Super Adventures: Game Over - Continued

This week on Super Adventures, I'm back with another set of game over pictures that weren't quite good enough to make the cut when I wrote my first Game Over article!

Yeah, I know it seems like filler, and it kind of is. But I worked really hard getting all the pictures! You think it's easy to lose in this many games? I had to train for years to be this bad. Also it's been three years since the last Game Over article and like three months since my last post on the site, so I feel like I've left you waiting long enough for this.

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Last time around I said I wasn't going to show Chrono Trigger's iconic game over screen because it's actually kind of dull to look at. But seeing as I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel here and showing off the 30 next-best game over screens I can think of, I figured I may as well start here. I mean it is a good line at least.

Here, have a police officer killing a subordinate with his atomic breath:

This is from APB on the Lynx. It's a port of an arcade game, but I think the handheld version of this screen makes his roasting look more devastating. I can really believe that this guy needs to start using Listerine.

To keep the theme going, here's another cop being sentenced to game over by his superiors, from the SNES version of Judge Dredd.

That's it, the theme's over now, I'm all out of pictures. But I can switch to a set of images with "Game over" written on them.

This one from Awesome Possum... Kicks Dr. Machino's Butt, and it shows the devastation that the villains have caused after the protagonist's demise.

Here's the thing though, there are two graves in this rubbish dumb and they're both empty. This is such an interesting mystery it's almost enough to get me to play more of the game to find out what's going on there. Well, it's almost enough to get me to read the Wikipedia page anyway. Almost.

Here's a gross-looking game over from Rise of the Triad: Dark War.

I got a cheap pair of shoes recently that ended up looking like this after a couple of months, so I can really relate. Sometimes it's worth paying a little more I guess.

Here's bounty hunter Popful Mail looking a bit dazed, in the game Popful Mail on the Sega Mega CD.

The sad thing is, this is a game over screen, not a 'take a five-minute break and have another try' screen, so I think those spinning eyes might be permanent. Her brain's stuck in a 'buffering, please wait' loop.

Here's the game over screen from the legendary Castlevania: Symphony of the Night on the PlayStation.

The thing I don't quite get about this screen is... well... everything. I mean the castle surrounded by bats is fairly obvious, that's Castle Castlevania, the sinister maze you're stuck inside for the whole game. But why has the game over screen put us out here next to a dragon skeleton in a Transylvanian desert? And why did they go with that nasty glow for the GAMEOVER text?

The biggest mystery is the writing at the bottom though. "Let us go out this evening for pleasure. The night is still young." What?

Oh good, finally a game over screen that makes sense, from racing game Crazy Cars on the Amiga.

I've had some pretty amazing crashes in racing games, some of the gymnastic routines I've pulled were as stunning as they were frustrating, but I've never managed to plant a car in the ground like that before. As far as I can recall.

Continuing the theme of game over screens that make you go 'huh?', here's the bad ending from DOS game Virus Rage, from way back in 1983.

This isn't quite the earliest game I've ever taken a screenshot from, as I covered Akalabeth from 1979 a few years ago. But that was a 33 year old game when I covered it, and the relentless passage of time means that this one's just turned 40.

Huh? Oh, it says "Game over"! Well that's very fitting.

This is from Skeleton Krew on the Amiga by the way. It also features a continue screen where you punch your way out of your own grave.

I love being able to continue, it's so much better than having to stop! Sadly you can only do it once. I guess the villains must have had the sense to reinforce the coffin lid the second time around.

Jurassic Park on the Game Boy's got a pretty good continue screen. Somehow I don't think it's likely this guy's going to be continuing though.

This guy in the NES game seems pretty doomed as well. Though at least he's not surrounded by a gang of hideous monsters who have chained him down underneath a circular saw. Because that would really suck.

Ooof, unlucky.

This is from the Ninja Gaiden arcade game by the way. The sad thing is, I had enough credits to save him, but I wanted that game over screen.

Sometimes game over screens don't even give you the text, they just show the poor unfortunate protagonist facing a terrible fate.

Like this one from Rise of the Robots on the Amiga. They keep calling this fighter 'Cyborg' but it's only when you're defeated that you can see that there's anything organic under that metal.

Here's the trippy game over screen from Robinson's Requiem on the Amiga. It looks like it should be a wall texture in Doom or something.

The next one's something even more horrifying:

Poor James Pond gets eaten by penguins! (In James Pond II: Codename RoboCod on the Amiga.)

This guy in RPG Ishar 2: Messengers of Doom got killed so badly that they had three ghosts! Or maybe they buried the whole party in the same grave, I dunno. The important thing is that they're free now, free to go haunt a dungeon somewhere and bother other adventurers!

Theme Park's game over animation features the bankrupt park owner leaping out of his window while a photograph of his family looks on! It turns out that his office is on the ground floor so he just pops up again afterwards, but for a moment things look really grim.

The game over screen on Cool Croc Twins looks kind of disturbing as well, but it's fine, he's got a cork in the gun. The worst that's going to happen is he'll lose an eye or something. Though looking at the 'game over' text, maybe he already has?

Sometimes a villain likes to taunt the defeated hero on the game over screen. I mentioned in my last article that the Arkham games elevated this to an art form, with each of the villains having an opportunity to mock you when you get Batman dead, and here's Harley Quinn giving you a demonstration in this screenshot from Arkham City.

But I don't think any of them do the classic video game villain pose. I mean the one where they loom over the screen with their hands out, as if they have you in their clutches and they're ready to pounce.

Mortus from Comix Zone has the right idea, but the wrong direction. The camera's over here mate.

There you go, that's the pose I'm talking about! Andross from Starfox has nailed it, and the guy doesn't even have arms.

Of course the King of All Cosmos from Katamari Damacy knows how it's done. The guy is a pro at being a villain.

Eh. close enough. I never played DOS game Mutant Penguins, but this guy looks a bit penguiny and also maybe hungry.

I've only got a limited sample size at the moment, but so far the data suggests that if you die in a video game, you're most likely to get eaten by a penguin or a tyrannosaurus rex.

Dweezil from Putty on the Amiga chooses to leave his hands behind and manifest as just an evil head, but that's good too. There are plenty of quality sinister floating head game over screens.

Like this one for instance. Myth on the Amiga has all the skulls, in case you've been wondering where they went. It's definitely a case of 'nice game over screen, shame about the game' though.

There's a proper evil floating head for you. What sort of a monster uses a heart emoji when they're telling you that you've lost?

This is actually the special game over screen for Bust-a-Move 4's edit mode. When it says I haven't finished 25 rounds rouns, it means I haven't finished making them. Can't complete 25 levels if they don't exist yet.

I wish I could find some other text-heavy game over screens. I found some quality walls of text for my first article, just solid blocks of mockery that tear the player down for their failure, but I think I might have used all the good ones already.

At least this picture from Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden - Chapter 1 of the Hoopz Barkley SaGa has a famous quote from Kurt Cobain on it.

There some text on the 'Continue?' sequence from the arcade version of Toki as well. Nice of the evil shaman (or whatever) to set up a TV on a jet powered robot so that Miho can guilt Toki into putting more coins into the machine.

You get like three lives in this and one hit kills you, so it's going to be asking for coins a lot.

Oh wow, UFO: Enemy Unknown has not let me down. This is a properly bleak bad ending.

Anyone 'lucky' enough to survive their cities being leveled ended up being poisoned, mutated, and enslaved.

The world is so screwed that they keep using a lowercase 'e' for Earth. It's not worth a capital letter anymore. It's basically all humanity's own fault for withholding XCom funding though. If Toki's taught us anything, it's that if you want a good ending you have to pay for it.

Those are some really weird-looking buildings by the way. At the time of humanity's downfall, skyscrapers were being built in a variety of colours, but windows had started going out of fashion so you had to go outside to see them.

Here's another game with a proper apocalyptic nightmarish ending.

A Prehistoric Tale on the Amiga is a basic platformer about as sophisticated as Donkey Kong where you go around collecting dinosaurs and avoiding... dinosaurs, or something. But you wouldn't know it from this ending image:

That is actually horrific. There's nothing left for the surviving dinosaurs but fire and death.

It took me ages to notice the words 'Game over' written in blood. 

The Terminator: Rampage has a proper apocalypse as well. Plus it's one of the few games to depict the nuclear annihilation of Gordon Ramsey.

You can see a little bit of the aftermath in the background of this next image:

This is from a different Terminator game, RoboCop vs. The Terminator on the SNES. Honestly, I was expecting to find more grinning skeleton faces when I was doing my game over screen research, but this is the closest I've found so far. Not counting all those skulls earlier.

Have one last apocalypse. I saved the best until last:

This is from Gon on the SNES. 

The player character doesn't have hit points, he has frustration points, and when they run out he finally loses his temper and destroys the entire Earth in a rage. Which means you lose.

I'll end with a more chilled out and mysterious game over from Perihelion.

I never got far enough in the game to understand what it means, but I do know it's much less distracting than having a GIF of tiny dinosaur splitting a planet in two at the top of your screen.

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Now you know what it's like to lose 30-something games in the same day, in a row. Welcome to my world. I mean a couple of these were taken by mecha-neko, but most of these are my own screenshots and GIFs. I've been failing all over the place to get you these shots.

If I ever refill my 'good game over screens' folder I'll put together a third article someday. Sadly my 'good victory screen' folder is currently still empty after 10 years, so I wouldn't hold your breath waiting to see something more positive. It'd probably just be wall-to-wall spoilers anyway.

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Next on Super Adventures, it's this year's Screenshots of the Year article!

I'm sorry that there's no game for you to guess this time, but you can still leave a comment about other things. Like you could talk about this article or suggest ideas for a possible part 3! Or suggest something better!