The 6 Most Politically Incorrect Video Game Moments
As much as we love Japan, they do seem to be about 30 years behind the rest of the world in the area of political correctness.
And while it may be wrong to stereotype Japan in an article about cultural insensitivity, we can't help but notice their domination of the game industry has led to some hilariously cringe-inducing moments. We're talking about games like...
#6.
Vendetta (1991)
In the Japanese version of this Sega Genesis game, men clad in leather chaps and a bushel of chest hair daintily stroll up to your character and attack. And when we say "attack," we mean "dry hump you from behind."
If there are two of these leather-clad enemies on the screen simultaneously, the other one will sometimes hump a light pole until the bulbs drop on his head, bludgeoning him.
Gay or straight, if two people are so horny that they're willing to risk their lives to have intercourse with a light pole, wouldn't common sense dictate that they'd just have sex with each other instead? And what does that say about the one guy who continues to probe a stranger's anus while he watches his friend die from blunt trauma to the skull?
Maybe he's just afraid of the poison that seems to coat the genitals of gay men in Konami's Vendetta universe (your life bar drains substantially with each thrust of the attacker's hips).
Almost As Bad...
While Vendetta really set the bar for unrealistically flamboyant portrayals of male homosexuals, Sega's Bare Knuckle 3 (Streets of Rage 3 in the US) couldn't back down from the challenge. Thus, they gave us Ash.
He slaps. He cries when he's defeated. He strikes effeminate poses, covers his mouth while giggling and bends his knees inward, all while looking every bit the Village Person.
Yet, you can measure the progress of Japanese game developer attitudes toward homosexuality by the fact that in a game made three years later, the gay character no longer humps you to death.
#5.
Square no Tom Sawyer (1989)
Nintendo of Japan licensed Square no Tom Sawyer (Square's Tom Sawyer), a role-playing game developed by the future makers of the Final Fantasy series, meaning that it had met Nintendo's rigorous standards of quality. . . blackface and all.
Square no Tom Sawyer was never released in America, probably because an acute Square executive commented, "Someone, maybe an African-American, may find the blackface on Jim offensive." Hey, better safe than sorry, right?
Almost As Bad...
In 1989, SETA combined racism and incoherence to get The Adventures of Tom Sawyer for the Nintendo Entertainment System.
Thankfully, there is no blackface in this adaptation. SETA opted to replace all of Twain's subtle commentary on racial inequality with giant alligators, zombies and gnomes. But then, Tom lands in what is either an underground lava cave headquarters, or Hell itself. There he encounters an American Indian straddling an enslaved brontosaurus:
A few well-thrown projectiles were enough to send the filthy Injun to a watery death. The game then cuts to a young boy apparently reading these adventures in a book, his face frozen in a priceless expression of childish wonder.
"What the fuck did I just read?"
#4.
Gekisha Boy (1992)
In Gekisha Boy, a young man, still reeling from the deaths of his parents, finds himself failing photography school. The dean offers him a last-ditch test where his academic career hinges upon the quality of the unusual snapshots he takes.
According to Gekisha Boy, this includes: flying saucers, wind gusting up a decades-deceased Marilyn Monroe's dress and all sorts of African-Americans.
Maybe you could forgive the idea of photographing blacks as if they are exotic creatures to be glimpsed in the wild, but you'd still have to deal with the fact that in the world of Gekisha Boy, African-Americans only come in three varieties: street pimp, prostitute and Michael Jackson.
Almost As Bad...
A word of advice to all future game designers: If one of your characters has even a passing resemblance to Mickey Rooney from Breakfast at Tiffany's, you have a problem. Witness this cutscene:
If you're thinking the graphics there are a little too good to be from the "They Didn't Know Any Better" era of old school gaming, you're right. This is 2003's Kung-Fu Chaos, for the Xbox. And we can't blame Japan for this one, since it's from Cambridge-based developer Ninja Theory.
Thankfully, their attempt to use technology to break new ground in cringingly awkward character interaction mercifully cuts off soon after the "tiny sausage" jokes begin.
I still have to give it to Two Crude Dudes by Data East. First, it was I believe between the 80's-90's for this games release, so the times were fairly unforgiving on details in games. Many gamers will recall for example a large controversy where the game Dr.Mario was cited for the promotion of recklessly using medical drugs (clearly silly of course when one notices that the most popular street drug now are prescription pharmaceuticals and meth solutions derived from that?. Anyways, in the arcade version of Two Crude Dudes,a psuedo-spin-off of the game Bad Dudes, aside from a few other racy things present, the wall crawling opponents...well, they s**t on the player. Literally. Their anuses open up and large brown feces drop on and injure the players. When it was ported to the home system, in this case the Sega Genesis, the " anus open " animation was removed and the fecal matter recolored white. I'm still not sure what they thinking when they released that nonsense. This game was All-Ages FYI.
ReplyExcept for #1, these are issues of political correctness if you're a true, flaming liberal retard.
Reply Hide All See All 3 RepliesIt's nice to see that the first website you visited was cracked when you stepped out of your time machine from the 40's. Welcome to the 21st century where we have evolved from racist, homophobic pricks to become normal people.
Zachary132 is a liberal. Point proven
Also, they are political correctness issues if you're not a true, flaming liberal retard. This is stated in the title...and the definition of political correctness, and people who decide what words mean. And I KNOW, I really do. See, I may be liberal, and I may in fact, be retarded, but I am not flaming.
Huh, somehow I'm missing what the issue is with GTA VC- if the parts about the cubans and haitians are offensive then I'd say it's the whole game that's offensive in general (and Italians have the right to claim that too for the main characters). What makes that one mission more offensive then all the others in the game? As someone who's played the game straight through several times, I'm not seeing that mission as any different then the other ones. Is it the voodoo? The haitians vs cubans? And how on earth is that more offensive then blackface? I'm really interested to know what the thought is there...
ReplyMan, the Punch-Out!! characters are simply so over-the-top, it really doesn't do any harm. Nobody actually believes that Indians can fly on carpets or that Spaniards dance Flamenco all day long. (And c'mon, depicting the Canadian as a savage who trains with bears and squirrels is just plain funny, for instance. I, for one, am German, and I just love the Von Kaiser character with all his Wilhelmine uptightness.)
Reply"What the f**k did I just read?"
ReplyHa!
The Wikipedia article for Custer's Revenge says Andrea freakin Dorwkin protested it. I guess insanity attracts insanity.
Oh, and according to #1 it's OK to hit men but hitting women is sexist.
Reply Hide All See All 8 RepliesI see you haven't quite mastered third grade-level reading comprehension yet.
He didn't say that. Compare those women to the man, for one. There's an obvious size difference. If a woman attacks a man, yes, he should definitely defend himself in whatever way possible. But in general, hitting someone smaller than you is never okay. Women are -usually- smaller than men, but not always. If they wanted to show men and women fighting, they should have made them closer in size. That would have made the issue a lot less... well, of an issue.
I agree with Pug here. Women are always using the whole "US WOMEN ARE JUST AS STRONG AS MEN! WE CAN DO ANYTHING YOU CAN DO, BUT IN HEELS!" Which I agree with, as I've always seen women as equals. But, if women are always saying that (which yes, they are) then how come you cant hit a girl? It's always "We're stronger than you!" but ask a girl to do some heavy lifting for you (assuming you're a guy) and you'll get the whole, "I'm not as strong as you are! I'm a girl!". Ask a girl why you cant hit girls but you can hit guys, and they'll say "Because we're fragile!"
Well I dont think women are usually stronger than men but Ive met a few. All I know is I cant shove something the size of a watermelon out of any part of my body nor would I want too. Ive seen it man. Ive seen it. So for that they get super hero status in my book.
It wasn't just because they were women. It was largely about the fact they they were so sexualized, and the violence against them ended up being heavily sexual. That was a big problem that anti-violence advocates were dealing with, especially back in the 80's. Remember that cover of Hustler where it shows the woman being put through the meat grinder? Hitting a woman in a video game is not in itself bad. Hitting a woman in a video game that looks like soft core porn IS bad.
I'm smaller than a lot of guys and I could probably kick their asses
size has nothing to do with your ability to fight
In Cody's defence, not only did Roxie and Poison tend to go at him both at the same time, as seen in the picture they frequently cloned themselves to further tilt the odds. I think I'd put chivalry aside if I where in his pants.
Well, violence against transexuals is a huge problem too.
How is "Punch Out" racist if it included a caricature for basically ever race in the world?
Reply Hide All See All 5 Replies"Hurr, that's racist against Russians," except it's also racist against Whites, Blacks, Indians,...which would basically mean it's in fact equal, right?
Umm... no? Because a) the game didn't actually include a stereotype for everyone, and b) even if it did, having a racist caricature for everyone doesn't mean a game isn't racist, or that it's "fair", unless the caricatures are all the same.
You don't know what "basically" means but use a poorly written ad-hominem about my writing skill.
Failtroll logic.
Um, that would just make it MORE racist, not less racist. For example, if I said "men have to work and women have to raise kids," it would be sexist. It's -equal- because I'm splitting the requirements up equally. But it's still sexist because I'm saying what they should be doing based on their sex.
Everyone being affected doesn't mean no one is affected.
Meh, clouds are racist, what with being white and all.
Except that greygoose's response wasn't an ad hominem attack. Just because you heard your 8th grade English teacher mention it doesn't mean you know what it is.
Circumvent
Reply.
I believe I have an explanation for the bad guys' behavior in Vendetta. They're drunk off their asses. That's it. They're so wasted they don't know a light post from another dude. Wiskey will do that to you.
ReplyI don't think Punch-Out counts. Their character design was not done out of malice or to insult those peoples, it was to A) Be Funny and B) Allow you to instantaneously understand these purposefully simple characters. In the original Punch-Out, they couldn't make very complicated cut-scenes, and couldn't give the fighters voice acting. So, to make each character a character, they were made so that you already knew who they were. They were stereotypes. Take, for example, Glass Joe. His entire life story is spelled out in 8 glorious bits. His name is "Glass Joe", and he's literally never won a single match (a statistic the game lets you become aware of just before the match). As if you didn't have enough doubt about how (on purposely) darkly funny this character is, he's French, which plays on the American and (correct me if I'm wrong) general stereotype that Frenchmen are losers to make you think "wow. This guy has one hell of a s****y career. He'll be a push over". So, using stereotypical ideas already in the head of most of the players of the game, Nintendo used implied narrative to say "If this game was a being-a-pussy contest, this guy would be the final boss"!
Reply Hide All See All 3 RepliesFirst time I've wished I could thumbs-up something twice.
Just because someone uses a racist stereotype for a "joke" rather than out of malice doesn't make it any less racist. It just means that instead of working a little bit harder to define their characters, the people at Nintendo decided they would just rely on harmful, racial stereotypes in order to make their jobs easier.
when are people going to understand that everyone is racist, everyone
wow. just wow.
Replychrist, why don't we just find the developers of custers last stand and publicly hang them then pull their pants down? Give it a rest already!
ReplyIt remains a mystery why all the countries in the world should uphold the American policy about stereotypes (which, as even Americans themselves admit, is sometimes exaggerated, ill-applied and tends to shift).
ReplyIf you are LITERALLY ashamed when looking at a blackface character or a Rocky Horror-style gay (created without malice of course) - that's your problem, not others'.
...by "your problem" I mean local peculiarity, like Germans' attitude towards WWII-related themes (there is a heavily-enforced media policy towards that to this day, dutifully perpetuated).
What idiotic world do you live in where caricatures portraying blacks as subhuman beasts with distorted features and gay men as rapacious degenerates who will literally rape you to death are "created without malice"?
As a white, 35 year old, straight male I found none of these examples offensive.
ReplyThis was a parody comment, right? Right?
I just found them ridiculously funny
Give these guys a break. The nerdy programmers only left their parents basements about once a year. They weren't used to females or people whose skin wasn't pasty white. They only learned about the opposite sex and people of different races from TV shows and porno videos. As Oprah says, when you know better, you do better.
Reply Hide All See All 5 RepliesAre you an a*****e or just an idiot?
Oh great, another nerdy programmer stereotype! Just what this world needs. Man, some people are so insensitive.
Lmao at all the thumbs downs DLS is getting from the nerds who aren't bothered by hateful portrayals of other people getting their panties in a twist at programmers being called shut-ins.
Pathetic AND hypocrites! Who knew?
So, Greygoose... You're saying that people who thumbs-downed this guy are not only programmers who are offended, but also the people responsible for all of the hateful stereotypes portrayed in the above article? You can call them all "pathetic" but you've probably played a game or two in your life, and alot of work probably went into creating it. You look at these 6 examples, and when you compare them to all the games ever made, it's not so easy to generalize all programmers as hateful bigots, is it?
I was thinking about Kicking your ass for saying something retarded, then I remembered the title of the article.
clever guy
Sports Champion for PS3 isn't all that great on the stereotypes, either.
ReplyI like the vendetta one. xD
ReplyYeah, men shouldn't be fighting women! Then there's a chance a woman may actually manage to beat a male in said fight! Everyone knows females aren't capable of doing anything other than cooking, cleaning, or making babies, right 1989 type people?
ReplyBesides, if the period's game developers had included women, they would have been programmed to just stand there while the main character rained blows down on them, then they'd scream "It's nothing! I just fell!" after they were defeated.
Actually that's a lie, I think that 1989 would be a little too modern for that, but maybe if it came out a few years earlier...
I get the feeling there's something else on your mind.
Kung Fu Chaos was an amazing game. And the whole thing was designed to be a giant joke.
ReplyNinja Fu Hiya, Master Sho-Yu etc.
Is it bad that i kind of want to play every one of the games listed now?
Reply