5 of the most controversial PS3 and Xbox 360 games ever

Every machine has an expiry date. Technology — that ever-improving, ever-mutating entity — has an unceremonious tendency to leap forward at a startling rate, leaving machines looking positively antiquated in its wake.

Indeed, time is almost up for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. These consoles are, in animal years, doddering and senile. Yet they have remained relevant throughout their lifetimes and 2013 looks set to be a bumper year for these workhorses. It might be a fitting swan song too.

To honour their passing we’ve compiled a retrospective that deals with the most controversial games to grace the Xbox 360 and/or PlayStation 3. What do we mean by controversial? Everything the word implies. From the most controversially bog-standard sequel to the most tastelessly profane game, it’s all here. Enjoy.

5. Spec Ops: The Line (Xbox 360, PS3 – 2012)

Take one look at Spec Ops and you’ll instantly know the archetype: a military shooter that numbs the mind with liberal bloodshed and shootouts aplenty.

Look again. Spec Ops: The Line is in fact a compelling yarn that weaves in both the surreal and the truly macabre. For a game that looks so utterly dreary on the outside, the story is a terrific surprise.

And a controversial surprise. Without spoiling anything, let’s just say this: The Line paints warfare as a big, bloody beast that takes its toll on the souls of all involved. It’s one of the few games to really paint war in an unfavourable light. Spec Ops: The Line isn’t simply a shooting gallery with expendable cannon fodder. No, it’s dark and scary look at the travails of war.

4. Duke Nukem Forever (Xbox 360, PS3 – 2011)

Good old Duke isn’t known for his subtlety. He likes his women loose, his guns large and his cigars strong. Duke, with his absurd box haircut, is a walking and talking phallic symbol. He’s all man, fortified with brawn, not brains.

And yet he’s become an absurd and utterly unfunny caricature of what it is to be masculine. When Duke Nukem Forever opens, good old Duke is being orally serviced by two women off-screen. It’s the sort of joke a twelve year-old (boy) might appreciate. The two women turn out to be the Olsen twins. And it’s then that you remember Duke Nukem Forever is stuck in a virtual time-warp.

Forever is controversial not because it’s crass, or puerile, or rude — though it is. No, it’s controversial because it hammers home the stereotype that all games are the work of overgrown boys, designed with a ruddy-faced, acne-riddled teen in mind — a teen who truly believes that women want a macho man in the vein of Mr. Duke Nukem.

3. Mass Effect (Xbox 360 – 2008)

No Sci-Fi tale is complete without a bit of sauce, a bit of hanky panky that crosses the species divide and unites the good old alien races. Mass Effect embraces this notion, envisaging a fictional world where alien lovers are an inevitable occurrence. Intergalactic sex — who doesn’t love the idea?

Answer: Fox News. The American news agency was riled to hear that a game had the audacity to depict sex and, moreover, homosexual sex. It was enough one newscaster to describe Mass Effect as boasting “full digital nudity and sex”. They continued by painting it as a game sold to children replete with buxom babes and full on “graphic sex”, without ever having seen the game in action.

Happily, Mass Effect lived down these absurd claims. It’s a pity Fox News did too.

2. Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 (Xbox 360, PS3 – 2009)

By and large, Modern Warfare 2 plays it safe. You play as an American soldier who’s tasked with mowing down foreign combatants. Nothing controversial there, the operative word being “foreign”. Sure, it’s big and bloody – but it’s the sort of stuff we’ve been playing for years, right?

And then, suddenly, you’re an undercover soldier posing as a terrorist. You’re walking amidst vile, uncompromising souls. Together you move through the innards of an airport. The stage is set. Suddenly your compatriots open fire on a sea of civilians and the choice is yours: follow suit or coolly observe the slaughter without lifting a finger.

The level, dubbed “No Russian”, was criticised for being needlessly violent, but it conveniently ensured that Modern Warfare 2 was yet another titanic financial success in the Call of Duty series.

1. Resident Evil 5 (Xbox 360, PS3 – 2009)

Capcom could never have envisaged the political storm they were hurtling towards when they released Resident Evil 5. In a series that had trawled America and Eastern Europe before it, Resident Evil 5 made the mistake of visiting Africa.

You might think that Africa’s feral turf would be a good setting for a series that has done the US to death. You might even assume that, in a game about zombies, a few would shamble onto the screen, like lambs to the slaughter.

But a vocal minority, evidently out of touch with games yet in touch with their political sensibilities, decided that depicting Africans as bloodthirsty was tantamount to “classic racism.”

It’s true that Africa deserves a game that doesn’t only depict the continent as a hotspot of bloodshed and war-mongering. But on the other hand, the Resident Evil series has served up a number of unlikable American and European characters too.

Sometimes fiction is at a liberty to serve up zombie monstrosities. It doesn’t mean the fiction in question is rooted in racism.