8 Video Game Items That Pranked Players

We as players love having the freedom to explore, discover awesome items, and figure out which ones work best for our respective loadout and play-style.

Games developers are of course acutely aware of this, and as this list proves, they sure as hell love to make fun of players and their industrious quest to hoover up every last possible item on the game map.

While most in-game items will serve a purpose like buffing your health or unlocking the next stage of a quest, sometimes they're designed solely to troll those who find them.

These eight video game items, then, absolutely pranked players, whether offering up less-than-useless "upgrades" or even fundamentally putting them at a disadvantage.

The lesson here, if there is one at all, seems to be that you shouldn't obsessively pursue every last shiny object out there in the wild, but rather pay attention to the loot you come across and be discerning about whether you really need it or not. Or something.

Either way, these video game items were included so the developers could have a good, hearty laugh at the thought of you trying to figure out what they were really for, the smarmy gits…

Both Hotline Miami games allow players to unlock a series of masks which grant strange and often awesome abilities, such as the Tiger mask which grants faster executions, the Pig mask that spawns more guns on the map, and the Horse mask which turns slammed doors into lethal objects, because why the heck not?

But the first game also features a pure troll-job of an unlockable mask - the Fish mask unassumingly named Phil.

Phil can be discovered in the game's final mission, "Resolution," and rather than offer even a minor tactical advantage to embattled players, it simply translates all of the game's dialogue into French - and does so bloody badly at that.

Indeed, the dialogue will now not only be written in French, but the grammar, word order, and overall syntax will be totally banjaxed beyond comprehension.

The reason for this? Developers Dennaton Games outsourced the translation work to the online Babelfish translator for a laugh, ensuring the resulting word salad will leave just about any native French speaker ready to have a conniption fit.

Fun fact: the mask's name is a reference to controversial Fez creator Phil Fish, who in addition to being French-Canadian also has the birth name of Philippe Poisson. Neato.