Games to make you laugh
It may seem as if video games are all about jumping, shooting, running around or making things explode, but most have comedy at their core, write Jordan Erica Webber and Keith Stuart.
VIDEO GAMES have always been funny. From the lumbering kidnap animation in Donkey Kong to the witty wordplay of the Uncharted series, developers have used every tool at their disposal to make us giggle while we shoot, jump, explore and accelerate. Sometimes the humour comes from the script, sometimes the mechanics, and sometimes it’s just the emergent joy of competing against friends. Whichever, we all remember games that have had us doubled over our controllers, helpless with laughter.
Here are the 10 funniest games we’ve played.
10 Lego City Undercover
(2013)
It’s funny because: It’s a brilliant Grand Theft Auto pastiche in which supercop Chase McCain hunts crime boss Rex Fury through a cavalcade of deconstructed actionmovie cliches, daft characters and whipsmart oneliners — all of which gleefully whizz over the heads of its younger fans.
9 The Stanley Parable
(2013)
It’s funny because: It’s a complete deconstruction of video game narrative conventions, allowing the player — as downtrodden office worker Stanley — to disobey and contradict the ongoing voiceover exposition. It’s like an interactive Franz Kafka novel, only a lot more enjoyable.
8 Saints Row IV
(2013)
It’s funny because: On the surface it appears to be a game about hitting people with a giant purple dildo, but in fact, when you delve deeper, you realise it is a game about becoming president of the United States, committing insurance fraud, repelling an alien invasion, and hitting people with a giant purple dildo.
7 Fable
(series, 2008)
It’s funny because: Its a Britishmade roleplaying adventure and that means it has more fart gags, condoms and double entendres than it does monsters. The Fable series wonderfully challenged the pofaced pomposity of most fantasy games – and the sad thing is, we’ll never see another.
6 Surgeon Simulator
(2013)
It’s funny because: It’s about incompetent organ removal, using a deliberately inaccurate physics model to render the player laughably ineffectual. Forget
Drunk History, this is Drunk
Surgery.
5 Grand Theft Auto
(series, 1996)
It’s funny because: Every instalment takes place in a horrendous moral vacuum where thudding violence and highspeed vehicular mayhem are only ever a button press away. Even if you hate the sledgehammer satire of the scripts, you’ll stay for the anarchy that comes whenever openworld environments, innocent pedestrians, zealous cops and freely available firearms collide.
4 Bulletstorm
(2011)
It’s funny because: It’s a scifi shooter about rogue mercenaries guilty of massive war crimes but it’s also a bawdy comedy that mercilessly mocks macho gaming conventions. Scripted by Marvel writer Rick Remender, most of the best lines are unquotable in a family publication, though we can at least rejoice in the fact that it features a giant robot dinosaur called Waggleton P Tallylicker.
3 The Sims
(series; 2000–)
It’s funny because: Developer Will Wright intended his interactive reality TV show to be an exploration of urban life and relationships — but what did we do? We drowned our sims in swimming pools, forced them to pee on the kitchen floor and locked them in the cellar so that they could endlessly produce paintings for our profit. The Sims taught us that in video games, the real monsters are on this side of the screen.
2 Portal 1 and 2
(2007 and 2011)
It’s funny because: One of the greatest characters in the history of video games is a murderous computer that sadistically toys with the player at every opportunity. That character is of course Glados, a vengeful AI who sets all the physics tasks in this firstperson puzzler, while calling you a monster, lying about cake and singing about science. The sequel adds a brilliant comic performance by Stephen Merchant as ineffectual robot assistant Wheatley, but it’s Glados who steals the show once again, even when extracted into a potato battery.
1 The Secret of Monkey Island
(1990)
It’s funny because: It’s a loving tribute to swashbuckling Errol Flynn movies that brilliantly ridicules and subverts the conventions of its genre. Throughout the 1990s, LucasArts created a series of pointandclick adventures that would become legendary for their sharp sardonic humour — Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle, Sam and Max Hit the Road — but Monkey Island is the pinnacle, best known for the brilliant insult swordfighting sequence, its eccentric characters and its oneliners. A triumph. — Guardian News and Media