From twists that were so bad that you couldn’t help but get angry, to being misled in every way possible, we count 10 of the biggest WTF moments in gaming.
10 – Fallout 3 – Tranquillity Lane,
- So chances are you’ve played quite a bit of Fallout at this point, you’ve dicked around in the wasteland collecting several metric tonnes of empty bottles just-in-case, because you’re not OCD, you’re just making sure you don’t miss anything cool, like one of those random events you’ve heard so much about, so when the theme changes and the colour goes to black and white you’re already a little unsettled.
- I mean, it’s more than obvious, if not outright told to you that it’s all a simulation but you know it’s a Matrix style thing so you die in there, you die in real life and if that isn’t a massive red flag I don’t know what is, so you wander around for a bit and everything actually seems pretty nice, albeit a bit grey, but hey, grey ain’t that bad.
- But then you meet the little girl, or as I like to call her, the little girl because I have no creativity, but really she’s evil as all buggery, she’ll try to make you kill everyone else in the simulation and it really seems like you have no choice but to do this unless you explore, which you should and probably did do, but the thing is, using the supposed good karma option actually kills everyone too, but it’s a mercy killing so you character walks away guilt free.
9 – Metroid – Samus,
- If you played this back in the good old days, back when the sun was pure, the TVs were fuzzy and an app was a cute way of saying an apple, you would surely know why I am talking about this here experience, because I tell you what it was something that had yet to be seen on the best delivery system: cartridge.
- But in all seriousness, retro-games are really fun and all, but god damn did the past suck, I don’t care what you say, broadband is not worth turning your back to.
- So yeah, basically the whole time I actually thought that Samus was a robot, most people apparently thought it was a guy, but it looked like a robot to me, I mean, why wouldn’t you want to play as a bad-arse robot?
- At the end I was pretty surprised, I mean who would have thought that Samus was a bird and not a robot? Certainly not I.
8 – Super Mario Bros. 2 – The End,
- In retrospect, it should have been much more obvious that the entire game was a farce, I mean it played nothing like the original, the main goddamn mechanic of Super Mario Bros. was that you could jump on pop and to make them drop then all of a sudden we got turnips and that asshole who kept telling me the princess was in another castle?
- But I was a kid, I didn’t know better, I read Goosebumps and actually felt scared after doing so, but even though I enjoyed the ‘masterful’ writings of R.L. Stein I didn’t take the ‘it was a dream he whole time!’ thing well at all, I mean, it’s not like Mario is a narrative experience, but still, if I was dreaming I would have had robots and a monster that looked suspiciously like a man in a suit chasing me through molasses, but no Mario dreamed about turnips and quite possibly didn’t dream of himself throughout the entire night.
7 – Call of Duty 4 – Nuke,
- Going to be perfectly honest with you right now, I don’t actually like CoD, I’m not that much a fan of the military shooter scenario, they put on the premise of realism, but then they smear jam all over your eyes like you went to an American school and refused to call it jelly.
- But with that said, I did give CoD 4 a go and at least got to this point, I didn’t really pay attention to the story much, but I did know what was going on enough to notice that, hey my guy’s actually dead, as in properly dead and now I’m a different dude.
- I was impressed, they did something that was completely unexpected, usually the good guys win or at least they die with a heroic sacrifice, but this man was just smeared into ghoul juice without any of that faffing about, he died without really going through a full character arc, it’s doubly good when you compare it to the previous CoDs which didn’t really have stories at all.
6 – Arkham City – Joker,
- I was actually pretty bemused when they brought Joker back. It’s not like Batman of all people has a shortage of good villains, I mean sure I like him, who doesn’t? So I was kind of grumbling the whole way through the game and I actually felt bad about my attitude towards the game.
- Well actually the whole Arkham City concept was pretty contrived if you ask me, but even still it’s a game I’m willing to suspend disbelief at least a little.
- So when it turned out that good old Mark Hamill actually was dead the whole time I was completely taken off guard, sure he might as well have been in the game and it was a bit of a cop out, but I don’t hold it against them.
- Any game that manages to both pleasantly surprise me and tell me I’d been silly the whole time makes me like it all the much more, and it really was a WTF moment.