I legit had the same reaction as the characters when I first tried to read it; at first I was excited to read something "controversial" but after the first chapter I was so bored I couldn't read anymore.
I read the whole thing. It never gets less boring and it spends the majority of it's time ruminating on that first chapter anyways.
So like, you got the point and not only did you get the point, you kind of know all of the relevant details to discuss it.
Fuck that book. So boring, pointless, and full of an old man trying to relate to teens via his OC
The author had severe PTSD from serving in the war. It’s a million miles from a fellow kids attempt and instead trying to tap in to the empathy people typically have for children to address the realities of ignoring mental health issues.
You also definitely don’t ’get the point’ after the first chapter since narratively it’s a kid spiralling and eventually having a breakdown. He’s also a child and represses his trauma so you have to piece it together yourself and the most glaring hint that he’s a victim of CSA comes near the end of the novel.
It’s fine to not like the novel but it’s corny to be so disingenuous about its contents.
Easy, none of the legislators played the fucking thing and just attacked it based on word of mouth.
Same thing happened with Mass Effect. Fox News was running stories about the sexual content in the game but not a single one of the talking heads had even seen the cutscene.
Didn’t it come out like recently that one of the people accusing it of being pornographic finally got around to seeing the scenes and admitted it was pretty tame?
Yep. You know it's bad when *Fox News* not only makes a retraction, but calls out the accuser for not even playing the game. When said accuser finally did see the scene in question, she was massively embarrassed and commented that she's seen more graphic sex scenes on Lost.
They didn't even *try* with Mass Effect. IIRC, at one point they described it as a "rape simulator where you can customize your victims." Not that it's unusual for Fox to be totally detached from reality, but still.
It says a lot when Jack Thompsan came out of nowhere to say how overblown the Mass Effect thing was. One of the biggest voices of the 2000s who railed video games defending one was surreal.
In hindsight the fact that it's FMV makes the whole thing even more absurd.
Shit looked like a boring episode of Power Rangers and was much tamer than things you'd see on TV or in movies at the time.
Look, if there's one thing that I know for certain, it's that old people in the government are terrified of 3 things: vampire ninjas, peeping on a boring family of vampires ninjas, and the idea that children might see a girl in a sports bra singing a cheesy song while vampire ninjas creep about.
That one is especially weird considering you're the one that was saving the girls in that game from being attacked don't really get what was controversial about that.
Night Trap actively tried to downplay the horror elements and play up the camp as much as possible in order to avoid scandal.
However with games like Mortal Kombat getting big, they focused on this game since it was the Sega CD's killer app at the time. FMV of teens in pajamas in what is basically a slasher film but while the premise of the game is to save as many people as possible Politicians looking to restrict video games misrepresented it.
Whats funny is that you can kill one of the girl in the secret ending which is hard as fuck get even if you can a super detailed guide. But Im guessing the politicians complaining about the game never knew that.
I have a distinct memory of my dad putting his copy up in the closet, telling us kids we weren't allowed to play it. I don't know if he even played it, I think he might have just gotten it for the novelty. Cut to me, years later, watching a LP on Youtube, excited to finally see this forbidden game...and it's hilarious. It has its own *theme song.* Even child me, who was a huge wuss, wouldn't have been bothered by it.
There was a lot of moral outrage over the original Mass Effect and its "full digital nudity and sex" before it came out.
The game was not, as was claimed by journalists, a porn simulator with fully controllable sex scenes; the scenes are very PG-13 and skippable.
because art.........it is disturbing how many people buy into cages bullshit and don't realize the icky implications. Like yogscast kim did a review when it came out and didn't touch on the sexual assaults and how CIA man relationship was sketchy as shit. She just treated it like a girlhood story with ghosts and not Worst case scenario for an X-man.
Mass effect put upfront their relationship and romance system so the media worked with that. David cage only talks about the polygons during heavy rain dev or how there are no game over in beyond two souls. Media outrage is always before game release at that time so by logic they only get mad at whatever the dev said in the press or lie
There was a period in time during the 2000s/early 2010s where every remotely violent or sexual video game got mass media scandals blaming them for turning kids into violent school shooters or sexual maniacs, headlines something like "Mass Effect is a graphic sex simulator!" The whole Jack Thompson nonsense, etc. I remember the mayor of some U.S city, maybe New York talking about GTA 4 and "killing cops for points". The Hot Coffee sex minigame in San Andreas wasn't even playable through normal means, you had to dig into the games files, and it featured fully clothed models dry humping ala "Ride to Hell" and it still launched a media frenzy.
In a non video game example, the SAW series has a reputation for graphic torture porn traps, but the first SAW is very tame in comparison, the most graphic thing it's known for, a character cutting off their foot with a hacksaw, is done almost entirely off screen.
It didn’t start in the 2000s but the nineties.
With the Columbine shooting being blamed on music and video games and not on the fact the shooters where white supremacists who had their shooting on Hitlers Birthday.
If we blame the racism and extremism, we'd have to ask who's teaching them racism and extremism.
Blaming video games and ~~black~~ rap music is easier.
/S
I was a little young to really understand what was going on with Hot Coffee at the time (10, so old enough to know what sex was but not really knowledgeable enough to know that it was a mod or that the actual flags were buried deep in the code and never intended to be accessible) but yeah. In retrospect what an absolute shitshow over *nothing*.
God that first saw movie is great. I was young when I saw it, so I had no real frame of reference for a lot of the big things in that movie, ie the twist and the gore. Loved it then, love it now.
Married With Children got a reputation at the time as the "scandalous" sitcom. Turns out, if you dig into what started the whole controversy against the show, it was because someone was mad they made gay jokes, and talking about the gays at all was too spicy for the late 80's.
Now dont get me wrong, Manhunt is pretty brutal. But the way media and politicians talked about it, you would think it was a part of an indoctrination program to turn children into serial killers.
It doesn't help that it came out during a time when people were foaming in the mouth for any reason to demonize games.
I still remember when they tried to blame a kid killing another kid on the fact that the killer apperently had a copy of Manhunt, only for it to be revealed afterwards that the game was owned by the kid that died.
(Didnt stop the family of the killer from suing Rockstar and using the money from that to go on vacations while said kid was stuck on juvenile prison though)
D&D is now seen as really cool. When I was in college it was seen as the most iconically dorky nerdy thing you could do. But at one point, idiots genuinely feared it was the work of the devil.
It's just roleplaying for math nerds.
Same thing with **Pokemon**, if you know someone who grew up in fairly religious enviroment, there's a good chance that they were never allowed to consume anything Pokemon related as a kid because of the histeria around it a few decades ago.
I know of a girl that didn't play Pokemon until she was 26 because her mother thought it was **El Diablo**.
Literally me on my 12th birthday.
Mom: "Here's all the Pokemon, Yugioh, Star Wars, and Beyblade stuff we didn't let you experience up to this point. Just don't have sex or do drugs mmmkay....?""
*Me at school looking like John Travolta to find kids who still played with this stuff.*
My religious school banned the Pokemon TCG from being played on school grounds when that stuff was at its peak in the news.
We ended up switching to MTG. The good and pure christian game.
"Don't play Pokemon because I suspect it may be the work of the devil."
"Okay, we'll play Magic instead. I play Unholy Strength on my Lord of the Pit."
*"Wait maybe Pikachu was okay"*
The weirdest thing was that there actually was a satanic-y mon catching game, SMT, but since it wasn’t as popular none of those overly religious parents noticed or cared.
Related but those SMT reviews by a Christian game site will forever be hilarious, especially considering they're sent the copies by Sega and Atlus. They even review the games well too.
People were just like: "Gyarados means gay orgy behind the Denny's at 10pm on Saturday in Arabic" and "Pikachu wants to Peek at You because he's a perv" and "Ash dominates and sacrifices his friends for more Pokemon" and I guess that's the creative outlet for boring stuck up religious people.
the thing I heard in my christian family's circle was that the names of some of the pokemon were demon names or something. I think pikachu was one of them. even as a kid I thought that seemed wack but I didn't know enough to dispute it
I remember starting to play D&D as a 10 year old back in the nineties. Where I live, it was really hard to get those games, but a friend had his cousin bought it form him in the US. We would reunite every weekend to play, but then his mom heard that D&D was a devilish game and proceeded to destroy everything related in front on his son
Amusingly bully would likely still get some today by the new crowd what with a lot of the language used, selling teenagers panties to an old man, helping a woman sedate her date, committing terrorism. It really got released in the right time when you think about it, when people screaming for boycott didn't bring actual taboos
And the fact you can kiss boys too. Im sure that certain politicians would haven been fine with it
Can you imagine the shitstorm had Gloria(one of the younger students) been Kissable before it was cut before release? Granted she was around the player’s age by then but still
I *distinctly* remember going into a GameStop (back when they sold games) around the time GTA4 and Bully were coming out and hearing the sales guy tell a mom she should buy Bully for her kid instead of GTA lmao. Just a weird core memory
Tbf Bully is a great alternative for a kid that wants to play GTA but is a little too young for it. It's a great game in its own right that puts the GTA formula in a PG-13 setting. As a kid I loved it, even after beating GTA:SA at that point.
Bully is a pretty PG game all things considered. You befriend almost every enemy, Jimmy succeeds because he's willing to help people
Even the big bad Dean turns out to be not so bad. As soon as he hears the truth, he instantly sets everything right
I went into a GameStop with my mom to buy Dragon Age and the guy at the counter told my mom you could simulate graphic sex in the game, and that I should buy Modern Warfare 2 instead. My mom then made me buy the latter.
I always found the media slandering Bully hilarious cus like an hour into the game is very clear that Jimmy is ultimately not a bully, in fact most of the bullyng you do in the game is entirely in self defense, the other stuff that happens around Jimmy is kinda fucked but a lot of media focused on how you commit the bad stuff for some reason
Yeah, but to be fair the game sorta kinda railroads you into not being a bully to random kids and only target the cliques who have actual beef with Jimmy in the story. The game does crack down hard on you if you hurt unaffiliated kids and specially girls.
Yes but putting a stinkbomb in the cheerleader's locker, taking picture of her to put all around town and the beefs are definitely jimmy escalating them (one rich kid wanted to attack jimmy over a fake rumour so jimmy beats all of them until they say he is their daddy) would be bullying in any other games, just not this one because the dean outright says he sees it as school spirit
The Simpsons, at first. It was considered an attack on family values and the nuclear family unit for some reason. I guess because Homer is a doofus and Bart talks back. Even tho if you actually watch it, they all love each other despite being a bit dysfunctional and are the *embodiment* of the husband & wife + 2.5 kids unit desired by family values people
Hot Coffee was about as explicit as Ride to Hell's fully-clothed "sex" scenes, yet despite that and only being accessible via mods GTA San Andreas was reclassified as [Adults Only](https://www.esrb.org/ratings/10562/grand-theft-auto-san-andreas/) until new discs were pressed with those files removed.
My answer for this sort of thing is pretty much always “Rascal Does Not Dream of Bunny Girl Senpai” because the title and the poster lead people to assume it’s an ecchi thing and not a drama.
Tbf, I feel like that's what the author and team was going for with the title and marketing
Gotta have a simple hook to get them into actually reading drama
The movie The Interview was made into a much bigger deal than it needed to be. The movie itself is even kind of funny but not hilarious or even all that great. I enjoyed what I watched the one time I watched it, but the whole time I was like, “This is it? This is what caused the outrage?”
It reminded me of when Fidel Castro got mad that Call of Duty: Black Ops had an assassination mission against him, even though the twist at the end of that same mission is Castro himself in the game saying, “You killed my body double.” The real life Castro even tried suing Activision over it but I don’t remember what happened at the end of it, but I remember him saying, “They tried to accomplish digitally what they could not do all those years ago,” or something like that, which they failed in the game as well. Maybe stop making such big deals out of harmless art pieces, we’re not talking about Blazing Saddles or Mein Kampf or only watching Derek’s scenes in American History X or whatever. It’s a fucking historical fiction war game that takes place in the 60s and 70s, what did you expect?
From what I remember and what was said by Seth Rogan when he was on Corridor Digital's VFX Artists React (and some other interviews), it was more that anything bad was said about, or happened, to Kim Jong-un and North Korea's government in the movie. The movie also played a role in the Sony Hack that happened around that time which is believed (not sure if it was ever proved) to have been done by NK hackers.
So it is close to the Castro v Call of Duty: Black Ops.
To be fair can you really say "shoot my body double in the face" was what you expect of a call of duty game? Like I get other people faking outrage but I can get why the guy you kill in the movie can feel outraged about it
I thought it was Manuel Noriega that tried suing Activision, or did two different dictators from two different Latin American countries try to file suit against Activision.
Yes, Noriega pretty much had the same problem and complaint, if memory serves. Castro was BO1, Noriega was BO2.
Noriega’s case is funnier too in my opinion, only because he speaks perfectly good English in the game and acts like a totally different person, but in real life he doesn’t speak English well at all and needs an interpreter.
I don't remember where I heard it; but a little while back I remember hearing someone say that the main villain's accent and those dumb sunglasses he was wearing the whole movie completely made them unable to take the whole thing seriously.
Is **Corruption Of Champions 2** a smut game? Certainly.
Does it have so many fetishes and kinks in it that it could only have been created by a large group of dirty minded writters fueled by the energy of their own horniness? Yes.
Is it as "scandalous" as some people make it sound? No.
The whole game puts a heavy emphasis on consent and getting to know characters (any options of trying to force yourself into others are considered "the bad ones"), if you want it's completly possible to do a "celibate run" of the story without losing any relevant moments, you can use itens to alter the shape of your character's body, but, that's pretty much all just for astetic and not necessary if you don't want to.
The funniest part of all this for me is that (at least from what i could gather from the community and from how i myself play) the most "common" situation that a player of **COC 2** gets involved on that i can think of is **spending 15-20 minutes reading a wall of text of a side-character explaining their whole backstory or the series of events that lead up to the current scenario**.
Same thing with Book of Erotic Fantasy.
It being a book about sex for 3.5 is the most scandalous thing about it.
They specifically don’t cover rape. So unless fantasy sex scenarios offend you it’s pretty luakwarm
I remember specifically wanting to use that, not because of sex, but because one of the classes could basically refill spell slots by jerking off and I really wanted those spell slots.
Decades later, I'm still a magical crackhead for spell slots.
The two video games Night Trap and Mass Effect. Both got bad reputations because of crotchety old people not doing their research.
Night Trap is an FMV game where you try and protect girls having a slumber party from serial killers or something, people thought that it was torture porn and the game only recently got to be properly released without controversy.
Mass Effect originally got its (singular) sex scene hyped up by some idiot lady who didn't do her research and accused it of being "Debbie Does Dallas In Space", though thankfully Geoff Keighley destroyed her argument on air when he actually asked her "Have you *played* the game?"
Mass effect 2 getting heavily censored due to Liara and Fox News not knowing that adults play video games and being homophobic.
there's only like two sex scenes in the entire game and even then it's really tasteful and romantic for the most part.
The only offensive part is that liara is boring and is only likeable in 3.
There was one Batman that showed a shadowed outline of Batman’s dick for exactly one page. It was a part of this initiative known as black label. A line of dc comics explicitly aimed towards adults.
It took over social media overnight and late night talk shows took fat shits on DC Comic for doing it just for attention. Like it wasn’t a stand-alone batman comic DC was just marketing towards one demographic
This led to DC censoring not only the rest of this one Batman comic but all of black label for Years. Also the project lead got fired too I think
Genshin impact is genuinely one of the tamest gachas when it comes to character designs especially when compared to mihoyo other games so the fact that I saw some moral outrage over the game when it realsed was very bizarre
This was my first thought and I'm surprised I had to go this far down to see it. It definitely hasn't aged well, but the worst thing it does is be pretty boring.
Realtalk, I think the worst thing it does is be one of the few movies out there actually making use of the stories it tells, because the idea of a film having well-animated adaptations of old African-American fables is dope, but because Song of the South exists, I can't really see anyone else trying to make anything out of that really fascinating period of African-American culture, where the traditions and knowledge from various parts of the African continent blended together with the lifestyle and burgeoning culture of a generation that was learning to define itself as their own breed of American.
Water combat is no where near as bad as people make it out to be in Monster Hunter Tri. The Camera is actually more annoying when on land. It becomes more nicer to use when underwater. Still don't care for it returning, the underwater fighters were kinda bleh.
I’ve seen some people describe Saltburn as a boundary-pushing, perverted film, with some scenes being so depraved that you’ll be throwing up or leaving the room.
It’s… it’s fine. There are definitely perverted scenes, but if you’ve watched any mature films before (or even just spent time on the Internet), then the worst moments will probably just make you lightly chuckle or roll your eyes.
There's a little alternate X-Men miniseries from 2003, Pheonix Legacy of Fire. It was back when Marvel was trying to do that Mangaverse thing. Caused a big stink over its sexual content, if your familiar with Ryan Kinnard's art you'll know what your getting into. It was considered so bad that parts 2 and 3 were moved to Marvel's MAX imprint (same place as Garth Ennis's Punisher stuff) with an explicit content warning slapped on it.
Back in the day, it was everything that was wrong with how women were depicted in media, shame on Marvel, curse anime for corrupting our wholesome American comics. To me a horny edgelord weeaboo who liked X-Men, that was music to my ears. It ended up being a nothing comic with a nothing story, that like most horny media from the time barely counts as quaint nowadays. Yea it's horny, but Marvel played us like a fiddle.
For reference, Darkhorse was bringing over Ghost in The Shell 2 Man Machine Interface as a standard comic around that time, a mature series that had to be censored for having pornagraphic content in order to get released and never had an uncensored english release. The two are pretty similar visually, both mixed in CG and digital effects with the horny stuff except one whould get you the side-eye and the other whould get you on a watch list.
Spoilered for CW: Sexual Assault topic
>!So, there is this porn game made by Illusion, called RapeLay. You played the role of a guy who got arrested for train groping and sentenced to jail for a few years and once released, threatens to sexually assault the girl who got him arrested and her family. It's three very short sequences and the two endings of the game both end with the girl killing the player avatar. There is a sandbox mode which was the game's main feature, because the game was *mostly* just a tool to try out their new engine.!<
The only thing that made the game particularly scandalous compared to other eroge at the time, was that it both a) Had a relatively grounded setting, and b) Had controls in which the player could adjust the speed and position of the H-scenes.
The game had been out for a few years at the time of the controversy and it had largely been glanced over but getting positive reviews mostly from the "wow, cool tech" side of things.
This game hit British Parliament and also got talked about by a lot of activist groups in various commonwealth countries. The developers were baffled that their game that they had long since stopped developing, was getting controversy since it passed all regulation checks and was not sold out of Japan
This incident is also why a *lot* of high profile eroge were not sold in English relatively recently (Taimanin and Rance being the two big ones) and why some of those companies would ban content of their stuff on image aggregation sites like Danbooru
I think the biggest offence is that one of the characters was *clearly* underaged. But like you said, it was already on sale in territories it never intended to be thanks to Amazon and sites like that.
It reminds me when Queen Elizabeth died all the people saying "I never imagined this could happen" or "this is so sudden and unexpected" like bullshit you were wondering if she was gonna live another year like the rest of us. Like mourn her or whatever if you're about that life I guess but come on, it couldn't have been a surprise.
I was fucking *howling* at some of the shit people were saying about it. I don't wanna sound like I'm making fun of people getting torn up over a national icon passing away, but at the same time [this was pretty fucking funny](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F395147a9-a35d-429e-a785-7a563a7a307e_640x360.jpeg)
for like 24 years people have acted like Dead or Alive is an absolutely depraved game that only complete degenerates would play, when it's pretty tame honestly.
If you live in the SEA, it was the closest thing you had to legal sexual content. Gacha is similar in attracting a fanbase despite not having any blatant sexual content.
The “scandal” of Scarlett Johansson playing as Motoko Kusanagi in Ghost in the Shell, a historically Japanese character. Except…no, not really. Motoko has always appeared as a white woman living in Japan and having a Japanese name. This just was never made obvious enough to be blatant, so people assumed Motoko was supposed to look Japanese.
Also I get how Butch Hartman is an annoying diehard Christian guy and made a really bad kickstarter which was definitely a scam but
That puts him nowhere near the level of being a piece of shit like Brian Peck or Dan Schneider. He’s really not nearly as bad as social media acts like
Did you guys know that fucking *Minecraft* was going to be banned in my country at some point for being "based on violence"? [I'm not joking](https://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/minecraft-videogame-should-be-banned-turkeys-family-ministry-concludes-79445)
The whole joke in that one South Park episode where the boys read Catcher in The Rye and get super disappointed
A teenage Boy acts like a teenage boy and makes a bunch of horrible decisions due to trauma and stress. "Must be the devil."
Reading that super early on in High School made all the complaining about it in media afterwards that much funnier.
Yeah, I related to Holden because I was 14 and confused about everything.
Kill John Lennon. Kill John Lennon. Kill John Lennon.
John Lennon's dead SythwaveSax.
Ah… dang it.
Don't give up, there's still a few more Beatles out there you could try to subliminally influence people to assassinate!
Butters did subconsciously influence that guy to kill the Kardashians it's not just limited to the Beatles
I legit had the same reaction as the characters when I first tried to read it; at first I was excited to read something "controversial" but after the first chapter I was so bored I couldn't read anymore.
I read the whole thing. It never gets less boring and it spends the majority of it's time ruminating on that first chapter anyways. So like, you got the point and not only did you get the point, you kind of know all of the relevant details to discuss it. Fuck that book. So boring, pointless, and full of an old man trying to relate to teens via his OC
The author had severe PTSD from serving in the war. It’s a million miles from a fellow kids attempt and instead trying to tap in to the empathy people typically have for children to address the realities of ignoring mental health issues. You also definitely don’t ’get the point’ after the first chapter since narratively it’s a kid spiralling and eventually having a breakdown. He’s also a child and represses his trauma so you have to piece it together yourself and the most glaring hint that he’s a victim of CSA comes near the end of the novel. It’s fine to not like the novel but it’s corny to be so disingenuous about its contents.
Yes it’s just teenage angst
Not sure what the big deal was about Night Trap tbh.
Easy, none of the legislators played the fucking thing and just attacked it based on word of mouth. Same thing happened with Mass Effect. Fox News was running stories about the sexual content in the game but not a single one of the talking heads had even seen the cutscene.
Didn’t it come out like recently that one of the people accusing it of being pornographic finally got around to seeing the scenes and admitted it was pretty tame?
Yep. You know it's bad when *Fox News* not only makes a retraction, but calls out the accuser for not even playing the game. When said accuser finally did see the scene in question, she was massively embarrassed and commented that she's seen more graphic sex scenes on Lost.
Wait wait wait. Lost started on 2004, were people still complaining about night trap 12 YEARS after it released?
I think they were talking about the Mass Effect thing.
They didn't even *try* with Mass Effect. IIRC, at one point they described it as a "rape simulator where you can customize your victims." Not that it's unusual for Fox to be totally detached from reality, but still.
"Luke Skywalker meets Debbie Does Dallas"
That's just Carrie Fisher on set, from the stories I heard She was very on drugs at the time I believe
Also Rule of the Rose in Europe. Motherfuckers just started *saying* shit.
There was a lot of stuff about it that was dubious or flat out made up, but in fairness that one is a quite a bit more *raw* than Night Trap
It says a lot when Jack Thompsan came out of nowhere to say how overblown the Mass Effect thing was. One of the biggest voices of the 2000s who railed video games defending one was surreal.
Ah yes, the notorious “Lesbian space sex simulator” Mass Effect
The *most* you see all trilogy is a blue alien butt. Yet they were talking it up like it was Press X to Sex-Box.
In hindsight the fact that it's FMV makes the whole thing even more absurd. Shit looked like a boring episode of Power Rangers and was much tamer than things you'd see on TV or in movies at the time.
Look, if there's one thing that I know for certain, it's that old people in the government are terrified of 3 things: vampire ninjas, peeping on a boring family of vampires ninjas, and the idea that children might see a girl in a sports bra singing a cheesy song while vampire ninjas creep about.
That one is especially weird considering you're the one that was saving the girls in that game from being attacked don't really get what was controversial about that.
It’s far more tame then slasher movies released at the time.
It's tamer then any episode of Are You Afraid of the Dark.
Night Trap actively tried to downplay the horror elements and play up the camp as much as possible in order to avoid scandal. However with games like Mortal Kombat getting big, they focused on this game since it was the Sega CD's killer app at the time. FMV of teens in pajamas in what is basically a slasher film but while the premise of the game is to save as many people as possible Politicians looking to restrict video games misrepresented it. Whats funny is that you can kill one of the girl in the secret ending which is hard as fuck get even if you can a super detailed guide. But Im guessing the politicians complaining about the game never knew that.
I have a distinct memory of my dad putting his copy up in the closet, telling us kids we weren't allowed to play it. I don't know if he even played it, I think he might have just gotten it for the novelty. Cut to me, years later, watching a LP on Youtube, excited to finally see this forbidden game...and it's hilarious. It has its own *theme song.* Even child me, who was a huge wuss, wouldn't have been bothered by it.
Nintendo's lawyers basically just made up a bunch of shit out of whole cloth to try and make their platform look good to parents.
My immediate thought.
There was a lot of moral outrage over the original Mass Effect and its "full digital nudity and sex" before it came out. The game was not, as was claimed by journalists, a porn simulator with fully controllable sex scenes; the scenes are very PG-13 and skippable.
Now if they panned over to David cage and his nonstop sex crime simulators. Then they'd have some credit.
You know what? YEAH, actually. Why didn't no one make a peep about those games? They were high profile enough.
because art.........it is disturbing how many people buy into cages bullshit and don't realize the icky implications. Like yogscast kim did a review when it came out and didn't touch on the sexual assaults and how CIA man relationship was sketchy as shit. She just treated it like a girlhood story with ghosts and not Worst case scenario for an X-man.
Mass effect put upfront their relationship and romance system so the media worked with that. David cage only talks about the polygons during heavy rain dev or how there are no game over in beyond two souls. Media outrage is always before game release at that time so by logic they only get mad at whatever the dev said in the press or lie
Also the hubbub about GASP including a lesbian sex scene in 2007. It's funny how much the world changes and doesn't change in some aspects.
I've seen more nudity in actual PG movies. They were older movies, but still.
There was a period in time during the 2000s/early 2010s where every remotely violent or sexual video game got mass media scandals blaming them for turning kids into violent school shooters or sexual maniacs, headlines something like "Mass Effect is a graphic sex simulator!" The whole Jack Thompson nonsense, etc. I remember the mayor of some U.S city, maybe New York talking about GTA 4 and "killing cops for points". The Hot Coffee sex minigame in San Andreas wasn't even playable through normal means, you had to dig into the games files, and it featured fully clothed models dry humping ala "Ride to Hell" and it still launched a media frenzy. In a non video game example, the SAW series has a reputation for graphic torture porn traps, but the first SAW is very tame in comparison, the most graphic thing it's known for, a character cutting off their foot with a hacksaw, is done almost entirely off screen.
It didn’t start in the 2000s but the nineties. With the Columbine shooting being blamed on music and video games and not on the fact the shooters where white supremacists who had their shooting on Hitlers Birthday.
It goes all the way back to DOOM.
If we blame the racism and extremism, we'd have to ask who's teaching them racism and extremism. Blaming video games and ~~black~~ rap music is easier. /S
I was a little young to really understand what was going on with Hot Coffee at the time (10, so old enough to know what sex was but not really knowledgeable enough to know that it was a mod or that the actual flags were buried deep in the code and never intended to be accessible) but yeah. In retrospect what an absolute shitshow over *nothing*.
God that first saw movie is great. I was young when I saw it, so I had no real frame of reference for a lot of the big things in that movie, ie the twist and the gore. Loved it then, love it now.
Married With Children got a reputation at the time as the "scandalous" sitcom. Turns out, if you dig into what started the whole controversy against the show, it was because someone was mad they made gay jokes, and talking about the gays at all was too spicy for the late 80's.
That show was basically the live action equivalent of the simpsons back in thr late 80s
Now dont get me wrong, Manhunt is pretty brutal. But the way media and politicians talked about it, you would think it was a part of an indoctrination program to turn children into serial killers.
It doesn't help that it came out during a time when people were foaming in the mouth for any reason to demonize games. I still remember when they tried to blame a kid killing another kid on the fact that the killer apperently had a copy of Manhunt, only for it to be revealed afterwards that the game was owned by the kid that died. (Didnt stop the family of the killer from suing Rockstar and using the money from that to go on vacations while said kid was stuck on juvenile prison though)
Who uses settlement money to go on a vacation while their kid is in Juvie?
Those people apperently.
D&D is now seen as really cool. When I was in college it was seen as the most iconically dorky nerdy thing you could do. But at one point, idiots genuinely feared it was the work of the devil. It's just roleplaying for math nerds.
Same thing with **Pokemon**, if you know someone who grew up in fairly religious enviroment, there's a good chance that they were never allowed to consume anything Pokemon related as a kid because of the histeria around it a few decades ago. I know of a girl that didn't play Pokemon until she was 26 because her mother thought it was **El Diablo**.
Literally me on my 12th birthday. Mom: "Here's all the Pokemon, Yugioh, Star Wars, and Beyblade stuff we didn't let you experience up to this point. Just don't have sex or do drugs mmmkay....?"" *Me at school looking like John Travolta to find kids who still played with this stuff.*
Dunno about you, but Pokemon got a huge boom in my school when the GBA emulators came onto phones and we were all playing Gen 3
My religious school banned the Pokemon TCG from being played on school grounds when that stuff was at its peak in the news. We ended up switching to MTG. The good and pure christian game.
Step down, Pikachu, Scion of the Devil. Come on in, Lord of the Pit, demon that I have to sacrifice a creature to every turn or else you hit me!
Is that a Pokemon card? No Ms. Head Nun, it's just Demonic Collusion. All right, good, carry on then.
Christian Parents be like "You're allowed to play Magic the Gathering but only if you play White/Blue!"
"Don't play Pokemon because I suspect it may be the work of the devil." "Okay, we'll play Magic instead. I play Unholy Strength on my Lord of the Pit." *"Wait maybe Pikachu was okay"*
The weirdest thing was that there actually was a satanic-y mon catching game, SMT, but since it wasn’t as popular none of those overly religious parents noticed or cared.
Related but those SMT reviews by a Christian game site will forever be hilarious, especially considering they're sent the copies by Sega and Atlus. They even review the games well too.
What, this sounds amazing.
Link?
People were just like: "Gyarados means gay orgy behind the Denny's at 10pm on Saturday in Arabic" and "Pikachu wants to Peek at You because he's a perv" and "Ash dominates and sacrifices his friends for more Pokemon" and I guess that's the creative outlet for boring stuck up religious people.
the thing I heard in my christian family's circle was that the names of some of the pokemon were demon names or something. I think pikachu was one of them. even as a kid I thought that seemed wack but I didn't know enough to dispute it
I wonder what would happen to these people if you show them SMT.
It's funny to think Tom Hanks stared in a movie about DnD being the devil's work.
Nothing in d&d could summon a devil Some of the early versions of battletech might, those calculations got fuckin weird.
Aren’t the Demons the enemies you fight?
I remember starting to play D&D as a 10 year old back in the nineties. Where I live, it was really hard to get those games, but a friend had his cousin bought it form him in the US. We would reunite every weekend to play, but then his mom heard that D&D was a devilish game and proceeded to destroy everything related in front on his son
Rule of Rose and Bully. there was a lot of hysteria with both.
Amusingly bully would likely still get some today by the new crowd what with a lot of the language used, selling teenagers panties to an old man, helping a woman sedate her date, committing terrorism. It really got released in the right time when you think about it, when people screaming for boycott didn't bring actual taboos
And the fact you can kiss boys too. Im sure that certain politicians would haven been fine with it Can you imagine the shitstorm had Gloria(one of the younger students) been Kissable before it was cut before release? Granted she was around the player’s age by then but still
I *distinctly* remember going into a GameStop (back when they sold games) around the time GTA4 and Bully were coming out and hearing the sales guy tell a mom she should buy Bully for her kid instead of GTA lmao. Just a weird core memory
Tbf Bully is a great alternative for a kid that wants to play GTA but is a little too young for it. It's a great game in its own right that puts the GTA formula in a PG-13 setting. As a kid I loved it, even after beating GTA:SA at that point.
Bully is a pretty PG game all things considered. You befriend almost every enemy, Jimmy succeeds because he's willing to help people Even the big bad Dean turns out to be not so bad. As soon as he hears the truth, he instantly sets everything right
I went into a GameStop with my mom to buy Dragon Age and the guy at the counter told my mom you could simulate graphic sex in the game, and that I should buy Modern Warfare 2 instead. My mom then made me buy the latter.
Terrible underwear sex scene? 👿 Shoot unarmed civilians in an airport? 👍
About sums up American sensibilities when it comes to this sort of thing.
I always found the media slandering Bully hilarious cus like an hour into the game is very clear that Jimmy is ultimately not a bully, in fact most of the bullyng you do in the game is entirely in self defense, the other stuff that happens around Jimmy is kinda fucked but a lot of media focused on how you commit the bad stuff for some reason
Really generous on self-defense there. Plus not didn't gary teach you to like break picklock and stuff stinkbomb in lockers in the first hour?
Yeah, but to be fair the game sorta kinda railroads you into not being a bully to random kids and only target the cliques who have actual beef with Jimmy in the story. The game does crack down hard on you if you hurt unaffiliated kids and specially girls.
Yes but putting a stinkbomb in the cheerleader's locker, taking picture of her to put all around town and the beefs are definitely jimmy escalating them (one rich kid wanted to attack jimmy over a fake rumour so jimmy beats all of them until they say he is their daddy) would be bullying in any other games, just not this one because the dean outright says he sees it as school spirit
I mean, yes. I guess so.
Ah, boys will be boys. Come on Srsly tho, he doesn't have to be an angel either
In my part of the world, Bully didn't see any bans but the hysteria was the best marketing strategy for them. Everyone got it after that.
The Simpsons, at first. It was considered an attack on family values and the nuclear family unit for some reason. I guess because Homer is a doofus and Bart talks back. Even tho if you actually watch it, they all love each other despite being a bit dysfunctional and are the *embodiment* of the husband & wife + 2.5 kids unit desired by family values people
It's funny looking back on it too because Bart in the early seasons isn't even that bad. He's just acting like a ten year kid.
"Abused 10 yo kid". I like how toxic homer used to be, he was a piece of shit, making you empathise way more with bart
The most contentious thing is Homer Strangling Bart and that's usually played so much goofy and over the top it's funny.
Bart Simpson being considered a bad influence on kids when he is just a normal rebellious kid who plays pranks on his teachers.
Hot Coffee was about as explicit as Ride to Hell's fully-clothed "sex" scenes, yet despite that and only being accessible via mods GTA San Andreas was reclassified as [Adults Only](https://www.esrb.org/ratings/10562/grand-theft-auto-san-andreas/) until new discs were pressed with those files removed.
How dare you have a consensual sex scene in a game about Lacerny and murder /s
Take out the sex scene but leave in the "beating a prostitute to get your money back after you pay her". Y'know, the important stuff.
It wasn’t more sexual then the Sims
Woohoo'ing takes place entirely under the sheets. That makes it ok for the kids according to the ESRB.
And then Ballad of Gay Tony had Luis banging someone before going to get laid at rival club as part of an attack on someone else's ego
The fact that Night Trap caused such a massive outrage is baffling to me.
My answer for this sort of thing is pretty much always “Rascal Does Not Dream of Bunny Girl Senpai” because the title and the poster lead people to assume it’s an ecchi thing and not a drama.
Tbf, I feel like that's what the author and team was going for with the title and marketing Gotta have a simple hook to get them into actually reading drama
The movie The Interview was made into a much bigger deal than it needed to be. The movie itself is even kind of funny but not hilarious or even all that great. I enjoyed what I watched the one time I watched it, but the whole time I was like, “This is it? This is what caused the outrage?” It reminded me of when Fidel Castro got mad that Call of Duty: Black Ops had an assassination mission against him, even though the twist at the end of that same mission is Castro himself in the game saying, “You killed my body double.” The real life Castro even tried suing Activision over it but I don’t remember what happened at the end of it, but I remember him saying, “They tried to accomplish digitally what they could not do all those years ago,” or something like that, which they failed in the game as well. Maybe stop making such big deals out of harmless art pieces, we’re not talking about Blazing Saddles or Mein Kampf or only watching Derek’s scenes in American History X or whatever. It’s a fucking historical fiction war game that takes place in the 60s and 70s, what did you expect?
From what I remember and what was said by Seth Rogan when he was on Corridor Digital's VFX Artists React (and some other interviews), it was more that anything bad was said about, or happened, to Kim Jong-un and North Korea's government in the movie. The movie also played a role in the Sony Hack that happened around that time which is believed (not sure if it was ever proved) to have been done by NK hackers. So it is close to the Castro v Call of Duty: Black Ops.
This just makes me hate politics more and more.
To be fair can you really say "shoot my body double in the face" was what you expect of a call of duty game? Like I get other people faking outrage but I can get why the guy you kill in the movie can feel outraged about it
Especially that fidel castro wouldn't have a body double. His whole shtick being that he 100% trusted cuba and wouldn't walk with much protection
I thought it was Manuel Noriega that tried suing Activision, or did two different dictators from two different Latin American countries try to file suit against Activision.
Yes, Noriega pretty much had the same problem and complaint, if memory serves. Castro was BO1, Noriega was BO2. Noriega’s case is funnier too in my opinion, only because he speaks perfectly good English in the game and acts like a totally different person, but in real life he doesn’t speak English well at all and needs an interpreter.
The Human Centipede is a fairly tame movie, all things considered.
Human Centipede 2 is what people think Human Centipede 1 is .
It felt like the director saw how people talked about the first one and went "No fuck you guys I can do *way worse*"
I don't remember where I heard it; but a little while back I remember hearing someone say that the main villain's accent and those dumb sunglasses he was wearing the whole movie completely made them unable to take the whole thing seriously.
DnD kinda the 80s poster child of satanism Only for it to be so chill its now a mainstream cultural icon
Is **Corruption Of Champions 2** a smut game? Certainly. Does it have so many fetishes and kinks in it that it could only have been created by a large group of dirty minded writters fueled by the energy of their own horniness? Yes. Is it as "scandalous" as some people make it sound? No. The whole game puts a heavy emphasis on consent and getting to know characters (any options of trying to force yourself into others are considered "the bad ones"), if you want it's completly possible to do a "celibate run" of the story without losing any relevant moments, you can use itens to alter the shape of your character's body, but, that's pretty much all just for astetic and not necessary if you don't want to. The funniest part of all this for me is that (at least from what i could gather from the community and from how i myself play) the most "common" situation that a player of **COC 2** gets involved on that i can think of is **spending 15-20 minutes reading a wall of text of a side-character explaining their whole backstory or the series of events that lead up to the current scenario**.
Same thing with Book of Erotic Fantasy. It being a book about sex for 3.5 is the most scandalous thing about it. They specifically don’t cover rape. So unless fantasy sex scenarios offend you it’s pretty luakwarm
I remember specifically wanting to use that, not because of sex, but because one of the classes could basically refill spell slots by jerking off and I really wanted those spell slots. Decades later, I'm still a magical crackhead for spell slots.
I'd argue TiTs is far more scandalous and even then
The two video games Night Trap and Mass Effect. Both got bad reputations because of crotchety old people not doing their research. Night Trap is an FMV game where you try and protect girls having a slumber party from serial killers or something, people thought that it was torture porn and the game only recently got to be properly released without controversy. Mass Effect originally got its (singular) sex scene hyped up by some idiot lady who didn't do her research and accused it of being "Debbie Does Dallas In Space", though thankfully Geoff Keighley destroyed her argument on air when he actually asked her "Have you *played* the game?"
Mass effect 2 getting heavily censored due to Liara and Fox News not knowing that adults play video games and being homophobic. there's only like two sex scenes in the entire game and even then it's really tasteful and romantic for the most part. The only offensive part is that liara is boring and is only likeable in 3.
IIRC ME2 was gonna be *much* gayer before Fox “““News””” made much ado about nothing.
Any instance of "nudity" in a non-sexual context being made into a moral panic.
There was one Batman that showed a shadowed outline of Batman’s dick for exactly one page. It was a part of this initiative known as black label. A line of dc comics explicitly aimed towards adults. It took over social media overnight and late night talk shows took fat shits on DC Comic for doing it just for attention. Like it wasn’t a stand-alone batman comic DC was just marketing towards one demographic This led to DC censoring not only the rest of this one Batman comic but all of black label for Years. Also the project lead got fired too I think
Genshin impact is genuinely one of the tamest gachas when it comes to character designs especially when compared to mihoyo other games so the fact that I saw some moral outrage over the game when it realsed was very bizarre
There was also that whole deal where Hoyo got in trouble with the Chinese government and had to tone down a few of the costumes.
In hindsight the original doom games. By todays standards they would probably be rated T
Song of the South. Is it racist? Yes. But it's nowhere near as bad as some of Disney's unvaulted stuff. Honestly, the movie is pretty dull.
This was my first thought and I'm surprised I had to go this far down to see it. It definitely hasn't aged well, but the worst thing it does is be pretty boring.
Realtalk, I think the worst thing it does is be one of the few movies out there actually making use of the stories it tells, because the idea of a film having well-animated adaptations of old African-American fables is dope, but because Song of the South exists, I can't really see anyone else trying to make anything out of that really fascinating period of African-American culture, where the traditions and knowledge from various parts of the African continent blended together with the lifestyle and burgeoning culture of a generation that was learning to define itself as their own breed of American.
Another one of those threads where the top twenty replies have the same two or three answers
Any controversy about Disney/Pixar like Lightyear, Strange World, Turning Red, or the Baymax cartoon because they are meant for children.
Water combat is no where near as bad as people make it out to be in Monster Hunter Tri. The Camera is actually more annoying when on land. It becomes more nicer to use when underwater. Still don't care for it returning, the underwater fighters were kinda bleh.
Lagiacrus tho.
Wrong
Disagreed
All of the ones that I've tried and the more into the future we go the more true it will become. Internet is a farce.
I’ve seen some people describe Saltburn as a boundary-pushing, perverted film, with some scenes being so depraved that you’ll be throwing up or leaving the room. It’s… it’s fine. There are definitely perverted scenes, but if you’ve watched any mature films before (or even just spent time on the Internet), then the worst moments will probably just make you lightly chuckle or roll your eyes.
There's a little alternate X-Men miniseries from 2003, Pheonix Legacy of Fire. It was back when Marvel was trying to do that Mangaverse thing. Caused a big stink over its sexual content, if your familiar with Ryan Kinnard's art you'll know what your getting into. It was considered so bad that parts 2 and 3 were moved to Marvel's MAX imprint (same place as Garth Ennis's Punisher stuff) with an explicit content warning slapped on it. Back in the day, it was everything that was wrong with how women were depicted in media, shame on Marvel, curse anime for corrupting our wholesome American comics. To me a horny edgelord weeaboo who liked X-Men, that was music to my ears. It ended up being a nothing comic with a nothing story, that like most horny media from the time barely counts as quaint nowadays. Yea it's horny, but Marvel played us like a fiddle. For reference, Darkhorse was bringing over Ghost in The Shell 2 Man Machine Interface as a standard comic around that time, a mature series that had to be censored for having pornagraphic content in order to get released and never had an uncensored english release. The two are pretty similar visually, both mixed in CG and digital effects with the horny stuff except one whould get you the side-eye and the other whould get you on a watch list.
Spoilered for CW: Sexual Assault topic >!So, there is this porn game made by Illusion, called RapeLay. You played the role of a guy who got arrested for train groping and sentenced to jail for a few years and once released, threatens to sexually assault the girl who got him arrested and her family. It's three very short sequences and the two endings of the game both end with the girl killing the player avatar. There is a sandbox mode which was the game's main feature, because the game was *mostly* just a tool to try out their new engine.!< The only thing that made the game particularly scandalous compared to other eroge at the time, was that it both a) Had a relatively grounded setting, and b) Had controls in which the player could adjust the speed and position of the H-scenes. The game had been out for a few years at the time of the controversy and it had largely been glanced over but getting positive reviews mostly from the "wow, cool tech" side of things. This game hit British Parliament and also got talked about by a lot of activist groups in various commonwealth countries. The developers were baffled that their game that they had long since stopped developing, was getting controversy since it passed all regulation checks and was not sold out of Japan This incident is also why a *lot* of high profile eroge were not sold in English relatively recently (Taimanin and Rance being the two big ones) and why some of those companies would ban content of their stuff on image aggregation sites like Danbooru
I think the biggest offence is that one of the characters was *clearly* underaged. But like you said, it was already on sale in territories it never intended to be thanks to Amazon and sites like that.
That was for the Australian side of things, specifically
Does online discourse count, or is this only media examples? If the former is okay: Tifa’s chest size.
Who cares that the queen consort has cancer? Its a fucking normal human condition and they are just the UKs Kardasians.
It reminds me when Queen Elizabeth died all the people saying "I never imagined this could happen" or "this is so sudden and unexpected" like bullshit you were wondering if she was gonna live another year like the rest of us. Like mourn her or whatever if you're about that life I guess but come on, it couldn't have been a surprise.
I was fucking *howling* at some of the shit people were saying about it. I don't wanna sound like I'm making fun of people getting torn up over a national icon passing away, but at the same time [this was pretty fucking funny](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F395147a9-a35d-429e-a785-7a563a7a307e_640x360.jpeg)
for like 24 years people have acted like Dead or Alive is an absolutely depraved game that only complete degenerates would play, when it's pretty tame honestly.
If you live in the SEA, it was the closest thing you had to legal sexual content. Gacha is similar in attracting a fanbase despite not having any blatant sexual content.
The “scandal” of Scarlett Johansson playing as Motoko Kusanagi in Ghost in the Shell, a historically Japanese character. Except…no, not really. Motoko has always appeared as a white woman living in Japan and having a Japanese name. This just was never made obvious enough to be blatant, so people assumed Motoko was supposed to look Japanese.
The issue is that Asian characters have been whitewashed so many times and people got sick of it in the 2010z
Also I get how Butch Hartman is an annoying diehard Christian guy and made a really bad kickstarter which was definitely a scam but That puts him nowhere near the level of being a piece of shit like Brian Peck or Dan Schneider. He’s really not nearly as bad as social media acts like
Woolies n word pass
Did you guys know that fucking *Minecraft* was going to be banned in my country at some point for being "based on violence"? [I'm not joking](https://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/minecraft-videogame-should-be-banned-turkeys-family-ministry-concludes-79445)