< Noodle Incident

Noodle Incident/Video Games

  • Return to Zork had various characters making reference to a "boar in the forest" joke, which was always interrupted at inconvenient times. One could make the argument that the blacksmith's interruption, "Did you hear the one about the boar in the forest? Ooops, greasy fingers" was the whole joke, as it did gain laughs from the audience when you told it at Chuckles Comedy Club. Eventually the player encounters a statue of a boar in The Forest of the Spirits which must be struck by a sword to uncover one of the missing pieces of the Disc of Frobozz.
  • In Uncharted 2 Sully tells Nate that they should follow a hose that leads to a campsite, in which Nate remarks, "You always follow the hose. Remember back in Montreal?" Sully answers, "You'll never let that go, will you?" with no explanation as to what happened in Montreal.
    • Sully has a few of these.

Sully: I'm sweating like a hooker in church.
Nate: ...You brought a hooker to church?
Sully: Why not?

  • F-Zero has a "great accident" that is mentioned in every other character profile in GX.
    • The Great Accident in question was from the Nintendo 64 website for X: during a race in the circuit, a well known member of royalty and many racers present ended up dying, which led to the banning of the sport.
  • Half-Life 2 has a "cat incident", involving two teleporters, Dr. Kleiner, Barney Calhoun and a cat.

Barney: You mean it's [the teleporter] working? For real this time? Because, I still have nightmares about that cat.
Alyx: What cat?
Dr. Kleiner: Now, now, there is nothing to be worried about, we have made major strides since then. Major strides.
Alyx: (louder) What cat?!!
(later as Alyx is stepping into the teleporter...)
Dr. Kleiner: (checking the readings) Conditions could hardly be more ideal.
Barney: That's what you said the last time.
Alyx: (in the teleporter) Hey uh, yeah, about that cat...
(one in-game week later)

Barney: Did you hear a cat just now? That damn thing haunts me...

    • Concerned referenced this from before the incident.
    • However, the "microwave" incident mentioned by Dr. Magnusson in Episode Two is a Brick Joke, as it's something that you can do in the original Half-Life 1.
    • There is a Steam achievement in Half-Life 2 that you can get for screwing up Kleiner's teleporter during that scene, titled, you guessed it, "What Cat?"
    • According to Half-Life: Raising the Bar, the cat in question was turned inside out.
  • Metal Wolf Chaos gives us a Noodle War in the form of the Arizona Conflict/Insurrection that Michael, Richard and several others are veterans of.
  • In Dungeon Siege II: Broken World, Celeb'hel wants to cast a spell that will allow him to impose his will on the world. He says that this particular spell was cast twice before in the history of Aranna, but the Ancestor of the Azunites says that neither casting had the intended effect; we aren't told what exactly happened
  • In the Castlevania mythos, the titular castle was sealed within an eclipse, and its master was Killed Off for Real, in a climactic battle in 1999. However, that's all we know of the event -- it is only ever referenced in the Aria and Dawn of Sorrow games set after that battle, where the reappearance of Castlevania is cause for much concern. As of this writing, IGA has expressed reluctance to tackle the issue, as fan expectations about exactly what happened in 1999 have only increased over the years.
    • As have the fangirl expectations for a young Julius Belmont's character design. He set the bar pretty high in the Sorrow games...
  • Sam and Max, in the Telltale episodes, constantly refer to events that happen in other cases without getting into the specifics. Examples:

Max: Great, now what am I going to do with the buckets of Sea Monster Blood?


Sam: Remember our old car, Max?
Max: I said I was sorry!


Sam: (looking at a dartboard with one dart in it) Someday we're going to finish that game.
Max: I'm still trying to get the rest of the darts out of the police impound.

    • This is also present in the first game, Sam and Max Hit The Road, as early in the game you can...not go upstairs. When you try...

Sam: We don't go upstairs.
Max: Not since the accident.

    • These blend impressively seamlessly with references to older games; for someone who hadn't played the earlier games, things like the man locked inside their closet and Max's election to the presidency seem nearly as noodley.
  • Monkey Island:
    • Guybrush Threepwood states that the Giant Monkey Head is the second largest monkey head he has ever seen. We never hear about the largest.
    • And then there's the intense, bizarre phobia of porcelain.
    • Tales of Monkey Island starts at the end of an adventure we don't get to see. Apparently, it involved LeChuck being reincarnated as a walrus.
    • The Secret of Monkey Island includes a long scene where Guybrush tries to get the Idol of Many Hands from the governor's mansion, almost all of which takes place outside of camera range, though the action prompts still pop up. They say things like "Hypnotize Infuriated Rhino," and "Push tremendous Yak."
  • Metroid Prime 3: Corruption had the Horus Rebellion that was mentioned by two Federation members. Nothing else was mentioned about it besides the fact that it was apparently as bad as the events of the game.
  • In Persona 4 it's occasionally mentioned that Kanji singlehandedly beat a biker gang while he was still in middle school. Actual information on how the fight went down is never explained, but Kanji finally relents and says the only reason he got into the fight in the first place was because they were making too much noise and giving his mom a headache.
    • The opening video shows bits of Kanji's beatdown of the bikers.
  • From the Mass Effect series:
    • In Mass Effect 2 there are various including missions Jacob and Miranda went on (which are explained in the IOS game) and Jack's list of entertaining crimes including dropping a starbase on a moon and hijacking a military craft. While she explains the starbase, the incident with the military ship is never explained other than 'they should've locked it'.
    • Then there's Mordin mentioning how he's killed people with guns, knives, drugs, tech attacks, "once with farming equipment," but never with medicine. Mind you, in the DLC, you find out just what the farming equipment was. He killed a krogan by stabbing him in the face with a pitchfork.
    • A rather suspect one can be found by talking to Liara during the approach to Saren's base on Virmire:

Dr Liara T'Soni: I don't know which is worse. The geth, or all this sand in my...never mind.

    • A minor one from the "Lair of the Shadow Broker" DLC: Thane's dossier mentions that he was responsible for an event on Omega called the "One-Hour Massacre".
    • The setting has an entire Noodle War in its background with the Morning War between the quarians and the geth. Exactly what happened during the war is unclear, and we only get a vague understanding of how it was fought. All we really know is that the quarians panicked when the get began developing sentience and tried to destroy the entire synthetic race before it could rebel and destroy them, and the geth fought back. Many quarians tried to protect the geth and died during the war, and the conflict ended with only about sixteen million surviving quarians who the geth deliberately allowed to escape because they did judge themselves able to accurately judge the consequences of causing the extinction of another species. (By comparison, two other major wars in the setting's background, the Rachni wars and the Krogan Rebellions, are more extensively covered by the setting's lore)
  • In BioWare's Dragon Age, some of your party members will reference various noodle incidents--such as Zevran's mention of the stages of lanthrax poisoning ("I watched a man go through all seven once!"), Alistair's childhood ("I locked myself in a cage once, when I was a child, for an entire day. Ahh, good times. . ."), and the time Leliana rode on the vanes of a windmill.
  • The "Meet the Medic" video supplement to Team Fortress 2:

Medic: When the patient woke up, his skeleton was missing, and the doctor was never heard from again! *laughs* Anyway, that's how I lost my medical license.

    • BLU Spy's severed but still living head is also being kept in the Medic's refrigerator for some reason[1].

Spy: Kill me.
Medic: Later.

    • In the 2011 Smissmas comic, the BLU Soldier somehow becomes the Scout's court-appointed lawyer. When Miss Pauling asks the BLU Spy how that happened:

Spy: It's a long story, but chapter one: his roommate is a magician. Should I continue?
Pauling: You know what? Nevermind.

    • Finally, we have issue of the Pyro's gender, which Valve is keen to tease about. Their official stance: it's one of those questions "that get asked so often that they become, in a sense, unanswerable."
  • In Marvel vs. Capcom 3, Phoenix Wright's Hyper Combo involves prosecuting the opponent for... Well, a lot of the details of the actual crime goes unsaid, other than the fact that it involves a flower vase, a cellphone, and a hunting knife. Still, it's a pretty lethal move that causes the opponent to break down and confess.
  • Medic's Patient, Heavy, has one as well (although it never is mentioned in his "original" game, but in Poker Night At the Inventory):

Heavy: "We had to either box or learn to herd goats. *Beat ... I am not good with goats."

  • Disgaea: At some point, Laharl is blackmailed with an "embarrassing photo", but we're never shown what it is. Laharl, Etna, and Flonne have some interesting reactions to it, though.
  • In Dwarf Fortress, dwarven crafts, engravings, and statuary frequently represent events from the world's randomly-generated history. Unless you have a spare copy of that world to look at in Legends Mode, you'll end up with a bunch of images of some random creature you've never heard of doing something irrelevant.
  • In Left 4 Dead 2, Ellis tries to regale his new friends with stories about his buddy, Keith, who apparently has a tremendous misfortune and frequently becomes involved in fantastical acts of self-endangering stupidity. However, Ellis is most often interrupted with "Is now really the time?", so we don't get to hear how Keith survives. If Ellis' tall stories are to be believed, Keith...
    • Suffered from third-degree burns to the majority of his body (on two seperate occasions; making fireworks and deepfrying a turkey)
    • Was teargassed by the police (the effects of the gas blinding him for a whole year)
    • Snuck a paintball gun on a rollercoaster to invent a new sport. Also falling off the coaster and having to dodge carts because the carny wouldn't stop the ride
    • Was buried alive after falling down an open manhole.
    • Was nerve-gassed and cluster-bombed by the US Military
    • Ran himself over with a riding lawnmower he fashioned into a bumpercar.
    • Received an "I'm a Moron" tattoo on his forehead for a $200 dare.
    • Ate three pounds of raw chicken (the resulting salmonella paralysed his right foot and obliterated all memory of his brother, Paul)
    • Tried to stage a recreation of Colonial war in his garden, but only ended up with a raccoon fight.
    • Lived in a graveyard for a year after he was kicked out of home. He was stabbed and robbed by a man wearing a bedsheet, pretending to be a ghost.
    • Nearly drowned in a Tunnel of Love.
    • Broke both of his legs after pluging his car off a cliff
    • Joined a couple in Matrimony despite not being a minister. (He would have been married himself, had he not have run away from his own wedding.)
      • It is not known if Keith is even real, or if he is an imaginary character of Ellis' creation to impress the others in his group.
  • In The Silver Lining, Hassan explains that he was almost executed and can no longer enter the Isle of Wonder. When Graham asks what he did:

Hassan: Er... well, let's just say I had two gold earrings, Sire, and I'm not likely to get the second one back anytime soon.

  • Fallout: New Vegas had Incident Playtime with cyberdogs involved which took a sizable chunk out of the budget of the Big Empty. Given the fact the female cyberdog was in heat, lets just say that it was mating season and a lot of sterilization (of both the cyberdogs and the resulting mess) was involved...
  • Jak II Renegade: Who knows what happened with the wumpbee nest on Jak's ninth birthday?
  • In Chrono Cross, the rise of Porre as a military superpower and the fall of the Guardian kingdom came across as this to many players, especially since Crono, Marle, and Lucca returned home after beating Lavos in the first game. Even the DS Updated Rerelease of Chrono Trigger, which reveals Dalton as having masterminded the fall of the Guardia, sheds only a little bit more light.
  • At the end of Super Mario Galaxy 2, Lubba actually tells Mario that he met Rosalina before. However, it's never explained when the two last met, and Lubba isn't even in the first Super Mario Galaxy game at all!
    • And speaking of the first Galaxy game, in the prologue, just right before she is captured by Bowser and is carried off into space, Peach can be seen with a little white Luma in her hands (who will then help Mario save her from Bowser). However, it's never explained how, where, or when she got that Luma in the first place!
      • IT'S A DOLL.
  • The "Baconslicer Incident" from Fantasy Quest leaves even grizzled ogres trembling.
  • In every Elder Scrolls game except Daggerfall, the player starts out as a prisoner. In The Elder Scrolls: Arena, Morrowind, and Oblivion, it's never explained what the crime was that landed you there. Oblivion even has a dialog option where the Player Character (that deserves repeating: the character you play) doesn't know either.
    • Skyrim never tells you outright, but it's heavily implied you were a victim of mistaken identity on the part of the Imperial Legion. It seems they were rounding up Stormcloaks at Skyrim's border and you were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Now the Noodle Incident becomes why you were crossing the border into Skyrim.
  • In RuneScape, you can learn the story of a minor quest character named 50% Luke if you wear a certain magical ring. You see, it all starts with this albatross... okay the rest is kind of confidential, but the end result is a zombie pirate with a body half made of magical witchwood.
  • EV Nova has the mysterious artificial ring around the planet Kont. This Noodle Incident was eventually resolved when one of the devs let slip on the forums that it was an ancient hypergate.
  • Beirut in Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. All the player as Soap hears about it is:

Kamarov: Hm... I guess I owe you one.
Gaz: Bloody right you do.

  1. ↑ a later released animated storyboard reveals that the Spy was decapitated during an attempt to infiltrate the base and then rendered immortal by a prototype Medigun
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