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[Captain_404]

Is there an actual game that will reward you for 100% completion with something like "CONGRATULATIONS! You wasted your life on this!" (or a more offensive equivalent)?
I'm not thinking about South Park, no, sir!

That would case quite a ruckus if the game takes several hours to complete in its entirety, I imagine!

Yes, yes there is. I made it though, so I don't know if it actually counts.

http://www.nonoba.com/404/bridgerunner

In non-cheater mode, it will take you 5-10 hours to get between each troll, during which, you can press any button to increase your score. There are ten trolls, so it's 50-100 hours long.

...Allegedly. There may be a glitch that makes it ten times that though, I really don't have the patience to test it...

To quote the "victory" text:

Congratulations!

You just wasted so much
of your life playing this!

You'll never get those
hours back either!

play again?
submit score?

To my knowledge, nobody has yet completed it...


As far as not-indie, not-Flash games that do this though, I really have no idea.

[Lucaz]

I just finished Ico a while. It's the most moving ending I've played. I went all the way from excited to sad to kinda happy. And the game managed to do it all the time.

Also, from it I realised something. Difficulty works against the plot at the end. If the player is all excited about finally beating the game, you'll have a hard time overcoming that excitement with the plot.

[jakten]

I do believe that Takeshi's Challenge for the Famicom mocks you once you complete it for wasting too much time on it.

[JohnH]

<i>Despite how much I enjoy the franchise, I absolutely despise every-single Legend of Zelda ending. Lame beyond reason</i>

The first game's ending was amazingly awesome: "We present you with another quest.  Press Start."  The game practically contained its own sequel!

The second arcade Golden Axe ends with all the characters, the good ones and the bad, final boss included, meeting up in a tavern and thanking the player for playing.

Bubble Bobble had a notorious sequence of conditions that had to be met to reach the real ending.  Winning in another way either sends the player back earlier in the game or presents the key to a code that the player would have to apply to the screens in some of the secret rooms to figure out how to play a special advanced mode in order to really win.

ToeJam & Earl's ending was a special level with completely different graphics and lots of funky aliens to talk with.

Phantasy Star II's ending was amazing, and somewhat tragic too.  Will not say anything more about that, go play it yourself....

Arcade S.T.U.N. Runner's "ending" was a special endless level.  It challenged the player to get as far as he could, and compared him to the other players who reached that level, whose names flashed by at the point in the level they reached when they ran out of time.

Nethack's ending is like four lines of text.  But because of the difficulty in reaching that point, they're <i>awesome</i> lines of text.

[Synnah]

Arcade S.T.U.N. Runner's "ending" was a special endless level.  It challenged the player to get as far as he could, and compared him to the other players who reached that level, whose names flashed by at the point in the level they reached when they ran out of time.

I had no idea S.T.U.N. Runner did this! It's a really neat idea; more games should have some kind of extra challenge or minigame when you complete them. Beautiful Katamari on the 360 had a 2D scrolling version of the game which you played during the ending credits, which was a nice touch.

[rob]

Meteos? 

[hamburger]

I thought the ending of Half Life 2:Episode 2 was excellent and very authentically emotional. Of course it's a cliffhanger though, which is almost like cheating. Excellent writing throughout Episode 2, I thought, even by the monumental standards of HL2.

Lesson learned here is that the emotional impact of your ending depends a lot on how well your story was crafted up to that point.

[Alevice]

Is there an actual game that will reward you for 100% completion with something like "CONGRATULATIONS! You wasted your life on this!"

Not exactly this, but Pugsley Scavenger Hunt's ending on hard made me feel like that. For those who don't know, the game's regular ending is soemthing like "You should try to end this game in the hardest settings". Once you do it, all you get is "Wow, you are good at this!", everything else the same. Same for Cool Spot, other than it said that you should take a picture of this screen and send it to 7up for shit.

[William Broom]

I thought the ending of Half Life 2:Episode 2 was excellent and very authentically emotional. Of course it's a cliffhanger though, which is almost like cheating. Excellent writing throughout Episode 2, I thought, even by the monumental standards of HL2.

Lesson learned here is that the emotional impact of your ending depends a lot on how well your story was crafted up to that point.

Personally I didn't like the ending of Ep2 very much. I didn't feel much of an emotional connection to it because it seemed very contrived, the way that SPOILER

[5parrowhawk]

We're up to this point, and nobody's mentioned Homeworld?

If you're talking about closure vs. revelation, the two poster-children are probably Homeworld and Braid respectively.

That being said, the block-castle at the very end of Braid kind of spoilt it for me. It was much too upbeat compared to the rest of the game. Personally, I think it'd have been cool if you just kept running along an endless stretch of ground forever ("But Tim is still searching."), and only rewinding time at that point would allow you to "escape".

On an unrelated note, personally I'm not really a big fan of "you get to wander the world forever as a reward". It's done a lot more often than it should be, IMO, considering the characters and plot. Although when it's done right, it can be really good.

[Egoraptor]

Endings imply a linear story. I dunno, I've always had way more fun with the game itself than any ending!!

For example, Kingdom Hearts. I beat it, yeah. Do I remember the ending? No. You know what I do remember? Fighting Kurt Zisa. Man, that was an awesome fight, and the fight itself and the satisfaction of beating it was way more gratifying than any cutscene has ever been.

Same with Mega Man X Command Mission. Pretty mediocre standard RPG but when you beat it (an ending I also don't remember), you unlock all these secret bosses that were HARD. I remember all of those fights really well, and I loved them. That felt like closure to me.

I think it's best to look at endings from a game standpoint, and not a story standpoint. What does an "ending" mean for a player, and if a player has the option to continue playing, whether it be from the beginning or otherwise, is an "ending" really necessary?

[Eclipse]

Nes-style text dumps as game endings. I don't remember actually encountering any of these back in the day, but it's pretty likely that I never actually finished a game on the nes, now that I think about it. In any case, these are pretty rare now, because people used to complain about them. But they do raise some interesting questions:

Is there a good way to do game endings? How long should a game ending be? Are playable epilogues a good idea? who cares about game endings anyway?

Talk about game endings, good ones you've seen, ideas for ways to do cool endings.

A WINNAR IS YOU appears on the screen and then your favorite band knocks at your door to song to you the ending game theme live, then they leave saying "you're truly an awesome guy"

[Ego_Shiner]

An enthusiastic voice declaring "Game over YEAH!"

HUUUUGE HIGH FIVE!

...game over yeaaaaaaaah!

But anyway, Tales of Symphonia had a really stupid ending.
Lloyd just sprouts wings and flies and the robot turns into a tree... wow

[Hajo]

Is there a good way to do game endings? How long should a game ending be? Are playable epilogues a good idea? who cares about game endings anyway?

Talk about game endings, good ones you've seen, ideas for ways to do cool endings.

Usually I'm happy with a high score table, a title, or something like that. I like it if I can play games all over, trying to get better, but I also want the games to be slightly different each time - games that have random or procedurally created content are good for that.

If games have a story, I hope it has a happy end, but I usually don't like games with stories much, because they seldom are replayable more than once or twice.

[Seth]

Dreamweb had a good ending

[Eclipse]

Dreamweb had a good ending

dreamweb was so an awesome game...

[gunswordfist]

Playing epilogues, huh? That's very interesting. I kind of thought about that after FF8's endings. The thing that I don't like about Final Fantasies' endings is they don't let you play after the credits. That would be too cool.

Anyway, endings must be some kind of hard challenge. I'm NOWHERE near doing those right now but I bet trying to come up with a good ending has giving countless people Hell. I wonder if people plan out endings like some people say you should plan out movie scripts, by coming up with the ending first. That seems like the logical approach because if you know the ending, you have an idea of where you're going. Now I'm not saying that that means that your game's ending would now be written in stone and you should never change it. Everyone knows that things change over time.

Well that's all the ranting I'll do now.

it seems unfortunate to me that happy endings seem to be universally expected in video games

That's true. Hearing people talk about Cave Story reminded me of that. I don't think I've ever seen a Saw-like ending in a game which means a ending that is EXTREMELY satisfying and cool and yet not a happy ending at all. Not even close.

The closest thing to that kind of unhappy ending is the bad endings from Breath Of Fire 1 and 2 and Castlevania Harmony Of Dissonance oh and Cave Story. But all of those endings leave gamers very unsatisfyed. That's why they are called Bad Ending after all. Or is it because they are not 'Happy' enough...hmmmmm...All those games good endings are definitely very happy. This also reminds me that the 'bad' ending for the best handheld game of all time, Astro Boy: Omega Factor is probably my absolute favorite ending out of any game I've ever played. My jaw was scrapping the ground during the 'last' scene and all through the credits. Whoa just whoa.

On that note: Earthworm Jim, anyone?

I could never beat that game myself (I'll try to get past the glass bubble underwater sequence on gametap this week though) but I saw it on ScrewAttack and lol'ed. It's ingenious once I think about it. The player literally effected the ending. I also remember that you can see the cow floating in space through some levels. Screw Mario's ending, EJ did it better.

[fiber optic asparagus]

there should be a game in which the ending is the universe exploding. 

[JasonPickering]

Smokes Fatality in Mortal Kombat 3

you blow up the earth.

[gunswordfist]

Smokes Fatality in Mortal Kombat 3

you blow up the earth.

I LOVE that sh!t!!