Freaks of the videogame world
Weird, according to the dictionary definition, means ‘involving or suggesting the supernatural; unearthly or uncanny’ or it can quite simply mean ‘bizarre’ or 'different'.While there are many games that could fit into the ‘weird’ category, for example ‘Silent Hill’ or ‘The Darkness’ could certainly be filed under ‘supernatural’, whereas there are 101 alien shooters or space-hopping adventures that could easily slot into the label of being ‘unearthly’, for this article I'm looking at it slightly differently.
I'm looking at games where the sentence ‘What the hell is all this about?” suddenly springs to mind or those games that contain surreal or bizarre moments that make it stand out from the crowd for the right, or maybe wrong, reasons.
Without further ado, I've compiled the following list of what I deem to be weird titles...
Rule of Rose – PS2
Rule of Rose freaked me out for a few days. I slept uneasily after the first night of playing it. The game was released in 2006 and despite being set in the UK, it never did get the green light for release in Britain. It was pulled before it hit the shops, but the publishers inadvertently shipped out copies of to reviewers, of which I was one of them.
Rule of Rose is a Japanese psychological survival horror game, with a similar but much darker atmosphere to that of Silent Hill. It’s not just that it's scary though, it also sends out some very strange messages. Amidst the foggy locations and ghostly apparitions are half a dozen young female characters, many of them pre-pubescent. The weird thing is that amidst the violence in the game there’s a strong sense of sexuality between the young girls.
The result is a bizarre mix of horror and sexual tension, which at times feels really uncomfortable.
I spent a couple of days mulling over the reasons why the developers went down such a route with its 'close to the bone' material and still I can’t work it out. Developer Punchline say that it “wanted to depict the darker side of children.” I say, “They're a bunch of very weird individuals.”
The screenshot shows a glimpse of the strangeness that awaits.
Baby Pals – Nintendo DS
No game has disturbed me more than Baby Pals on DS. It totally freaked me out. Similar to the likes of Nintendogs, the game basically involves you caring for a baby and carrying out daily chores, from changing its nappy to feeding the noisy bugger.
The weird thing about this title is that the babies look like the devil’s spawn, like something out a horror film. When I first heard the sound of a baby gurgling, laughing and then screaming through the DS speakers it made me feel slightly distressed. The only babies I want to hear crying are real babies, not pixelated freakish ones with evil laughs.
Why anyone would want to feed, bathe, play entertain and pretend to love a digital baby I have no idea. I understand the concept of girls carrying around baby dolls and pushing them around in pushchairs, but this, this is just wrong.
Are there hundreds of women out there who can’t for whatever reason have children and take solace with obsessing over their pretend freak baby? The thought scares me.
Look away now if you don't want to have nightmares.
