10 Video Games That Owned Themselves
Don't read this! Ten of the worst entries ever!
A quick glance at the computer games section of your local supermarket or digital entertainment emporium reveals that the medium, despite the polite dismissal of your gran as being 'for the kiddies', is serious business. Presented with a tedious array of armour-clad lads clutching heavy artillery like one would their first-born, you'd be forgiven for believing there's not a single shred of humour to be found anywhere on gaming's range of big black boxes.
This might be the case for earnest po-faced mass market triple-A titles, but it's actually a million miles from the norm. Almost since their inception, video games have, probably as a direct consequence of a mainstream media which for the longest time denied them any artistic legitimacy, came with a tongue firmly planted in the cartridge slot. It was hard not to when pub punters were being asked to suspend their disbelief in the face of a dozen pixels as an abstract for tennis.
From Earthbound and Undertale to Frog Fractions and Fat Princess, we've gradually seen games ridicule even their own conventions. But best of all are those which put the target on their own back. Take note Duke Nukem Forever: If you can't laugh at yourself, how can you laugh at anyone else?
10. Sonic Mania
As esteemed as the spiny speedster once was, Sonic has made himself drastically and devastatingly easy to mock over the latter half of his 30 year tenure, thanks to a slew of terrible, noodle-armed disasters and a fandom which has turned self-parody a fine art. SEGA themselves have even got in on the act, releasing an utterly preposterous movie, one originally animated by competition winners working off a rough description reading 'small blue man'.
The Sonic the Hedgehog movie didn't have much right gently ribbing the series given it was contributing to the problem, but 2017's Sonic Mania, a gushing love letter to lapsed fans and the best Sonic game of all time, did. Christian Whitehead's delicious dose of erinaceidae action affectionately lampoons some of the more ridiculous aspects of Sonic culture, though the most sardonically subtle comes under the bright lights of the game's second level, Studiopolis.
After besting the zone's boss - a climate-flipping egg-o-matic itself parodying Sonic & Knuckles' weathervane Cluckoid badnik - the TV feed cuts to a test card, accompanied by an annoying buzz. This is no standard studio static though; it's the exact same buzz which plagued SEGA's 25th Anniversary livestream, one infamously beset by technical issues.
Now that's a pointed barb.