Where’s the fun without an audience?
I’m fairly new to the Twitch game. A couple months ago, I began doing streams for my one-life challenges on Fallout 4. As I got going, I realized how great it is to have an audience for the WTF moments that inevitably crop up when I game. It’s nice to have witnesses to the ridiculous video game occurrences in my life. Of course, I’m not always streaming, which means that some of my favorite, freakiest game moments have gone undocumented.
A quick note about these moments before I dive in: I have no idea how common they are or if they have happened to anyone else. To me, they were important because they surprised, angered, or terrified me. That’s the kind of stuff I find most interesting to share with friends. Luckily, most of these moments were shared with a friend or a sibling. I wish you all could have seen them go down though, because they were wack.
The Exploding Mole Rat
This is actually one of the moments that made me want to start streaming in the first place. My preferred way to play most RPGs is using the one-life method–playing on the hardest mode and restarting the game every time I die. I find it far more challenging and rewarding. So, I was playing Fallout 4 shortly after its release on a one-life character. I was being incredibly careful: sneaking everywhere, clicking V.A.T.S like a maniac to check for hidden mines, and running away from all major sources of danger.
I was wandering around near an old, broken down radio tower when it happened. I clicked my V.A.T.S. (always paranoid about what danger could be ahead) and zoomed in on a mole rat. Just a simple mole rat. Or so I thought. I was feeling pretty confident. I was six or seven levels into the game without dying yet. I wasn’t feeling like taking on a horde of feral ghouls or super mutants, but I could certainly take a measly mole rat. Right?
I pulled out my trusty bat, thinking it best not to waste precious bullets on such a weak enemy, and swung at the mole rat. When the hit landed, the mole rat exploded. Yes, exploded. I lost an arm, both legs, and all of my progress thus far. I still don’t know exactly what happened. Maybe a psycho wastelander had strapped a mine to the poor little guy or something. Thanks to this experience, I tend to use guns for just about all my enemies in the wasteland.
The Mudcrab Incident
We’ve all been there: those dragon fights in Skyrim that literally take ages. It can be difficult to get a handle on the flying behemoths when they’re zipping around and blasting fire everywhere. I was having an especially difficult time with one while I was playing on a high difficulty. Slowly but surely, I was witling down its health bar while trying to avoid the same from happening to mine. By the time the dragon was almost dead, I wasn’t so well off myself. I had used up all of my available health potions and had only a sliver of health left.
By some stroke of good luck, I managed to deliver the final blow without taking any damage myself. The dragon fell to my feet, dead. I loosened my grip on the controller, allowed myself to really breathe for the first time since the battle started, and felt my shoulders relax as I basked in my glory. Just as the dragon’s body melted away and its soul started to rise off of its skeleton, I heard the most horrific sound known to mankind: the snip of a mudcrab’s claw. So I died at the hands of a sneaky little mudcrab that came out of nowhere. The mudcrab was left standing over the bodies of a dragon and the Dragon Born herself. I swear it danced over my dead body. 
I hate mudcrabs.
The Left 4 Dead Map Change
Once, my brother and I set out to beat all of the levels on Left 4 Dead 2 on the hardest mode (you may be sensing a trend at this point). We spent most of our time on the mall map. Over the course of about a week and hours of gameplay, we attempted to conquer the mall–I kid you not–at least 100 times. We obviously weren’t very good. We did, however, start to memorize the first three quarters or so of the map. We knew where special enemies might pop up, where to bunker down against hordes, and the quickest way to progress through the vast mall.
On the 101st time we attempted to beat the level, we rounded the corner into a hallway–the one that comes just before the large area where the alarm goes off. Normally, we’d go left at that point like we had the hundred times previous. When we got there, though, the normal door was blocked by a vending machine and some other refuse. It simply wasn’t there. It was honestly the freakiest thing that has ever happened to me in a game before. My brother and I were floored. We didn’t know what to do, so we checked the other direction. Sure enough, there was a doorway there that had never been there before.
Up until this point, we were having our best run yet. Our health was up, we both still had our med kits, and none of our companions had died. This new door, though, made is so we had to start on the bottom of four floors when the alarm started to ring, instead of the third floor where the original path had let us out at. We died horribly.
It felt like the game had developed its own consciousness, knew how well we were doing, and decided to screw us over. Don’t be fooled, friends: Skynet is real and it’s coming for us.