SPOILER WARNING: This article contains PLOT SPOILERS. If you have not played these games, and don't want the plot spoiled for you, please avert your eyes from the screen and interact with it only by licking.
Villains are rarely the smartest guys in the video game, but they usually have plots we can respect. Kidnap a princess. Poison a water supply. Control the world with ancient dark magics. You know, self-improvement. But sometimes you want to shake these villains and tell them, in the words of Black Adder, "You wouldn't know a cunning plan if it leapt up, nipped you in the ass, and sang four choruses of 'I am a cunning plan' to the tune of 'I am Henry the Eighth'."
5) Portal
A computer artificial intelligence gains awareness and begins trying to kill you. Okay, we know what you're thinking: Computers becomes sentient and evil and try to kill people all the time, whether it's in Terminator or that bastardly garbage disposal in your sink that clearly is just waiting for you to stick your hand in. Evil computers hardly make for an absurd villain plot.
Where it gets absurd...
The thing is though, GLaDOS is a little bit different. Her scheme is to run you through a series of scientific research tests, and then promise you some cake. This is the true evil genius of GLaDOS at work, preying on man's weakness for tasty baked goods. GLaDOS is also a devious liar, referring to the flaming pit of death into which she is trying to drop you as a "victory candescence", and generally sweetly assuring you that there will be a big party with cake.
Oh, tasty, tasty cake. Say what you will about the overuse of evil computer AIs (Although we liked Shodan from System Shock), but never before has one used the lure of baked goods in such a diabolical manner. We were almost ready to put down our gun and wait for the party escort service as requested, until we remembered that computer AIs are always trying to kill us.
4) Sam & Max Hit The Road
British country western singer Conroy Bumpus is not your typical villain, as you might have guessed from the fact that he is a British country western singer. Bumpus has kidnapped a bigfoot (one of many, in this wacky world), as well as the bigfoot's girlfriend, who happens to be a giraffe-necked circus freak. The kidnapping is the only sensible part about this scheme, though.
Where it gets absurd...
Having acquired his own mini-menagerie, Bumpus holds them captive in his own house (which is an Elvis-style shrine to himself), forcing them to play guitar and tambourine with electric shocks while he sings about how he acquired them. His evil plot consists mainly in capturing bizarre creatures and forcing them into work as his backup band.
Yes, you read that right. Rather than kidnapping people for ransom, or creating an evil death ray and trying to kill people, Conroy Bumpus is going to conscript a back-up band.
Actually, once your heroes manage to entrap the villains, they hatch a scheme of their own, which involves sacrificing a bigfoot to the gods in order to cause magical forest to spring up and destroy the city. It's not a plan created by villains, per se, but as absurd schemes go, the heroes end up doing a lot more damage than the villains.
3) Destroy All Humans!: Big Willy Unleashed
Cryptosporidium 137 is an alien bent on, as you probably figured out from the title, destroying all of humanity and taking over the earth. He's a furon from the planet Furon, and yet he's a grey wrinkly bald-headed big-eyed creature with no fur on. Go figure. Anyway, his plot in this installment of the series is to take over the world by amassing power in a secret organization, and then attacking with a giant robot. So far, so good, right?
Where it gets absurd...
Crypto's secret organization is a fast-food hamburger franchise. Eat your heart out, Ronald McDonald. Or actually, let Crypto eat your heart out for you. Because his burger franchise grinds up human beings for meat, thus providing a convenient disposal method for the vast swaths of bodies that Crypto leaves lying around during his usual rampages. As if this weren't enough, the giant mechanical mascot of the franchise (the titular "Big Willy") is the battle-mech key to Crypto's plan to take over the world. It has regular death-robot features, such as the ability to shoot laser beams from its eyes, as well as less regular features, such as the ability to belch toxic gases and so forth.
Also, although it's not a key part of the evil plot, Crypto has an anal probe. Because that's what aliens do.
2) Psychonauts
An evil war-obsessed camp counselor has decided to power an army of supertanks by having his mad scientist dentist friend steal the brains out of psychic children to power the tanks. As evil villain plots go, this one pretty much has it all. You've got your world domination plan, which as we all know from James Bond, is essential to any supervillain scheme. You've got your evil death ray, which in this case is in the form of a giant tank. You've got your mad scientist, who in this case is a dentist, but he has the labcoat and goggles, so that's good enough. You've got your suffering innocents, because the kids brains are being stolen, and you've got your paranormal angle, because they're psychic. Whatever you're looking for in an evil villain plot, this one pretty much has it.
Where it gets absurd...
The plot is made slightly more absurd by the fact that the villain's brain theft method relies on beaming his psychic commands into a giant lungfish with feet, who swallows children whole, carries them in his mouth underwater to an insane asylum (which still has some residents) where the evil dentist removes their brain, and then returns the children to camp where they want to do nothing but watch TV. Yeah. And that's just the basic plot.
As you might be able to tell from the summary, Psychonauts is possibly the best game ever made, so if you haven't played it, you really ought to -- even though you've just been spoiled a little bit.
1) Mario Sunshine
Bowser and Mario. One of the original video game rivalries. Bowser has been hatching evil plots since the Nintendo was first invented. Generally speaking, he kidnaps the princess, and then tries to take over the world, or at least the Mushroom Kingdom. So since Bowser Jr. is the villain in this game, you'd expect him to do something similarly evil, right? Kidnapping? Murder? World domination?
Where it gets absurd...
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Nope. Try graffiti. That's right, the best evil plot Bowser Jr. could come up with was polluting a vacation island by spreading graffiti everywhere. (What's next, villainous double-parking?) To be fair, he did dress up as Mario while doing it, so Mario arrived to be arrested for vandalism. Even though Mario was then sentenced to community service work of cleaning the entire island and was not allowed to leave, the graffiti frame-up still seems a bit pathetic for a villainous scheme. But hey, it got Mario to spend time cleaning up instead of cleaning koopa clocks, so I guess it was a success, as ridiculous schemes go.
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