You now how the Lord of the Rings saga ends with gigantic birds transporting Frodo and Samwise away from Mount Doom and dropping them back to safety in Hobbiton? (Oops! Spoiler Alert!) You might have thought to yourself, “Why didn’t they just ride the birds there to begin with? The One Ring would have been melted down to ore by elevenses.” Yeah, except there wouldn’t be an epic trilogy for the ages. In the same spirit, if you made the following tiny tweaks to the following popular video games, they would barely exist.

Assassin’s Creed II: A rope -- If I were Leonardo Da Vinci, I would have taken my assassin friend Ezio aside and said, “Hey, Ezio, don’ta you t’ink you coulda climb the buildings better if’a you packed a rope? Mebbe instead of one of thosea many, many swords?” But then Assassin’s Creed 2 would have been over in like 16 minutes, which is why genius inventors rarely star in video games.

BurgerTime: A gun -- If I had had a gun, I would have murdered those walking hot dogs and sentient fried eggs fast, and been happy making hamburgers all day long. I would have become the greatest hamburger chef in history, a culinary legend, known worldwide for my delicious, unbeatable burgers. Curse you, walking hot dogs and sentient fried eggs! I hope you're being grilled over eternal hellfire, thou despoilers of dreams.

Grand Theft Auto IV: A USCIS office -- There is a huge variety of government offices in Liberty City. You’ve got your police stations, hospitals, fire stations, airport security, military complexes and more. But you will not see a single Immigration Services office anywhere within the city limits. That’s because USCIS would have sent Niko Bellic back to Serbia faster than a Turismo rounds a corner. If all it takes is cargo boats and shady cousins to get into this country, we're screwed.

Dead Rising: A leash -- If that old biddy in the mall had just kept her damn poodle on a leash, he wouldn’t have gotten away and run into a horde of marauding undead, the barricades would have held, Frank West would have spent three days snapping Pulitzer Prize winning character studies of survivors instead of slamming banjos into decrepit ghoul heads, and the helicopter would have flown him off into the sunset like those giant birds at the end of Lord of the Rings.

The Mario Bros. Series: Homosexuality -- If Mario hadn't been so interested in preserving Peach's well-being, most Mario games wouldn’t have happened -- and Donkey Kong would have had a very different ending.