Has a game ever disturbed or offended you? (possibly NSFW)

[brunoafh]

things like Medal of Honor: Warfighter running a promotion that puts real guns into people's hands.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWS-FoXbjVI

[Luke]

Luke, i think you are being unfair to Maher, Manhunt, and Hostel. Each has more than shock to offer...

That's definitely possible.

My "beef" is that although Maher may be incredibly insightful he's always a stooge when I see him on tv. He'll trade character for ratings. I would more than enjoy sharing a cup of joe with the guy and discussing his views on politics, but tv Maher can take a long walk as I'm concerned.

Manhunt is a GTA side quest that gets repetitive after the first fifteen minutes. It certainly has its own style, but the game's soundtrack is basically a guy breathing heavily and with so many dark spaces the stealth aspect of the game isn't very challenging.

HOSTEL; I didn't care for it, but it isn't all torture porn so you got me there. I won't back pedal on saying that I don't think it was good and I also think it could have been much better.

[Gamerforlife]

Two games off the top of my head I found a bit offensive. Shadows of the Damned with its rather mysogynistic (in my opinion) treatment of Paula and that No Russian level (though, it's not like I would have ever played a Call of Duty game anyway since I don't like games like that). I also found it offensive that someone made an indie game about the Columbin shootings. As offensive as those games are to me, I'm not exactly bothered by their existence. I believe in freedom of expression and always find it sad when things are censored or banned from a country. You're stifling someone's creativity and depriving others from experiencing whatever that artist wanted to convey to his/her audience. Now whether or not I like or agree with what that artist is presenting, I won't take away his right to do it.

I haven't played a lot of games that offend me. A game has to really push things far to offend me and I think the above games do that. I laugh at how upset people get over a game like Lollipop Chainsaw. Seeing a girl in a cheerleader outfit get people so upset is funny to me, especially when she's wearing more clothes than most video game females and is more realistically proportioned as well. Have these people never played an Itagaki game?

I just finished Alice: Madness Returns and the Dollhouse level really left me creeped with all of its themes of childhood abuse and prostitution farms. It was sick and fascinating all at the same time, but I think it was carried by the work of the visual artists and the gameplay only minimally added to the content, which I'm never sure really should have been tackled in this game in the first place... or maybe it should... I appreciate the ambitiousness of the concept and I think they did have something to say, but there were also times when I think they just wanted to be fucked up for the sake of being fucked up. And it's really weird to be platform jumping through some pedophilic nightmare land.

Thanks JT for making me feel stupid as I don't think I even picked up on all those themes when I played that part of the game LOL. I realize now how obvious it all is though. I just didn't take a lot of the visual stuff in that game seriously because it did seem like it was often trying to be effed up just to be effed up

[Erik_Twice]

I remember a scene in Persona 3 made me very uneasy. The (male) characters meet a woman, who is actually a transexual man who tells them he can teach them sexually but after the characters celebrate and accept (Dafuq?) they notice that the operation wasn't well made, they have been tricked! That's a good chunk of stereotipes there!

In fact, the only thing that keeps me from actually assesing that scene as an improptu minstrel show of sorts is that it's so poorly written, so out of character and so silly that I can't really make enough sense of it so as to actually complain about it too much. You can't get any deep understanding from something so shallow.


Other than that, I don't recall much else. Sure, stupid gender roles breaking my inmersion annoys me, but I don't think they fit here or many things would

[retrosportsgamer]

Luke, i think you are being unfair to Maher, Manhunt, and Hostel. Each has more than shock to offer...

I'm a big Maher guy - I don't think he's "stunt" at all. Just my opinion.

[J T]

I just finished Alice: Madness Returns and the Dollhouse level really left me creeped with all of its themes of childhood abuse and prostitution farms. It was sick and fascinating all at the same time, but I think it was carried by the work of the visual artists and the gameplay only minimally added to the content, which I'm never sure really should have been tackled in this game in the first place... or maybe it should... I appreciate the ambitiousness of the concept and I think they did have something to say, but there were also times when I think they just wanted to be fucked up for the sake of being fucked up. And it's really weird to be platform jumping through some pedophilic nightmare land.

Thanks JT for making me feel stupid as I don't think I even picked up on all those themes when I played that part of the game LOL. I realize now how obvious it all is though. I just didn't take a lot of the visual stuff in that game seriously because it did seem like it was often trying to be effed up just to be effed up

There was apparently a fight between EA and American McGee over Alice: Madness Returns. EA was pushing for the already dark game to be more "mature" by adding in more sex and violence. McGee was tired of them pushing this to be more over-the-top-and less tasteful, so he sent them a mocked up art concept for a giant snail shaped like a penis with boobs for antennae and he threatened to put it in the intro if they didn't let him keep his art direction in the way he saw fit. hahahah. That might explain some of what we were picking up on from the game and why it felt a bit shock-for-the-sake-of-shock.

You can see a photo of the penis-snail here. It is obviously NSFW.
http://updates.kotaku.com/post/34684194 ... mature-dev

[Menegrothx]

McGee was tired of them pushing this to be more over-the-top-and less tasteful, so he sent them a mocked up art concept for a giant snail shaped like a penis with boobs for antennae and he threatened to put it in the intro if they didn't let him keep his art direction in the way he saw fit.

Shin Megami Tensei games have demons like that
http://megamitensei.wikia.com/wiki/Mara
http://www.giantbomb.com/profile/eirikr ... /46-15347/

[Erik_Twice]

Shin Megami Tensei taught me why Incubus aren't more popular