• 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 were pure, the TV was 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. 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.
