Have you ever played a game that just made you want to flip a table?

[Malbourne]

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Have you ever played a game that just made you want to flip a table?
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Spoiler: Half-Life 2

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Just as the title says: have you ever played a game where it's just plain fun to wreck the furniture? Sure, it breaks character and makes the protagonist look like a destructive loon on a martini bender, but the player's enjoyment always comes first.

A re-e-e-e-eally good example is [i]Half-Life 2[/i]. Ya get to just go nuts on the wood. You get the Mu-crowbar-amasa after less than half an hour and you just [i]sense[/i] its wood-thirst. As soon as Gordon whips it out, everything's gotta break. Don't tell me you left all the television screens unmolested, the chairs unfrazzled, and the windows untarnished. It helps that the physics engine causes milk jugs to ricochet when pelted with a watermelon, a mechanic that's given rise to the popularity of so-called "simulators." Ha, more like...more like, sham-ulators. Because the physics are so wonky.

The point is, some game designers just like to give a little player-fodder when they litter the environment with props. So I pose the question to you:

[HEADING=3][color=sienna]Has there been a special game in your life where ransacking was practically encouraged just because it was so FUN?[/color][/HEADING]

 

[Casual Shinji]

Red Faction: Guerilla

It's basically Break Shit: the Videogame. Taking a car strapped with explosives and ramming it into a building, hammering away at the base of a structure with your mallet till the whole thing eventually comes crashing down, or just taking a mech and plowing through everything man made while flailing your giant robot arms around. It's all good!

It's a one-trick pony for sure, but it's the most smashing pony in the world.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

Max Payne 3 lets you break just about everything, and the damage registers for keeps. Every little bullet hole is lovingly rendered. This is particularly satisfying during the office shootout levels. You can practically count every shard of glass you break. Destroying stuff is so much fun it actually makes you wanna lower your accuracy when shooting at enemies, just so you can see all the pretty wreakage you can create around them.

 

[Inglorious891]

Posting the obvious.

An entire game centered around going to town on everyday annoyances, and damn is it satifying.

 

[Prime_Hunter_H01]

OH

I thought this was about games so rage inducing it made you want to flip the table.

I am going to post on what I thought.

Hearthstone, I have not played many ccgs before so the need to have some semblance of ideal decks just to play causally was infuriating, but kinda ok, thought everything went down hill when I played their single player Curse of Naxxramus. To any one who is going to play that, prepare for the most bullshit game you have ever played, the only thing that at all balances it is the fact that the CPU is not as smart as a real player. That barely helps.

By the time i was done for the night I wanted to flip my table over and wished that I had something physical related to Hearthstone to destroy.

OT: Also in Hearthstone, you can mess around with the battle field, its fun to break the windows of a building or mess with stuff like vines, or a catapult

 

[Jason Rayes]

Red Faction: Guerilla

It's basically Break Shit: the Videogame. Taking a car strapped with explosives and ramming it into a building, hammering away at the base of a structure with your mallet till the whole thing eventually comes crashing down, or just taking a mech and plowing through everything man made while flailing your giant robot arms around. It's all good!

It's a one-trick pony for sure, but it's the most smashing pony in the world.

This. Pretty much the whole game is its destructible terrain and it's a hell of a lot of fun. There is an impressive sense of destruction, especially when you are destroying massive structures. Going through a base lobbing a whole bunch of remote charges on as many buildings as you can then pushing the button and watching half a base slowly topple to the ground is pretty neat.

 

[scotth266]

Nothing comes to mind immediately.

I mean, getting Foxiest of the Hounds in Deus Ex: Human Revolution made me furious enough to reload several saves and just start gunning people down, but that was more to relieve the tension of constantly sneaking and hoping that this time the plan would work.

I do know what theme music this thread could use though!

 

[Shoggoth2588]

Other than Red Faction: Guerrilla, Just Cause 2. Sure it's set on an island but it's a freaking HUGE island with snowy mountains, a desert, cities...the buildings don't crumble which is kind of lame but a ton of other things DO crumble and can be destroyed. I had fun breaking things in Dishonored too but mainly because once you found things that could be broken, it felt like you're won a very special kind of find-it puzzle.

 

[MeatMachine]

My first playthrough of Fallout: New Vegas.

NPC: "If'm ya wanna head ta New Vegas, I suggest headin' south on the I-80, roundin' Primm, then Nipton, then Novac, then the 188, then the Sharecropper Farms, then Freeside, then MORE Freeside, then a credit check, THEN y'all find yerself in New Vegas."

Nah, think I'll just go north instead.
CAZADORES.
Instant death.
Respawn outside of Prospector's Saloon.

Alright then, guess I'll just head north-east.
GIANT RADSCORPIONS.
Instant death.
Respawn outside of Prospector's Saloon.

Alright, fine - I'll just go due east this time.
...
Hey, nice, nothing instantly killing me this time.
DEATHCLAWS.
Instant death.
Respawn outside of Prospector's Saloon.

...

NPC: "So... have you reconsidered headin' south yet?"

 

[Pikey Mikey]

Red Faction: Guerrilla, because breaking shit IS the game. No, there isn't a story. You want a story? Shit's fucked, make it even fuckeder (I know that's now a word =P). The story is sooo bad but breaking things is sooo fun. My favorite part was taking a MOAB (collect stuff to unlock it and install it by driving over it), installing it in a truck. Taping 15 remote explosives to said truck, launch it (road-bumps ftw) into the city hall-building, detonate it and just LOOK AT IT! (It has such nice explosion graphics (and the explosion was Huge (with a capital 'H'))).

Also:...Half Life 1 I guess (only played HF 2 once (stop raging, I thought it was ok (please don't rage, I like you more when you're happy (yes YOU, you wonderful person)))) when I 'were a wee little lad' I'd break everything; TVs, crates, soda-machines, boxes, that microwave oven in the beginning and let's not forget;
HUMAN FACES! (smash them with the crowbar and, depending on RNG or something, you might actually gib them before they hit the ground)

 

[Barbas]

(Postal 2 snip).

My absolute favourite Useless Exploding Props Simulator. Good gravy, those cars were deadly.

OT: Yep, I also thought you meant anger-inducing games. The destruction in Borderlands 2 has always been a favourite of mine. I love how the enemies keep respawning in juuuust the right amounts in an area for farming but not so many that they become aggravating.

 

[Saltyk]

How about any game that makes Random Number Generation a major mechanic. I always hate when luck is a more important element than skill or strategy. And honestly, I hate stealing in a lot of RPGs. Pretty much because it can be so random.

But I can't really think of any games that have ever been that bad. Closest I can think is having played a game for an hour without saving and then dying. Usually due to something cheap and unexpected. I've literally stopped playing games for months following that sort of thing.

 

[Something Amyss]

Maybe not quite as epic, but Saints Row 2 had a ton of stuff you could use as weapons or smash in the scenery. I think it was even the game where my friend and I tried to kill each other by using cars to punt traffic cones at each other.

 

[wooty]

I've recently started to realize how fun yet how much of a pain in the arse the physics/scenery in Battlefield 4 can be.

Yeah its fun to wreak havoc on scenery, yeah its fun to roll over cars and trees in a tank, yeah its fun to blow up and topple buildings.....but why oh why do my retarded team mates decide to blow up and topple buildings whenever I decide to go into them? Its happening far too often

 

[Jason Rayes]

I like how half the people here get that this thread is about games where its fun to destroy stuff and the other half think its about games that make you angry. Two threads for the price of one

 

[Someone Depressing]

Dark Souls. Oh my fucking God, Dark Souls. People usually said, "It's hard but fair". I watched videos; it looked just like that. But the game has it in for me, it fucking hates me.

I fucking hate you too, you unbalanced, badly translated, overly hyped piece of garbage, with your bullshit and your constantly respawning enemies and your agro-able NPCs and your magnificient chests, you...

Iron Flesh
...Oh.
And that's why Dark Souls is the best game ever.
But then they nerfed it. And now I hate it again.

 

[Siege_TF]

Fun to destroy stuff: Resident Evil 5, particularly the first act where resources are limited.

HATE THIS GAME SO HARD: Warhammer 40,000 just as recently as last Friday where I made a nice and balanced list with lots of variety... and came up against 3 groups of Chaos Rubric Marines in Rhinos with Havoc Launchers and a Sorcerer, two groups of Havocs with five autocannons each, and a Chaos Stormeagle (courtesy of Forgeworld). That's three different types of units if the rhinos and sorcerers are considered upgrades. Three. In fifteen hundred points. I'm finishing my damn Leman Russ motorpool. To hell with my Storm Troopers, Hellhound, Sentinels, and vet squads. Pask, Russes, conscripts, Russes, Russes, and more Russes. >:c

 

[Jodan]

goldeneye 64 sometimes i would go through a level and destroy everything that was desroyable id shot out the lights explode every chair etc.

 

[Malbourne]

Yep, I also thought you meant anger-inducing games. The destruction in Borderlands 2 has always been a favourite of mine. I love how the enemies keep respawning in juuuust the right amounts in an area for farming but not so many that they become aggravating.

You gotta respect a game where the scenery you have fun eviscerating is also the enemy horde. There are even several in-game statistics for the number of enemies you gib!

I like how half the people here get that this thread is about games where its fun to destroy stuff and the other half think its about games that make you angry. Two threads for the price of one

I try to maximize the value of every thread I make! There's something for everyone.

OH
OT: Also in Hearthstone, you can mess around with the battle field, its fun to break the windows of a building or mess with stuff like vines, or a catapult

Yeah, half the time I played was spent strategizing, and the other half was spent breaking stain-glass windows and lighting bonfires. I do not regret it.

Max Payne 3 lets you break just about everything, and the damage registers for keeps. Every little bullet hole is lovingly rendered. This is particularly satisfying during the office shootout levels. You can practically count every shard of glass you break. Destroying stuff is so much fun it actually makes you wanna lower your accuracy when shooting at enemies, just so you can see all the pretty wreakage you can create around them.

Yeah, I never actually considered buying Max Payne 3 until recently thanks to how inexpensive it's gotten. Mehbe I'll buy it on disc for a song and give it a whirl. Bog-standard over-the-shoulder third-person shooters typically don't take advantage of their mechanics and I wouldn't be so shallow as to mark destructable environments as the main selling point. But it helps.