The Game: Resident Evil 4

The Problem: Trapped in the dark and labyrinthine depths of a haunted castle, elite government agent Leon Kennedy stops at a locked gate. Er, make that yet another locked gate. With no key in sight, an army of flesh-nibbling monks at his back and a super annoying sidekick to unload, the dude is kinda in a hurry.

The Logical Solutions: 

• Kick the rusty thing down like you did with 99% of the other doors in this place.
• Blast the lock off with any of the dozen high caliber weapons sitting in your inventory.
• Um, don’t you get a rocket launcher in this game?
Think that might work, genius?
• Seeing as how you’re only going to encounter more enemies in the room beyond, maybe you should avoid opening the gate altogether.
Just sayin’...

The Stupid Solution: You shoot a switch which, as expected, opens the gate immediately. So where’s the stupid?

Everywhere. First, the switch is... a bottle of wine. Second, you don’t push or pull the switch so much as you explode it from across the room with a sniper rifle. Third, the bottle of wine is camouflaged in the middle of a two-dimensional painting. Fourth, you have to ring a goddamn desk bell to even get the painting to appear. Fifth, the clues you need to piece all this nonsense together were left behind in snatches of poetry written on the walls around you. My, how convenient and believable.

We knew the parasitically-controlled “zombies” of Resident Evil 4 were supposed to be smarter than in previous games, but did they also manage to earn degrees in English, Art History and Engineering at some point? Way to reach for the stars, fellas.

The Game: Escape from Monkey Island

The Problem: Guybrush Threepwood, the world’s worst named pirate, has bumbled his way into a predicament. A wacky predicament. Caught in the middle of a bank robbery, he must prove to the town’s police that the real culprit isn’t Guybrush Threepwood, but an imposter masquerading as Guybrush Threepwood. Before hilarity can ensue, however, he needs to get inside the bank to gather evidence.

The Logical Solutions: 

• Walk through the entrance in front.
• Climb through the window in front.
• Shimmy through the other window in front.
• Ask the bank manager. Guess where he’s standing?

The Stupid Solution: Sure, the approaches above would prove incredibly simple and straightforward, but then how would Guybrush get to use any of his zany novelty items?! The man has a live duck in his pocket, for chrissakes!

More importantly, he has a swath of artificial skin he recently picked up at the local prosthetics store. And we’re sorry to report that you did, indeed, read the preceding sentence correctly. In addition to a live duck, the man owns a human hide. And the town has a shop selling nothing but body parts. No way the developers are gonna make that kind of shit up for no reason. Well, here it is:

There you go. Guybrush’s sword pries off the nearby manhole. Stretching the skin across said manhole creates a trampoline. Jumping on said trampoline results in admission to the bank through an open upstairs window.

So easy. So obvious. And you wanted to enter through the front door...
Feel pretty silly now, don’t you?