6. Unethical Scientific Experiment Gone Wrong
We've included a picture of Half-Life 2 to hammer our point home, but in all honesty, the Half-Life series pretty much gets a free pass, because at least it was good-natured scientists who weren't actively trying to unleash a blood-thirsty alien race upon the world, whereas the vast majority of games that fit this bill positively are. Take Resident Evil and Doom, probably the most popular and successful games to fall under this tenet; both involve a shady, mysterious organisation who is trying to breed evil for their own gain, one a bio-engineered virus, the other a gateway to Hell, both of which get completely out of hand. Though these games were ground-breaking for their time, it's about time that developers hung this mantle up and tried something else, because we've become dangerously over-exposed. Far too many games in this genre just introduce an inter-dimensional oddity as an excuse for us to paint the walls with it; how's about coming up with something other than campy B-movie clichés?