Home

 › 

Articles

 › 

Top 10 Gaming Controversies (That Were Totally Lame)

Top 10 Gaming Controversies (That Were Totally Lame)

The video game industry is rife with controversy. Every day almost, the online discourse machine is raging, all systems go. Someone is always mad about something. But that anger isn’t always righteous. Despite some controversies out there being totally legitimate, just as many are downright trivial, if not bizarre or sad. Sometimes, even, the controversies aren’t even real, fabricated by bad actors trying to cause trouble. So without further ado, here are some of the lamest controveries in video gaming.

Cuphead and Game Journalism

Cuphead and Game Journalism

A writer at Venture Beat uploaded a video of himself playing Cuphead , a game that is notoriously difficult. The video was literally a gag, the guy was making fun of himself for misunderstanding a part of the tutorial and flopping around like a doofus. This video was meeant to make people chuckle, but instead it sent the post-gamergate crowd into frothing rage over the entirety of game journalism. Apparently, if you’re not good at every video game, you aren’t qualified to write about them in any capacity. Sigh.

Diablo Immortal

Diablo Immortal

Oh no! A team at Blizzard totally devoted to making mobile games, which doesn’t have anything to do at all with the company’s other teams making AAA games for consoles and PC, is making a mobile game! The sky is falling! The world is ending! Mobile gaming is ruining everything!

Actually no, it’s just a mobile Diablo game that will come out, be fine, and not get in the way of Diablo 4 at all. Relax.

Manufactured Outrage over DOOM Eternal’s Offensive Joke

Manufactured Outrage over DOOM Eternal’s Offensive Joke

When DOOM Eternal was being reveiled at Quake Con, the trailer included a gag calling Demons from Hell “mortally challenged,” riffing on corporate-mandated respectability politics and socially sensitive language. Some people cringed a little, and as far as the record showed, one person wrote a feature article calling out the joke as possibly emboldening the anti-SJW crowd’s re-appropriation of certain progresive language. Naturally, this writer predicted the future and the one article caused a manufactured outrage wave, especially on YouTube, with dozens of videos screaming about the nonn-existent hordes of people lambasting DOOM Eternal .

Fallout 76 Canvas Bag

Fallout 76 Canvas Bag

This is a weird controversy, because of how bizarre it is that Bethesda thought this would blow over. Originally, the super special edition of Fallout 76 was supposed to come with a canvas duffle bag. It’s a pretty nice-looking one to boot. When it shipped however, the games came with cheap nylon bags that almost looked like trash bags. What compounded everything is that Bethesda did this without warning, turning the matter into a false advertising problem. The fanbase started talking about taking legal action, and Bethesda ended up getting the canvas bags made anyway and having to spend more money than before. D’oh.

Tifa’s Boobs

Tifa’s Boobs

Everyone’s excited about Final Fantasy VII Remake , except for the weirdos. When Tifa made her long-awaited debut in the upcoming game’s marketing materials for E3 2019, a percentage of the fanbase started getting really mad about her bust. Because, apparently, the low-poly model in the original game was sexier than this one somehow, and that meant censorship was afoot. Square Enix even ended up commenting on the matter, saying her design now incorporates more practical clothing. Why this “issue” needed official comment is beyond baffling.

Jax’s Mortal Kombat 11 Ending

Jax’s Mortal Kombat 11 Ending

Mortal Kombat 11 ‘s plot has a heavy aspect of time travel. At the end of each character’s Klassic Mode story, the winning fighter gets to use time travel to acheieve some sort of goal. In Jax’s case, he uses his newfound time travel allowance to undo the Atlantic Slave Trade and live a whole new life of prosperity. This wasn’t a widespread issue, but look at any YouTube comment thread and you’ll find people trying to make it into one from the “no politics in muh video games” crowd.

Randy Pitchford’s Porn Habits

Randy Pitchford’s Porn Habits

This one is just embarrassing. In the middle of a legal battle involving Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford, it was revealed that there’s a bit of a fratboy culture at the Borderlands developer. This included visits to cornball restaurant/jousting chain Medeival Times, where lots of drinking and rowdiness happened. But on one fateful day, Pitchford left behind a USB drive, which was promptly found and browsed by a random passer-by. Not only did the drive contain corporate documents, but it also had some porn on it, which was included in the lawsuit accusing Pitchford of keeping underage pornography. While that hasn’t seemed to have been the case, Randy did decide he needed to explain what the porn in question was, in the most awkward way possible.

Vagina Bones

Vagina Bones

While a lot of censorship yelling these days is overexaggerated, Nintendo has a long history of changing all kinds of details during localization. Of course, we aren’t talking about an example that has a measurable impact on anything. In T okyo Mirage Sessions , Nintendo had some pelvic definition removed on a character, likely due to her underage appearance. This led to outcry from the usual places, but also a legendary tweet from someone complaining about “vagina bones.” The tweet is still up to this day, and it’s still funny.

Puddlegate

Puddlegate

Sometimes, when a game is shown off at E3 or another big showcase-like event, the fidelity of what is shown is often far better than the final product. There can be several reasons for this, many of them not even related to dishonesty. Stuff happens, especially in game development. But sometimes, the gaming community is so tired of that “downgrading” that happens, that the slightest indication that’s happening is cause for anger.

Take “Puddlegate,” for example. A scene that played out in Marvel’s Spider-Man was shown in new footage that was also shown in earlier footage. Players used a collection of puddles on the floor in the scene to accuse Insomniac of “downgrading.” Insomniac responded by stating things in games change, such as the time of day in the game and the lighting, along with the rearrangement of the water on the ground. Of course, none of that stuff had anything to do with the game’s fidelity.

Fighting Nazis is… Bad?

Fighting Nazis is… Bad?

Since the early 90s, the Wolfenstein series has had one major consistency: Nazi killing. These games are all about our boy BJ, his collection of firearms, and all the pseudo-sci-fi Nazis he uses them on. Shooting Nazis in video games is a time-honored tradition, thanks to the easy villain label on Nazis as a group. The modern American political climate is a trash fire, however, and found a way to make this somehow controversial. When Bethesda’s PR team tweeted out footage of the game paired with anti-Nazi sentiment, this somehow became a huge problem with online gamers. Apparently, a game about killing Nazis using anti-Nazi language in its marketing is… some kind of left-wing infiltration of video games. I know.

To top