Best booze power-ups

Alcohol always makes an interesting power-up. Put two or three into your character's system and he's feeling fine. Four and five? He starts stumbling and his friends ask for his car keys. More than that and you'll unlock some interesting new abilities: projectile puke, cab call and black out mode.

For brotastic week, we've assembled a list of our favorite booze power-ups. These in-game alcoholic items can increase your character's prowess or make him impossible to control. Remember: there's such a thing as too much of a good thing. Don't become a digital drunk!

There are few things more deplorable than driving while intoxicated, but we assume that shooting while intoxicated would be pretty high on the list. It’s so awful that it makes sense that in Bulletstorm, a game that rewards the player for debauchery, committing such a vile act is actually rewarded with more points, because... well, shooting while hammered is real hard.

At random points the protagonist will stumble across some alcohol, and after taking a quick swig he gets drunk. It’s harder to aim, things slow down, and the camera waves back and forth, perfectly emulating the feeling of downing that last shot of whiskey that you really shouldn’t have ordered but you weren’t drunk when you ordered it and damned if you’re going to waste that $8. During this haze, all successful killshots are rewarded with bonuses, meaning you can earn additional points for being smashed when you kick an enemy into a cactus and shoot him in the butt. Video games.

Shadows of the Damned is the voodoo laden, oddly hilarious collaboration between two game design auteurs: Suda 51 and Shinji Mikami. Mikami is the man behind Resident Evil 4 and Viewtiful Joe, to name a few. His presence can be felt in Shadow’s rock-solid shooting mechanics. Suda’s fingerprints, however, are all over weirdo protagonist Garcia Hotspur, the game’s pervy sense of humor, and downing bottles of booze for health.

Leave it to the man behind No Man Heroes to make boozing it up a health enhancing choice. In Shadows of the Damned, Sake restores a little bit of health, and Absinthe refills it all, but Tequila is your bread and butter means of replenishing health. Garcia goes through cases of the stuff on his quest to rescue his girlfriend from the demons of Hell. An extreme alcohol tolerance must be a prerequisite for demon slaying!

In Everquest 2, drinking yourself silly and getting murdered by Gnolls is a grand tradition, reaching back to the original EQ. Originally started by the Dwarves, but quickly adopted by the rest of Norrath, Brewday is less of a power-up and more of a week long festival in March - just in time for a certain green-tinted real world holiday. Brewday festivities include a special set of quests as well as much in-game drinking.

To prepare, it's important to max out your alcohol tolerance - yes, that’s an actual skill in Everquest and Everquest 2. It allowed you to imbibe copious amounts of Dwarven ale or Elven wine without having the screen distort so much you couldn’t see, or have the game garble anything you typed to others. Getting boozed provides a modest strength and stamina boost, at the cost of wisdom and intelligence drops. Obviously drinking was mainly a melee fighter’s pursuit, but a few slumming casters always got in on the fun. A Wizard who could hold his booze is always impressive sight!

Cowboys and booze have a long and storied history. Back in the frontier days, alcohol didn’t just keep lonely cowpokes warm at night, it was practically medicine. That’s why doctors in Red Dead Redemption sell moonshine, a high potency, mostly illegal homemade liquor. Why is it called moonshine? Because it was generally distilled secretly at night, under the shine of the moon.

In Red Dead Redemption, moonshine is an essential item for John Marston. A fast and reliable source of Dead Eye, the fact that Marston could pound this stuff and only get more accurate with his pistol was a sign of his hard living past, and has us hoping for a Red Dead prequel.

Even at the world’s biggest casino, a zombie apocalypse is a real bummer. After chainsawing your way through dozens of undead tourists, you need something strong to take the edge off. That’s where mixed drinks comes in, a high potency elixirs with a wide range of effects.

There are a ton of recipes that yield useful power-ups, and most of them involve booze. Some of them even sound like real drinks, such as whiskey and soda or cocktail mix and vodka. Some less so, like beer and ketchup or whiskey and a hot dog. OK, it might be the end of the world, but let’s keep our humanity here. Although we wouldn’t mind trying this bacon and beer recipe...

We never would have known it from his appearance in Diddy Kong Racing, but Conker is one rude little dude. The Conker from Conker’s Bad Fur Day is a pretty different character from the one we saw racing alongside Diddy and his pals. Let’s hope he wasn’t secretly as boozed up behind the wheel as he sometimes got in his solo N64 outing.

With a bunch of fire imps threatening to burn his tail off, Conker had to get loaded enough to douse his foes in urine. You don’t have long to do it though, and while under the influence, Conker stumbles about in drunken stupor, with a creepy smile on his face. Then, once the beer wears off, you’ve got a brutal hangover to deal with. It may be a dirty, Mature-rated game, but at least it presented some sort of consequence for binge drinking - even if a quick Alka-Seltzer pick-up provided instant relief.

Big and mean with a threateningly thick mustache, Wario has always been Mario’s ruder, cruder doppelganger. He lies, cheats, steals and does basically everything Mario won’t, but drinking? Even Nintendo’s most obnoxious character does do that on-screen...at least not in America.

In the Japanese version of Wario Land 2, beer was more of a power-down than a power-up. While alcohol in an E-rated game is questionable, the game wasn’t exactly encouraging consumption. Enemy penguins would splash beer in Wario’s face, making him temporarily drunken and hard to control. Why penguins? Why beer? Maybe that’s what the stateside Nintendo people thought when they turned the frosty mugs of ale into dizzyness-inducing bombs instead. It puts a whole new spin on the phrase “getting bombed!”

League of Legends’ Gragas’s full title is “Gragas, the Rabble Rouser,” because he’s known to rouse a few rabbles. This mostly comes when he’s drinking, and since every single one of his abilities is enhanced, in some way, be alcohol, it means plenty of rabble rousing. The oaf’s passive skill is called Happy Hour, and makes it so he “takes a drink from his cask every time he uses an ability, restoring 2% of his maximum health over 4 seconds.”

If that was his only link to booze he’d still make the list, but there’s plenty more where that came from. His other attacks? One has him rolling a cask of ale at his enemies that blows up after a few seconds, another involves throwing said cask and creating a gigantic explosion, while another has him guzzling his brew in a move called “Drunken haze.” His last ability is a charge that slams into enemies, and while it’s not technically related to booze, it certainly doesn’t sound like something someone sober would do.

MK’s Bo Rai Cho is the definition of a functioning alcoholic, because none of his moves would work without a big swig of Sake. Without it, he’d just be another fat guy with a ponytail. We shouldn’t make fun of him though, this drunken master trained tournament legends like Liu Kang, but it seems he kept some of his best moves for himself. That, or his students didn’t want grow a gut big enough to crush foes with, or drink to the point where they vomit and get opponents to slip in it.

Bo Rai Cho was a mostly a behind-the-scenes kind of guy. He only appeared as a playable fighter in 2002’s Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance. The titular alliance referred to pact between Shang Tsung and Quan Chi, which lead to the murder of his pupil Liu Kang. Apparently that’s what it takes to get Bo off a barstool and into the fight. His opponents regretted angering him when they saw his flaming fart Fatality.

Grog is an essential part of pirate life. It’s basically watered down rum, and it serves two purposes. First, to help pass the long hours at sea. Second, diluting the rum rations helps them last longer, and keeps the deck hands from getting too rowdy.

The grog of Monkey Island fame seems to be a tad stronger. How else could it have dissolved the lock to Otis’s jail cell? Real grog is probably closer to near-grog, the further watered down alternative for pirates looking to keep their livers intact. Just ask Captain Kate Capsize!

Sorry, we've just gotta get these power-ups out of our system! While we're, uh, busy, why don't you tell us some of your favorite booze soaked in-game moments?

And for more bro-manship, check out our list of Worst attempts to appeal to bro gamers and Most fist bump-worthy moments.