8 Great Games That Said F**k You To The Player

6. Dead Rising 2

Dead Rising 2 Most of the other f**k you moments in this list come from the narrative of games, and that€™s refreshing because it proves gaming is becoming more grown-up as a medium, capable of telling adult stories. Yet this isn€™t the case for Dead Rising 2, a puerile yet-awesome game which allowed you to strip down your boxers and take on a horde of the undead wearing a flaming animal head. Where Dead Rising€™s f**k you lay was in it€™s mechanics, or more specifically, the ability to let you restart the game at any point with all the abilities and weapon recipes you€™ve gained so far. On the face of it, this is good idea and I€™m aware many people really like this addition. Yet to me it made an already-repetitive game almost monotonous, and the worst thing was that for an arch-completist or unprepared player, these rewinds became inevitable. This is because occasionally in the game you would stumble across psychopaths, and if you came across them in your first play-through they were often far more formidable than your pathetic self, and capable of cutting you to ribbons in seconds. Yet they became visible from an early part of the game, so you always stood the chance of coming across some utterly unbeatable boss, like a psycho hippy in a toilet €“ in itself absolutely gutting when you€™re just looking for somewhere to save €“ or a motorcyclist in the unavoidable main square, ready to chop your already-wounded novice Chuck to bits. They simply couldn€™t be killed first time around, and when you combine this with the lack of checkpoints in the Dead Rising world, what was once a fun game became an infuriating slog as you passed through the same story missions again and again after continuous restarts. By making the restart a necessary evil, the game said f**k you to any time-poor player or any player who got caught out in murderous ambushes, hamstringing a cool game with constant bang-your-head-against-a-wall moments. If you mastered the restart mechanic you were in for a hell of a good time, pirouetting through zombie hordes with two chainsaws and a paddle €“ if you didn't, your fury could be heard from several continents.
Contributor
Contributor

Durham University graduate and qualified sports journalist. Very good at sitting down and watching things. Can multi-task this with playing computer games. Football Manager addict who has taken Shrewsbury Town to the summit of the Premier League. You can follow me at @Ed_OwenUK, if you like ramblings about Newcastle United and A Place in the Sun. If you don't, I don't know what I can do for you.