Check the manual for Super Mario Bros. The original on NES.

Mario is described as "The hero of our story (maybe)"

Which is kind of a weird way to describe the main character.

I remember a comic where one character says "Why are there so many monsters in this dungeon?!"

The other says "because they live here."

And the first character says "oh. ...ooooooohhhh...."

One example: the early-80s arcade game Elevator Action, in which you play a secret agent who abseils to the top floor of an enemy building and has to grab secret files and make his way down to a getaway car on the ground floor. Well, that’s how it’s described. In reality, you’re a spree shooter rampaging through an office.

It's my estimation that every man ever got a statue made of 'em was one kinda sombitch or another.

I believe The Last of Us II actually portrayed this one thing oerfectly. At the beginning you can feel some of Ellie's hesitation as she comes upon death, but the more the story unfolds and the more she becomes psychopathic. It's hinted and it's shown. The last Act of the game is her giving in to her PTSD. I think that, for once, this is absolutely brilliant.

In Halo, you can kill an elite squad commander and the grunts will run and cower. Halo wins once again.

uncharted is the worst for this because the fights add basically nothing. the games are great humourous adventure serials occasionally broken up by obligatory murderous rampages. after my first playthrough of uncharted 2 it showed that i had done over 200 headshots alone. friend of mine had something like 1500.

I think it's pretty cool this issue is actually addressed in the witcher (action rpg). At the very end you get confronted by Death (personified). He blames you for all the pain and suffering you caused and that he has to follow your footsteps wherever you go and asks you to give up as the world would be a better place without you. You can decide to give in or to fight him, if I remember correctly. It's really one of my favourite moments in video games history and really worth considering the good you as the witcher have done vs the pain you caused. If you think it's moral to measure life vs life you can definitely share Deaths opinion.

The witcher still holds up today and I think is worth playing if you haven't yet.

Trepang2 still has you killing guards like a blender, but adds a fear mechanic to the enemies. Makes you really realize you are a monster.

My flatmate used to call that Tomb Raider (the first of the new trilogy) "PTSD Simulator". It's as you say, the first few deaths are entirely survival-driven, with her constantly crying and then she becomes an emotionless one-woman army.

Yeah, it was funny how they tried to create some narrative arc about how she reacts to killing, and it just made the whole thing even weirder

I couldn’t keep playing that game after the first few hours. It felt like some kind of Lara Croft torture simulator fetish thing and made me feel icky.

It bothers me because TR2013 didn't have to be like that. The dogs were challenging and scary. The puzzles were good. The bow and melee combat was tense. Hunting and exploration could've played a bigger part, the game so rarely took you off the rails and it was good when it did.

The game could've been made with killing humans being rare dramatic moments, with the guns being tools of last resort.

Also, you don’t want to know what she thinks of trans people

DC's Poison Ivy is always one of the best examples of this.

I want to say she is from the 70s? And "evil lady eco terrorist" is both sexy and evil. Except, as time went on, more and more of the readers/viewers started to REALLY like the lady who murders the patriarchy while destroying chemical factories and oil refineries to protect the planet. So she became more of a plant monster and DC Editorial learned how many of us are into bondage and so forth. Which has led to the modern day where she is basically an anti-villain, at best, alongside her lesbian lover Harley. Although the Harley Quinn show did a great job of playing with that with everyone more or less thinking her an annoying goodie two shoes even though she is torturing and murdering children and whatever else her background atrocity of the week is.

But a lesser known example that might actually be one of my favorite movies at this point is Donnie Yen's Raging Fire. Yen plays the hero cop, as he always does, who is older but has morals and butts heads with his bosses who are too political. Except that, years prior to the movie, he was on a case with his protege and partner and they were told to do whatever it took to find a rich business man. Oh noes! His entire unit accidentally kills a suspect and now then Oh Noes, Donnie narced on them because of his morals so they went to prison and had a REAL bad time.

And now they are out and killing the corrupt cops and business people who betrayed them. Also it is basically Heat (right down to getting caught because the psycho killed a hooker) and the movie does a REAL good job of showing why Tse's criminal is the way he is and why Yen's cop is pushed to his breaking point and outright fighting the system he is supposed to uphold when his loved ones are in danger.

Until the final sequence which is the bank robbery from Heat. Except the writers realized the CCP is REALLY not going to like a movie that is this anti-cop so suddenly they are mowing down civilians left and right and lobbing grenades everywhere just to make sure you understand these ex-cops are actually the bad guys. And Donnie Yen and his CCP mouthpiece ass still has it.

Its a deeply problematic movie, like most of Donnie Yen's post 2010s work, but it is also incredibly fascinating when you think of it from the perspective of sympathetic villains and state mandated "tone". Also, like ALL of Donnie Yen's work, it is a beautiful spectacle of martial arts coming from a guy who is even more frustratingly charming than Tom Cruise.

I don't read many comics, but there was a Wonder Twins run by Mark Russell that was amazing.

The villain had a plan to scramble everyone's identity on Earth, so one day you could wake up and be in a horrible economic situation. His thinking was that with the deadline approaching, people would have to work to make the world more fair for everyone.

That's why I like Wolfenstein and Doom games. You only kill bad guys there, and it is expected that you should have no mercy for them.

Is this for real? Never played the game.

The real treasure was the personality disorder we developed along the way

I've never seen Lara sitting for therapy. I, on the other hand, have sat a few times. 👍

"We named the dog Indiana"

Along with Nathan Drake for exactly the same reason.

Stopped right before Uncharted 4? But that one has the "jump off a high ledge and punch a guy in the face to break your fall" move. It always felt so good.

I think the writers pretty much admitted they had no plan for Trinity, seeing how their goal completely changed from immortality to apocalypse between Rise and Shadow. They were just the reason for Lara to track them across the world and stumble on ancient stuff.

Have you not seen those movies that end up saying "if we kill the big bad, we're no better than them" after mowing down countless faceless mobs

Well THERE'S an interesting idea!

BANG! "I did it again, I hate myself. Poor guy was minding his own business and hadn't done anything to me."

The third game of the reboot trilogy starts with her tracking this evil organization that's been screwing with her family, finding the item they're trying to steal to trigger an appocalypse, stealing it first, and almost triggering that same apocalypse because she doesn't know what she's doing, thinking she's doing good. Second game also started with her tracking the same organization to figure out what they're doing, and from that, she stumbles into some archaeology. It's a long character arc, she was looking for unrelated answers, but she learns that she can be good at figuring out ancient stuff, and she finds out the hard way that she can also fuck up badly when she doesn't know what she's doing. It's supposed to end at the point where she's mature enough to do better. We just see all the "fucking up" parts.

Are they talking about her physically modelled breasts?