10 Times Video Games Made You Feel Bad (For No Good Reason)
That's right. Cry for Donkey Kong.
Having a video game make you feel something is one of the easiest ways to measure its success. Be it feeling like a badass in Uncharted, feeling scared in Outlast or Amnesia, or feeling a childlike sense of joy in Crash Bandicoot or Spyro, connecting with a game on an emotional level means you're less likely to forget it than even games you've played more recently.
Which is presumably the main reason why some games go out of their way to guilt trip you for stuff that they really don't need to.
Sure, if you blow up a city in Fallout or fail to save a hostage in Batman Arkham, a little bit of guilt is inevitable. But some games will put the thumbscrews to you for forgetting to feed your fish, or daring to not play the game for a day or two.
There's a fine line between a justifiable guilt trip and a surreal one, and many games walk a magnificent tight rope across it. These examples, however, jab you in the side with their keys for forgetting to validate their free parking.
10. Needing A Minute - Sonic The Hedgehog CD
Generally, one of the first extras a developer programs into a game is an idle animation for a character when you leave them for a while.
Sonic is a series that generally pulls this off pretty well. Most games feature the blue hedgehog and his friends chilling out when you leave them for a bit, with unique animations for each character.
Some instalments can have a slightly pettier tone than others, though. Take for example Sonic Spinball, where the game itself will flash dialogue if you leave it for too long, telling you to hurry up.
But this pales in comparison to Sonic the Hedgehog CD, which decides to go all out with shaming you for daring to leave it unattended.
Should you - god forbid - need to go to the toilet, or pop away fro a quick chat, the game will take the action it sees fit, and straight up have Sonic kill himself after three minutes have passed.
And sure, in video game time this is a while to be away, but it's also a totally reasonable amount of time if someone needed to just quickly do something, unaware that their game was joining to kill of Sonic in order to guilt-trip them about not being there.