Crusader: No Regret…Many Ways to Die
To celebrate the release of Crusader: No Regret on Good Old Games, it seems fitting to take a look at a few of the many ways you could dispatch your foes in the game. The Crusader games were known for their high level of gruesome (for 1996 audiences) violence and gory death animations.
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You could disintegrate your enemies, torch them, irradiate them with microwaves that boiled away flesh, blow them into tiny pieces, electrocute them, or freeze them. And I think you could do even more than that, but these are all the pictures I could find.
And remember: check out Echo Sector and the Wing Commander CIC for more Crusader-related content and coverage!
(hat tip: Hardcore Gaming)
If they had graphics to connect your player visually with the other players being killed, that would be awesome. For example:
If disintegrating a player, you could hit them with a round of small flechettes from a shotgun and pulp them nicely.
Torching them would involve a lot of screaming, even if you did it quickly.
Irradiating and boiling off their flesh could involve a weapon derived from this science:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_weapon
We can debate the cooking implications later…
Blowing them into tiny pieces could be accomplished with explosives planted in a flesh-dense region such as the torso. Even so, you’d need something more dispersed to pulp the arms and legs equally and simultaneously with the chest. If you could coat several hundred needle-thin flechettes with an element such as these (in order of weakness):
Potassium
Potassium behaves rather like sodium except that the reaction is faster and enough heat is given off to set light to the hydrogen. This time the normal hydrogen flame is contaminated by potassium compounds and so is coloured lilac (a faintly bluish pink).
Rubidium
Rubidium is denser than water and so sinks. It reacts violently and immediately, with everything spitting out of the container again. Rubidium hydroxide solution and hydrogen are formed.
Caesium
Caesium explodes on contact with water, quite possibly shattering the container. Caesium hydroxide and hydrogen are formed
I like the idea of lacing needles with such chemicals. Very Quake-like and brutal.
Anyway, on to electrocuting them. Something like a mobile, projected Tesla coil on a portable nuclear battery would be awesome. As long as no one shoots your reactor/battery, you could tase with a full bolt any fool you pointed your beam at. You could control the beam strength with a long trigger on the gun as to vary it subtly. Crack a few bolts and surges on two wall circuits with your gun then point it at them and ask them to do you a favor. You could use it on the low settings to torture people if they were in jail or otherwise constrained.
Freezing them. The final frontier. Can’t find too much information on it, so I’ll improvise. This gun would use an electomagnetic torus to accelerate specific rare earth elements from storage capsules to speeds close to that of light, then cause a controlled series of collisions timed to amplify their energy such that it forms a small black hole. The close gravitational pull would suck the air out of the room and absorb radiant heat and such as well. The creator could then run away from the black hole and detonate it remotely, causing it to collapse like a star.
That’s all for my 1000 Ways to Die Crusader Edition montage.