WARNING: In case the title didn't tip you off, this article contains spoilers, so you should go and play all of these games through before reading this.

Some games are just terrible through-and-through; nobody was expecting Postal to sparkle in its final moments unless they had placed it in a microwave (as many people did, to be fair.)  But there's nothing worse than when an otherwise good game craps the bed at the last second, like these games did.

#4. Elder Scrolls: Oblivion - Fuck You, I'm A Dragon

Nobody's going to blame you if you said you were expecting a big ending to Oblivion.  After all, "big" was pretty much the game's mission statement: big world, big monsters, big quests.  If the game had a downside, it was that much of the story quest consisted of looking after Martin, the last heir to the throne of Tamriel and the only hope of blah blah blah.  All you really needed to know was that he was more important than Jesus and more suicidal than Kurt Cobain after watching Saving Private Ryan.  Par for the course in RPG sidekicks, in other words.

But fuck him.  Oblivion was simply too big to worry about one stupid asshole running around like he was the king or something.  There's undead to battle over here, and a forsaken tomb to plunder over there, and once you've finished with that there was a tide of ravenous demons spewing forth from the scorching womb of hell itself!  No way could one douchebag mess this up, right?

The Big Finish:

Well, as it turns out, he could.  And he could do a pretty damn good job of it, too.

Oblivion's end sequence primarily consists of the big bad motherfuckin' grandfather of the demons you've been fighting the whole game bursting on to the scene in a blaze of Satanic glory.  If we had to sum up our reaction to this guy in three words, it would be: "Holy shit, awesome."  This guy was what all good little end bosses want to grow up to become; big, mean, and nigh-invulnerable.  Killing him was going to be so sweet.

Then, so quickly that he's nearly a blur, Martin traps the player in an inescapable cutscene, turns into a fucking dragon, and proceeds to battle the demon lord.  Experts would later call this "history's most heinous killsteal."

Asshole.

#3. Assassin's Creed - Go To Your Room

Assassin's Creed ruled because it essentially let you become a middle-ages superhero.  You could take a dozen swords and arrows to the chest before you even started breathing hard.  Gravity had only the slightest hold on you, and even that was pretty tenuous.  You were so good at hiding that guards who had just witnessed you murdering half a dozen of their close friends would pass you over without a second thought the moment you sat down on a bench.  You killed as easily as breathing, and there was nothing about this that didn't kick ass.

Sure, between your assassination missions you had to go back to being boring old future-era Desmond.  Sure, Desmond was a whiny little queef who allowed himself to be bossed around by a small woman and a cranky geriatric.  Sure, little if any of the future-era plotline made any sense at all, but none of that mattered.  Why?

Because you could punch a man in the nuts and then stab him in the brain.

The Big Finish:

In defense of Assassin's Creed, the final boss battle kicked all sorts of ass.  Regrettably, the developers decided that your triumphant victory was too simple a place to let the game finish, and instead decided to treat us to one more look at the boring, nonsensical predicament of future-era Desmond.

See, Desmond has been kidnapped, and is being detained by the aforementioned small woman and old man.  After the explosive final battle, we return to Desmond's time and the following events majestically unfold:

- Desmond's kidnappers decide not to murder him, much to the player's dismay.

- The kidnappers exit the room, leaving Desmond to discover that he possesses the amazing ability to see meaningless jibberish written on the floor.

- Desmond wanders into his bedroom, looks at the wall, sees more meaningless drivel, and the game ends.

Riveting!

We can only assume that the developers decided not to include Desmond silently brushing his teeth, showering, and saying his prayers in this explosive ending sequence on account of those being "too exciting."

#2. Unreal Tournament 3 - Die Alone

Like all of the Gameist staff's favorite opiates, the UT series has a formula that makes it great: big guns, trash talking, and explosions mixed together with the intoxicating glamour of a legitimized sporting event.  UT3's gets almost all of this right, including the guns, smack-talk, and explosions but misses the 'tournament' angle, instead deciding to set all of the matches against the backdrop of an actual war.  Whatever, it's a competitive FPS and there isn't a gamer in the world who needs more than a flimsy excuse to launch rockets at someone.

After all, how often have you heard someone say "Well, I guess it'd be cool if I reduced that guy over there to an unrecognizable heap of smoking flesh with a barrage of superheated shrapnel, but what's my motivation for doing so?"

The Big Finish:

The big problem with setting a thought-free murderfest like Unreal Tournament anywhere but a gigantic sporting event means that eventually your meatheaded, triggerhappy character is going to have to deal with the consequences of his massive bodycount.  Kill enough people and somewhere along the line you're going to piss off someone (and believe us when we tell you that you kill a lot of people.)

In UT3, your character leads his ragtag band of mercenaries (one of whom is his sister,) to a hostile planet in order to kill an alien lady that did him wrong a while ago.  This goes well, insofar as the alien lady is killed by your character.  The countrymen of said alien lady are very displeased about this, and respond with a series of stern letters reprimanding your character in some very harsh language.

Just kidding.  They actually slaughter your teammates in several seconds, throwing your sister's corpse at your feet.  The cutscene ends at this point, but we're not going to put heavy odds on your character living to pass on his favorite rocket launcher to his grandson.  Thanks for playing!

#1. Fallout 3 - Logic Need Not Apply

Fallout 3 continued the proud Fallout tradition of making life in a post-nuclear-war wasteland more fun than a bucket full of dolphin giggles.  Upon staggering from Vault 101 into the bombed-out wasteland, players find themselves astonished at the sheer amount of things to do, in spite of human civilization having been blown to nothing more than a fading memory.  Want to shoot lasers beams at robots?  You can do that!  Wanna launch miniature atom bombs at a gang of genetic freaks?  Get to launchin'!  Just feel like kickin' back, listening to some tunes, and playing with your dog?  Well, you can do that too!

We'll stick with the atomic explosions if it's all the same to you though.

The Big Finish:

Fallout 3 tops this list because its ending comes so close to kicking just as much ass as the rest of the game, but nosedives at the absolute last second.  The last story mission has the player storming a water purification facility alongside a platoon of futuristic marines and a colossal, jingoistic, smack-talking robot named Liberty Prime.  You and your metal buddy stroll along the streets leading up to the facility while blasting enemy soldiers, fucking up helicopters, and dry-humping forcefields:

Everything about this image rocks so hard.

After beating the shit out of the weak-ass final boss, the player is then informed that the purification facility was damaged in the attack, and must be activated before it explodes!  Oh, and the activation chamber has been flooded with radiation, meaning that whoever activates the machinery will perish soon after!  The player must decide whether to go in themselves, or to send in the heroic captain of the marines!

In order to conserve space, we're going to go over the most retarded things about that ending in point form:

- Radiation, well, radiates.  Here's a rough diagram of the activation chamber:

You can have radiation that can kill a person in minutes and you can have radition that doesn't reach more than a few feet in any direction, but you can't have both.  That's science.

- There's really no reason that the forces of good can't simply build another purifier.  The enemy army has been more or less obliterated by you and your robot friend, meaning that it'd really only be a couple more years of work before everyone had pure water.

- The player may have with them any one of three companions who are completely immune to radiation.  If asked to go in and activate the purifier on behalf of their trusted friend, they will all respond with a resounding "fuck you."  We're not sure what's more retarded: that the developers left in such an obvious loophole, or that they only cared about it enough to insert dimwitted cop-out dialogue options.

We could go on, but we here at the Gameist only have so much space to tell you why a science fiction game ending is dumb and wrong.  Go ahead and play the game, but it'd probably be best if you turned your brain off for the finale.

When not cursing the end cinematics, Malcolm also writes over at The Last Gaffe.

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