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10 Gotcha Moments in Gaming

10 Gotcha Moments in Gaming

Throughout gaming history there have been a few times that we got fooled by the characters we interacted with. Some of them turned out to be bad, some good, but nevertheless, we were surprised when that reveal happened. So much so that entire games have been based on that pivotal moment that the character we came to know turned out to be someone completely different, and sometimes the entire plot hung in the balance. These are a few of our favorites. SPOILER ALERT! If you haven’t finished a few of these games, some of these may come as a shock to you but we had to include them because they were so damned good.

Army of Two: The Devil’s Cartel

Army of Two: The Devil’s Cartel

In The 40th Day , you played as Tyson Rios and Elliot Salem, and when you got to the end you were forced to decide who lived and who died. So it was a bit of a surprise when in The Devil’s Cartel , you found out the man that tried to have you killed was none other than Elliot Salem himself. So not only was the betrayal deep due to your investment in him in the previous game, but he also turned on his own people and caused the deaths of countless innocents. He was such a bastard that by the time you face off with him, you are ready for him to die.

Final Fantasy VII

Final Fantasy VII

The story of Final Fantasy VII was intense enough; you had Shinra to deal with, AVALANCHE, the whole Jenova thing, and then there was Sephiroth – and if you played it, you know what a mother of a fight that was. I mean it was nuts. All kinds of people died in horrible tragic ways. It was really a depressing story altogether. But then you find out that you (as Cloud Strife) are nothing more than a clone. A clone of Sephiroth. Really?! It wasn’t bad enough that dude was tearing the planet apart one piece at a time and trying to hold back Aerith’s Holy spell to stop a meteor from destroying Midgar. Now you are a clone of the guy too?! It was almost too much to take in.

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time

Okay. Link wakes up from a nightmare, saves a holy tree from a curse, it gives him a magic emerald before dying and then sends Link on a quest to stop a mysterious evil man. So Link rides off to Hyrule castle and meets up with Zelda, who tells him about prophecies and Ganondorf and blah blah blah. Then Link goes to find the Master Sword but gets sealed in a room for seven years until he is grown enough to wield the Master Sword. He gets awakened by a sage who tells him how to stop Ganondorf. Then Link meets an enigmatic character named Shiek who guides him to the other sages. After accomplishing this task, Shiek is all like, “Oh by the way, I’m actually Zelda.” So Link is all like, “Whoa, you mean that hot chick from when I was a kid? Man I totally had a crush on you, now let’s go kill us an evil wizard dude.” The end.

Alan Wake

Alan Wake

A brain-blocked writer and his wife schedule a vacation to a beautiful and remote location to try and provide some inspiration so he can finish his book. Then something weird happens. His wife pisses him off. Just kidding, that’s not the weird part. The weird part is when he goes for a walk to clear his head, she gets dragged into the nearby lake by a dark force. This dark force uses creative people to try and free itself, but like all good evil powers, you can’t just be some lame writer. You actually have to make things interesting or else the dark entity gets bored with you and your work. So in order for you to save your wife, you have to write some crazy-ass story and try and bring her back. Oh, then you find out that the evil is actually you and you have to kill yourself to balance things out and save her. Bummer.

Beyond: Two Souls

Beyond: Two Souls

This game is a hot mess. Though a harrowing story of how an ordinary person might deal with extraordinary situations, it felt a little disjointed at times. Until you find out who or what Aiden is, you really don’t understand his role in the story. He just seems to be a guardian angel or a watcher of some sort that helps Jodie get through her very random and unhappy life. It isn’t until you find out that Aiden is the soul of her unborn twin brother that you realize how deep their tragic relationship is. While Jodie was safely delivered at birth, Aiden was strangled by the umbilical cord. But rather than dying completely, his soul was unexplainably tethered to Jodie and grew alongside her as if it occupied a body of it’s own. Though you never fully see his face, Aiden’s presence is felt ever stronger throughout Jodie’s life.

Metroid

Metroid

This original NES title had it all. It had space battles, high-tech weaponry, pirates and aliens and a malevolent evil super-power. As Samus Aran blasts through the many caves of Planet Zebes, you get the feeling that this was a dude of major badass proportions. You are trying to stop pirates from exploiting the little metroids and using them to reach their aim of galactic domination. You end up facing off with some seriously intense henchmen named Kraid and Riley. You do all you can to power yourself up for the final hoorah with Mother Brain, a super-genius, technologically superior evil force that wants nothing more than to enslave the galaxy. After stopping the threat you think to yourself, “Man…I am one badass dude.” Then it happens. The helmet comes off. That’s when you realize that Samus is the baddest chick in the freakin’ universe!

Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag

Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag

SPOILER ALERT! If you haven’t gotten very far in this game or you haven’t played it yet, click to the next page, cause I am about to drop some knowledge on you that caught me a little by surprise. Being a fan of pirate lore, I had read about the rumors of the surviving bastard children of Captain William Kidd. So When James Kidd shows up in the game, I got all excited about being able to play a game alongside the offspring of one of my favorite pirates. So you may imagine my surprise when young James Kidd turned out to be none other than the even more notorious, and much more real, “Bloody” Mary Read. One of the most infamous female pirates of the Caribbean Piratic era. Her exploits were legendary, but now none so legendary as fooling me into thinking she was the lost son of Captain Kidd. Excellent.

Bioshock

Bioshock

This game starts out in such a cool way. You are chilling on an airplane, having you a cigarette when it blows up and falls from the sky. You land in the middle of the ocean. You struggle your way to the surface, only to find that everyone on the plane is dead but you. In the distance you see a lighthouse. So you do what any normal person would do: you swim for it. Only that lighthouse turns out to be the portal to an underwater world filled with mutants and psychos, Big Daddy’s and Little Sisters. As you get to the bottom of the drop in the bathysphere, you witness some little mutant dude kill someone in front of you. Then you hear the voice of someone who appears to want to help you. Atlas gives you helpful hints and keeps you from getting killed, but in the end you find out that he’s the real threat and that you have been brainwashed to be used as his pawn since your birth. What a downer.

Silent Hill 2

Silent Hill 2

James Sunderland is the seemingly kind-hearted protagonist of Silent Hill 2 . He is led to Silent Hill by a letter he receives from his wife who has been dead for three years. She succumbed to an awful disease that remained unexplained until her death. He searched for answers for a long time after her death, but when he received her letter, he wondered if she had even died at all, and went to Silent Hill in search of her. As the game progresses, and after a few brushes with Pyramid Head, you start to realize that maybe James is a little unstable. He seems to have less and less of a sense of self-regard and self-preservation as the game goes on. Then it hits. You find out that he is the one who killed his wife and that his trip to Silent Hill is nothing more than his soul being tormented for her murder. And in one of the endings, he kills himself. Fun times.

Dead Island

Dead Island

I love zombie stuff: TV shows, movies, comic books and especially video games. Smashing my way through hordes of the undead is one of my favorite forms of stress relief. So much so that I actually plan for “zombie-killin’ time.” So when I saw the trailers for Dead Island , my interest was piqued. The more I saw about the game, the more I liked the idea. I loved the idea of drop-in, drop-out co-op modes. I love the idea of playing through the story with friends. I thought that this could actually be the zombie game that I had waited on for so long. Then the game came out. It was riddled with glitches and over-powered enemies. The online portion became more of an encumbrance than an enlightenment. So I guess the real gotcha moment here has less to do with the story or characters and more to do with the fact that we all got duped into thinking this game was going to be awesome. Then it wasn’t. And they even released a sequel that was worse. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice…well, just shame on any of us who bought it.

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