10 Video Games That Punish You For Trying To Be Cool
These games have no time for players who think they're slick.
What are video games if not blatant wish fulfilment, where we're able to do all those awesome things we either can't or shouldn't in real life?
It is an entire industry built around power fantasies and allowing the player to embody a cool, badass hero who does cool, badass things, and why the hell not?
Yet not all games are quite so interested in totally stroking the player's ego and simply giving them an outlet for whatever issues they've got going on upstairs.
Some games prefer to poke a little fun at players who think they're here for nothing more than an empty-calorie thrill-ride.
These games all dangled a tantalising, impossibly cool concept right in front of their face, only to snatch it away and replace the potential joy with a punishment instead.
Perhaps this punishment was a tongue-in-cheek rug-pull or a more mean-spirited thumbing of the nose, or in some cases a totally baffling case of just not giving players what they clearly wanted.
Whatever the reason, these games all made you look totally daft in your pursuit of a profoundly cool gaming experience...
10. A Botched Combo Loses All Your Points - Tony Hawk's Pro Skater
What is the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater franchise if not a wish fulfilment exercise for those of us lacking the co-ordination or flexibility to do trick skating for real?
It's a series entirely concerned with looking as rad as possible while pulling off death-defyingly acrobatic tricks, which if chained together into an implausibly long combo can net you a colossal number of points.
But the games also don't suffer overzealous showboats lightly, as if you decide to keep a trick going past your obvious capability, you'll end up falling flat on your face and pissing all your accrued points for the trick down the drain.
This can be infuriating if you've racked up hundreds of thousands of points while chaining a dozen moves together, yet because you dared to shoot for the moon rather than banking a sure thing, you ended up paying the humiliating price for it.
This is even worse if it happens while playing in front of a friend or livestreaming, so be sure to know you can land a tricky combo before showing it off in not-polite company.