch the cocoa pods are then eaten by fish and the tapeworms release chemicals to manipulate the fish into staying still at the water surface where they'll be eaten by birds where the worm lays more eggs and that brings us back to dough that's disgustingly educational oh yeah and the fire I mentioned earlier well now that Eve has full autonomy her cells are kind of like the queen bee to other cells so she can just cause biological matter in a small radius to just spontaneously combust she can also manipulate the cells of others to mutate into horrible beasts the only person immune to this is aya who had an eye transplant from her sister meaning she's also part Eve but the actual Eve doesn't control her because I don't know power of sisterly love mitochondria Eve is certainly evil killing people left and right and giving Melissa a really gaudy outfit she may hate humanity but she loves the human navel apparently but for real though Eve actually sees what she's doing as simply the next stage of evolution to her humanity is the parasite upon this planet keeping life from fulfilling its true potential she's not even after ultimate power for herself she just wants the genetic material necessary so that she can give birth to an even greater life-form to her incinerating theater patrons is like burning ants with a magnifying glass cruel but to humans really matter in the grand scheme of things thanks for revolving thumbs you dumb eight men now die as long as we're talking about science let's look at the trauma center games the most accurate portrayal of Medicine in all of media whoa I should call it doctor I've come down with a bad case of the sarcasm doctor Stiles runs the hippocratic gamut with his operations ranging from standard appendectomy to defusing bombs but the worst ailments usually have really dramatic biblical names like sin and doesn't that sound like it's supposed to end humanity we die to sin or our number 5 parasite that pesky deadly guilt short for ganglia did you trophy NIM you know latency toxin guilt was developed and weaponized by a terrorist cell called Delphi who believed that the creation of medical science has skewed the path of evolution and humanity needs to die already to make the earth fair again Wow I get that Eve would have this opinion because she's literally an evolved life form but screw you guys get off your high horse guilt blurs the line between parasite and disease but based on its behavior their ability to mature how to lay eggs yeah it's definitely a parasite so what's it do man what doesn't it do there's a strain for every day of the week literally they named them after the Greek days of the week though II always felt like they should have saved Monday for last we all know that mondays are the worst effects include internal lacerations organ failure tumors hemorrhaging and they get really cheeky when you try to extract them either splitting into smaller gnats excreting poisonous gas or sticky gel or webbing up the heart and use the heartbeat to heal themselves oh and they cause cancer there's even an eight-string of guilt called bliss but so far it's only been found in delft eyes leader Adam it's actually the only thing keeping him alive I'll be it in suspended animation so he's completely unaware of the pain he's caused everyone turns out bliss is ignorance while it operates on a smaller scale than the last of us is cordyceps or parasite eve trauma center has a way of making every twitch and jitter feel ultra tense I knew I wanted it at least in the middle of the list since it's the only parasite here that you deal with the way you'd actually fight a parasite by seeing a doctor you can't just shoot all of problems away but then again that's pretty much what we're gonna be doing for the rest of the countdown but at least we got some legitimate science here now stitch this one up and let's get moving they may not be plausible but Las Plagas are a lot more fun to kill unlike the previous Resident Evil zombies created by the t-virus Resident Evil 4 introduces a secluded town in rural Spain afflicted with zombification thanks to these million-year-old bugs that got Jurassic Park back to life from fossils you probably expected las Plagas at some point but why put these zombies so far above the ones from the last of us in half-life I guess it's because they're being parasites informs us a lot of how these zombies work I mean they're not even really zombies not in the traditional sense the ganado are more like a misinformed angry mob a religious cult called las Illumina dos run by Osman Sadler injected their followers with eggs that would hatch into subordinate plug us and take over the central nervous system Sadler injected himself and his favorite lieutenants with a slightly different dominant form of las Plagas that are able to control subordinate Plagas in a hive like fashion through ultrasonic communication at any time Sadler can wave his hand and make his followers do whatever he wants by commanding the bugs within them he even injects Leon at one point and renders him incapable of fighting the catch is if Sadler's not actively commanding them he doesn't have control the ganado swell full of violent tendencies are free to go about their business otherwise but Sadler has also instituted control over them through his religion teaching them to be wary and skeptical of any outsiders I think that's a cool angle they're controlled by parasites but it's their religious extremism and conformity that really keeps them under Sadler's thumb that's why Luis Serra is able to escape and remove his parasite or why the merchant will kindly sell you guns as long as Daddy Sadler's not around as for the bugs themselves they're disgusting they also get real big just stating inside people every once in a while you'll kill a ganado only for a fully formed super bug to burst out and start attacking the dominant bloggers can also transform their hosts in a variety of ways grant new power but seeing how it usually rips and mangles their body to do it I don't think you can just go back to normal after doing that just look at B Torres Mendez there that's gonna leave a mark our old friend Wes Kirk gets his hands on some samples and develops them into much scarier bugs for Resident Evil 5 now they can survive in sunlight they keep better control of their hosts some of them even fly through scientific manipulation we get all kinds of weird monstrosity including an Gigante and those freaking regenerators and eventually they're combined with the t-virus and some other mojo to create Ouroboros but that's another story so the combine uses headcrabs to wipe out cities Sadler plans to use a blaga infected Ashley to control the US and Eve wants to create the dominant species on earth but moving forward will have to think bigger we're talking galactic threats here and the greatest threat to the Milky Way was that time it was flooded [Music] the flood is the result of an ancient war where one race was such a sore loser it dropped a bunch of powder on the enemy that would eventually destroy all life as we know it the flood is a voracious unrelenting and endlessly multiplying species with no defined biology just an appetite for any sentient life funny enough it won't go after any non intelligent life like animals or copyright protectors however the flood steals not only the bodies but also the knowledge of those at feasts on and shares that knowledge with the rest of the hive when you first encounter these undying legions in halo 1 it's an adrenaline shot to the game space your battle with the Covenant seems less important when you're staring down these feral beasts that pounce on anything that moves at first they're only smart enough to wield the guns that their hosts were using that's about it but once the flood collects several thousand brains worth of data they'll build a grave mind basically an organic supercomputer that commands these previously mindless brawls into a ruthlessly efficient wave of tactical decimation by the end of the forerunner flood war the hive minds were even using forerunner computers and convincing them to turn on their creators oh great they learned to use the internet we're doomed the forerunners did find a way to defeat them though and it only required killing all sentient life in the galaxies so that the flood would starve to death that's right the best this hyper advanced civilization could do to stop these things was wipe out all life and start over talk about a pirate victory anywhere the flood shows up you just have to quarantine and blow it up it's the only way the flood makes a great third party in the human covenant war of the original trilogy it gives the enemy something to band together against even if just temporarily and in halo 2 the grave mine even saves Master Chief knowing he'll stop the profits from reactivating the extinction devices it only cares about itself but it's cool to see these parasitic hive minds that can actually reason and plan beyond kill kill kill next to the prophet of truth and Guilty Spark the flood is downright reasonable the last metroid is in captivity the galaxy is at peace yeah you say that so why do we keep finding ourselves in mortal danger it's safe to say the Metroid's are the most famous parasites in gaming and for good reason I really like these space ticks they're built up so well in the first game and when you finally see them it's like oh Sh kill it with ice but how parasitic are they really I mean yeah they suck the life energy out of animals and the power out of your suit the manual even calls them parasitic but unlike other ticks and mosquitoes they usually kill you in one go then discard your dead body you're not their host you're their prey and once they grow to their next stage they'll just gobble you up like any other carnivore though can you really blame them they were developed by the chozo for the express purpose of eating and the organism on the menu was the dreaded X parasite our real number 2 after Super Metroid with their chief predators the Metroid's now gone the X parasites research on Planet sr388 Samus goes to investigate and gets immediately owned by these erratic floating Gaul Buell's she's rescued by the federation and whisked away to a nearby space lab and she's only safe from assimilation when scientists infuse her DNA with the remains of the last living Metroid making her the only entity in the universe capable of fighting these things good thing too because while she had her back turned they infested the entire BSL research station hopefully there's not any diverse wildlife in there to inhabit the spaceship oh wait the whole ship is basically a zoo damn it not only do these deaf blobs insta-kill pretty much anything they touch they can copy the DNA and even the memories not unlike our last entry they can then either morph their bodies to copy any animal they've encountered or live inside and control that animal as an extra meat shield all the while growing smarter and more numerous they adapt to all the different climate biomes on the station they find Ridley's corpse and copy it but nothing compares to the specimen known as the sa X the one that first attacked Samus and is now playing dress-up in her old various suit now let me reiterate something here it doesn't just cop biological matter it copies technology and weaponry so it's able to perfectly replicate the armaments and the experience of history's greatest Metroid hunter and now Samus is part Metroid there's some fun twists along the way as well the s ax is willing to team up with you to destroy some not so extinct Metroid's on the ship so like the grave mind it's able to reason what's best for the flourishing of its race much faster in fact according to halo lore it takes hundreds of thousands of sentient beings to make a grave mine and organize the troops but the X just need one human to gain human intelligence sure the flood posed more of a threat to the galaxy but I think that's just because Samus is such a badass and she took them out before they could spread come on now Samus is way better than Master Chief who are we kidding had she failed in fusion the X would easily be a galactic threat of equal if not greater magnitude which leaves me with one question Samus honey are you sure you got all of them yes you blew up the Space Lab and that was after you caused it to crash land into sr388 but do you really think that that got all of them are you sure they can't survive in space I just think maybe we should double-check on that it seems like the kind of thing you should be sure about sixty-five million BC dinosaurs walked the earth and humankind's ancestors fight to survive when out of the blue an unidentified object falls from the heavens igniting as it barrels through the planet's atmosphere before smashing into the ground it isn't an aircraft nor stone but an extraterrestrial parasitic life-form that burrows downward it needs a host but it will choose neither the budding humans nor the more advanced Rep tights but the world itself one woman Eila witnesses the event and names the object big fire or in her language la voz [Applause] [Music] this enormous dragon leech is the main antagonist of Chrono Trigger shaping the world while hardly moving we don't know where it came from or if it has a real name our heroes can scarcely comprehend the existence of one let alone consider if it had parents it's one and only goal is to sit at the Earth's core sucking energy and collecting data from all the world's life-forms unnoticed until it's ready to emerge destroy the planet and endow its offspring with all it's learned before sending them out to conquer new worlds it's definitely to take her in this relationship but who could say how life would have turned out without it well we actually know that thanks to an alternate ending the rep types would have won and we'd be living in Reptar land but thanks to la vocês arrival in the ensuing Ice Age humans were able to advance they also learned magic thanks to the frozen flame a piece of la voz that broke off on impact this makes la voz the only parasite today that's straight-up magic so immense is la voz as power that time distorts around it in 12,000 BC the Utopia of zeal tried to harness la voz as power bad idea and the prince was thrown thousands of years into the future bowing revenge may just became the world's mightiest warlock and summoned the beast to slay him once and for all also a bad idea really any idea involving la voz is pretty bad but we have to do something right good thing chrono and friends can time travel but even this legendary band of Heroes has their hands full not only do they need to breach a knight impregnable shell of quills la voz can mimic the attack patterns of the mightiest combatants in Earth's history including a giant t-rex a dragon tank mages himself and a future tech security system whether organic or synthetic even if it's from before or after la versus time on earth it can access the data of any creature on earth like a more efficient ex parasite well it did take 65 million years to kill the world but time is relative especially with this thing it makes me think back to parasite eve yeah la voz is a serious threat but it's not malicious or anything it's just doing what its biology tells it to do and without it human society in this world wouldn't even exist in the first place we're living on it benefiting from its magic maybe we're the parasites yeah Lavos destroys the world but we got a few good millenia out of it after a bunch of monster simulations and three terrifying forms the time gang finally slays the Beast for good but it can't just die can it with the DS remake we see that la voz wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey sends it back into the darkness beyond time where it runs into shala and becomes the dream devourer so it's still eating us just more metaphysically and it's back one more time in Chrono Cross using the frozen flame to inconvenience us from outside reality so that it can gain the power to devour all of space-time okay wait a second come again it's going to eat space-time sure it pushes a definition but you can't tell me that this thing isn't a parasite and in my opinion the most powerful and most memorable of all time and beyond I'm the green scorpion and thank you for enduring the sickening menagerie of bowel dwellers if you ever feel like your Energy's being sapped or you're just not feeling like yourself make sure to see a doctor or a geologist a quantum physicist wouldn't hurt either stay healthy and have a happy Halloween [Music] you [Music]

Channel: The Green Scorpion

Views: 70,579

Rating: 4.9434195 out of 5

Keywords: greenscorpion64, The Green Scorpion, Top Ten, Video Game, Parasites, Buzzsaw The Righteous, Patreon, Reward, gameplay, commentary, review, countdown

Id: ppcOk5Vx1q4

Length: 33min 33sec (2013 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 31 2018