10 Times Controversy Made You Discover Amazing Video Games

3. The Punisher

Biggest Controversy: Graphic, controllable torture scenes. Third-person shooters have kind of stopped being a 'thing' since the last Gears of War, with the following influx of first-person entertainment reaching a tipping point in a year where ex-Halo developer Bungie actually turn in a product that's noticeably worse than the annual instalment of COD. In the early aughts though, Resident Evil 4 helped usher in a wave of over-the-shoulder shooters, the most violent of them in terms of real-world enactments of what's on-screen being THQ's spectacular envisioning of Frank 'The Punisher' Castle; a Marvel superhero who had one of the best runs in graphic novel history with Garth Ennis' MAX spin-off. By putting the focus squarely on being one-man war machine hell-bent on delivering retribution to the mob, the thing that got Fox News et al whipped up was that one of the core gameplay mechanics saw you interrogating anyone you came across. Although this released in a post-Manhunt world, apparently the very nature of moving the analogue stick back and forth to 'simulate' throttling someone with your bare hands was taken more seriously than introducing a hammer to a thug's face in Rockstar's effort. In the end all versions of Punisher received a black and white filter to make things more palatable, but PC owners soon got through that. What was tucked away underneath this reactionary coverage was a surprisingly tactile shooter, one that had a ton of hidden collectibles, multiple paths through levels, scores of weapons and a pitch-perfect performance from Thomas Jane.