In games, nothing can be said to be certain except death and… well, mostly that. Death as a consequence of failure has been a part of games since the days of , and what came after has stayed pretty much the same: a Game Over screen, a Continue? prompt (maybe with an exchange of quarters in there somewhere), and you begin again as if nothing happened. That's been the gaming standard for decades and it's practical enough, but it can make death insignificant.

But not all games play to that standard - some choose not to ignore that you were a corpse just a moment ago, choosing instead to weave the reason for your resurrection into the gameplay. Death isn't merely an inconvenience that loudly reminds you you're in a video game!, but a real part of the game with a place in its world. It’s not the right fit for every situation, of course, but a creative workaround for death can genuinely enhance your playing experience.

As seen in: Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, Assassin's Creed, Tales from the Borderlands

We all know how it goes when you tell your friends some incredible personal story: you fudge the details and forget things, so you sometimes have to back up and correct yourself. Most of us stop short of claiming we died during our travels, but video game protagonists have a habit of trading in extremes. When they describe their adventures after the fact, they'll detail their own demise before remembering that they're very much alive, and none of that actually happened.

Being able to explain away death as overenthusiastic storytelling is a happy accident - the frame exists for bigger reasons, to keep you wondering how (rather than if) the hero escapes deadly harm to recount the story later. That makes this non-death a close cousin of the standard revert-to-checkpoint approach, but one thing saves it: its sense of humor. You get to feel like you're in on the joke, and hearing how the protagonist explains away their mistake can be worth the failure. It can even seem logical, if it's .

As seen in: BioShock, Borderlands, Crackdown

In the very near future (sometimes so near that it's actually the past), mankind hammers out all the ethical and biological ramifications of cloning and starts mass production on personal body copies. Now you can get clones like snacks out of a vending machine, which is convenient when your job involves being repeatedly destroyed by enemies who want to nail you into the ground like a tent spike.

This kind of death-dodging works best in games that are meant to be challenging, but also aim to create a certain feeling around each fight. For instance, the most satisfying conclusion to a Big Daddy battle in BioShock is watching a giant monster go down after throwing everything you have at it, which doesn't work as well if you have to completely restart the fight every time it kills you. Fighting your way through Rapture has to feel difficult if the struggle is going to be meaningful, but you don't want to lose out on the rhythm each fight is meant to have. Having another you waiting in the wings, ready to be spawned on a moment's notice, keeps you on beat.

As seen in: Dark Souls, Shadow of Mordor, Bloodborne

If used incorrectly, this can quickly become the narrative equivalent of the creators throwing up their hands and storming out of the room. Given that you do technically come back to life time and time again, immortality is the laziest possible explanation if nothing more is done with it. Thankfully, the games that use this concept best avoid that by making immortality an even bigger part of the game.

The immortality method takes some serious commitment from the game to avoid looking like a cop-out. By planting the concept deep in their world lore (the way, for example, Dark Souls does by making you an Undead out to destroy the source of your reanimation), unending life becomes as much a part of the plot as it is a gameplay device. It never feels like there's an unnatural break when the protagonist dies, because it falls perfectly in line with the storyline.

As seen in: Grand Theft Auto, City of Heroes

There's little way to play this one straight, but that's half the fun. Regardless of what sort of damage your character is subjected to - falling from a ten-story building, getting run over by a Jeep, slamming a jet into a suspension bridge and succumbing to the resulting inferno - nothing actually kills them. Instead, after the loading screen comes and goes, they trot out of the nearest hospital, with nothing to indicate their misadventure except a slightly lighter wallet.

This undeath is sure to get a few laughs on principle, which is part of its appeal: it's the game giving you a wink and a nod over your unfortunate and likely stupid demise while showing it doesn't really care to punish you. In fact, it purposefully moves you from the place where you died so you can start fresh somewhere else and not have to immediately deal with what just killed you. That's why you mostly see this in sandbox games - where it would be incredibly annoying to restart far away from your goal in a linear title, in an open-world it feels like a respite, so you're free to go cause mayhem elsewhere.

As seen in: Destiny, Conker's Bad Fur Day, Too Human

It's good to have friends in high places - or low ones, depending on your perspective. While the hero may not have a supply of body copies on hand, they do have a patron deity who's interested in keeping them alive. That means whenever they bite it, their connection to those divine beings is what raises them from the dead, just in time for to charge back into the fight and send their enemies into cardiac arrest.

This one can both be taken seriously or played for laughs, based on how the game frames the situation. The ethereal Traveler in Destiny is taken very seriously, so it's a matter of grave importance when its power is used to raise a fallen guardian. Same goes for Too Human, where you're resurrected by Valkyries. Meanwhile, in Conker's Bad Fur Day, a drunken squirrel makes a deal with the Grim Reaper to pay for new lives with severed squirrel tails, which everyone involved knows is weird. In either case, it gives the main character an even greater sense of importance: not only are they untouchable, but they have a patron god keeping them that way, because they're just that important to the survival of the world (or whatever's going on in Conker).

As seen in: Psychonauts, The Talos Principle, Ether One

We're getting downright here, when death adversion is based on the idea that you have no physical form to kill. Whether that's because you're a robot, or are projecting into a digital world, the result is the same: you get an infinite amount of 'lives' because dying kills the image of you, not your essence. Deep.

While that seems like a simple way to handwave in-game death, since your synthetic form can be mentioned once and never again, it takes serious legwork to implement it in any game with a hint of story. Portal's co-op mode gets away with it because the robot bodies are just there to facilitate you shooting holes in the wall, but something like The Talos Principle has to explain why you, robot, need so many bodies to accomplish your objective. Robot-projection death only works if it's built into the bedrock of the game, but when it is, your mechanical immortality can itself open up interesting questions. Reaching your goal is the only way for this all to end, but what could be so important that the game keeps endlessly rebuilding you to do it?

As seen in: Super Meat Boy

You're not a creature of this world. For whatever reason the laws of physics and biology don't apply to you, and after being mercilessly splattered against a stray sawblade, you're able to gather up your own remains and reconstitute yourself. There's no pretenses of logic here, no attempt to explain how you flagrantly defy the blueprint of the universe. Just you, reforming yourself at the end of every death, the game daring you to question it.

This approach only really works if a game is willing to commit to the levels of absurdity it demands. But once that's accomplished, this may well be the most indisputable death dodge out there, because it isn't really a dodge at all. You die, and have enough will left to rebuild yourself through a means that only the unforgiving cosmos understands. That, in a weird way, becomes the epitome of persistence. If the protagonist is willing to scrape what remains of their flesh off yet another death contraption and do it all over again, what excuse do you have?

The creative twists on death I've described here range from stiff-lipped serious to unapologetically silly, but all have the same aim: give in-game death as much consideration and coherence as every other part of the story.

When death is tweaked to fit the game, rather than the other way around, that attention to detail makes the world of the game feel so much fuller, and death itself more genuine. Many of these death-aversions are just as strange as time-reserved regeneration, if not more so. Most players will buy the idea of a restart without a second thought, while walking out of a hospital unscathed after falling out of a helicopter might be hard to buy. But it's the effort that makes it believable, to carve death into the proper shape that makes it fit into the overall puzzle. And so you have a better game, even when it involves a helium-inhaling Grim Reaper.

In games, nothing can be said to be certain except death and… well, mostly that. Death as a consequence of failure has been a part of games since the days of , and what came after has stayed pretty much the same: a Game Over screen, a Continue? prompt (maybe with an exchange of quarters in there somewhere), and you begin again as if nothing happened. That's been the gaming standard for decades and it's practical enough, but it can make death insignificant.

But not all games play to that standard - some choose not to ignore that you were a corpse just a moment ago, opting instead to weave the reason for your resurrection into the gameplay. Death isn't merely an inconvenience that loudly reminds you you're in a video game!, but a real part of the game with a place in its world. It’s not the right fit for every situation, of course, but a creative workaround for death can genuinely enhance your playing experience.

As seen in: Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, Assassin's Creed, Tales from the Borderlands

We all know how it goes when you tell your friends some incredible personal story: you fudge the details and forget things, so you sometimes have to back up and correct yourself. Most of us stop short of claiming we died during our travels, but video game protagonists have a habit of trading in extremes. When they describe their adventures after the fact, they'll detail their own demise before remembering that they're very much alive, and none of that actually happened.

Being able to explain away death as overenthusiastic storytelling is a happy accident - the frame exists for bigger reasons, to keep you wondering how (rather than if) the hero escapes deadly harm to recount the story later. That makes this non-death a close cousin of the standard revert-to-checkpoint approach, but one thing saves it: its sense of humor. You get to feel like you're in on the joke, and hearing how the protagonist explains away their mistake can be worth the failure. It can even seem logical, if it's .

As seen in: BioShock, Borderlands, Crackdown

In the very near future (sometimes so near that it's actually the past), mankind hammers out all the ethical and biological ramifications of cloning and starts mass production on personal body copies. Now you can get clones like snacks out of a vending machine, which is convenient when your job involves being repeatedly destroyed by enemies who want to nail you into the ground like a tent spike.

This kind of death-dodging works best in games that are meant to be challenging, but also aim to create a certain feeling around each fight. For instance, the most satisfying conclusion to a Big Daddy battle in BioShock is watching a giant monster go down after throwing everything you have at it, which doesn't work as well if you have to completely restart the fight every time it kills you. Fighting your way through Rapture has to feel difficult if the struggle is going to be meaningful, but you don't want to lose out on the rhythm each fight is meant to have. Having another you waiting in the wings, ready to be spawned on a moment's notice, keeps you on beat.

As seen in: Dark Souls, Shadow of Mordor, Bloodborne

If used incorrectly, this can quickly become the narrative equivalent of the creators throwing up their hands and storming out of the room. Given that you do technically come back to life time and time again, immortality is the laziest possible explanation if nothing more is done with it. Thankfully, the games that use this concept best avoid that by making immortality an even bigger part of the game.

The immortality method takes some serious commitment from the game to avoid looking like a cop-out. By planting the concept deep in their world lore (the way, for example, Dark Souls does by making you an Undead out to destroy the source of your reanimation), unending life becomes as much a part of the plot as it is a gameplay device. It never feels like there's an unnatural break when the protagonist dies, because it falls perfectly in line with the storyline.

As seen in: Grand Theft Auto, City of Heroes

There's little way to play this one straight, but that's half the fun. Regardless of what sort of damage your character is subjected to - falling from a ten-story building, getting run over by a Jeep, slamming a jet into a suspension bridge and succumbing to the resulting inferno - nothing actually kills them. Instead, after the loading screen comes and goes, they trot out of the nearest hospital, with nothing to indicate their misadventure except a slightly lighter wallet.

This undeath is sure to get a few laughs on principle, which is part of its appeal: it's the game giving you a wink and a nod over your unfortunate and likely stupid demise while showing it doesn't really care to punish you. In fact, it purposefully moves you from the place where you died so you can start fresh somewhere else and not have to immediately deal with what just killed you. That's why you mostly see this in sandbox games - where it would be incredibly annoying to restart far away from your goal in a linear title, in an open-world it feels like a respite, so you're free to go cause mayhem elsewhere.

As seen in: Destiny, Conker's Bad Fur Day, Too Human

It's good to have friends in high places - or low ones, depending on your perspective. While the hero may not have a supply of body copies on hand, they do have a patron deity who's interested in keeping them alive. That means whenever they bite it, their connection to those divine beings is what raises them from the dead, just in time for to charge back into the fight and send their enemies into cardiac arrest.

This one can both be taken seriously or played for laughs, based on how the game frames the situation. The ethereal Traveler in Destiny is taken very seriously, so it's a matter of grave importance when its power is used to raise a fallen guardian. Same goes for Too Human, where you're resurrected by Valkyries. Meanwhile, in Conker's Bad Fur Day, a drunken squirrel makes a deal with the Grim Reaper to pay for new lives with severed squirrel tails, which everyone involved knows is weird. In either case, it gives the main character an even greater sense of importance: not only are they untouchable, but they have a patron god keeping them that way, because they're just that important to the survival of the world (or whatever's going on in Conker).

As seen in: Psychonauts, The Talos Principle, Ether One

We're getting downright here, when death adversion is based on the idea that you have no physical form to kill. Whether that's because you're a robot, or are projecting into a digital world, the result is the same: you get an infinite amount of 'lives' because dying kills the image of you, not your essence. Deep.

While that seems like a simple way to handwave in-game death, since your synthetic form can be mentioned once and never again, it takes serious legwork to implement it in any game with a hint of story. Portal's co-op mode gets away with it because the robot bodies are just there to facilitate you shooting holes in the wall, but something like The Talos Principle has to explain why you, robot, need so many bodies to accomplish your objective. Robot-projection death only works if it's built into the bedrock of the game, but when it is, your mechanical immortality can itself open up interesting questions. Reaching your goal is the only way for this all to end, but what could be so important that the game keeps endlessly rebuilding you to do it?

As seen in: Super Meat Boy

You're not a creature of this world. For whatever reason the laws of physics and biology don't apply to you, and after being mercilessly splattered against a stray sawblade, you're able to gather up your own remains and reconstitute yourself. There's no pretenses of logic here, no attempt to explain how you flagrantly defy the blueprint of the universe. Just you, reforming yourself at the end of every death, the game daring you to question it.

This approach only really works if a game is willing to commit to the levels of absurdity it demands. But once that's accomplished, this may well be the most indisputable death dodge out there, because it isn't really a dodge at all. You die, and have enough will left to rebuild yourself through a means that only the unforgiving cosmos understands. That, in a weird way, becomes the epitome of persistence. If the protagonist is willing to scrape what remains of their flesh off yet another death contraption and do it all over again, what excuse do you have?

The creative twists on death I've described here range from stiff-lipped serious to unapologetically silly, but all have the same aim: give in-game death as much consideration and coherence as every other part of the story.

When death is tweaked to fit the game, rather than the other way around, that attention to detail makes the world of the game feel so much fuller, and death itself more genuine. Many of these death-aversions are just as strange as time-reserved regeneration, if not more so. Most players will buy the idea of a restart without a second thought, while walking out of a hospital unscathed after falling out of a helicopter might be hard to buy. But it's the effort that makes it believable, to carve death into the proper shape that makes it fit into the overall puzzle. And so you have a better game, even when it involves a helium-inhaling Grim Reaper.

The United States is a vast country, filled with a wide variety of cities and individual pockets of culture, so it makes sense that many American developers often look to their own hometowns for inspiration. But game design is a worldwide industry, with studios found all over the globe, and many of them are just as intrigued by the American way of life as the people who actually live there. But in many ways, the outsider's perspective of the good ol' US of A is far teresting, because these games often provide a different look into how the country presents itself to the rest of the world.

Sure, America eats a lot of cheeseburgers and drinks more coffee than tea, but the American experience is much more than just a few stereotypes. That's what makes these video games so fascinating: they're games about America, made outside America, and they all seem to have their own interpretations of what makes the United States tick. Whether they're focusing on American culture, a specific region in the country, or an aspect of America's own history, these games all focus on something Americans find important, and hope to give a different take from a unique perspective.

Made in: Japan

Technically EarthBound takes place in Eagleland, but it's basically the United States in everything but name, and the cities in the game certainly feel like their US counterparts. You've got the sleepy burg of Onett, the busier suburbs of Twoson, and even the bustling metropolis Fourside. Only things are... off. The skate punks run around wearing onesies and brandish hula hoops. The country's biggest band, The Runaway Five, has six people in it. The town of Threed is overrun by zombies. And you're constantly accosted by Unassuming Local Guys and New Age Retro Hippies.

The best part about EarthBound isn't how it combines so many different American pop culture references and analyzes them from a completely different cultural perspective. No, the best part is that it's so sincere about it, like eating a slice of warm apple pie while watching Leave It to Beaver re-runs. EarthBound clearly comes from a place of love, even when it's portraying an evil blue-loving cult or corrupt politicians. It's a game that lets you bask in the joy of wandering through department stores or without judging you for partaking in empty consumerism. While a game this goofy could easily come off as as mean and sarcastic, Earthbound is anything but.

Made in: UK

If EarthBound is the optimistic, "Gee, isn't this country swell?" vision of America, then Grand Theft Auto is its polar opposite. America is often referred to as 'The Land of Opportunity', but GTA asks a question that nags Americans in the back of their minds when someone refers to the 'American Dream': "Does the 'Dream' really exist, and if it does, is it worth the paying the price to achieve it?" GTA's answer comes with big, sardonic sneer. Many of the businesses and products sport self-aware puns for names, like Ammu-Nation or GoPostal, and many of the ads for these products make snide, pithy comments. The biggest social media platform is called Lifeinvader. And everyone is so self-absorbed it's a wonder society hasn't fallen apart at the seams. GTA's satire is incredibly over-the-top, a caricature of what America is really like, but there is truth there.

While GTA 5's depiction of Los Angeles is perhaps the most authentic, GTA 4 distinctly captures the outsider's view of what America is, as it's about Niko Bellic, a Serbian who arrives in America for the very first time in order to escape his past. To Niko, Liberty City is a massive culture shock from his relatively simple life overseas, and while his cousin Roman has acclimated to his new life of excess well enough, Niko finds the opportunity the city offers to be fleeting and empty. The one thing it does share in common with Niko's home is the one thing Niko is trying to escape: an endless cycle of violence. GTA's vision of the American Dream is distinctly pessimistic, considering the evils one has to go through in these games to attain it.

Made in: Japan

Did you know that there's an airstrip under the White House? Yeah, the whole ground opens up so Air Force One can take off in case Washington, D.C. is overrun by an enemy invasion. Oh, and the President of the United States is also a damn good mecha pilot. Wait, you say you missed all that stuff in history class? That's OK, because Metal Wolf Chaos is here to educate you with a patriotic grand slam of a video game.

Metal Wolf Chaos is essentially Team America: World Police: The Game as made by Japan. It is pure, jingoistic Michael Bay-hem in video game form. Evil Vice President Richard Hawk has stolen the presidency from Michael Wilson, reinstated such American gems like slavery, and is generally responsible for a litany of war crimes. So it's up to Wilson to take the White House back, which of course means travelling across the country in a giant flying mech and unleashing burning American justice on anyone who opposes him. Metal Wolf Chaos is a celebration of patriotic excess, a game that you can't help but laugh at while pumping your fist and shouting "USA!", and it's a crime that this game .

Made in: Finland

Ever since Twin Peaks became a cult TV phenomenon, the wooded, rural areas of the Pacific Northwest have become synonymous with creeping psychological dread. It's not entirely unwarranted: some of the smaller towns you can drive through are disturbingly eerie in that 1950s-America-as-seen-through-the-Twilight-Zone kind of way (especially at night), and the constant fog and rainfall certainly don't help. Alan Wake takes these inspirations and uses them craft a truly unique horror game that feels like an HBO mini-series.

The town of Bright Falls, Washington looks like your average secluded logging town, and it's got the small town charm that goes along with that; the diner that looks like it never made it out of the mid-20th century, the kitschy city-wide festival that everyone takes part in, the dense, sprawling forest parks that are begging to be explored. It's also got a bunch of creepy shadow monsters that come out at night, but I doubt those are on the travel brochure. But it's not just the setting of Alan Wake that evokes strains of America; the game's very narrative structure resembles that of a hit American TV show. Broken up into six distinct episodes, playing Alan Wake is like experiencing an interactive version of Twin Peaks or The Twilight Zone, taking as much inspiration from American television dramas and horror fiction as it does from the rural Pacific Northwest.

Made in: Japan

The Metal Gear series has always had an ample supply of self-aware anime and video game weirdness, but applying that weirdness to something as intimate to Americans as its own history and government only multiplies that feeling exponentially. It's one thing to hear a fictional conversation between world leaders Lyndon B. Johnson and Nikita Khrushchev; it's another entirely to realize one of the world's superpowers is dealing in walking nuclear-armed mechs. But despite its most absurd moments, there's a bizarre truth underlying how Metal Gear envisions the American government.

Take the ending of Metal Gear Solid 2, for instance. At the time, it seemed like total nonsense, as the AI that has been directing your every move exposes its plans for world domination. But the things it talks about - how information never disappears, so anyone can cling to a specific 'truth' they believe in - is particularly prophetic in hindsight, especially in the face of what's going on with the Internet, the 24-hour news cycle, and current events in American government. And Metal Gear Solid 4's exploration of private military corporations may be exaggerated (never mind the presence of numerous bipedal battle tanks), but it's no secret that the US government uses PMCs to sub-contract much of its work. Metal Gear Solid may go way beyond realism in many respects, but many of its core concepts are generally based on fact. In many ways, the series isn't about what 'is' or 'was' in American history, but rather what 'could be' or 'could have been' - if things were a bit more like one of Otacon's Japanese animes, anyway.

Made in: Czech Republic

Like Alan Wake, Mafia 2 makes no effort to hide where its influences come from. Evoking strains of classic gangster movies, Mafia 2 takes bits and pieces from films like The Godfather, Goodfellas, and On the Waterfront, sprinkles in some classic 1950's tunes, and sets it all in a GTA-style open world that uses its city to flesh out its setting and story, rather than fill it with a bunch of random minigames and side missions.

The game opens on protagonist Vito Scaletta as he reminisces on his past while looking through an old photo album. Born and raised in Sicily, Vito immigrated to Empire City along with his family when he was a young boy. Once again, the 'American Dream' turns out to be a sham, as his father can barely afford to make ends meet at his grueling job on the docks, so Vito does what he can to help his family: he turns to a life of crime. The fictional city is an amalgamation of New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston, and Detroit during the mid-20th century, and while it doesn't feel like any one of them in particular, it certainly evokes nostalgia of America's biggest metropolises post-World War Two. Mafia 2 is essentially a pastiche of gangster movie tropes, but 2K Czech uses those tropes to tell a surprisingly authentic story of the difficulties of rising out of poverty in a large city, the rise of modernity in American society, and the racial tensions of the era.

Made in: Japan

Ahh, consumerism - the hallmark of the American economy. And what better way to celebrate consumerism than to head to your local shopping mall and spend, spend, spend? Well, unless the mall’s overrun with mindless zombies, that is. There's probably a metaphor in here somewhere, but hell if I know what it is. Anyway, the classic tale was initially told by the George Romero flick Dawn of the Dead, but Capcom takes that idea and lets you fend off zombies while shopping until you drop.

The mall itself is enormous, featuring everything you could ever possibly want in a single shopping center. It's your one-stop-shop for televisions, CDs, children's clothing, power drills, books, restaurants, swords (!), and more. It's even got a roller coaster! Virtually everything that isn't nailed down can be turned into a weapon, or worn, or eaten, leading to situations where our hero Frank West is bashing zombie skulls with a sledgehammer while wearing a tutu. It seems a bit ridiculous to run around in a mall this huge, but it's actually loosely based on the in the center. If there's one thing Dead Rising gets right, it's that Americans sure love to shop - but most of America's malls aren't even close to being as big as they are in this game.

Made in: Canada

Many games on this list try to evoke the feeling of being in America, but as much as Liberty City or Empire Bay feel like New York, their cities are facsimiles of the real thing. Ubisoft's futuristic crime thriller Watch Dogs, on the other hand, tries to replicate Chicago with painstaking accuracy. While it takes some liberties with the size of the city and the landmarks inside it, Watch Dogs' version of Chicago is actually stunningly accurate.

Chicago has a vast history, filled with legendary gangsters, dramatic shootouts, and iconic architecture, and Watch Dogs serves as pretty decent virtual tour guide through the city's greatest hits. You can hop in your virtual car and drive to the exact virtual spot where the . The plot itself is rather ridiculous, a high-tech tale of corruption and revenge, but parts of it do have roots in the city's long history with organized crime.

Made in: Japan

Admittedly, No More Heroes is probably the most over-the-top entry here, but at first glance, the city of Santa Destroy looks like any other Californian city. It's got the palm trees, the wide stretches of sandy beaches, and the endless sunshine. But if you look closer, you'll notice that the entire city has an absurdly violent streak, and you'll find that No More Heroes becomes a commentary on America's fetishization of violence as its gameplay revels in gleeful geysers of pixelated blood.

First, there's the name of the city itself: Santa Destroy, a peculiar combination of words that immediately evokes an air of wanton violence. A quick drive around the city on your massive Akira-style motorcycle will reveal a wide variety of shops and locations, each with names that feature a strange fascination with violent activities, with a heavy focus on wrestling. There's Burger Suplex and Destroyer Antiques, and locations like the Atomic Drop Ward and Body Slam Beach fill out the rest of the city. Local ad company K-Entertainment is actually a front for a corrupt organization that assigns contract killings. There's also the Destroy Stadium, home of the Santa Destroy Warriors, who, according to the in-game map, lead the league in "violence towards fans." And the main character, Travis Touchdown, has no problem murdering people with the beam katana he won in an online auction. Despite how obsessed the city is with violence, Santa Destroy is a surprisingly safe place to live - outside of the events put on by the United Assassinations Association, of course.