< Funny Aneurysm Moment

Funny Aneurysm Moment/Video Games

  • The WTC towers- or situations that in retrospect bear some similarity to their demise- appear in several cases:
    • During the Fragile Cargo mission from Ace Combat 3: Electrosphere, you have to prevent an airplane packed with anthrax by a bunch of terrorists from crashing against some huge chimneys that look a bit too much like the World Trade Center. In order for that blimp to safely land on water and not crush the chimneys, the player must shoot the chimneys in the way.
    • On a related note, in Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2, the first Soviet mission sends you to destroy the Pentagon. The third posts you taking over the WTC area. Yes, you can destroy the towers with your tanks. To make matters worse, game rewards you from this. By revealing two cash boxes.
      • The original RA2 packaging had artwork of the Soviet attack on New York, Twin Towers prominently displayed. Needless to say, said packaging was pulled off the shelves after 9/11.
        • And in its sequel, Red Alert 3, the main tank of the Empire of the Rising Sun, which is Japan, is called the Tsunami tank.
    • In the opening to Combatribes on the SNES, the center of all evil in New York is run by a group called Ground Zero. Awkward.
    • In one of the Aero Fighters games on the Neo Geo, a level that takes place in New York City lets you blow up the World Trade Center towers... with a plane... and you get rewarded with money for doing so.
    • The first level of King of the Monsters 2 has the Twin Towers, which can be thrown or destroyed for giggle.
    • In the opening levels of Deus Ex, set in NYC, an artist left the WTC towers out of the skybox by mistake. The in-game explanation? Terrorists.
      • The fact that one of the main plots portrays a government orchestrating terrorists acts to get pretense for freedoms-curbing legislations doesn't help either.
    • Then there's the Statue of Libery being C4'ed by terrorists, which makes the absence of the WTC even more disturbing.
      • On the other hand, Statue of Liberty has been decapitated by French freedom activists who have deliberately chosen such act to perform a symbolic action without any human casualties. Although it is strongly implied that the main villains framed them for it, which makes it possibly more disturbing.
      • Another one from Deus Ex: One of your missions reflects the in-universe gas prices. The gas station in question has something in the lines of $4.50 a gallon (this was back when gas was still under $2/gallon). Now take into consideration that average price of gas now in the U.S. has reached that point...
    • One of the possible things that could happen in SimTower was for terrorists to plant bombs inside your tower, which you then have to stop. Ouch.
    • The cover and start screen for the NES Die Hard game is "kinda disturbing, maybe offensive" as The Angry Video Game Nerd put it.
    • Urban Strike. It's 2001, and you're in New York during a terrorist threat. Yep. One of the tasks includes picking survivors out of the gaping hole in one of the WTC towers. Many players were surprised to find that Urban Strike was released before 9/11, since the games usually have a real-life basis.
    • In Final Fantasy V, there is a forked tower (meaning it is one building on the bottom, but splits into two) that two party members must take each side.[1] It turns out the bosses are load-bearing.
  • The game series Rampage, where the object of the game is to destroy skyscrapers as a Captain Ersatsz of Godzilla or King Kong, among other monsters, in a city has become this since 9/11. It took them 7 years to produce a new game because of it. Worse still, you can actually target some real-world landmarks in a few of the games.
  • Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots managed to turn much of Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater into a Funny Aneurysm Moment: bad enough that Naked Snake ends up becoming Big Boss, the villain of the first two Metal Gear games, but MGS4 reveals that the rest of your team - Sigint, Para-Medic and the all-important Major Zero - went on with EVA and Ocelot to found the Patriots, the organization which eventually became the shadow government of the United States, and that Big Boss - originally one of the group - set off the Outer Heaven and Zanzibar Land incidents in order to throw off their control. Furthermore, it's revealed that both Sigint and Para-Medic, a.k.a. DARPA Chief Donald Anderson, who probably indirectly created the AIs, and Dr. Clark, the creator of the Les Enfants Terribles project and the person who turned Frank Jaeger into the Cyborg Ninja, were both killed; Dr. Clark shortly before the events of the first Metal Gear Solid, and Sigint/Ocelot were aware of their true allegiances when Ocelot killed Sigint; by the end of MGS4, none of the original members are left, though it's a surprise as to which one is really the last to die.
    • Way back in the first Metal Gear, released in the late Eighties, Snake must reach Metal Gear by crossing an electric floor. All the other electric floors in the game have had panels which can be shot with missiles in order to prevent Snake getting zapped; this one had no such thing. In order to reach Metal Gear, Snake has to eat Rations to regain his draining health meter while he blinks in eight-bit damage. If you have played Metal Gear Solid 4, this simple gameplay puzzle will likely bring you to tears, for its similarity to the gutwrenchingly horrible microwave tunnel scene. Only there, Snake can't restore his health with rations.
    • In the first Metal Gear Solid, there's a funny sequence where Naomi lectures Snake about what happens to the body when someone smokes, and informs him that if he carries on doing it he will get cancer and die. In Metal Gear Solid 4, Naomi dies, of cancer. Suddenly the conversation isn't funny.
    • Also, wince at a line where the Colonel informs Snake that if he refuses to co-operate, he'll be 'in the stockade until [he is] a very old man'. Considering Snake's accelerated aging as a clone and how he looks as of 4, he wouldn't have to be there very long.
    • Less unfunny, more squicky/Back to The Future: In Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops Plus, Old Snake is a bonus playable character. As a bonus detail, all the girly magazines in Portable Ops use pictures of EVA. Being a man, Snake is not immune to the irresistible lure of pictures of his beloved naked, smoldering - mother. Lampshaded by CMP Studios, a Metal Gear Machinima group, in a one-shot special - "I apologize for what I used your pictures for".
    • In Metal Gear Solid 2, there's a famous scene where a corrupted AI character rants about purple stuffed worms and scissors, among other things which lighten the mood of the otherwise dark section of the game. It's not so funny in Peace Walker when the AI Boss starts doing the same thing, even quoting some lines, while she's being essentially murdered.
      • Similarly, there was a movie on Metal Gear Solid 3's Secret Theatre where Snake and Para-Medic argue about whether Snake should kill and eat The Boss's horse, with The Boss becoming incensed enough to storm away quickly and send GRU soldiers over to their location. It's not so funny in Peace Walker when Big Boss is forced to euthanize The Boss's horse with his gun in a manner similar to his killing The Boss, after the horse was critically and mortally wounded from falling off the Costa Rican/Nicaraguan border while in pursuit of Peace Walker.
    • In the same game, Otacon in an optional Codec call will reprimand Snake for throwing away a lit cigarette into the harbor from the George Washington Bridge. Shortly after the release of the game, it was shown that Otacon wasn't the only person upset with Snake's actions, as quite a few people were in an uproar over this fact, enough to have Kojima have Naked Snake actually stamp out his Cigar just before doing his HALO jump at Tselinoyarsk in the next game.
  • The Undertaker's SmackDown! vs. Raw Curse qualifies. A storyline of the story mode in WWE Smackdown vs. Raw 2006 ends with Eddie Guerrero landing in a casket during a feud with The Undertaker; soon after the release of the game, Eddie Guerrero died. In the 2007 edition, a storyline has dialogue where The Undertaker tells Chris Benoit (who he's feuding with) that his grieving family will have no one to blame but himself; months later, the real Chris Benoit kills his wife, his son, and himself. In the 2008 edition, Undertaker has a feud with Jeff Hardy in the story mode; in 2008, Jeff Hardy suffered his second Wellness Policy strike, and during his Wellness Vacation, his house burnt down, destroying all of his possessions and killing his pet dog.
    • As a side note: in the 2009 edition, Undertaker feuds with Finlay and Santino Marella, and eventually you control one of them in an alternate "zombie" attire to aid him during the game's Road to WrestleMania story mode...
  • The first few missions in Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon involve trying to stop a Russian backed rebellion in Georgia's South Ossetia region and later, an actual invasion by pseudo-communist Russians...and the entirety of the game is set in the year 2008, no less, even starting in a month that's name begins with the letter "A" (April in the game and August in reality). Reality is officially Unrealistic.
  • In the 1992 arcade game Total Carnage, you control a one man army blowing his way through an insane landscape of chaos which is clearly inspired in several ways by the 1991 Iraq conflict (it's in a desert) mixed with a much higher dosage of constantly escalating madness (the mad general is called "General Ackboob", you battle hordes of mutant monsters). In 1992 the way your PC tears his way through all this chaos without any trouble save a quarter shortage is amusing in its insanity. Viewed in 2008 against the many complications of the second Iraq war...not as much.
  • The first time you play Halo, it seems like just a well-made, fun, alien shoot-'em-up. It's got little monkey enemies that like to panic at the first sign of you and marines shouting lots of funny things like, "Get up--SO I CAN KILL YOU AGAIN!" Then your AI guide sends you alone into an eerie containment facility where the mutated corpses of slain soldiers really do get up for you to kill again... and again....
    • Hilarious Outtakes feature Sgt. Johnson saying "Halo 4, I get a woman". Halo 4 is now on the way... but Johnson got KIA at the tail end of Halo 3.
  • In the early 1990s, Doom enjoyed massive popularity which can be credited to a vast community of fans making Game Mods. One of which, "UAC Labs," featured modified enhanced gore, and levels where you are supposed to kill swarms of demons. The description of the WAD ends with "Good Luck Marine, and don't forget, KILL EEM AALLLL!" The copyright notice says "You may NOT change a damn thing with this WAD, if you do, i will blow you up." This mod was one of a handful made by Columbine shooter Eric Harris (one of which included an on-screen gametesting credit for accomplice Dylan Klebhold), and no, Eric did not make a Doom mod set in Columbine High School that allowed the player to shoot students.
  • In The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, at the entrance of Kakariko village, a solder introducing the village says that they're a small community and that he hopes they'll one day be as lively as the Castle Town market. Years later, when the market is overrun by ReDeads, the village ends up holding the escaped population of Hyrule's humans, making it the liveliest area in Hyrule.
    • Then there is the guard posted at the gate of Hyrule Castle Town, who complains about how boring things are, and that he wishes things would become more interesting. The player also learns about the guard's fascination with ghosts. Fast forward seven years, after Ganondorf had overtaken the castle, in the place where the guard was stationed sits a mysterious individual who buys and sells ghosts, who somehow earned Ganondorf's favor.
    • But at least the game ends happily! Right, Link? ...Link?
  • Players of the original Ace Attorney trilogy would know the fate of Phoenix Wright did not end as happily as it has been heavily implied in the final game once another new protagonist has been introduced, including Wright's fall from grace as a major plotline. Ema Skye unfortunately suffers from this fate also, with a bright light of hope coming to her at the final case of the first game to become a forensic scientist. This was only to be shattered upon discovery that she failed in doing so, causing her to grow angry and bitter at everything and everyone.
    • Related to this, many characters, including Maya Fey, Ema and Lana Skye and Detective Gumshoe have joked about Phoenix giving up or even losing his badge. It was funny during the first three games, since the players reaction was guaranteed to be "Yeah, like that'd ever happen!"... Then, Apollo Justice came along and the jokes turned into Nightmare Fuelish Foreshadowing instead.
    • In Trials and Tribulations Case 2, Pearl jokes that Phoenix will one day grow famous enough to have imitators. In Case 3, Tigre gets Maggey thrown in jail by impersonating Phoenix and doing a deliberately awful defense at her trial.
      • And at the end of that case it's revealed that Godot cannot see red on white. The name of Mia Fey's murderer in the English version of the game? Redd White.
      • Godot's line, "by the way, I've tried salt in my coffee. It tastes terrible," Take a look at the end of Flashback case 3-4, Mia is crying that Terry Fawles commits suicide, Dahlia got away with that murder and Diego says "relax, kitten, your tears are getting my coffee salty."
  • The arcade game Michael Jackson's Moonwalker might be weird enough, but it just gets creepier (or sillier) each year: You touch kids (in the video game sense, and they're all girls, but still... the fact they are at the height of Michael's crotch does NOT help.) to gain points and powerups (and in home version, you cannot advance unless you get ALL the kids, which could be... hiding), or touch Bubbles the Chimp to get a super cyborg transformation. One of the attacks is Michael grabbing his crotch. And then there's the dance attack: MJ does his moonwalker gig, and it wipes out all the enemies on the screen.
  • Moe's constant sleeping in Da Capo when you get to the end of her route. Suddenly the Cloudcuckoolander thing and all her sleeping are a bit less charming, aren't they? And the vitamins... She's trying to sleep as much as possible so she can see the childhood friend who died saving her. She stopped taking the vitamins - read: sleeping pills - when she started dating Junichi but started taking more and more after the cherry tree died and she couldn't dream anymore. Eventually, she tries to overdose on sleeping pills where she met her friend right as Junichi convinces her to move on with her life. She gets better but... For extra fun, remember that the tree dies in lots of routes and she doesn't have the hero around to help her.... Yay...
  • Subverted in Spider-Man: Web of Shadows. During the battle with Black Cat, Spidey takes a metareferencial jab at his movies when encountering a Kingpin Tech Flyer for the first time: "Green Goblin is so 7 years ago! The kids are into guys like Venom and Sandman now!" The kids probably aren't liking Venom some time later in the game after he resurfaced with his symbiote army that turned New York into a deserted city, almost devoid of human activity (which is far more than what he did in Spider-Man 3). The catch? The player was well aware of that, for this would have been a straight example if the game didn't start In Medias Res.
  • Plants vs. Zombies, which came out in May 2009, featured a zombie version of Michael Jackson, complete with Thriller-style backup dancers. Six weeks after the game's release, Michael Jackson died suddenly from cardiac arrest. Needless to say, the dancing zombie has been turned into a Disco Stu in a patch.
    • Making things even worse, if you look up that enemy type ("Dancing Zombie") in the in-game encyclopedia, the entry states "Any resemblance between Dancing Zombie and persons living or dead is purely coincidental" (again, a joke on the Thriller Credits Gag).
  • Taking advantage of the 2008 presidential election, a game was released featuring animals competing for the throne to the animal kingdom. It was called Hail To The Chimp. A bit less funny when a black man was elected.
  • In F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin, Stokes asks Snake Fist who Alma is. Snake Fist replies "She's the mother of the apocalypse!" This amusingly unhelpful description becomes somewhat less amusing in light of the game's ending - Alma rapes the player character and becomes pregnant with his child who is, due to the nature of her parents, possibly the Antichrist.
  • Yuuichi and Ayu's pinky swears in Kanon suddenly become a lot less childishly innocent at the end than they were to start. Or rather, they remain the same childish innocent gesture but...
  • Ever 17: Tsugumi and Takeshi's scene in the flooding elevator while talking about the Archimedes Principle becomes a lot less amusing when the mini sub they're in starts to sink and they need to lose about 100lbs in order to start rising again. Takeshi distracts her with by asking her about it again the leaps into the airlock and moments later out into the ocean which is ice cold and in a setting that does not ignore the effects of water pressure or the human swimming ability.
    • Second example: At the beginning of Coco's route, there's a moment where Takeshi, You, and Coco are looking at a photo album of You's. When they see a picture of a baby Takeshi humorously asks You if it's her baby, which she reacts with a brief "no". Later in the route, we find out it actually IS her baby/clone, which she only had because she's dying of a lethal heart disease and made her to carry on her legacy. Ouch...
  • In the Tex Murphy game The Pandora Directive, set in the 2030s, Tex meets an NSA agent who reminds him of the Graham Act, a law that was passed "40 years ago" in response to increased terrorist threats to the US, giving the NSA carte blanche when dealing with internal security matters. The game was made a full 5 years before 9/11 and the resulting Patriot Act.
  • The antagonists of the first three games in the Mega Man Zero series all have the Greek letter Omega as their symbol. Sure most of them are Knight Templars, but they still mean well, fighting for the sake of humanity. But later we're introduced to an actual character named Omega, who is everything that the antagonists (except one) ever stood against.
    • Somewhat related: in Mega Man X 2, Zero, freshly Back from the Dead, very easily destroys a weak clone of himself that the Big Bad made. Cue Mega Man Zero 3, where Omega (the same one mentioned above) is the original body of Zero, while The Hero is the clone. But it was subverted, the clone Zero didn't mind the irony of the situation he was in, and goes on to defeat Omega Zero easily. Also, The Hero may be using a duplicate body, but the mind is real; he is still the real Zero. Omega Zero is now just a mindless puppet.
  • In Disgaea: Hour/Afternoon of Darkness, when Flonne is introduced she says she wants to be like the flowers. In most of the endings, Flonne is turned into a flower by Seraph Lamington as her punishment, before the final battle. In the Good ending, she is revived as a Fallen Angel, in the Neutral ending, Laharl sacrifices himself to resurrect her, and in one of the bad endings, he picks the flower and wanders the Netherworld for eternity.
  • Persona 4's Shadow Rise looks disturbingly similar to Nena Trinity, compounded with the fact Neena is Rule 34 fuel. Shadow Rise just loses its appeal.
  • In the game before that, many characters will talk about future plans they want the main character to be a part of, and how their lives have changed for the better ...and then the main character dies at the end of the game.
  • In Dragon Age, if you choose the Human Noble origin, your young nephew asks his father (who is about to ship off for war) to bring him back a sword as a present. His father replies something along the lines of "Don't worry, you'll be able to see one up close soon". Your nephew and the rest of your family are brutally murdered shortly thereafter by the armies of a rival nobleman.
    • Similarly, if you play a City Elf, when you talk to your cousin Soris, he'll say that his bride-to-be sounds like a dying mouse, to which you can respond (paraphrased) 'maybe I should get you a cage for your wedding gift'. Considerably less funny later on when she and a few other female wedding guests are imprisoned in a human noble's mansion so that he can rape and kill them one at a time.
  • In the theater level of Psychonauts, it's a bit hard to find the over-the-top, sickly-sweet "happy" play put on by kids in flower costumes to be amusing once they start talking about Gloria's mom, if you've played before and already know what happened to her....
  • In 1998, the makers of Doonesbury released Doonesbury Flashbacks: 25 Years of Serious Fun, which contained an archive of every strip published up until that point, as well as numerous extras. Each menu on the disc featured "fun" little animations. The menu for the archive itself was an exterior shot of the White House. One of the many "whacky" things that goes on if the viewer leaves the menu on long enough: an airplane crashing on the White House lawn.
    • Note that a small plane crashed on the South Lawn of the White House in 1994, and that's probably what the menu animation is referring to.
  • After the death of Heihachi's voice actor, the end of the arcade intro for Tekken 5 that proclaims "Heihachi Mishima is dead." definitely qualifies.
  • Drawn to Life: The Next Chapter was made for the DS and Wii by two completely different teams. In the Wii version, the character Mike, a random human who is inexplicably stuck in the game world, mentions in random dialogue that the world is very odd and "like a dream." At the end of the DS version, the world is destroyed in a Dream Apocalypse, and it was all created by Mike when he enters a coma.
  • In-universe example: Tidus in Final Fantasy X keeps telling Yuna about how much he's looking forward to going back to Zanarkand with her, and about how great things will be once they get there and all the stuff he'd like to do with her once the pilgrimage is over. He says this a lot. Much later in the game, he finds out that Zanarkand is the ultimate destination of the pilgrimage, where Yuna will acquire the Final Aeon, but in defeating Sin will die. Upon realizing how boneheaded this makes him seem and how much pain it must have caused Yuna to hear him talk about it all so cheerfully, Tidus experiences a brief Heroic BSOD before freaking out over why nobody told him this. Some players felt this way too.
    • It gets worse if you play through the whole game again. Some of the seemingly-innocuous lines become really dark.
  • In EarthBound, there is a character who, when you speak to them, says "I wonder if Earthbound 2 has been released yet?" There's a lot of us in Europe (and America) who would sadly say "No, and it may never be".
  • It's kind of funny how the front cover of the 24 video game has a shot of Tony and Michelle diving for cover from an explosion. Michelle is killed by a car bomb at the start of Season 5.
  • SimCity Societies is notable for promoting BP's "green" agenda by stamping its logo on windmills and solar power plants. Three years later, the same company is responsible for one of the worst oil spills in U.S. history.
  • In the game Home Front the antagonist is North Korea. With all the fuss surrounding the torpedoing of that South Korean ship...good thing it's statistically impossible.
  • Way back in 2008, Pandemic Studios releases a game called Mercenaries 2: World in Flames, set in Venezuela. Part of the background events is a new regime moving to nationalize the oil rigs and refineries of an American company. In 2010, Hugo Chávez prepares to nationalize the oil rigs of an American company.
  • In BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger, Taokaka's joke ending involves having been trained with Bang until an unknown enemy attacks, forcing Bang to make a Heroic Sacrifice, while Tao is left to fend off against the antagonist: Jin and Litchi, played out like an upcoming movie, which turns out to be Taokaka's lies. Cue the sequel, Litchi herself ends up reluctantly making a Face Heel Turn, going from neutral to antagonist because her beloved's life is in danger and she has no choice if she wants to save him. Way to go in your imagination, Tao... Let's hope that Bang doesn't end up biting it in Continuum Shift's sequel.
  • In Anachronox, there is a segment where you have to vote on a battery of silly Propositions affecting a planet's society. Even though you just arrived on the planet 10 minutes prior. Your goal is to vote in the same way the ruling High Council does in order to gain their trust. One measure attempts to legalize marriage between the Planet-dwellers and Ring-dwellers (lower and upper caste), which the Council has voted against. The measure? Proposition 8.
  • The first Uncharted is set in Indonesia. In Uncharted 2 there are propane tanks that can be used as explosives. Suddenly Indonesians start dying from gas tank explosions.
  • Mass Effect - "This is all Joker's fault! What a tool he was! I have all spend all day computing pi because he plugged in the Overlord!" Cue the Overlord DLC where David, who's been forcibly plugged into a VI and kept alive with machines, spends all day computing Pi as part of an experiment conducted by his own brother. And to just add cruelty, he's autistic and has to communicate with hundreds of geths at the same time, which is torture to him. Untill Shepard rolled along, he had no way of freeing himself and the "MAKE IT STOP!" screams were both Tear Jerker and Nightmare Fuel at the same time.
    • Also, in Mass Effect 2, if you bring up his past hobby as an actor, Mordin will sing a modified version of the Major-General Song to the amusement of both the players and Shepard. The moment becomes really depressing in Mass Effect 3, if Mordin sacrifices his life in order to cure the Genophage, as he quietly sings it as the building collapses and explodes around him in one of the biggest tear jerkers in whole game serie.

Mordin: I..am..the very..model of a - BOOM

    • In the original game, a Tali/Liara elevator conversation has Tali mentioning that most of the technology she wanted to send back to the flotilla tried to kill her. In the second game, she is accused of sending active geth parts back to the flotilla, which proceeded to kill everyone aboard the Alarei, but it was actually her father who was responsible.
  • Umineko no Naku Koro ni: Maria constantly adds the words 'uu uu' to her sentences, infuriating her mother, Rosa, who scolds her for her childishness. Taking this to be a comment on cute characters and their catchphrases, the reader finds this therapeutic. Then Episode 4 rolls by. Rosa is shown to be both severely abusive and neglectful of her child in private. It also turns out that the catchphrase is a spell Maria invented which she believes will make her mother happy. This is based on a moment in the past where Maria forgot the words to a song she was singing and merely went 'uu uu', which made her mother smile. It now has the opposite effect, but that only makes Maria think that she has to say it more, which causes her to suffer further abuse.
  • Hyperdimension Neptunia, a game where you play as several goddesses of Console anthromorphisms out to fight Majiquone (an Anthropomorphic Personification of Flashcarts and Custom Firmware) was launched on the Play Station 3. Just a month later, hackers broke into the Playstation Network, forcing the service to shut down for months.
  • Space Channel 5 has Space Michael, who was voiced by the King of Pop himself. Due to his death, it's hard to talk about him without feeling upset, even in the fanbase. It becomes a Funny Aneurysm Moment when you realize that some of the fanbase wished for him to be dead....
  • X-Men Legends featured a trivia game that would ask questions about the X-Men in exchange for experience. One of them gave you a list of 5 characters and asked which one of them was not a mutant. The correct answer to the question is Juggernaut, although Jubilee is one of the choices. Jubilee lost her powers as of M-Day.
  • Tales of the Abyss, has a particularly nasty example, Guy's fear of women. Most of the fellow characters, and even the players snicker at seeing him freak out whenever women get too close to him. Some characters even make fun of it. Then you find out his fear stems from being hidden under the dead bodies of his sister and the maids who sacrificed themselves to save him when Kimlascan soldiers massacred his family. When he was around FIVE. Then everybody feels like an absolute Jerkass.
  • Motorstorm Apocalypse is a racing game involving a group of adrenaline junkies that hold a race festival in a ruined city during an earthquake (and other disasters). The early videos featured buildings collapsing around your ears during aftershocks, explosions and tsunamis. During release week... uh... The game was pulled from shelves in NZ and Japan.
  • Utsuho Reiuji, a character from the Touhou series, is a nuclear raven girl inspired by Chernobyl. Now that Japan had a nuclear crisis itself, let's just say don't be surprised if she is claimed by Chuck Cunningham Syndrome.
    • It doesn't help that one of Tenshi's victory quotes against her in the fighting games is, "Say, you're not related to the earthquake on the surface, right? Right?" For that matter, Tenshi herself has come under fire for this, as she had stated she wanted to set off a massive earthquake on the surface world...
    • A milder version kind of occurs in fandom. Let's just say that Running Gag about Youmu Konpaku idolizing Sakuya Izayoi as her Onee-Sama to ridiculous proportions gets less meaning or could be unfunny as Youmu gets included in Touhou 13 without Sakuya, who's more probably jealous like hell.
      • Then again, Sakuya did say that she was just a maid and that the role was for... something. It was in the dialogue for one of the games.
  • In Police Quest 2 when you hit pause you get a screen saying that every cop needs a break now and then. The unpause option on the screen? The words: "Let's roll!" It doesn't seem like much until you happen to pause the game as you try to defeat the terrorists on the airplane.
  • Many lines in Dragon Age Origins -- Awakenings became Funny Aneurysm Moments due to the plot twists involving Anders in Dragon Age 2. Among these are Justice's discussions with Anders and Nathaniel about possession, Anders accusing Valenna having a "chip on her shoulder that replaced her head" and Anders joking that he's fond of "iconoclasm" since in Dragon Age 2 he blows up the Chantry in Kirkwall to incite a war.
  • The Kanto region of Pokémon Red and Blue/Yellow features an abandoned and ruined power plant, in about the same spot where the Tokai Nuclear Power Plant exists in Real Life. Tokai was one of the plants which faced meltdown after the 2011 Earthquake and Tsunami. Since Pokémon is implied to occur in a parallel universe, It makes one wonder where Pokemon really came from, and how long the ruins have been there...
  • There was a Super Nintendo game call Air Strike Patrol that was unashamedly centered on the Gulf War, despite changing the name to Zarak. It is possible to beat the game, but no matter what you do you get one of the bad endings because of casualties, money or politics, despite being told you were doing well. Compared to the current Iraq war, this is rather uncomfortable.
  • In Golden Sun: Dark Dawn, our heroes encounter the pirate leader Briggs while he's having his ship repaired. Several characters comment on how old and ratty the ship looks, to which Briggs replies, "This ship is my greatest treasure and my oldest friend. I expect I'll die on board her one day." Three guesses where Briggs is when the Grave Eclipse hits, and he subsequently dies of Eclipse-monster-related injuries.
  • Balloon Kid, a 1990 Game Boy sequel to Balloon Fight, featured a girl trying to rescue her little brother as he gets blown away while riding on balloons. Almost 20 years later...
  • In World of Warcraft up to the end of Wrath of the Lich King, Horde players were given quests during the holiday of Hallow's End (the equivalent of Hallowe'en) to bomb the little town of Southshore with stinkbombs. Then the Cataclysm expansion came out... and the Forsaken have since bombed the town with something far less harmless, the Blight, killing everyone who lived there and polluting the earth itself. The place is now inhabited only by sentient slimes.
  • On the way to meet with Page to sneak into Reaver's masquerade in Fable III, at the entrance of her base, you pass by Captain Swift, who's off to stir up further support for the uprising among the soldiers at Castle Bowerstone - before leaving, when Page refuses to let him come with the two of you, Ben half-jokingly whines that he should've just gone with Swift (who is for the record essentially the Walter to Ben's "you"). The next and last time he sees him is at his public execution. It's also a little of a downer on a replay that one of the promises you make to your supporters for when you're on the throne is to put Swift in charge of your army.
  • Meta-example relating to Katawa Shoujo: the Act 1 preview prominently featured deaf-mute Shizune and her sign language interpreter/VoiceForTheVoiceless Misha as close friends. Naturally, they were a popular pairing in discussion and fanart. Come the full release, Shizune's route reveals Misha is in love with Shizune, and confessed before the start of the game. Shizune rejected her, but offered continued friendship anyway. The ongoing consequences of this form much of the tension within the route's plot. Many shippers shat bricks.
    • Also on that subject, Emi asks in Act 3 of her route why Misha would hang around with someone as bossy as Shizune, in a somewhat lighthearted moment. If you've played Shizune's route, you know why.
    • Late in Act 1, one of the scenes leading up to Lilly's route has her joking with Akira about how bad Akira is at cooking. Later on, it's revealed that Akira was essentially forced to raise Lilly by herself when they were 19 and 12, respectively, after their parents left for Scotland. Akira believes that she was a failure as a substitute parent, and couldn't do as much for Lilly as she should have.
  • Guild Wars: Eye of the North introduces Gadd, a vitriolic and insufferable genius who is unrelentingly hard on his son, Vekk. Vekk declares he'd sooner push Gadd off a bridge if they didn't need Gadd's help. Not long after, Gadd is killed during battle and a grieving Vekk scatters his ashes from a bridge.
  • A possible In-Universe moment can happen in Fallout: New Vegas. In Old World Blues, the toaster says that "Soon the world will burn in nuclear fire, again!" You can't help but laugh as the Toaster is Ax Crazy yet harmless (because he is a toaster). Then, Lonesome Road comes along, and the Big Bad try to launch nuclear missiles at the NCR/Legion/Mojave depending on your relations with all the factions in the Mojave. Whether the nukes hit the Legion/NCR/Both or aren't launched depends on your choices.
  • In the anime Puella Magi Madoka Magica, we have the meme "Lonely Mami is Lonely". It's mostly Played for Laughs... but then in Puella Magi Madoka Magica Portable, while you CAN save Mami from her Episode 3 death, you CAN enforce this meme, and it results Mami continually growing miserable that she ends up into a witch due to that. What the hell, meme?
  1. ↑ Half of it's magic, half physical. Any deviation will fucking kill you.
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