There used to be an institution in Germany, abbreviated BPJM (I will spare you the full German name) that checked if games are in need of being restricted due to excessive violence. They curated a public list of games that were only acessible for age 18+ to purchase. You can imagine what this list did for young teenage gamers, it was the forbidden fruit, the Streisand-effect before the Streisand. I played those games before I was 18 and that rating had a bit to do with that. It was colloquially called the Index and so any game that would make it to the Index would be highly sought after by gamer teens.

In other news this institution is the reason why there were some specific changes in a few games for the German market. From what I remember, Command and Conquer ( yes the RTS, not just FPS games went on there) had to change the color of blood for the human soldiers which became robots/cyborgs whatever in the German version.

No, no, no, Dungeons & Dragons turned us into devil worshipping heathens. The murderers all came from videogames.

I'm old enough to remember the OG Mortal Kombat controversy. If I recall, the Sega and SNES versions were different. I believe the SNES version had no blood and the Sega one had blood.

Oddly enough, doom and Wolfenstein was never controversial in my circles, but we weren't allowed to play the terminator game. It was very willy nilly. I think quake was a bit of a nono as well, but counterstrike was fine.

Is that last one a specific game or did a developer do that?

7 days to die has been making progress though .I remember picking it up and thinking I made a huge mistake then I played it a couple years later and loved it

Wasn't Colonial Marines the game that gearbox "stole" budget from so they could fund Borderlands 2?

Iirc, it also had absolutely abysmal AI, with Alien(s) standing perfectly still in clear view, not reacting until they had been shot multiple times.

Then someone found that there was a single value in one of the game's ini configuration files you could change from 0 to 1, and the AI would become competent. The switch had been there since release, over multiple years the game was never updated to flip the "make the AI not braindead" switch. As far as I know, it still hasn't been updated to flip it.

Fo76 basically was a shitshow to the point it was false advertising. (Fucking canvas bags)

Good points, but a few of these are mixing up controversy with genuine critics.

• Arkham Knight's performance was terrible at launch. But many Ubisoft games could make this list, they were quite famous for their buggy games for some time.
• Along with the Diablo 2 remake, you could add the Warcraft 3 remaster as well which was nonetheless apparently abysmal, but which also removed the original game from Battle.NET. We may also add most remakes and remasters, it feels like an exception when a remaster is generally appreciated.
• Like Starfield, Fallout 4 was also heavily criticized at launch for the same reasons: unengaging story, always the same bugs, lackluster roleplay due to the voiced character... But maybe that's always the case with every new Bethesda game.
• If I remember correctly, on of the main issues with Alien: Colonial Marines wasn't so much that it was a terrible and unfinished game (which it was), but that the demo released was very engaging, and a completely unfair representation of the actual game, which was considered false advertising.

I'm surprised there isn't a Storm the Capitol, Insurrection 2021 game.

Ok, you win

A small but vocal subset of turbovirgins loudly denouncing it for plagiarizing pokemon, who even the pokemon company themselves is fed up with lmao. The pokemon company’s investigation of the game is basically them saying “we’ll do our due diligence but please shut up they don’t seem to have done anything wrong”

People are likeing it to Pokemon and big daddy N are very heavy handed when it comes to its IP.

THRILL KILL had some heady controversy around that time as well, for the same reasons.

Hot take on Payback, maybe it's worth a revisit. I remember that game being a dog after the awesomeness that was 1 and 2. Especially with 2's crazy rogue'esque mission generator and stellar multiplayer. We ran a heavily modded MP server for years and it was a blast.

Too bad what happened to Raven. Once in awhile you can still feel and see their spirit in some of the CoD details.

What's the controversy with Yandere Simulator? I missed it.

Missed opportunity when double-listing Catherine to use both spellings.