5 – Super Meat Boy – Hell Boss,
- I was so angry with this game, by the time I was a third of the way through it I had already learned to ignore the blood remains and ghosts of my mistakes, they were just there to taunt me more and I was bigger than that, I was prepared to let the game’s attempt to make me angry pass over my head.
- But bugger me silly and call me Kelly, they took the meat servings that could have fed the entire world for 100 years and made it into a boss.
- I can’t really express how much I love it when games take something that I considered a disconnect between story and gameplay and actually show that they’re connected, that the developers actually care about their game and that it wasn’t just a way to make me feel inferior about my platforming skills.
4 – Shadow of the Colossus – Oops You’re a Bad Guy,
- Maybe it’s just me, maybe it’s because I played this before I played Ico, but I really didn’t think that the game was actually going to have anything more meaningful than a bunch of really cool puzzle giant fights with a happy ending.
- I mean obviously I’m not alone in not seeing the ending come, but I feel like if you came into this game expecting less story than A Link to the Past you got way more impact out of its ending.
- The fact that it feels so blatantly obvious that it was a trap the whole time after I fucked it all up is all the better, basically like it outsmarted me in the best way possible, I just assumed it was saying ‘I’m just a fun game, sorry about the lack of story’, but no it was going for art and I was staring at my smart phone laughing about this vandal called Banksy getting an exhibit.
3 – Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem – Breaking the Forth Wall,
- This wasn’t the first game to break the forth wall, but it was the first one to do so that actually worked with the feel of the game, don’t get me wrong psycho-mantis was cool as a walrus’s whiskers, but this really added to the fear in the game, it even made me question my sanity at least a little.
- Because when you start having the game mute, or getting a disc read error, or having a girl’s head pop off, you genuinely start to ask ‘is my Game Cube broken, is it part of the game? Or, wait, am I going off my knocker?’
- If any horror game makes you ask that, even for a nano-second it’s doing something so very right and I honestly screamed ‘What the Fuck!’ when the GameCube ‘had an error.’
2 – Spec Ops: The Line – The Ending,
- It isn’t until the ending when you realise just how very fucked up the main character is, I mean a big thing about being a soldier is that if you follow the rules and the orders, you’re not really to blame, sure many people have issues convincing themselves of that, but it’s a big part of it.
- So when everything else is gone from the MC’s life, at least he could think ‘I was just following orders,’ but then they took that away too, turns out he was more fucked in the head than a thirsty camel near a glory hole.
- It really made the game for me, sure the white phosphorous scene was amazingly depressing and poignant, but it felt like just another bad thing this dude is going to have to talk about in therapy, but when the ending came along I couldn’t see any path to redemption this man could take without at least a decade of medication plus therapy and then dedicating the rest of his life to charity organisations.
1 – Metal Gear Solid 2 – Raiden
- Fucking Kojima, he makes some crazy arse stories that are hard not to love, but when he pulls a complete head fake and makes you play as a brand new character without any preparation, while also making you think you get to play as that old bad arse Snake again?
- I genuinely believe that if he didn’t pull this move people would actually talk about the intended WTF moment at the end, but we’re not talking about that because he wanted to fuck with us right from the beginning.
- You even got to play as Snake in the demo, Snake was on the cover, all of the marketing and hype made you excited to play as Snake in a new adventure, it’s a damn shame too because the story is actually really fun if you ignore this moment, but how can you? It’s the biggest what the fuck moment in all of gaming, you can’t just go and ignore it.
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