What are the most pretentious games ever made?

At least it gave us this classic review from Worth a Buy, one of the only game reviewers who still has a working bullshit detector.
I couldn't agree more with his review. I've played The Witcher, Subnautica and Morrowind, so I have a high tolerance for dogshit combat if there are other things I like about the game, but in SCORN it was so terrible that I'd run past the enemies whenever I could, though I could only do that sometimes since it's hard to maneuver around enemies in a narrow corridor when you have no evasive actions.

Another shitty thing these devs did was pull a switcheroo on the art book that came with the deluxe version. Originally it was in a .pdf format but then they changed it to some other bizarre format without telling the buyers and later they said the .pdfs were only for certain orders or some other nonsense like that. I tried to read the book in this new format and the text was completely broken even though I tried three different readers. Ultimately I had to pirate the .pdf to get a readable copy.

The story and the puzzles suck too. There were two whole areas cut from the game (they're mentioned in the artbook), and one area was meant to show the conflict between those baby-looking things in the biomechanical suits and the rulers. If I'm gonna stick a baby in a juice press I'd like to know why. As for the puzzles, the most complicated one is the first and it's not all that hard once you figure out where the dick and pussy-shaped objects go. The rest are baby tier.
 
Death Stranding. Koji in general could be pretty pretentious with the anti-war/nuke shit (coming from Japan lol) in Metal Gear, but DS was Koji absolutely taking the George Lucas-tier piss. All the people who used to restrain his full retardation at Konami were gone and he could finally do whatever he wanted. And unrestrained Koji turned out to be even wackier than people expected. It was also a BLATANT attempt to further ingratiate himself with hollyjew and to get his actor/hack friends a few more gamer shekels. It didn't work out too well though, apparently. I'm sure Kike-Fink ESG funds helped stem the blood loss at Soyny, but the Cali Commies will feel Konami's pain, i.e. Kojima always goes over-budget and gets ass fucked in the process... Sony Delenda Est.
Styx's metal head brother can tell you.
 
Are we limited to video games? I think it's worth looking at Monopoly... or rather it's origin as The Landlord's Game which every single midwit is quick to remind you. What they also love to remind you is that "the game is a stanch critique about Capitalism". This is, of course, completely fucking wrong since it was actually about Georgism which is it's own, weird thing. That said, you have to be high on your own farts to make a game dedicated to criticising a micro-niche ecnomic ideology.
 
SimEarth and Spore are both pretentious for their scope alone. An earth simulator. Right. Maybe stop playing God for a few minutes and wash your underpants or do your taxes or something.

Myst is the most God damn pretentious game ever made. That shit is literally a PowerPoint presentation. No, I’m not joking, it was programmed with HyperCard. There’s very little (no?) dialogue, no enemies, no villain, no violence. You just go around clicking random spots until you get a horribly dated, pre-rendered cutscene.

A bunch of other point-and-click type games from that era were pretentious. Basically everything Sierra On-Line made was full of smug superiority over the lowly console action games peasants were permitted to play. Actually, I do like some of those games. But one in particular I did not play because I was disgusted by it was Phantasmagoria. It’s a horror game using FMV and it’s edgy, extreme, and distasteful. The sequel is even more demented, and you play as a complete loser so it isn’t even effective escapist fantasy.

The README about how Star Wars Dark Forces totally isn’t DOOM and is actually much more technologically superior is one of the most pretentious READMEs I’ve ever read. Great game but calm the fuck down Lucasarts!

SimHealth is a legendary game that I don’t know if anyone has actually played. Apparently it’s extremely complicated and I don’t even know why it was made. It’s a simulation of American healthcare policy. I suspect it was made more as a political statement instead of as an entertaining product (Maxis would later sell itself out after making too many boring games while the Chad Chris Sawyer and Microprose published Roller Coaster Tycoon).

Any game that incorporates esoteric real-world knowledge into it is pretentious in my book (outside of simulations). Example would be that red stone stuff in Minecraft. Imagine if you had to know how to tie knots in Wind Waker to keep your boat from drifting away? Or imagine how boring Super Mario would be if it actually tried to incorporate plumbing simulation elements.

Prince of Persia was already a bit pretentious to begin with, but after it came out there were a few ‘cinematic’ platformers using rotoscoping, such as Another World and Flashback. These games were slow and tedious, with a great deal of trial and error. Once you know what to do, the games are fairly short and have little depth. They are also padded to hell with slowass cutscenes.
 
The Mortal Kombat series.

It started out as a simple side-scrolling fighter where you kill other dudes while making progress up a tower to kill the final dude. Now it's a soap opera where none of the main characters ever permanently dies (despite the name of the series) because Nether Realm keeps finding ways to bring people back. Shocking fatalities have now been ramped up to the point of utter ridiculousness, serving now purpose other than to feed a fetish for ultraviolence. Characters also perform "X-Ray" moves on each other where the game takes control from you for a few seconds while you watch someone's bones get shattered or their organs splattered--none of which is ever permanent and just continues to feed the ultraviolence fetish.

Many of the main cast have now intermarried with each other (like a soap opera) and they have kids who (of course) are trained in martial arts and are also competing in these same splatter-fest tournaments. You can also have the parents to fight their children and perform all these fatalities as they please.

The main story takes place under the pretense that winning the Mortal Kombat tournament will save the world. Except whenever the good guys win, the bad guys break the rules. The Elder Gods who are supposed to enforce the rules never enforce the rules. Eventually the story just turns into finding a MacGuffin to save the world, excep that MacGuffin doesn't save the world and, inevitably, the thing that actually saves the world is one of the good guys punching the bad guy enough times until he dies.

There's woke politics in some of the more recent games, but does that really surprise anyone?

The series also has an escalation problem where, in order to raise the stakes beyond big bad wants to take over the world, the storywriters have to invent parallel worlds and multiple timelines just to keep things interesting. All this does, however, is make things even more confusing.
What makes it worse is that MK is seen as a counter cultural icon in the spiclands, despite being owned by one of the largest corporations in the world. This is bleeding into the Western world and its only a matter of time before the usual faggots start using the paper thin characters as communist mouthpieces.
 
Death Stranding. Koji in general could be pretty pretentious with the anti-war/nuke shit (coming from Japan lol) in Metal Gear, but DS was Koji absolutely taking the George Lucas-tier piss. All the people who used to restrain his full retardation at Konami were gone and he could finally do whatever he wanted. And unrestrained Koji turned out to be even wackier than people expected. It was also a BLATANT attempt to further ingratiate himself with hollyjew and to get his actor/hack friends a few more gamer shekels. It didn't work out too well though, apparently. I'm sure Kike-Fink ESG funds helped stem the blood loss at Soyny, but the Cali Commies will feel Konami's pain, i.e. Kojima always goes over-budget and gets ass fucked in the process... Sony Delenda Est.
Styx's metal head brother can tell you.
Can you call something pretentious when it's so blatant with naming and themes?
Are we limited to video games? I think it's worth looking at Monopoly... or rather it's origin as The Landlord's Game which every single midwit is quick to remind you. What they also love to remind you is that "the game is a stanch critique about Capitalism". This is, of course, completely fucking wrong since it was actually about Georgism which is it's own, weird thing. That said, you have to be high on your own farts to make a game dedicated to criticising a micro-niche ecnomic ideology.
To be fair, the creator was a woman that had the rights for the game stolen under her because she doesn't understand how patents work.
 
Death Stranding. Koji in general could be pretty pretentious with the anti-war/nuke shit (coming from Japan lol) in Metal Gear, but DS was Koji absolutely taking the George Lucas-tier piss. All the people who used to restrain his full retardation at Konami were gone and he could finally do whatever he wanted. And unrestrained Koji turned out to be even wackier than people expected. It was also a BLATANT attempt to further ingratiate himself with hollyjew and to get his actor/hack friends a few more gamer shekels. It didn't work out too well though, apparently. I'm sure Kike-Fink ESG funds helped stem the blood loss at Soyny, but the Cali Commies will feel Konami's pain, i.e. Kojima always goes over-budget and gets ass fucked in the process... Sony Delenda Est.
Styx's metal head brother can tell you.
While I'm not going to tell someone they're wrong for feeling like Death Stranding is up it's own ass at time, I think it's worth giving a contrasting opinion on the game as a whole.
To be fair, the creator was a woman that had the rights for the game stolen under her because she doesn't understand how patents work.
That's news to me. Last I checked, Magie ultimately ended up selling it to the Parker Brothers for what amounts to $11k in today's money. Unless you're talking about Finance/Fortune which was made as a backup plan in case negotiations fell through.
 
Can you call something pretentious when it's so blatant with naming and themes?
I think trying to make political statements and sweeping commentary about "bridging the divides between people" in a game about working as a post-apocalyptic amazon delivery boy and featuring characters called >Mama<, >Sam Bridges<, >Die-hardman<, and >Heartman< is the height of pretentiousness.
 
The Madness of Roland was one of the first 'games' to use the CD storage for FMV, and it's incredibly pretentious. Based on now-obscure medieval classics. Conflicting viewpoints and presentation of the basic plot. Contemporary images and references used to thwack home the point in a hamfisted fashion. One of the viewpoint characters is a sword that loves talking about violence until suddenly its getting lachrymose over not being a human woman. Occasionally there's some fourth wall breaking too as the characters directly address you, the player.

But on the other hand, I loved it at the time and I've replayed it now and then anyway. I've always liked obscure medieval classics and the acting is fairly decent, for what's basically presented as a video game stage play novel. The gameplay itself is basically like playing the Enkarta Encyclopedia - not the little bonus games or easter eggs, but the actual encyclopedia entries where you read what's going on and then dig into different links and sidebars and image references.
 
Death Stranding. Koji in general could be pretty pretentious with the anti-war/nuke shit (coming from Japan lol) in Metal Gear, but DS was Koji absolutely taking the George Lucas-tier piss. All the people who used to restrain his full retardation at Konami were gone and he could finally do whatever he wanted. And unrestrained Koji turned out to be even wackier than people expected. It was also a BLATANT attempt to further ingratiate himself with hollyjew and to get his actor/hack friends a few more gamer shekels. It didn't work out too well though, apparently. I'm sure Kike-Fink ESG funds helped stem the blood loss at Soyny, but the Cali Commies will feel Konami's pain, i.e. Kojima always goes over-budget and gets ass fucked in the process... Sony Delenda Est.
Styx's metal head brother can tell you.
There was an alleged Konami insider leak like ten years ago which claimed that Kojima was fiercely anti killing and that one of his demands for the Metal Gear series was automatic game overs if you used anything other than tranq pistol or CQC and that management had to threaten him to put lethal combat methods in.

I always thought that sounded like bunk but Death Stranding makes me reevaluate that.
 
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I don't know if it's the translation team's fault or if the native language is just that pretentious, but every single high profile jap game (titles like Persona, Bravely Default, Final Fantasy etc.) sooner or later gets unbearably pretentious, spiritual and feels like both the writers and protagonists are huffing their own farts 24/7. You always transition from regular turn based RPG experience to turn cringe RPG where you beat the shit out of some kind of god or a mystical concept made flesh, and spend half the time contemplating the nature of frienshit or freedom, romancing teammates for some fucking reason or whatever gay faggot retarded shit only a 14 years old sperg or a 20+ westoid manchild permavirgin would consider deep and profound. Japs have no sense of scale, to them the stakes have to rise exponentially, you always have to go from beating rats to beating gods, there are no exceptions.
 
There was an alleged Konami insider leak like ten years ago which claimed that Kojima was fiercely anti killing and that one of his demands for the Metal Gear series was automatic game overs if you used anything other than tranq pistol or CQC and that management had to threaten him to put lethal combat methods in.

I always that was bunk but Death Stranding makes me reevaluate that.
IIRC MGS3 had a big thing about not killing people that I recall people talking about circa 2015 when UNDERTALE came out.
Did this leak also specify his position on funny font skeletons?
I don't know if it's the translation team's fault or if the native language is just that pretentious, but every single high profile jap game (titles like Persona, Bravely Default, Final Fantasy etc.) sooner or later gets unbearably pretentious, spiritual and feels like both the writers and protagonists are huffing their own farts 24/7. You always transition from regular turn based RPG experience to turn cringe RPG where you beat the shit out of some kind of god or a mystical concept made flesh, and spend half the time contemplating the nature of frienshit or freedom, romancing teammates for some fucking reason or whatever gay faggot retarded shit only a 14 years old sperg or a 20+ westoid manchild permavirgin would consider deep and profound. Japs have no sense of scale, to them the stakes have to rise exponentially, you always have to go from beating rats to beating gods, there are no exceptions.
Moon Gaming (fag btw) did a video on this but it's basically all due to cultural context.
In Japanese history, gods are a revolving business. People could become gods. They could move up or down in rank. Most importantly, a lot of the time they were used as explicit political weapons.
 
There was an alleged Konami insider leak like ten years ago which claimed that Kojima was fiercely anti killing and that one of his demands for the Metal Gear series was automatic game overs if you used anything other than tranq pistol or CQC and that management had to threaten him to put lethal combat methods in.

I always that was bunk but Death Stranding makes me reevaluate that.
Meh, there are also documents which show the vast majority of non-retarded shit from the metal gear series came from writers not named Kojima. I paraphrase razor again...

It's hilariously telling that "the government is evil for censoring the net" Hideo Kojima tried to censor someone off the net for simply shitting on his work. He's the truest definition of a Lucas-tier hack fraud.
 
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