Games you're embarrassed by

[Ste Pickford]

My missus never watches me play games, but I've found myself explaining to her what happened in various Yakuza Like A Dragon side quests, and I kind of wish someone was watching me while I played them.

[wev]

4 hours ago, Jamie John said:

I don't know if "embarrass" is the right word, but there's definitely games which make me cringe, mostly Japanese games which feature perving on underaged girls: Yakuza, Persona, even Phoenix Wright. These are all games I've enjoyed but ones where I have to try to ignore the perviness. The Switch Fire Emblem game, where you're encouraged to seduce your students, was a step too far for me, and a bit part of why I ultimately abandoned it.

 

I've never really understood the justification for that, particularly in Japanese games with a certain aesthetic. I know some people try to hand wave it away by muttering about how the sexualisation of young women is so woven into anime culture that to try to remove it is akin to cultural appropriation, or some such bollocks, but I can't say that argument has ever really held much water with me. Interestingly, I know a lot of people were repelled by Catherine when it first came out, but in that game the sexualisation was actually a theme that the narrative confronted, as opposed to just being there for some incidental titillation, like it is in the above-mentioned games.

 

Also, iirc, Catherine is all adults? Though I also remember the way Erika was treated was really shitty

[Jamie John]

2 minutes ago, wev said:

 

Also, iirc, Catherine is all adults? Though I also remember the way Erika was treated was really shitty

 

I can't remember, to be honest, although I do seem to recall how the game essentially confronted the player character for being a perv.

[Capwn]

I wouldn't normally buy FarCry games but I essentially get them for free so usually try them out. 6 is way better than 5 but it's so cringe to listen to. Just constant cussing. I wish there was a way to create a variation of the audio track that cuts swearing but that would obviously be too costly.

 

 

[deerokus]

Train Sim World. Love those things.

[smac]

2 hours ago, strider said:

Lollipop Chainsaw. Some of my wife's female friends weren't impressed by it at all when a group of them came over. It's pretty much the only time I've felt embarrassed about my passion. (That's from an actual game point of view. Plenty of reasons to be embarrassed about the industry itself.)

 

Yeah, the camera positioning when she chainsawed through doors basically had you looking up the character's skirt as she bent down.

[Kryptonian]

I was playing Metal Gear Solid V and my wife was on her way home. I must’ve done something that triggered a cut scene with Quiet rolling about in the rain or something, I couldn’t tell you the details as I was trying to skip it and look out for the car pulling onto the drive. No need for it at all.

[Calashnikov]

6 hours ago, Dark Soldier said:

Yep.

 

Absolute wankfantasy shite glossed over by fan boys screaming 'combat depth'. Actually hate that series.

What if you’re a gay guy who fucking loves Bayonetta games to the extent that you actually got a job making them? Asking for a friend. Genuinely.

[teddymeow]

6 hours ago, layten said:

I bought this Beach Volleyball game for the gameplay, honest.

 

Beach Spikers by SEGA? It did play well, to be fair.

[therearerules]

The Zero Escape series are impossible to reccomend to anyone not on this forum without caveating that in each part of the trilogy at least one of the female cast is just wearing a bra. I mean, essentially all Japanese visual novels tbh.

[Qazimod]

I'm embarrassed by how much time I spent with Animal Crossing before I sold my DS collection. "So what do you do in the game?" Uh...

[Oz]

I remember putting my Nintendo ds away in my commute to work as I was getting closer to the office. I was playing yoshi’s island at the time. I had this feeling that given my age and the way I look I would be giving pedo vibes to my coworkers. 

[JoeK]

I found the death sequences in the Tomb Raider remake to be some of the worst torture-porn-esque garbage imaginable. Most games I'm more than happy with whatever gore the thing throws up, but that's usually in a game that is knowingly taking the piss out itself, or done in a distinctly over the top way - Doom 2016 and Eternal are two examples where it's just wonderfully funny. 

 

But, seeing Lara die in the most hideously graphic ways seemed utterly pointless, and I could never see the reasoning behind it. Unless the graphic designers just really hate women, and/or love seeing people die in as brutal a way as possible. 

 

Awful, cringe-worthy stuff and thoroughly embarrassing.

[FuntimeDave]

44 minutes ago, Kryptonian said:

I was playing Metal Gear Solid V and my wife was on her way home. I must’ve done something that triggered a cut scene with Quiet rolling about in the rain or something, I couldn’t tell you the details as I was trying to skip it and look out for the car pulling onto the drive. No need for it at all.

Same game I think.  Explaining the first 20 mins where you are in the hospital.

 

My wife like others rarely sees me playing games but managed to catch this exciting adrenaline fuelled reflex testing gaming moment.

 

Luckily my LSD kicked in and I was now watching whales in the sky and all was good

[Stopharage]

"Why are you still working on spreadsheets at this hour?"

"Errrr, it's errrr, a game."

 

Spoiler

 

[ChewMagma]

Fortunately my wife already knows I'm a fucking dork.

[Steve McQueef]

Try playing Tomb Raider (2013) at any decent volume, without someone thinking you're a pervert. 

[DarhkFox]

2 hours ago, Steve McQueef said:

Try playing Tomb Raider (2013) at any decent volume, without someone thinking you're a pervert. 

 

If you think that's bad then dead by daylight will blow your mind! Honestly sounds like the characters are having sex when healing each other.

[layten]

4 hours ago, teddymeow said:

Beach Spikers by SEGA?

Oh, my sweet summer child.

[Zio]

5 hours ago, deerokus said:

Train Sim World. Love those things.

 

My girlfriend knows I play Densha De Go on the Switch. Somehow that doesn't bother me... I've even streamed it to Twitch in the past.

 

But I wait for her to go out for the day and set my Steam presence to "Offline" before I'll load up Train Sim World.

[nakamura]

Densha Densha Densha-sha! Densha, Densha, Daisukiiiiiiii!

 

Sorry an old tune on my daughters dvd when she was about 3! 

[Monkeyspill]

There was an issue of Edge which had a close up of one of the Dead or Alive volleyball girls’ torsos on it. I made sure not to leave that lying around.

[skondo]

Many years ago my wife (then girlfriend) used to pick up Edge from WH Smith for me. She was extremely underwhelmed when she bought the Kasumi Dead or Alive Volleyball issue.

 

On recommendation as it was ‘funny’, I played a Senran Kagura game. I played it for about a couple of hours and while there were a couple of lines that were amusing, I couldn’t keep playing. Glad Mrs Skondo was out when I played that.

[chris on the moon]

18 hours ago, Jamie John said:

 The Switch Fire Emblem game, where you're encouraged to seduce your students, was a step too far for me, and a big part of why I ultimately abandoned it.

Three houses is weird as fuck and embarrassing, but you can't seduce your students in it. It does feel and look like you are though, and takes playing through basically the whole game to realise that it's not as bad as it looks.

[Jamie John]

45 minutes ago, chris on the moon said:

Three houses is weird as fuck and embarrassing, but you can't seduce your students in it. It does feel and look like you are though, and takes playing through basically the whole game to realise that it's not as bad as it looks.

 

Fair enough - I didn't get far enough into it to see! I distinctly remember there being a focus on a girl's clevage in one of the opening cutscenes, though, so that rang alarm bells straight away, and the bits where you can take them out for tea were...weird. Definitely wouldn't want the wife walking in on me playing those bits. This sort of shit:

 

 

It's a shame, because I loved the 3DS FE games and don't remember anything quite so overt in those, but that could be rose-tinted specs.

 

Edit:

 

Actually, the character in the pic above is supposed to be older, IIRC, so that undermines my point some what, but there were definitely lots of very thirsty young ladies in that game (thirsty for tea and other things). It was all a bit much.

[Benny]

Having played and loved Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward, I thought I'd try AI: the Somnium Files.

 

It was so full of pervy anime shit undermining the writing in it at literally every turn I think I cringed my way half around the world and back.

[Unofficial Who]

15 hours ago, Qazimod said:

I'm embarrassed by how much time I spent with Animal Crossing before I sold my DS collection. "So what do you do in the game?" Uh...

 

You've just reminded me of a moment from 20 years ago I've probably posted about before.

 

My then wife and I were really into Animal Crossing. And she was upset at a trade with one of the villagers gone wrong where she had traded away some nice furniture and gotten something shit in return.

 

So I sat down and painfully and slowly wrote a letter that went something like "Dear (whatever it's name was). You made my wife terribly upset. If you show your face again I will fuck you up for life. Have an apple. Love UW."

 

My wife and I had a good laugh about it and then forgot about it.

 

Fast forward a week and my friends are over trying out my new Gamecube and one of my friends started playing as a new villager. From the other side of the room I see this shitty little animal trundle over to her and cheerfully say "UW is my bestest friend in the world He's always writing me letters! You should see the lovely letter he sent me last week!"

 

I laugh now but at the time I wanted the ground to swallow me up!

 

[Alex W.]

17 hours ago, Down by Law said:

Dead to Rights (the original one) I LOVED this game when it came out, imported it for the xbox way back in 2002 when i had a US machine. I was 17, super into John Woo / HK style action at the time and this was hard as nails, had really loud, tense and exciting gun battles so I was so excited to replay it on my One X last year.

 

Anyway, there's a pole dance mini game on the 2nd level and it is so out of place compared to the tone of the rest of the game it's just flat out bizarre. It's like someone hire up said 'we have an M rating so stick some softcore in there for good measure' it wouldn't be so bad if it was just a short segment but it goes on for like a full 5 minutes. 

 

 

So embarassing. Can't ever go back.

 

 

On the up side, I’m pretty sure that PS2 era “mature” games’ strippers directly inspired the Necromorphs in Dead Space.

 

(Was it a technology limitation or did having to draw a sexy lady break the animators’ brains?)

[JamesC]

A huge proportion of the embarrassment in this thread seems to be caused by dodgy over-sexualisation in Japanese games which leads me to think they should cut that shit out. It must be costing them sales (in the West at least, maybe it boosts sales in Japan sufficient to make it even).

[Spacehost]

It's the combination of the fact someone's going to walk in on the worst part of the game, and that non-gamers assume the entire game is the bit they've seen, right?

 

So you're not playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, you're playing Pripyat Dog Stabber 3000.