Weirdest thing you saw in a game (ignoring any taboo for people such as taboo clothing or something "fan service" etc.)

To explain, I don't want to hear about the taboo oh my gosh some game had a guy or girl in a skirt in a risky or problematic situation or some R-rated interaction. That's been well documented and debated as bad or good, depending on the person.

TLDR: I'm speaking on just weird stuff, not stuff you morally think is bad or awful.

Sorry if this isn't exact enough, I don't want to label out what is “bad” as that may also be taboo.

I was playing TF2 during the time when Golden Wrenches were being distributed. They were very rare and only 100 were given out. One time, I was on a server that was pretty full and there was a message in the chat box that someone on the server had just gotten a Golden Wrench. Nobody in the server reacted to it, so to this day I never found out whether that was real or just some server admin playing the message or something. There weren't any other messages that might have led me to believe the server owners were playing around, it was just that one message in a normal game and it went completely ignored. It was strange.

I saw a guy fall in love with a girl who turned into an alpaca once.

This post is incomprehensible to me. Who would say that the strangest thing they've seen is a girl in a skirt in a risky situation? I don't even know what that means, but it sounds pretty normal for video games. Like who is playing Parasite Eve and thinking "GIRL IN A SKIRT IN A RISKY SITUATION! MUCH STRANGER THAN ALL....THE REST OF THIS."

Anyway despite not understanding the question I'm just going to say Seaman. Basically all of it. It's mere existence as a product and the fact that it's narrated by Spock.

Whatever fantasy weirdness you can come up with, like JRPG nonsense or whatever, it can't compare to the real world weirdness of the industry sometimes.

Runner up is that COD reinvented itself with Modern Warfare, a more grounded approach tied to current real world conflicts, and then slowly morphed into some kind of perverse mix of Celebrity Deathmatch and The Running Man where Nicki Minaj shoots Sylvester Stallone and Bruce Willis in the face and then flosses over their corpses. I would not have predicted that in 2008.

@bigsocrates: I think they mean to clarify that this thread is about the traditional meaning of 'weird', as in strange, and not the more modern meaning, as in perverted and/or sexual.

@eccentrix: I don't think that "weird" means perverted or sexual in modern usage. It maybe has a more negative connotation of "strange in a bad way" but when people say "it feels weird to go on public transit and see nobody wearing a mask" they don't mean that bare faces are some kind of perversion.

Regardless I do not understand how a "girl in a skirt in a risky situation" could be strange in a negative way. Those words do not parse to me.

Anyway I'm sticking with Seaman and Nicki Minaj flossing over Bruce Willis' corpse as my answers.

@bigsocrates: I see a lot of Twitch streams with chat rules that include something like "Don't be weird" which I've always taken as a euphemism for "Don't be sexual". I don't have more concrete evidence than that, but I'm pretty sure that's how young people are using it. I think Topcyclist's post makes sense in this context, with the skirt thing being the game encouraging upskirts, etc.

I think when people say "it feels weird to go on public transit and see nobody wearing a mask", they mean 'weird' in the traditional sense, not the new meaning. I'm not saying the 'strange' meaning is archaic. I guess by 'modern' I mean in the past few years, like how the modern usage of a question mark is to end any sentence whether it's a question or not.

Does Call of Duty really have emotes now?

@eccentrix: The use of "weird" in that context isn't new IMO. I think there are movies from the '90s where people say "don't make this weird" when someone says something that could be taken sexually. But I think that refers to situations that people are in rather than media. I don't think you'd use that meaning for something that involved fictional characters rather than yourself and someone you were interacting with.

Call of Duty has had emotes both in game and at the end of matches (which tend to be more flamboyant) at various times though I think current Call of Duty does not. I don't think you can actually floss over Bruce Willis' corpse but you could, of course, do some form of tea bagging, the old standard.

But I'm more talking about the very strange (to me) trend of putting real people into hyper violent games and also the mix of violence and silliness that a lot of modern games, be it COD or Fortnite or whatever, have. Like the New Day are in Gears of War so you can just chainsaw Kofi Kingston. Or even Mortal Kombat's use of celebrity likenesses. There's something surreal to me about seeing extreme violence towards real people played off for a laugh, especially remembering the video game culture wars of the 90s.

The weirdest thing I can think of right now is the twist in Dead Space 3, where the moon is revealed to be alive, there are many of them, and they're out to destroy humanity. That was wild.

I'm trying to think of something weirder but off the top of my head the sunflower lady from Conker, maybe? That was pretty weird. King of All Cosmos would have to be up there. Hm.

How about Celebrity Deathmatch? That was a fun one. I'm also now remembering that that had its own video game, too.

@eccentrix: There were a few differences there. The first and biggest was the graphical style. The show was claymation so the violence was unrealistic and comedic. The second is that for the most part the celebrities themselves were not involved, it was done without their consent. The third was the context, which was an obviously silly parody show, and not plopping down Nicki Minaj into an otherwise at least semi-serious battlefield.

The realistic graphics and the active involvement of the real people changes things for me.

"Hey Stallone, do you want to voice a lovingly recreated realistic polygonal version of your younger self who is going to get his spine ripped out and his guts sprayed around over and over and over sometimes livestreamed on the Internet?"

"What does it pay?"

Every single thing about "Ground Zeroes."

@undeadpool: Damn. That actually might be the best answer yet.

I ... yeah, that might be right.

I always thought it was weird that, in the Amstrad CPC game, "How to be a Complete Bastard." you could explode by over-farting.

Venting prevents explosion, silly.

Gerstmann recently played a game called Zombie Nation on his NES ranking show. In it you play a giant floating head that shoots projectiles out its eyes and mouth. The game is complete nonsense and really bizarre. Jeff went on a tangent about how people like to call games "weird" when they aren't that weird but he believed Zombie Nation was a good example of a weird game.

Yeah, I was originally going to select a moment from it before I realized: the entire thing so fucking weird on EVERY SINGLE LEVEL.

I don't know what this bit about Ground Zeroes is, but "man reminisces about pulling his eyeball out and eating it" is going to be awfully hard to beat.

The Katamari series... All of it. In a delightful yet somehow demented way.

I still find it weird when Huayna Capac instantly turns into a mummy, then the head of that mummy becomes a pan flute space ship and then the Spanish Galleons pursue it through space.

@retris:

We are lost. Where we go we don't know. We keep on flying, into the night. Inca people, looking for a place to go.

The time in Noby Noby Boy where BOY freaked out and vomited a ton of stuff and people and freaked out, I closed the game and didn't open it again for years.

A contender.

The Silent Hill games are full of weird stuff but the giant Eileen head in SH4 The Room always stood out to me

Goldshire Inn