Broken Record / Video Games

Acting like a Broken Record in Video Games Video Games Video Games Video Games Video Games

• Mirror's Edge has a checkpoint conveniently placed right before Merc says "Faith... The trains... Take the trains..." The following maneuver (jumping off a bridge and onto a moving train) is quite difficult and usually results in the player dying and this line being repeated A LOT.
• An early level of Lost: Via Domus, where the player is hiding from the Smoke Monster. Throughout this sequence, John Locke repeats: "Over here. I'm over here. In the banyan trees."
• Wario's taunting on the pause screen of Wario World speaks for itself. Though, he DOES apologize and stop if you stick around for long enough.
• In games where the characters call their attacks, the player can often cause this at will by simply using the same attack over and over again (Especially likely to happen if the attack in question is a Game-Breaker).
• Denning of Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade is a morph created specifically to tell the heroes "This is a message from Lord Nergal. "I await you on the Dread Isle"", something he repeats over and over again, the only variation being his death quote, where he stops midway through. He is beloved by the fandom because of this.
  • In Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones, Orson's dead and reanimated wife said nothing but "Darling."
• EarthBound (1994): Giygas, having completely lost it, spouts seemingly random phrases as you fight him, most prominently: "Ness, Ness, Ness, Ness, Ness, Ness, Ness, Ness, Ness, Ness, Ness, Ness, Ness, Ness, Ness, Ness, Ness, Ness, Ness, Ness, Ness, Ness, Ness, Ness..."
  • In Mother 3, during your Mushroom Samba on Tanetane Island, one of your hallucinations says to you, "You haven't eaten? You haven't eaten? You haven't eaten? You haven't eaten? You haven't eaten? You haven't eaten? You haven't eaten? You haven't eaten?"
• Kirby:
  • In Kirby & the Amazing Mirror, the final boss is Dark Mind. When you defeat him (rather easily), you end up in a regular level, after which you fight Dark Mind again. Then, you get another small regular-looking level, and fight Dark Mind again. This repeats for a few more times before he goes One-Winged Angel on you.
  • The final stage of Kirby and the Forgotten Land's postgame, Forgo Land, has a disturbing ambient track that repeats the Dream Discoveries Tour announcer's voice over and over again. The same music later plays for the start of the True Final Boss's absolute final form.
    Woman's voice: "And here we are! Let's meet the Ultimate Life Form, specimen ID-F86!"
• Used as a puzzle in the first Dark Fall game, where you have to use an old record player and play one of the ghost's favorite songs loud enough for one of their pictures to fall off the wall, revealing a clue inside.
• Kingdom Hearts II: GET UP ON THE HYDRA'S BACK! GET UP ON THE HYDRA'S BACK! GET UP ON THE HYDRA'S BACK! GET UP ON THE HYDRA'S BACK! GET UP ON THE HYDRA'S BACK! GET UP ON THE HYDRA'S BACK! GET UP ON THE HYDRA'S BACK!
• 3 words can sum up M&M's Kart Racing in a nutshell: APPROACHING SOUND BARRIER! APPROACHING SOUND BARRIER! APPROACHING SOUND BARRIER! APPROACHING SOUND BARRIER!
• Shu in Blue Dragon has "I won't give up!" as his personal motto. And he says it at virtually every opportunity. It's into the double digits by the time you finish the first disc.
• This tends to happen if you try to use any of the jukeboxes in BioShock, where a random song will play normally, get stuck a few seconds in, then stop.
• In Mass Effect, during the Peak 15 mission, the Mira VI will remind you about the main reactor shutdown and the cut tram lines every few seconds until you've completed that portion of the mission.
  • Not to mention the limited enemy chatter that can start to positively stink of this after a few missions: "Enemy is Everywhere!" and "I will destroy you!" are overused to the point that "I will destroy you!" became something of a Running Joke in the series.
  • In the Mass Effect 2 Overlord DLC, the very end of the Paragon route will have the now-rescued David Archer repeat one.
    The square root of 912.04 is 30.2. It all seemed so harmless. The square root of 912.04 is 30.2. It all seemed so harmless.
• In the Sam & Max: Freelance Police episode Reality 2.0, if you knock Bosco cold in real life, his internet avatar will do this.
• A more literal example than most (i.e., due to something actually being broken in the game), Team Fortress 2 had the announcer endlessly repeating "Overtime! Oooverrrtiiime... Overtime! Overtime! Oooverrrtiiime..." during overtime in King of the Hill mode for about a day and a half. (Apparently the line was triggered whenever anyone got on or off the point, which was almost constantly). Valve apparently thought it was funny, so they added it as a server option.
• Used in the intro to Fallout, right after the camera ends its long zoom-out from a black-and-white TV to a ruined living room and surroundings with The Ink Spots song, "Maybe."
  Maaaaayyyyybbbeee...you'll sit, and sigh
  wishing that I were near...
  then...maybe/maybe/maybe/maybe/maybe/maybe...
• One of the many beatmania inside jokes is a part of the song "Red Rocket Rising" being repeated for 4 minutes, in all its glory.
  • TAKAKU.
• Flight sims such as Falcon and F/A-18 Hornet have the "Altitude! Altitude!" warning ad nauseum when you're flying low.
• Rebel Strike's version of Rogue Leader's Battle of Endor mission seems to have a bug that causes one particular voice clip to play repeatedly:
  WE GOTTA BUY MORE TIME! WE GOTTA BUY MORE TIME! WE GOTTA BUY MORE TIME! WE GOTTA BUY MORE TIME! WE GOTTA BUY MORE TIME! WE GOTTA BUY MORE TIME! WE GOTTA BUY MORE TIME!
• Portal 2 gives us the Space Core, a personality core who is obsessed with... well, guess. Even more amusingly, it's a foreshadowing of the ending.
  "Space, space, wanna go to space."
  "SPAAAAAAAAAAACE!"
• One reviewer said the first skin of Lumines ("Shinin', shinin', shinin', shinin'...") "almost turned me into Jack from The Shining."
  • Just about any song from the Lumines series counts. An example from Electronic Symphony: Hey boys, / Hey girls, / Start DJin'... / HERE WE GO! (now keep repeating those same lyrics over and over)
• Sonic the Hedgehog
  • Any given Eggman boss fight in Sonic Adventure.
    GET A LOAD OF THIS! GET A LOAD OF THIS! GET A LOAD OF THIS! GET A LOAD OF- GET A LOAD OF- GET A LOAD OF THIS!
  • Repeatedly petting Chao in Sonic Adventure 2 results in this. Considering you tame your Chao by petting or feeding it, it's pretty much unavoidable.
    Sonic: Don't worry, buddy. Don't worry, buddy. Don't worry, buddy. Don't worry, buddy. Don't worry, buddy. Don't worry, buddy.
    Shadow: Hmph. Hmph. Hmph. Hmph. Hmph. Hmph. Hmph. Hmph.
    Eggman: Yosh. Yosh. Yosh. Yosh. Yosh. Yosh.^note The phrase "Yosh" means something akin to "Okay" or "Yeah" in Japanese. For some reason, this soundbyte was never translated to English.
  • From the Egg Breaker boss fight after Mad Matrix in Shadow the Hedgehog:
    Eggman: You know what they say... the more, the merrier! You know what they say... the more, the merrier! You know what they say... the more, the merrier!
  • From Sonic the Hedgehog (2006), there's Silver.
    IT'S NO USE! TAKE THIS! IT'S NO USE! TAKE THIS! IT'S NO USE! TAKE THIS! IT'S NO USE! TAKE THIS!
  • Sonic Generations
    • In the boss fight against the Egg Dragoon, Eggman repeats the phrases "FREEZE!", "BURN!" or "TIME FOR A CHANGE OF PACE!" every time he switches attacks. Which is often.
    • In the Time Eater-fight, expect to hear "THAT LOOKS LIKE A HOMING SHOT! BE CAREFUL, SONIC!" (or variations thereof) over and over and over and over and over again.
• This has a tendency to show up the Tales Series, as a result of an attack being used repeatedly and/or a character having a very limited assortment of phrases they say when taking damage.
  • Tales of Legendia has multiple bosses who emit a Flat "What" every single time they get hit. There's also Mimi Baker, who shouts "Crummy!" every single time she blocks a hit, and shouts "Take this!" for almost every single swing she makes, even with her Bread Rain: Alpha that consists of close to a dozen hits delivered in the span of a few seconds.
• In Tropico one of the Propaganda Machines repeats "Viva El Presidente!" uninterruptedly.
• "Encroachment over 90%! Encroachment over 90%! Encroachment over 90%!"
• Catherine gameplay in a nutshell: Edge. Edge. Edge. Edge. Undo. Edge. Edge. Edge. Edge. Edge. Edge. Edge.^note "Edge" is played when a block is caught by another block's edge causing it to be held in place. There is an "Undo" button that can be used to reverse up to nine of the player's most recent actions.
• In Chapter 1 of Lollipop Chainsaw, there is a segment where you must defend a bomb cake from being detonated by zombies. During this segment, Nick will endlessly yell: "Keep those zombies away from the cake!" "Keep those zombies away from the cake!" "Keep those zombies away from the cake!" "Keep those zombies away from the cake!" "Keep those zombies away from the cake!" "Keep those zombies away from the cake!" "Keep those zombies away from the cake!" "Keep those zombies away from the cake!"
• In Metroid Fusion, the "WARNING! NO ENTRY WITHOUT AUTHORIZATION!" alarm that plays from when you try to enter the Restricted Zone for the first time to when you actually succeed in entering. It only stops during the boss fight against the Security Robot B.O.X., and even plays if you have the game paused.
  • Another is "EMERGENCY IN SECTOR 3" that plays from when you are leaving Sector 5 until you reach the Navigation Room.
• In the video game adaptation of Toy Story 2, during the final fight against Stinky Pete he'll repeatedly berate Buzz telling him "Go back to your toy chest!"
• Final Fantasy X: During the attack on Home by the Guado, aside from the continual battle music, a man will constantly yell something in Al Bhed over loudspeakers that sounds, to some, like "I'M ANNOYING, HUH?"
• Hong Kong '97: The entire soundtrack, as well as the only sound in the game, is merely a five-second clip of a song called "I Love Beijing Tiananmen" looped ad nauseam. Even getting a game over and restarting the game doesn't stop it.
• Dynasty Warriors:
  • "BENEVOLENCE!"
  • "IMBECILE!"
• 2014's Rambo: The Video Game suffers from this in two different ways. Firstly, the music score is made up of short, repetitive loops, something that quickly becomes very obvious even in the fairly short stages that the game features. Secondly, the last few stages have higher-level enemies who increase the damage output of any nearby normal enemies, which is achieved by having them endlessly repeat the phrase "Fight harder, comrades! He's a man, not a god!" until you kill them.
• crossbeats REV. has its mascot Akatsuki cheerfully announce "MISSION CLEAR!' whenever you complete a mission. If you clear multiple missions in one song, it quickly becomes "MISSION CLEAR! MISSION CLEAR! MISSION CLEAR! MISSION CLEAR!"
• The Talos Principle: Elohim will start spouting one in the event you find a way to get out of bounds, which you likely will when hunting for secrets. The line gets louder as you go further out until you get reset back to a checkpoint. He has a second phrase he'll say on repeat in a hidden area that doubles as a Madness Mantra, going on about the world being a simulation that he's forced to eventually end.
  Elohim: In the beginning were the Words, and the Words made the world. I am the Words. The Words are everything. Where the Words end, the world ends. You cannot go forward in an absence of space. Repeat. In the beginning were the Words...
• The Turing Test: If you choose to shoot Ava and Sarah during the ending, TOM will start to repeat "Ava. Ava. Ava. Wake up.", apparently unable to understand that Ava's just plain dead.
• All of OutRun's music tracks have their loop start at beginning of the song's last phrase, which means said phrase repeats ad nauseam until you either run out of time or reach the finish line. This is most annoying with "Magical Sound Shower", whose loop is the shortest, at about 8 seconds.
• In Ikaruga, similar to the aforementioned OutRun, the ending theme, "Spirit Being", loops just its final phrase until the credits finish rolling. It doesn't help that the Xbox Live Arcade version's credits run on longer than other versions.
• A few examples in Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft.
  • Every minion has a specific voice line for being summoned, attacking, and being killed. If a player's strategy involves repeatedly copying his own minions, this can end up being invoked.
  • The Annoy-O-Tron is especially infamous for this in-universe, to the point that the gnome who invented it was banished from the eastern kingdoms.
  • Since each hero only has six emotes, be prepared to hear their lines a lot.
  • The Grim Patron, who summons another Grim Patron every time he's damaged, and shouts "EVERYONE, GET IN HERE!".
  • But the grand champion of this is the Shudderwock, a 9 mana card that performs the last twenty battlecries played. A clever player can make it repeatedly summon copies of itself, and have those copies return to the player's hand for one mana. And every time one gets summoned, it shouts "My jaws that bite, my claws that catch!".
• In Halo: Reach, Auntie Dot rattles off "Slipspace rupture detected. Slipspace rupture detected. Slipspace rupture detected. Slipspace rupture detected. Slipspace rupture detected. Slipspace rupture detected. Slipspace rupture detected. Slipspace rupture detected. Slipspace rupture detected..." when the Covenant's main fleet arrives at Reach.
• Resident Evil 2 has "Repeat; all employees proceed to the bottom platform" ad nauseam after the Umbrella Laboratory's Self-Destruct Mechanism is activated.
• In Silent Hill 4: The Room, one of the many hauntings that affects Room 302 in the game's second act is a voice endlessly repeating "I'm always watching you" from the phone.
• The Level 4 music for Marble Madness goes into a three-chord holding pattern after the intro, then seems to get stuck on a single chord in the second half of the stage. Likewise, Level 5 keeps repeating the same phrase at an increasingly higher pitch and speed until it becomes unrecognizable noise.
• In The Journeyman Project, the music for Sinclair's laboratory at the World Science Center (named on the OST as "Poisoned") is a 8-second loop in the vein of Hong Kong '97, which continues onto the Have a Nice Death screen. The remake Pegasus Prime fixes this by stopping this track after Agent 5 cures himself from a poison dart that a robot shot him with.
• In Armed & Delirious, the balloon maker spends a good portion of his musical number repeatedly singing the phrase "I love to make balloons" and nothing else.
• Forget Me Not: My Organic Garden: How living dolls operate, apparently, given this "conversation":
  Irene-Doll: Please have some delicious tea. Hee hee.
  Hamomoru-Doll: Beautiful weather today. Hahaha.
  Irene-Doll: Please have some delicious tea. Hee hee.
  Hamomoru-Doll: Beautiful weather today. Hahaha.
• Mega Man X7: Flame Hyenard and 2 copies will constantly scream "BURN! BURN! BURN TO THE GROUND!" during the entire fight. It's THE example of the game's infamously spotty English dub.
• The Final Boss of Mutant Fighter, Cronus the archmage, screams "MAGIC!" every single time he casts a spell (in other words, whenever he does anything aside from walking around or blocking).
• Xenoblade Chronicles 1: “You’ll pay for your insolence. You’ll pay for your insolence. You’ll pay for your insolence. You’ll pay for your insolence. You’ll pay for your insolence.”
  • The Ardanaian Soldiers in Xenoblade Chronicles 2 would go into every fight saying the same three phrases "THINK YOU CAN TAKE ME? DON'T FORGET ME! YER DONE!" over and over. This got so bad that it was patched to be less annoying.
• Spamton in Deltarune has this happen at to him at one point, one of the many speech impediments he's plagued with emphasizing how broken his mind is. Notable in that in this instance, his dialogue ends up going outside of the text box.
  Spamton: "I'LL GET SO. I'LL GET SO. I'LL GET SO. I'LL GET SO. I'LL GET SO. I'LL GET SO. I'LL GET SO."
• Disco Elysium: In a couple of places, you can get the detective stuck in a loop where he repeats, "Mr Evrart is helping me find my gun," or "cock carousel," over and over. Both any NPCs present and your own brain functions will be both confused and deeply concerned by this.
• The Pepega Edition mod from Need for Speed: Most Wanted, when Sgt. Cross yells EVERYONE!, his yelling is so loud that creates a echo of his "EVERYONE!" "EVERYONE!" "EVERYONE!" "EVERYONE!" "EVERYONE!" "EVERYONE!" "EVERYONE!" "EVERYONE!" "EVERYONE!" "EVERYONE!" to the point that EVERYONE! in the world especially KuruHS could hear it.
• Shantae and the Seven Sirens: A woman in Armor Town says the giant fans she made have many admirers, and she started...an admiration horde. She goes out of her way to avoid calling them fans whenever you talk to her. At least, until Shantae gets Jet Octo, where upon she starts going insane, and repeats "fan" for a bit when talked to:
  As you may know, I have forged many huge fan blades!
  And now my giant fans are more popular than ever.
  In fact, the other day an author stopped by.
  He liked my fans so much, he wrote original adventures about them.
  His very own...
  ...completely made up...
  ...imagination novellas.
  ....
  Fan fan fan fan fan fan fan fan fan.
  Be aware that any admiration scrawl you submit becomes property of my admiration horde.
• The Stanley Parable's Tagline is "The end is never..." but it is often repeated over and over again. This phrase devolves into Madness Mantra in the Skip Button Ending of Ultra Deluxe.
  "The end is never the end is never the end is never the end is never the end is never the end..."

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