Over the years, games have supplied us with a wide variety of intimidating and powerful enemies to challenge our button-mashing prowess. Under normal circumstances, you would expect to overcome these enemies through your overwhelming cunning, wit and strength before finishing them off with an honourable death as a mark of respect for the challenge they gave you.
However, some games like to throw common courtesy out the window and encourage you to finish off your rivals in the most underhanded, hilarious and humiliating ways possible. Here are five of the most outlandish times that we dealt our enemies the least honourable deaths possible to assert our dominance, I guess...
1) Hitman - Killed with expired spaghetti by a flamingo.
The World of Assassination trilogy of Hitman games provides you with an incalculable variety of tools for assassinations. You can kill your targets with knives, guns, bricks, bombs and occasionally, each other. However, by far the most embarrassing methodology that Agent 47 can employ to eliminate his quarries is beating them to death with a can of expired spaghetti.
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| (Image property of IO Interactive and Square Enix) |
Available in levels of both Hitman and Hitman 2, the expired spaghetti sauce is a melee weapon with which Agent 47 can incapacitate his target, allowing him to finish them off with a quick neck snap or whatever other manner of malevolent man-murdering he so wishes. Alternatively, if the humiliation of being smacked with sauce isn't enough for you, the sauce can also be used as an emetic poison which, in non-murderer's English, means that it will cause any unsuspecting target to projectile vomit after ingesting it.
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| (Image property of IO Interactive and Square Enix) |
If chunder-based assassinations are more your vibe then you'll be pleased to know that, following Chef 47's spaghetti surprise, you can follow your target into the bathroom and find them kneeling before the throne of poor digestion. Having crept up to your unsuspecting target in their moment of weakness, you can then drown them in the same toilet that, moments before, they were throwing up into. All of a sudden, Agent 47's life of assassinating shady global elites seems a lot less glamorous... and clean.
As if that wasn't already embarrassing enough to be omitted from the obituary, Hitman 2 also graciously provided players with the opportunity to undertake this pukey plot while dressed as a giant flamingo. Yes, should you so please, you can dress up the world's greatest assassin in an incredibly conspicuous flamingo mascot costume before following through with your ingenious plan of murdering your target with expired spaghetti sauce.
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| (Image property of IO Interactive and Square Enix) |
Personally, if I was part of a shadowing international cabal of power-brokers and one of my co-conspirators died in this way, I might just quit on the spot. I would spend the rest of my days living in fear of being killed by something equally embarrassing. I would have nightmares about being suffocated with a Hello Kitty plushie, or maybe being beaten to death with an anime body pillow.
2) GTA: San Andreas - Being buried alive in a portaloo
If the Grand Theft Auto series can be accused of anything, it probably isn't subtlety. As such, there are a wide variety of occasions in which the games' protagonists took one look at Sun Tzu's The Art of War before putting it back on the shelf to commit an atrocity. From being turned into dog food to crushed in a car-crusher, we aren't short of material to draw from when discussing dishourable deaths.
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| (Image property of Rockstar Games) |
However, the disrespectful dispatching that takes the cake is from GTA: San Andreas in a mission called 'Deconstruction'. In this mission, the main character, CJ, is tasked with driving a team of construction workers off a site for harassing his sister and so that he can acquire the land, a pretty serious matter. Indeed, CJ's opening salvo reflects this when players are instructed to destroy the six portable toilets scattered around the site in order to wreak some havoc.
Things then escalate with CJ's second objective which is to kill the foreman of the site. Still fairly standard GTA stuff you might assume. Well, the way in which you are encouraged to go about doing this is by burying him underground with cement. As if this wasn't brutal enough, the foreman is hiding in another portaloo and so, like any rational, well-adjusted person might do, CJ uses industrial construction equipment to roll the toilet, foreman and fecal matter still inside, into the hole before filling it with cement.
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| (Image property of Rockstar Games) |
What makes the foreman's fate particularly embarrassing is the fact that, all the way through this process, he is screaming and cursing his bowels for the turd which he is now coated in. This, combined with the knowledge that he will never escape from his concrete tomb makes this one of the most wildly disrespectful murders in all of video game history.
All of this for a man who, until this mission, CJ hadn't even met or knew existed. We can only hope that, having acquired the land, CJ doesn't have to contend with the foreman's vengeful spirit haunting his new property because, quite frankly, I hate to think how the exorcism might go in that scenario.
3) Middle Earth: Shadow of War - Getting jumped by all of their bodyguards
Upon its release, Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor was lauded for its achievements in creating a complex and unique ecosystem of characters, generating unique stories for each player all while having one of the blandest main characters in all of fiction. The Nemesis System pioneered by the game created a wide range of orc captains that you could come across in-game, each with a unique personality and set of skills. Through the player's actions, orcs would rise and fall through the orc hierarchy, giving every player a different experience depending on which orcs you had to behead to achieve your objectives.
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| (Image property of Monolith Productions and Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment) |
In the sequel, Shadow of War, a core element of the game is recruiting orcs to your cause and using them as sleeper agents against one another. Usually, you would insert one or two of your own orcs into an enemy stronghold so that they can turn your assaults into easier undertakings. However, if you are a particularly diligent player with frankly far too much free time on your hands, you can go out of your way to make sure that every single orc captain in the enemy stronghold is an agent of yours.
In addition to effectively causing the invasion to play out on auto-pilot because your agents have already done all of the work for you, this can also alleviate some pressure from the potentially gruelling boss fights against the overlords in charge of the fortress. Under normal circumstances, these fights are pitched as the player against the overlord and his bodyguards. Having eliminated his entourage, the player would usually execute the overlord in an honourable one-on-one duel.
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| (Image property of Monolith Productions and Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment) |
But if you think we did that, you're reading the wrong list. You see, instead, the less honourable but consistently more amusing way to tackle overlords is to brainwash all of the captains making up their entourage before the fight. If you do this, then when the fight begins, the overlord is immediately swamped in a writing mass of limbs, blood and sharp objects as his most trusted companions grind him into mulch while you watch. It may not be a dignified way to win but at least you won't have to sharpen your sword again after.
4) Borderlands 2: Falling down the stairs
The Borderlands series is full of enormous monsters and gargantuan vehicles that need to be destroyed in order to progress on your vault-hunting journey. Thus, you wouldn't expect one of the most memorable boss fights in the series to be against a skinny, short, balding scientist whose defining feature is grafting one robotic limb to his spine.
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| (Image property of Gearbox Software and 2K) |
The amputated Doc Ock in question is Professor Nakayama, a boss fight in Borderlands 2's Hammerlock's Hunt DLC. To put a long story short, he hates you. You killed his idol in the main game and now he's back for revenge. Unfortunately for him, Nakayama isn't an experienced murderer and pseudo grave robber like your character. Instead, he looks like someone's dad coming out with a very bad skin rash.
Having laid a series of traps to avoid a one-on-one confrontation with you, Nakayama is finally forced into open combat. However, right before you can do him the honour of a swift end to put him out of his misery, he trips at the top of a very long staircase. What follows is a painful few seconds as you have to watch him slowly bounce his way down, vertebrae shattering with each impact until he lands in a broken, humiliated and very dead heap at your feet.
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| (Image property of Gearbox Software and 2K) |
Now, we technically didn't kill Nakayama but, in my defence, he does have a health bar like an actual boss fight and I like to think that we were the ones who made him trip because he was blinded by all of the light shining off the fancy weapons and armour adorning our significantly more prepared personage.
5) Mortal Kombat 11: Becoming Johnny Cage's puppet.
Say what you will about Mortal Kombat but, when it comes to awful ways to dispatch your enemies, Ed Boon's bloodbath brawler refuses to be one-upped. From fatalities to brutalities to friendships, fights in Mortal Kombat can end in any number of ways, usually resulting in your death and dismemberment.
Despite this though, while there are many you wouldn't want to have on screen when your parents walk in, very few can be classified as being actively humiliating for the loser. Excessive, maybe but not dishonourable by the standards of the Mortal Kombat Tournament.
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| (Image property of NetherRealm Studios and Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment) |
That being said, one fatality stands out above the rest as being poor sportsmanship even in the context of a war between Earth and a fantasy hell dimension. Unsurprisingly, this fatality belongs to everyone's least favourite actor and horrible father figure, Johnny Cage. Who would have thought that the man whose signature move is doing the splits to punch you in the crotch might not be the most honourable combatant?
The fatality in question can be performed by Cage in Mortal Kombat 11 and entails him punching a hole in your spine and tearing your legs off. Certainly not ideal but not something that would get you uninvited from the Christmas party in the Mortal Kombat universe. When the fatality crosses the line from brutal to ignominious is when Johnny uses your newly-made spinal perforation to put on a puppet show with your still bleeding corpse.
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| (Image property of NetherRealm Studios and Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment) |
As if this wasn't bad enough, Johnny's ventriloquist routine is so bad that an unseen audience then starts throwing tomatoes at him and what was, prior to an impromptu career change, you. The only comfort to be taken from the whole series of events is that, judging by Johnny Cage's other dramatic performances in the games, at least you can die knowing you weren't the problem in your comedy double act.
Finally...
Thus concludes my breakdown of just a few of the deaths that we've dealt out to our enemies in video games that will probably reflect worse on us than on them.
Let me know if you have thoughts on any of these choices or if there are any other examples that you would like to put forward. You can find me on Instagram as the_cartridge_thief_blog.
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