Game tropes

[Cerys]

Puzzles that involve aligning mirrors to reflect beams of light. Off the top of my head:

Ocarina of Time
Wind Waker
Sonic Adventure
Uncharted 2
Ico
Portal 2 (sorta)

Yes! Also in Lego City Undercover.

Soul Reaver 2
Skyrim

[Bored of Canada]

Talos Principle is only that from what I've seen.

[Egyptian Feast]

Yes! Also in Lego City Undercover.


Soul Reaver 2
Skyrim

Not to mention Resident Evil 4.

[Kelvin]

Not to mention Resident Evil 4.

And the 3D Prince of Persia games.

[Consignia]

Let's not forget Mirror Puzzle Deluxe.

[HappyTree]

Beyond Good & Evil

One game trope that I love for its hilarity is being able to steal things from chests right in front of the owner of the chest as he's looking at me. Playing Divinity 2 right now and as the alchemist Buad is thanking me for being so wonderful I'm robbing him blind. "Oh really, is that right?" (x) Take All

[Big Jack McBastard]

I'm reminded of the old 'pot on the shopkeepers head' trick in Oblivion (or was it Skyrim?) that was hilarious first time around.

More tropes.

There's nothing in their hands!

Here's this git passing you <nothing visible> by doing an OTT sleight-of-hand move, by miming it. There, yours now.

..and another:

They don't throw you out of the army when you bloody-mindedly refuse to pick up a weapon on a gun range. Even if you arse about jumping in front of them and then go stock still for 10 minutes while you nip off to get a drink. By rights they'd have your character beaten and on the way to a psyche ward by the time you got back from making a brew.

[Phil_A]

"Welcome to the Guild, young adventurer! I'm sure you're keen to get started on your quest, but first we recommend you spend at least two hours beating up rats in a sewer."

[madhair60]

Walk into room.  Goes to letterbox mode.  Pan over to lever set into wall on other side of room.  Pan back to character.  Fade to black.  Cutscene.  Text box at bottom with dialogue.  Portrait of character to upper left of text.  Character acknowledges lever and need to pull lever.  Sidekick character (fairy, perhaps) acknowledges this also.  Fade to black.  Shot of enemies stalking around room.  Text box.  Acknowledges enemies.  Sidekick also acknowledges enemies.  Gives a hint on how to defeat them.  Fade to black.  Gameplay.  Back in full screen mode.  Cross room.  Beat up two enemies.  Takes eight seconds.  Stand in front of lever.  Press A.  Goes to letterbox mode.  Cutscene shows character pulling lever.  Text box.  Sidekick congratulates character.  Fade to black.  Shot of a door sliding open.  Text box.  Character explains that it must be the exit, and that pulling the lever opened it.  Sidekick affirms this.  Character says they'd better go through it.  Sidekicks affirms this.

Oh, also, all the dialogue is spoken as well as written out, and every character has circa 1999 anime dub voice.  And the cutscenes are all unskippable.  Oh, and if you die, it all happens again.

[HappyTree]

Ah, character voices. The fantasy land doesn't seem to have different people all with the same accent, due to living in the same place. Oh no. In fantasy land the baddie is upper class London, farm girls are from Bristol, the guard leader is from Aberdeen and robbers are Dubliners. All within about 10 square km.

[Cerys]

Secrets and achievement-related items are close to doors that close behind you and autosaves so that if you miss them you have to start the chapter/game all over again.

[chand]

Puzzles that involve aligning mirrors to reflect beams of light. Off the top of my head:

Ocarina of Time
Wind Waker
Sonic Adventure
Uncharted 2
Ico
Portal 2 (sorta)

Some in the God Of War games too, and as mentioned the 3D Prince Of Persia titles. I feel like the Tomb Raider series probably had some but I'm not sure. The Ratchet & Clank series had a few with laser beams you needed to reflect.

[chand]

One game trope that I love for its hilarity is being able to steal things from chests right in front of the owner of the chest as he's looking at me. Playing Divinity 2 right now and as the alchemist Buad is thanking me for being so wonderful I'm robbing him blind. "Oh really, is that right?" (x) Take All

Yeah, I love this, just pottering about somebody's house nicking stuff right in front of their faces. The other extreme was Fallout 3 where you couldn't nick anything from people's houses, even when nobody was around. Unless you ploughed some skill points into being a thief.

Playing Far Cry 4 and it's amazing the amount of cash and valuables people leave in unlocked chests outside their door. It's also weird that in these tiny villages with nothing to do where various factions are battling for domination nobody has stolen from the chests before. Local sites of clear historical interest a few hundred metres from a village remaining completely untouched for years, all their valuable artifacts left alone.

[thraxx]

Yeah, I love this, just pottering about somebody's house nicking stuff right in front of their faces. The other extreme was Fallout 3 where you couldn't nick anything from people's houses, even when nobody was around. Unless you ploughed some skill points into being a thief.

Playing Far Cry 4 and it's amazing the amount of cash and valuables people leave in unlocked chests outside their door. It's also weird that in these tiny villages with nothing to do where various factions are battling for domination nobody has stolen from the chests before. Local sites of clear historical interest a few hundred metres from a village remaining completely untouched for years, all their valuable artifacts left alone.

It is kind of a tradition in games, but it really annoys intensley me this.  I like it in Baldur's Gate when you pinch something, pick a lock, or slap someone and the labdicks come round and roll you in a carpet straightaway. 

Similar to this:  Animals, incorporeal beings and beasts that have no use for money dropping coins or harps and things.

(When I was a DM in AD&D or whatever, I was renknowned for my 'realistic' dungeons and campaigns where the players had NOTHING COMING TO THEM at all.  And none of that roll 4d6 and discard the lowest dice, then attribute the numbers as you wish bollocks.  You get 3d6 and roll the in order traits as they come and then pick your class accordingly.  I don't care if your highest score is 9, and it's on Charisma.

My players were lucky if they got half a dozen gold pieces and a set of serviceable ringmail at the end of an adventure.  Money meant nothing as in my world, ye shopes never has any goods worth buying anyway.)

[NoSleep]

Must have been a real escape from the drudgery of life, playing AD&D with you.

[thraxx]

Must have been a real escape from the drudgery of life, playing AD&D with you.

Austerity made for a different game.  We all ran campaigns so that was important, and in most of which everyone found an intelligent weapon or staff of the magi at the end of the first dungeon.  Doing it this way was different.  1)  It made everyone appreciate what they got a lot more.  2)  It made the role play different somehow - we had some chokingly hilarious episodes based on the simple opening of a chest and the jockeying to get whatever bauble was in it for example.  Improvisation became important in also every situation and hack and slash had to be avoided by both me and the players.

[NoSleep]

You're beginning to sound like David Cameron.

[thraxx]

You're beginning to sound like David Cameron.

In a very real sense.

[NoSleep]

So, instead of raiding the Temple Of Doom, you'd have them all on a quest down the road to sign on every day? Maybe pick up twenty cigs on the way home?

[thraxx]

In fact, now I'm recalling, I used to start them as 0 level characters with no skills at all, negative roll modifiers on everything, they had to play humans.  At first, there were no quests.  They just had to scratch around for work and they might get a job delivering a cartload of dung, so basically signing on yeah.  Then once having proved their worth with that, they might have to go and duff up some other humans, if they were lucky a handful of Kobolds to stove in.  Surprisingly, my austerity simulator tended to generate all kinds of petty crime, jealousy and violence.  Of course once they got up a couple of levels we did some more interesting stuff – I think Duergar were involved.  It was a very funny campaign, but in the present climate would be totally unnecessary.

[NoSleep]

I bet you think Ghost Recon was better than Quake.

[thraxx]

I bet you think Ghost Recon was better than Quake.

I have never played either.  They cost money.

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

The other extreme was Fallout 3 where you couldn't nick anything from people's houses, even when nobody was around. Unless you ploughed some skill points into being a thief.

Much as I love the recent Fallout games, it does bother me that you can repeat an action all day long but not get any better at it until you are able to put some skill points into it. It can be really offputting early on, especially when it comes to fights, as your guns skill is so low that bullets barely even tickle the baddies. I assume other RPG's do this as well, although a friend of mine has recently started playing Skyrim, which seems to handle levelling up in a more sensible way.

[Bhazor]

Beyond Good & Evil

One game trope that I love for its hilarity is being able to steal things from chests right in front of the owner of the chest as he's looking at me. Playing Divinity 2 right now and as the alchemist Buad is thanking me for being so wonderful I'm robbing him blind. "Oh really, is that right?" (x) Take All

Speaking of Divinity, Divinity: Original Sin has an especially fun variant of that where characters talking are essentially frozen. So you can walk up to a shop keeper staring at his cash till, start a conversation so he turns around, switch to someone else in your party and just empty the till right behind him.

Then there's the Skyrim Bucket Trick.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccBQZVpVvAE

[Lost Oliver]

Guy with glasses and Hard man get to a sciency barricade that is blocking their path.

Guy with glasses: Shit! An electro-cogno device system. In order to extrapolate the key code I'll need to use my leviathan wing titan and pump it full of goose noods.

Hard man: How long will that take?

Guy with glasses: if I start work now, it'll take no longer than two hours.

Hard man gets out his gun and shoots the barricade and creates a path through.

Guy with glasses: Or we could just do that.

Guy with glasses and Hard man walk through.

[Sexton Brackets Drugbust]

Guy with glasses and Hard man get to a sciency barricade that is blocking their path.

Guy with glasses: Shit! An electro-cogno device system. In order to extrapolate the key code I'll need to use my leviathan wing titan and pump it full of goose noods.

Hard man: How long will that take?

Guy with glasses: if I start work now, it'll take no longer than two hours.

Hard man gets out his gun and shoots the barricade and creates a path through.

Guy with glasses: Or we could just do that.

Guy with glasses and Hard man walk through.

To make that a little more specific to games, you have the variant whereby gun toting muscleman has to defend the computer whizz while they hack the system/override the security doors/download the data/upload the virus.

Cue several structured waves of enemies of increasing difficulty, along with lots of dialogue along the lines of "30% complete!" and "I just need a little more time!"

Sequence may end with a large boss enemy who only appears after all the grunts are done.