5 Weird Places No Video Games Should Go

5. Killing For The Sake Of Killing

This one goes back to an old controversy that still gets brought up every now and again. I'm sure you are all familiar with the €œNo Russian€ level within Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. For those who may have missed it, it involved taking part in a terrorist raid on a Russian airport, where your gang and yourself, if you chose to take part, proceeded to mow down crowds of unarmed civilians. You didn't have to fire your weapon, but as gamers who had just got their hands on a new Call of Duty game, people had itchy trigger fingers.

Modern Warfare though was a victim of its own success. It needed something jaw dropping and shocking to compare with the original Modern Warfare's nuke scene and this is what we got. Callously shooting down and executing screaming, crying, ordinary people. Yes they were pixels, but this one level gave nothing extra to the story, it was simply there to shock, and get people talking. It's a cheap tactic which a popular and successful development studio such as Infinity Ward should have been above using.

I'm not saying we ban all killing in games, the majority of popular games all feature the player dishing out various states of pain. However in most other games there's a reason to kill. In Assassin's Creed we stab Italians in the neck to avenge our family, in Fallout 3 we flame grill mutants to find our father and save the wasteland from a repressive American government. In Grand Theft Auto 4 we trap a hooker under our car and go to town on her head with a baseball bat because...well you get the picture. Destroying your enemies is all well and good, but there needs to be a reason for your actions. Simply killing, and glorifying it is not what I'd call good business practice.