10 Time Murphy's Law Invaded Your Video Game

"If it can go wrong, it will go wrong."

Thus spoke Murphy, although the saying is almost certainly as old as humanity itself. Weddings will be rained out. Power failures will ruin deadlines. You will pour salt in your coffee instead of sugar.

Gamers are not immune.

Even considering everything that can go wrong with software glitches, hardware faults and worn mechanical peripherals, games, with their myriad interlaced mechanics, are bound to serve up regular doses of bizarre control responses, uncooperative AI, or just plain bad luck.

Luckily, the worst that will happen will be a few hours of lost progress, a temporary rage-quit or uninstall, and an annoyed reload or reinstall (or in the worst case, a stint of anger management, should grievous bodily injury be done to your controller).

Whichever way, with only the Law of Entropy being more annoying and inevitable (other than trolls) there is little to do but have a laugh and soldier on.

Or review-bomb Steam and Metacritic, whatever floats your boat.

So, here follows a light-hearted look back at all the times Murphy, or Finagle, or Sod, let themselves in the house and gave you a bit of grief.

Looter shooters, such as Borderlands, feature no lack of guns, often leaving you buried up to your eyeballs in two-dollar pea-shooters and the odd gold-plated desert eagle. And yet there are always vendors where you can buy the stuff.

You know what’s coming next.

Because inevitably, something exceptional will pop up in the vendor’s inventory and, despite knowing better – this is a looter-shooter after all – you will cave and fork out the cash. Naturally, you will use that shiny new piece for all of five minutes before finding something much better plopped in some monster dung. Even better, that brand new gun will be worth half of what you paid for it.

Fantastic.

But the infinite joys of RNG the misery is not confined to looter-shooters. RPG such as Icewind Dale, action titles such as S.T.A.L.K.E.R. In fact, any game that features loot and vendors inevitably sees poor, unsuspecting players part with the better part of their hard-ground cash only to be instantly trolled by a bit of randomly generated swag.

The only thing worse would be to spend twenty minutes trying to get to that one locked chest only to find five gold pieces and an arrow. Yes, I’m looking at you, Skyrim.