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Features Editor I'm usually not disturbed by violent games in the same way that violent films bother or disturb me. Computer and video games have yet to achieve the same realism as feature-length movies or television shows. Even a great show like ER, which is not about gunfights, killing, or explosions, has had some very gory depictions of the aftermath of violence or of very invasive surgical procedures. I think that watching open-heart surgery, real or fictional, has disturbed me more than the animated deaths of 3D polygonal characters in first-person shooters.
That said, there are two games, neither of which was very successful or memorable, that left a big enough negative impression on me for me to have been disturbed. The first game is Ripcord Games' Postal from late 1997. The game was banned in more than ten countries, but not in the US. I can remember playing the demo for the first time, and I was pretty surprised by the game's concept, which is basically walking your player-character called "Postal Dude" on a psychotic rampage and killing every person in sight. One of the things that bothered me was how your dying victims would crawl on the ground and utter, "I can't breathe...." I guess what disturbed me the most about Postal was that the plot seemed so flimsy and didn't provide a very cogent reason for Postal Dude's paranoia or psychosis; paranoia that leads to indiscriminate killing really doesn't make for a good story at all.
The other game that disturbed me is Electronic Arts' Galapagos: Mendel's Escape, another game from late 1997. This puzzle game is about a synthetic organism that looks like a cute bug, which you're supposed to free from its prison in a bioengineering lab of some sort. Sure, that mission sounds easy enough, but the game was extremely hard when I first tried it. Instead of controlling Mendel directly, you're supposed to manipulate the environment around it and prod it by clicking it. This type of gameplay sounds interesting, as it's based on stimulus-response theory and animal behaviorism, but when I played the game, Mendel couldn't be encouraged to follow the right path or do exactly what I wanted it to do, and it died countless times from crushing doors or falling off platforms. And in line with the game's premise, Mendel would "learn" from these experiences, but in the end, it just became more and more unstable and neurotic. The more I played the game, the more Mendel's behavior deteriorated into neurosis and ultimately dysfunction - it was disturbing, indeed.
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