Filed Under:
You may not be able run over pedestrians in real life, but these games with great car kills make up for it!
One of the biggest reasons we play video games is to engage in actions that normally frowned upon in society. It is for that reason that driving and vehicular manslaughter has become a match made in gaming heaven. For every time you've cursed a clueless pedestrian from behind the wheel, these games have served a great purpose by allowing an alternative method of anger-management.
9- RoadKill
Don't remember RoadKill? Well, you're not alone. Despite being a blatant rip-off of Twisted Metal, this obscure combat-based racing game was actually quite good. Interestingly, the game that RoadKill imitated in just about every way you can imagine dropped the feature where you were able to flatten people under your car after the first Twisted Metal (remember those annoying bystanders who would shoot at your vehicle in TM1?). And if you're as sick in the head as us, it doesn't get much better than squashing innocent people in RoadKill to the 80s hair metal grooviness of King Kobra.
8- Excite Bike
Okay, colliding into other pixelated motorcyclists in the classic NES racing game Excite Bike isn't quite the same thing as making mush out of grannies in Carmageddon, but you're still running people over and it's still just as fun to do. In Excite Bike, smacking into a rival racer by getting in front of them and hitting them with your rear tire results in causing them to tumble over along with their dirtbike. Though not nearly as violent as most of the entries on this list, using your vehicle as a weapon in Excite Bike for the original Nintendo is a blast.
7- Halo series
There are plenty of fun ways to off your opponent in a multiplayer Halo match. You can snipe them, slice them with an energy sword, or just slap a plasma grenade and watch them suffer the inevitable. However, if you want to decimate your opponent without equipping an item, you might want to consider the Warthog. Sure, it may be a grenade magnet, but if you perform enough evasive driving, you'll soon learn that nothing's better than powersliding into an unlucky Spartan soldier to rack up the sweet Warthog kills.
6- Die Hard Trilogy
One of the forgotten gems of the PS1 era is Die Hard Trilogy, which packed three above average games into one title. While the light gun game and action shooter were good fun, the piece de resistance was the interpretation of Die Hard with a Vengeance. Now the actual goal in this game is to crash into bombs scattered throughout New York City, defusing them in the process (not exactly the plot of the movie, but we'll allow it). However, any virtual representation of the metropolis is going to be filled with panicky pedestrians, and Die Hard Trilogy allows you to mow them over without suffering any consiquences. As a matter of fact, if you switch to a first person perspective, hitting innocents with your car smears their blood on your window, which you can conveniently remove with your car's windshield wipers. Yippie ki yay, Mr. Falcon.
5- Death Race
Death Race on the NES (not to be confused with the ancient arcade game by the same name) makes it onto our list as one of the earliest examples of a video game that allowed players to satisfyingly strike down people down by rolling over them in your vehicle. Inspired by the original cheesy sci-fi film Death Race, which starred David Carradine (Kill Bill) and Slyvester Stallone, Death Race had players racing on different tracks in US cities while mashing pedestrians before the timer ran out. One of the coolest things about the game happened if the timer actually did run out, in which case a hail of missiles would automatically blow your vehicle to kingdom come.
4- Dead Rising
While it's plenty fun to mutilate the undead with hedge clippers and shower heads, you haven't truly committed a zombie massacre until you've taken a car into the underground parking area of the Williamette Mall. By nabbing a car in the outdoor lot adjacent to the underground one, you can take your sportscar on a spin through a sea of zombies below the mall, killing dozens of them every second. In fact, one of the game's most notorious achievements, Zombie Genocider, is best tackled by plowing through zombies non-stop, hopping from car to car. We can only hope that the upcoming Wii version of Dead Rising, Chop Till You Drop, offer similar vehicular thrills.
3- Unreal Tournament 2004
What better method to mow down your opponents than with the help of multiple decapitations and happy little accidents? The vehicles of choice that are relentless in the pursuit of enemies are Unreal Tournament 2004's Scorpion dune buggy and the Manta hovercraft. While the navigation of the Scorpion can be a bit unwieldy--sometimes inadvertently running over teammates--the razor-sharp retractable twin-blades are sure to take out anyone in its path of destruction. And nothing is more sastifying than running over the opposing team at full speed than the bone-crushing joy of forming human waffles via UT2K4's Manta hovercraft. As if landing flat on the heads of your enemies is not enough, players can even launch and abandon the vehicle at any given target, gaining stylistic stunt points for that unforgettable killing spree.
2- Carmageddon
How could we compile a list of the greatest video games to maul human beings in without including the mother of all vehicular-manslaughtering simulators? In the Carmageddon games, not only are you encouraged to heartlessly splatter as many pedestrians as possible with your vehicle while racing around a track, you're also awarded points for smashing into them in "artistic" ways like pancaking their bodies in between the front of your vehicle and the side of a building. And if crushing old ladies with walkers, businessmen, bums, clowns, and lumberjacks wasn't demented enough for you, you can also kill elephants, deer, Dobermans, penguins, and numerous other animals.
1- Grand Theft Auto Series
Whether in 2D or 3D, on the PS1, GBA, or Xbox 360, there's no denying that Grand Theft Auto has been the standard bearer for vehicular manslaughter. The simple 2D bloodsplats of yesteryear have evolved amazingly into the hard-hitting high-def car-on-citizen collisions you see in Grand Theft Auto IV. Saints Row and the like may ably imitate GTA, but the series is still the best around, as are its automobile-aided fatalities. While the upcoming downloadable expansion, The Lost and Damned, is motorcycle-focused, we're confident there'll be a few new four-wheeled vehicles coming to GTA to wreak havoc with.
Special thanks to Ivy Yup for her Unreal Tournament 2004 expertise.
