The Gaming Den

So there I was, playing the Streets of Rage Remake fangame and was having a blast. But it turned out it was a literal blast, because when a bad guy got hit by a grenade it literally tore him into two bloody pieces. In what was previously a firmly PG-rated game.

Don't you just 'love' it when games do that? I recall a certain Capcom game set in Warring States China doing something similar with a boss monster.

I was surprised by the level of violence in Metal Gear Rising.

Like, seriously, I wasn't too bothered by Raiden losing an eye. But when he lost an arm, too, and the camera lingered on the bleeding stump? Yeebus.

And I say that as someone who took most of the God of War games with equanimity. The only parts that bothered me were killing Theseus by slamming his head in the door and Hermes' death.

I'd probably find Rising really off-putting if it weren't impossible for me to take it seriously. The game's reveling in gratuitous gore just gets swept up into a perfect storm of raw silly with a bunch of other design decisions.

btw:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4B50TTQhX4

Now, obviously this one isn't gory, but it came as a real shock to me in the "speech-checks-defeat-everyone" ending of F:NV.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdVLMjXjwtA

It is kinda weird how quickly you can acclimate to something like GoW or whatever. People really can accept just about anything as long as you teach them to expect it first. I think my personal example of that principle is probably the xbox Ninja Gaiden. I rarely play particularly violent games, but Ninja Gaiden is structured in a way that kicking a dude and decapitating him in the same motion such that their head and body goes flying in different directions quits being novel very quickly. Meanwhile, it took a while for Rachel's fetish fuel to transition from being "Man, what?" to "Oh, right, this is a Team Ninja game, I keep forgetting" to grim acceptance.

Mario 64

the drowning

OgreBattle wrote:Mario 64

the drowning

This. I recall one of my friends being really freaked out by the drowning animation being so inconsistently grim compared to the rest of the game.

echo

OgreBattle wrote:Mario 64

the drowning

Yup. As a kid it made me stop playing the game for a while. Amazingly I never drowned once until reaching the upper floors and then I went back down to do the eel mission and was so freaked out by the eel itself that I lingered a bit too long then drowned. I couldn't even stand to think about the game for a while. If I'd ever had a nightmare (I haven't had one that I could remember) that would've been the thing that would've induced them.

The ways you could screw up flips and apparently break your neck in tomb raider even while just running about the mansion practicing was always a bit unnerving.

In TR2 you could only do that by attempting to dive but landing on the ground instead of water. But that was... yeah. Her drowning, too. Everything else (shot, mauled by tigers/wolves/bears/dinosaurs, on fire) and she just makes a small moan like she's fed up with it* and then collapses in a fainting type way.

But dive wrong and break your neck? Clunk, motionless, dead. And drowning has all the thrashing about then sudden limpness that you come to expect from real people drowning.

*To be fair, she puts up with being shot way more than I would.

I remember playing Majora's Mask and zipping around the Zora place as the Zora. I hit a bit of underwater structure, and Link shot straight into the air, neatly inverted, and landed right on his head, and it took off two hearts and made me wince the fuck out.

Maxus wrote:I remember playing Majora's Mask and zipping around the Zora place as the Zora. I hit a bit of underwater structure, and Link shot straight into the air, neatly inverted, and landed right on his head, and it took off two hearts and made me wince the fuck out.

The mask transformation sequences. *shudder*

Oh, yeah, those, too. Funny, the Majora's Mask on the Gamecube Zelda Bonus Disc doesn't differentiate the screams...

Oh, yeah, Wizard Fire. The flesh completely fucking melting off of Volov's dragon's bones. And by completely, I mean mostly.

Still, I should have been clued into the possibility for surprise ultraviolence with the ridiculous opening scene. And also on reviewing of a gameplay video, the (thankfully browned-out) corpses of children on the streets. Seriously, how did I miss that shit before the dragon flesh-melting scene?

Heart of Darkness. It has some pretty unsettling deaths, keep in mind that this game was rated E (10 and up) and you play a 12 year old kid.

Deaths

Whipstitch wrote:I rarely play particularly violent games, but Ninja Gaiden is structured in a way that kicking a dude and decapitating him in the same motion such that their head and body goes flying in different directions quits being novel very quickly.

No it doesn't.

Oniken fucking rules. It replicates the feel of a classic NES platformer (including the difficulty) almost perfectly sans a few cheats like multiple parallax scrolling and bigass boss sprites. And as you might have guessed from this thread bump, the ultraviolence.

However. Unlike a lot of the examples in this thread, I found the ultraviolence surprisingly thematic. It made the game feel like a late 80s/early 90s action anime like MD Geist or Angel Cop or Baoh Raihousha or, of course, Fist of the North Star.

Yeah, Oniken gave me flashbacks to the arcade version of Ninja Gaiden and its infamous continue screen.

Wolf Among Us actually shocked me in places.

It opens with Bigby being called into a domestic violence call. The Woodsman is in a drunken rage and slapping around a hooker.

So you have a brawl, the Woodsman gets a broken jaw.

And then

the hooker hits him in the back of the head with his own axe. Him being a fable, it doesn't kill him.

Later on, you get in a barfight and after kicking the other guy's ass, you have the option

to tear off his right arm

Midway through, Bigby

gets his arm broken so badly the bone's split out his skin and his hand's flopping. He sets it himself. Via a quick-time event

Not to mention a few unattached heads and all.

It's a hell of a gorey game in places. And I guess it's shocking because 1) The art style is fairly cartoony/friendly looking 2) A lot of times, shit gets real in a hurry

Maxus, I guess you never read the comics the game was based on. Also it's kinda funny since the guy you fight in the bar is name Grendel.

The Walking Dead Season One. After

Lee gets bit, and you cut off his arm in real-time.

Jesus christ. That was completely out of left field.

Leress wrote:Maxus, I guess you never read the comics the game was based on. Also it's kinda funny since the guy you fight in the bar is name Grendel.

No, I didn't, I've heard of them and meant to look it up.

And yes, I caught the reference.

But it's some seriously "Woah" shit to spring on someone as fast as it comes, even after, oh, God of War, Metal Gear Rising, Preacher, and a smattering of Todd McFarlane.

Having previously not done much research into WH(40K), i was a bit surprised at the pretty gory animations of Dawn of War back when it was first released.

The enjoyment of violence from the third person perspective is one of the weirdest things about people.

Super Metroid. The Crocomire.

Not only was that gruesome and unexpected, it was terrifying as hell.