It's Good to be Bad
Jul 5, 2007
It's great to rescue the princess, restore peace, and save the world. You should know -- you've probably done it enough times. But the fact of the matter is that villains, like blondes, have more fun.
So sometimes you just want to break stuff and kill people. Sometimes you feel like kidnapping the princess, wreaking havoc, and destroying the world. Sometimes you want to get in touch with your inner Darth. Sometimes being bad is good. So we present here ten games that let you take a walk on the bad side.
WARNING: This article is so evil that it contains spoilers! You have been warned. Bwhahahaha!
Black and White 2
The concept of playing god grew from Peter Molyneux's Dungeon Keeper games from the 1990s. Your disembodied hand slapped around the denizens of a cartoon dungeon. But in Black and White, you have more than just your godly hand. You also have a pet creature, such as a giant tiger, cow, or gorilla. Your pet will eventually be as good or evil as you, conditioned by how you treat him and learning from your example. Together, you and your pet will raise a village and eventually take over the ten islands of Eden.
How Bad Can You Be?
If you take the evil route -- and who wouldn't? -- you can do a whole mess of mean things. Start off randomly abusing your pet -- slapping him for no good reason. He'll learn to take it out on the villagers, who will be cowed into submission. An evil god rules by fear, and doesn't need to fuss with benevolence or prosperity as a way to sway new worshippers! Set up villages to breed new villagers quickly, who are then used to form armies that go out and conquer nearby villages. Keep the people in line by feeding them into pits of torture and prisons. Eventually, you'll swarm the map with your armies, and your pet will learn to eat people, kick them, throw them, and even poo on them. If that's not bad behavior, we don't know what is.
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Bully
Rockstar's childhood version of Grand Theft Auto turns you loose in Bullworth Academy, where you follow a storyline along the events of the school year. You have to balance going to class with navigating the school's various cliques, decking out your dorm room with trophies, and committing mischief.
How Bad Can You Be?
Bad enough that you'll eventually get expelled. But not before enjoying your moment as Big Man on Campus (even though you're considerably shorter than most of the girls you kiss along the way). The missions in Bully involve plenty of kid-like shenanigans, but you'll also abet some less-than-wholesome adults. You help a drunk English teacher hide his boozing, you secure girls' panties for a perverted coach, and you even assist the ugly cafeteria lady who drugs her unsuspecting date into submission. Along the way, you can give other kids wedgies, pick fights, and make out with girls for a temporary health boost. You know, the usual trappings of childhood.
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Burnout 3: Takedown
Like most driving games, Burnout is mostly about using speed to quickly get from point A to point B. But unlike most driving games, you're rewarded for destroying cars in the process. And among the races, you'll find crash events, which are all about trying to inflict the high dollar value of damage to the most cars.
How Bad Can You Be?
Crash events are so unabashedly about the worst possible driving behavior you've ever mustered. You know those times when you turn around on a track and drive the other way? Crash events are that times ten! But races encourage bad driving habits as well. The easiest way to build up the speed boost you need to win races is by veering into the wrong lane and driving though oncoming traffic. Near misses with other cars also help your boost gauge, but not as much as completely taking down an enemy racer by plowing him into a railing, an obstacle, or another car. A lot of the fun is discovering the number of different types of "takedowns" Burnout 3 tracks. But even when you've crashed, you're given a last chance at being bad: the game goes into bullet time and you can steer your twisted burning wreck into another car for an aftertouch takedown. "From the depths of the trip to the junkyard, I stab at thee!"
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Evil Genius
This very Austin Powers flavored game is part city builder, part personnel management game, and part puzzle game. Choose among three evil genius, each with his or her own special powers, and then build a secret lair from which you'll conducts Acts of Infamy. Hire twisted henchmen to lend you a hand and raise an army of loyal minions to go out and do your bidding on a World Domination map of the globe.
How Bad Can You Be?
Your first order of business will be to foil the secret agents who try to infiltrate your base. Set traps to main and capture them, and then throw them into holding cells for interrogation and execution. Meanwhile, you'll be sending out minions to implement evil schemes like destroying country music or stealing valuable relics from museums. If you finish all the game's mission, you'll build your own doomsday device, which sucks an entire city into space, devastates the earth, or converts everyone on the planet into a mindless drone. And all in good fun!
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Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
This is the latest in the ten-year-old series that made a dramatic leap to 3D in 2001 with Grand Theft Auto III. Since then, it's moved from Liberty City (standing in for New York) to Vice City (standing in for Miami) to San Andreas (standing in for Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Las Vegas). San Andreas is the biggest and best of these free-roaming games.
How Bad Can You Be?
Since the series began, the premise behind Grand Theft Auto has been that if you see a car you want, you take it. Naturally, this sort of lawless disregard for personal property leads to crime-themed storylines. Vice City was an obvious homage to Scarface, and San Andreas owes a lot to rap culture and the movies of John Singleton. Although this latest game follows the main character's attempts to do wholesome things like clean up the neighborhood and avenge his mother's murder, there's plenty of feckless law-breaking along the way. In addition to the now run-of-the-mill auto theft, you'll murder people to keep them from testifying against crooked cops, help the mafia build up its casinos in "Las Venturas", fend off and conduct drive-by shootings, pimp prostitutes, and burgle private residences. You can even eat lots of junk food and get fat, which further stresses the US's already beleaguered health care system. Michael Moore would be very unhappy with you.
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It's great to rescue the princess, restore peace, and save the world. You should know -- you've probably done it enough times. But the fact of the matter is that villains, like blondes, have more fun.
So sometimes you just want to break stuff and kill people. Sometimes you feel like kidnapping the princess, wreaking havoc, and destroying the world. Sometimes you want to get in touch with your inner Darth. Sometimes being bad is good. So we present here, in alphabetical order so as not to hurt anyone's feelings, ten games that let you take a walk on the bad side.
WARNING: This article is so evil that it contains spoilers! You have been warned. Bwhahahaha!
Hitman: Blood Money
Blood Money is the latest game in a long-running series that follows the exploits of Agent 47, a cloned assassin with a shiny shaved head and an even shinier pair of silver pistols. Each game is divided into multiple missions with multiple ways of taking out your target. Step into Agent 47's shoes before his debut on the big screen this fall.
How Bad Can You Be?
You'll do your fair share of shooting and strangling, but what makes the Hitman games memorable are the staged accidents. Kill an opera singer by swapping out a prop gun for a real gun, snap a weightlifters neck with his own weights, disguise yourself as a clown and light a woman on fire at an idyllic suburban barbecue party, crush a woman by dropping a piano onto her, and even poison a little yapping dog. Don't forget that a high notoriety will cost you money to bribe the authorities. Avoid this by simply killing any witnesses to your bad behavior!
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Knights of the Old Republic II
This is the second of two role-playing games set thousands of years prior to the events of the Star Wars movies. You create your own character and jump into a rich storyline, populated with character types familiar to any Star Wars fan, complete with aliens and droids. Navigate the plot through dialogue trees and choose to go Light Side or Dark Side. Who would want to feel the power of the Dark Side?
How Bad Can You Be?
In the first game, you could join with a Jedi turned to the Dark Side to take control of the Star Forge, an ancient factory that sucks energy from a nearby star and spits out an endless supply of ships and weapons. The Empire never had it so good. Perhaps even worse, you could persuade a Wookiee to murder his teenage girl sidekick with his bare hands. That's mean. In this sequel, you're being lured into a plot to destroy the Force and thereby eradicate all life in the galaxy. You can't be that bad, since it would pretty much spell the end of Star Wars 4000 years before it got underway, but there are various nasty subplots. Betray a princess during a political revolution, inform on dissenters to the fascist government they're resisting, and lie to husband and wife refugees to make them each believe the other is dead. Just ask yourself, WWDD? What Would Darth Do?
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Lord of the Rings Online
This recent MMO lets you play as one of the Free People helping Frodo and company head out from the Shire on the way to Mordor where they'll destroy the One True Ring. Choose among Elves, Dwarves, Halfings, or Men/Women. Then embark on quests that thread in and out of the events of the first book in the trilogy, The Fellowship of the Ring.
How Bad Can You Be?
Not very, at least not with your main character. However, LOTRO lets you jump into a magical portal called a Fell Scrying Pool, where you'll choose among various evil creatures, including spiders, wargs, orcs, and uruk-hai. You play these alternate characters in a segregated Player vs. Player area where you can battle other players' Free People characters. However, you can also accept quests that involve raiding a Halfling village, killing a mother bear, or poisoning a river that feeds into the rest of Middle Earth. You'll gather valuable trophies such as hobbit toes, elf ears, and dwarf beards, presumably hacked from your victims. There's nothing quite so satisfyingly evil as a pack of snarling wargs beating up on a hapless Halfling gardener for the privilege of ripping of his toes. Take that, Frodo lovers!
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Oblivion
Bethesda's lush first-person role-playing game combined the immersiveness of a shooter with the rich detail of an epic RPG. It also gave you the storyline of a single player game and the freedom of a massively multiplayer online game. From the moment you burst out of an Imperial prison, you could do whatever you wanted. Even the main storyline, which involved closing the gates to Oblivion that threatened the world with demonic infestation, was optional.
How Bad Can You Be?
One of the worst things you can do is nothing. Just ignore the storyline and let Oblivion gates open all over the countryside, essentially letting the world go to hell. In the pursuit of free-form gaming, you can join up with the Thieves Guild for some petty larceny that culminates in stealing from blind monks, including a quest to filch one of the Elder Scrolls themselves! But one of the most memorable plot lines from any RPG involved the missions for the Dark Brotherhood, an enclave of assassins. These missions begin with your standard issue murders, but escalate to a dark orgy of fratricide, matricide, chaos, and double-crossing, including a particularly memorable Agatha Christie style gathering in which you're the killer.
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Sid Meier's Pirates
This remake of a 1988 classic presents the life of a pirate as a collection of minigames that feed into each other. For instance, woo the governor's daughter to win a better cutlass to help you defeat the captain of a boarded merchant ship to plunder its cargo of sugar to sell for gold to spend on gifts to woo the governor's daughter. From dancing to sword fighting to ship to ship battles, this is a breezy and addictive perspective on pirates of the Caribbean.
How Bad Can You Be?
Yes, there's seizing enemy ships on the high seas, defeating their crews, and plundering their cargo, but this is a tame game about a more civil time, where a duel with a rival suitor involves you dropping a potted plant on his head rather than running him through. Think of it as Ye Olde Grand Theft Galleon, where you have the freedom to make friends and enemies of whomever you like, based on your own whims and the winds of war. Of course, everyone's favorite whipping boy is the Spanish for all their slow, cargo-laden ships. In addition to the relatively petty crimes of seizing a merchantman or galleon, you can take over entire cities on behalf of a friendly nation. Also, don't forget that you can betray your fellow pirates and steal their buried treasure. There is, after all, no honor among pirates.
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Dishonorable Mentions
Harvester had you playing through a strange David Lynch style world, but culminated in you having to bash your girlfriend to death while she pleaded for her life. Turns out you were in a serial killer training sim the whole time. Psyche! Speaking of serial killers, DreamWeb was a game about a guy who has a dream that seven prominent people are actually part of a cult to unleash evil in the world. So he sets out to murder each of them, one by one, using a range of gory techniques.
Mafia, Godfather, and Scarface were Grand Theft Auto-style games built around organized crime from various eras of US history. But for sheer scale of bad behavior, it's tough to top Galactic Civilizations II, which presents you with moral dilemmas as you play. Based on your choices -- do you enslave the sentient life forms on a newly colonized planet for a production bonus, or do you co-exist with them for a diplomacy bonus? -- you could eventually unlock evil branches of the tech tree, which makes it much easier to exterminate entire planets.
Aliens vs. Predator 2 was noteworthy for giving the bad guys equal time with the Space Marines. Hunt humans with the Predator's weapons, including spear guns that knocked heads clean off and pinned them to the walls, or scuttle around as a facehugger in search of humans who could serve as hosts for chestbursters. Destroy All Humans 1 and 2 let you play the little green men from sci-fi films, complete with their zapper beams, mind control, and anal probes. Yes, anal probes.