Most controversial videogame levels - from beautiful to cringey

[Kamov Ka-52]

That's a fair take, but I liked the scene. To me, the story wasn't about you, but about the main characters whom you are following around. Yes, you play as the main guy, but you are not the main guy. I think that the White Phosphorus scene, to me, cemented the idea that this is his story, not yours, and he is making these decisions.
That's how I see it, anyways.

It works in something like a film or novel (Heart of Darkness or Apocalypse Now,) because, well yeah, it's not your story. You're simply a passive observer in the story, you don't have any agency in what characters will do, or how they will react. To me at least, the problem is that the by virtue of being an interactive medium the game is admonishing and attempting to make the player feel guilty for a decision that they ultimately have no control of, at least outside of just quitting the game then and there.

In fact, after I did that section for the first time (and spent a good long while killing infinite spawns,) I thought I had done something wrong, and immediately restarted the level to see if there was something that I had missed.

Plus, vidya and films almost always collapse when saddled with an unreliable narrator.

Also the WP scene wasn't gorey enough, the textures were too muddled. You have your Crispy Burny Bois and Skeleton Lads now you could look up the real shit on the internet and compare. The horrifying and shock factor was pretty dull. If anything they really should have showed it up close and not through a cut scene. It's a third person game with some first person mechanics all this shocking shit should have happened in real time through the player's perspective it would have worked better.

If they did that they'd probably have run the risk of getting an AO rating.

I love watching gamers discuss Spec Ops: The Line. It reveals who the cultural illiterates are when they start gushing over a mediocre third-person-shooter because its story (badly) rips off some books and movies they've never read or watched.

I like that it gave some exposure to the source material.

 

[Marissa Moira]

If they did that they'd probably have run the risk of getting an AO rating.

Nah Resident Evil did some of the shit similar with how people turned into zombies, it's more effective if you're going for the body horror angle. You want it to happen in real time and while the player has control, that way it's more intimate and really sinks in.

 

[Colloid]

Speaking of Resident Evil. Resident Evil 5's African village level. The implications of white S.T.A.R. agents gunning down a whole village of black zombies makes for some irresistible, low-hanging fruit shit stirring that game journos couldn't resist taking 10 years ago.

 

[Wish I knew]

Speaking of Resident Evil. Resident Evil 5's African village level. The implications of white S.T.A.R. agents gunning down a whole village of black zombies makes for some irresistible, low-hanging fruit shit stirring that game journos couldn't resist taking 10 years ago.

Speaking of that, did journos ever get mad about Lanshiang because it's in China or no? Speaking of the whole Resident Evil 5 thing I remember that shit got so bad it had an entire section dedicated to it on its Wikipedia page yet in the end Resident Evil 5 became the most high sold Capcom game until Monster Hunter World came out.

 

[{o}P II]

I love watching gamers discuss Spec Ops: The Line. It reveals who the cultural illiterates are when they start gushing over a mediocre third-person-shooter because its story (badly) rips off some books and movies they've never read or watched.

I think critics liked Spec Ops at the time due to it ptresting itself as a generic modern warfare clone when those were all the rage and seeing be a bait and switch was refreshing in a sea of bland uninteresting games

 

[La Luz Extinguido]

This level is really controversial to my penis.

 

[JamFlowMan]

Didn't journalists get upset about this Lord of Shadows 2 scene where Dracula kills a family?

Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2 - Dracula Awakens

Clip of Dracula waking up in the modern day. Pretty cool sequence of him walking around and everything. Kind of hard to root for a protagonist that kills an ...

youtu.be

 

[Nobunaga]

The world getting nuked and the megido ark destroying humanity in smt 1 and 2

 

[The Last Stand]

I know a couple.

GTA: Vice City with the Umberto Robina and Auntie Poulet missions. They ended up changing dialogue for reissues of the game to avoid racial discrimination.

Spoiler: Context

Umberto Robina and Auntie Poulet were Cuban and Haitian respectively. Their missions would have you initiate conflict with the two groups with each other. Such lines of dialogue included "Kill all the Haitians" or "My boys dem war with them Cuban boys, but no guns." Eventually, a couple Haitian-American groups boycotted the game for "encouraging to kill Haitians". So, for reissues, they axed references to Cubans and Haitians from dialogue.

Postal 2 was banned from New Zealand because in one instance, you could pee on dead bodies from a terrorist training camp.

 

[Strange Looking Dog]

Glad to see other people see through Spec Op's shit. It was a mediocre knee-high-wall-shooter with ineffective heart-string-tugging added in for critic cred. The game got way to much praise from the critic crew for no better reason than the building disdain for modern shooters, and the only thing setting it apart from those other games is that it nags at you after it obliges you to press X to murder civilians.

I think critics liked Spec Ops at the time due to it ptresting itself as a generic modern warfare clone when those were all the rage and seeing be a bait and switch was refreshing in a sea of bland uninteresting games

Was it really that much of a bait and switch though? It was also a bland modern shooter, if you turned dialogue and subtitles off you would have a similar experience to it's contemporaries.

Either way, some nebulous pro-war message in modern shooters aren't the reason that they're shitty; modern shooters are shitty because they're tedious exercises in hiding behind furniture for minutes at a time.

 

[verissimus]

What about chapter 13 in FF15? Does that count?

 

[Recoil]

In the tomb raider reboot c. 2013 or so, there's a rapey bit in the game's intro where Lara gets assaulted by some crazy guy in a tight little cave that she's crawling thru. You have to do a 'don't get raped' quicktime event. It's not explicitly stated but heavily implied and seeing as SocJus was really getting up to speed like never before back then, that scene made for a lot of shitty Kotaku-flavored articles (a redundant statement, I know).

 

[Takodachi]

I love watching gamers discuss Spec Ops: The Line. It reveals who the cultural illiterates are when they start gushing over a mediocre third-person-shooter because its story (badly) rips off some books and movies they've never read or watched.

This level is really controversial to my penis.

MAH NEGRO
I'm guilty of jacking off to Custer's revenge at least once.

 

[A shitty ass clover]

I love watching gamers discuss Spec Ops: The Line. It reveals who the cultural illiterates are when they start gushing over a mediocre third-person-shooter because its story (badly) rips off some books and movies they've never read or watched.

Quoting Yahtzee "You gotta like war shooters, to get to play the war shooter long enough to get to the bit where it punches you in the face for liking war shooters"

altough it was pretty bland till that point. never finished it.

 

[Recoil]

I'm guilty of jacking off to Custer's revenge at least once.

Spoiler: Have some paul robertson

 

[MAPK phosphatase]

There's no such thing as 'civilians', there's 'enemies that haven't been given guns'.

I've come across your kind once before.

 

[TokiBun]

Tree Tops in Spyro 1 is a huge pain in the ass.

 

[Dom Cruise]

Personally I liked Spec Ops: The Line a lot.

Apocalypse Now for the War on Terror era, that was a great idea and I thought it was very well done.

Anyone who says the water temple level in OOT is just bad at games.

What's not tedious and a pain in the ass about it? You can know what to do easily, doesn't make actually doing it any less tedious.

In the tomb raider reboot c. 2013 or so, there's a rapey bit in the game's intro where Lara gets assaulted by some crazy guy in a tight little cave that she's crawling thru. You have to do a 'don't get raped' quicktime event. It's not explicitly stated but heavily implied and seeing as SocJus was really getting up to speed like never before back then, that scene made for a lot of shitty Kotaku-flavored articles (a redundant statement, I know).

That was one of the first times I can remember genuine SJW outrage over games, this was also around the same exact time as the outrage over the witch's giant titties in Dragon's Crown.

But that's what I liked about Tomb Raider 2013 was it was a more "realistic" take on Lara Croft in the vein of Batman Begins or Casino Royale, not really a SJW take on Lara Croft, Lara was still pretty damn attractive, she was just wearing more regular clothing and she had to struggle to survive, this was not some Mary Sue character who's the best at everything and victory always comes easily, there was real danger and stakes.

You got the impression that this Lara could become the booty shorts and tank top wearing, two gun toting Lara, but she was green, this was her "origin story"

But as the rebooted series went on they made Lara less attractive and the whole thing more SJW styled.

 

[MrTroll]

What's not tedious and a pain in the ass about it? You can know what to do easily, doesn't make actually doing it any less tedious.

The only thing that makes it tedious is having to constantly equip and unequip the iron boots. But that's not the temple's fault, it's the fault of the fuckface developers who didn't make the iron boots a c-item (preferring to reserve limited inventory slots for such critical items as ice arrows, bombchus, and Farore's Wind instead).

 

[Clop]

As much as I love Cave Story, I fucking despise how Sanctuary shakes constantly. In general I hate games requiring reactionary inputs and dodging pixel bullets while fucking shaking. Most of them at least let you turn that shit off now, but Sanctuary will never stop shaking.

Like... it's a videogame, calm the fuck down. You'll never be a book or a movie, your artistic value is that of a hangout at a strip club at best.

You could always play something that isn't shit. Books and movies will never be an interactive medium, therefore they will always objectively be less than a game can be. If you keep paying to read/see Twilight, you're going to get more garbage like it, and if you keep playing trash like Overwatch, there's going to be a dozen more of that next week.