10 Cheapest Deaths in Video Games

It’s likely that a lot of hardcore FPS players wouldn’t say Spawn Camping is worthy of being on our 10 Cheapest Death list, but think about it. If someone is spawn camping correctly you can enter the game, get shot in the head, and die before you can do anything about it! Even if you come out of your spawn shooting, a sniper with a scope aimed at your forehead will get to you first. It’s up to the rest of your team to take out the sniper in order to give you a chance to actually play.

The falling ceiling fundamentally changes the way games are played. Most stages in platformers, action games, shoot em ups, or any genre really, let you tackle obstacles as you like. However, falling ceilings (or closing walls or whatever variant you want to use), force you to make one very specific set of movements before you get to a save area where the ceiling won’t crush you. It changes creativity to perfectionism and it’s certain to make you waste a lot of lives.

Game designers aren’t perfect and thus games aren’t perfect. Everyone has had that experience where they were jumping around a map with no problems at all until they jumped in one very specific spot that caused them to get caught between a rock and a tree without being able to move. The obvious solution? Throw a grenade to kill yourself and respawn.

Old school NES games loved to create puzzles that required very specific usable items to get by. Of course, if you use up all of your item before the puzzle you are just screwed. Mega Man 3 should bring back frustrating memories of puzzles like these that required the Rush Jet to complete. No more Rush Jet energy? Guess you have to kill yourself and start the level all over again.

Platformers have this nasty habit of throwing fireballs at you from beyond the boundaries of the screen. The only real way to avoid these is to memorize when they are thrown at you and prepare to dodge them before they are even fired. What’s worse, is pro fighting gamers have managed to appropriate this cheap strategy for competitive play. Just watch a Youtube video of Chris G’s Morrigan in Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 and you’ll see what we are talking about.

Making a video game involves a lot of little choices. Like, when your character gets hit, how long is he invincible? Also, does he stumble back or get put into stun? If these questions aren’t considered you can easily find yourself stuck in a hit-stun lock until you die, or worse, knocked back by a minor enemy into a bottomless pit! Just one of the 10 Cheapest Deaths you'll find in video games.

Instant Kill attacks are pretty much the definition of Cheap Death. There is no real way to tell the difference between an instant kill fireball and a normal fireball. Also, when an enemy uses their insta kill attack for the first time you usually have no way to predict it coming. Instead, you just have to die once in order to learn how to not die every other time. It’s a natural inclusion for our cheap death list.

Disappearing Platforms are another one of those traps that change the way a game is played. Unlike the falling ceiling which at least gives you a safe space to stay before the ceiling crushes you, disappearing platforms never give you a moment to rest. You just have to hurry up and jump to the next one before you fall to your doom!

Spikes are even worse that bottomless pits or off screen projectiles. They are big areas of the stage that just say, “don’t go here.” They serve no purpose other than to prove that the gamer can’t survive a threat that is clearly advertised. Whether its spikes, lava, acid, swinging axes, or water that kills you for some reason, these types of traps have escalated gamers to controller throwing levels of rage.

Finally, the top of our list of the 10 Cheapest Deaths in Video Games is by definition a death that is unavoidable. Scripted deaths are those things in RPGs and action games where you fight an enemy that appears to be unbeatable. You’ll use all your items and magic and all the resources you have to struggle against him until he beats you anyway, and then the story continues! Then you have to either continue the game without all the items you wasted or turn it off and go to the last save point just to run into him head first and die again. These deaths are never fun and are the cheapest deaths we can think of.