Four Moral Decisions More Ridiculous than Resident Evil’s

Resident Evil is an amazing game that really knocked us over. It’s easily the most important game to play this year so far and is definitely an early game of the year contender. Gameplay is great, graphics are superb, and the story is…uh….well, not the worst in the series. We’ll have a lot more to say in our upcoming review, but the game successfully makes you feel terrified and empowered over the course of the 10 to 15 hour experience. The one ridiculous thing that Resident Evil does is badly is present you with a ridiculous decision in the last third of the game that, well, is just dumb. Your choice is obvious, there’s no reason to make any other decision, and – in fact – you are punished for making any choice but the one you clearly must make. The whole sequence is laughably unnecessary but it got us thinking about other times we had to make other ridiculous more decisions in games. Here’s our list of four other times we had to make stupid choices.

Whether or not you want seconds is not a tough choice.

Harvester

One of our first bizarre moral choice came from the classic and bizarre point-and-click adventure Harvester. In the game, you play as Steve, an average guy who wakes up in a 1950’s-style small town populated by strange residents. You have a family and fiance you don’t remember. The game’s story is pretty interesting (and seemed innovative at the time; today, though, the savvy gamer will probably see where this story is going quickly). At the end of the game, you’re given all of the answers to the mysteries and given the choice to become what the residents want you to be or to end your life there. Unfortunately, surviving the ending means you have to kill the girl who you believe to be your girlfriend. And I don’t mean kill as in “press a button and she dies.” Killing her requires you to brutally beat her to death. It’s a tough thing to do in any game, and maybe that’s the point: It’s definitely a choice that’s easy to make, unless you really are a serial killer, I guess.

This is such a weird little game.

Mass Effect 2 – Samara or Morinth

Mass Effect 2 may be the best game on the previous generation of consoles. The space opera provides a compelling story telling a better Magnificent Seven story than even the recent remake). You spend the game assembling a cast of characters for a suicide mission to attack a super powerful but largely mysterious race of invading aliens. One recruit is Samara, who also asks for your help in tracking down her serial killer daughter, Morinth. You trap Morinth by using yourself as bait and battle her with Samara. Winning the fight, Morinth offers to take Samara’s place and help you if you’ll agree to kill her mother. WHO WOULD DO THAT? She’s been trying to kill you this whole time and she’s killed plenty of others, besides the fact that you have to betray Samara in the process. Unless you’re deliberately playing as mean as possible, it’s ridiculous to think that anyone would be tempted by this. Even worse is the opportunity to hook up with Morinth later, which she insists will kill you. Spoiler alert: it does.

Sure, she’s a matricidal homicidal maniac, but she has a very trusting smile.

Far Cry 3 – Do You Want to Kill All of Your Friends?

Far Cry 3 was the first Far Cry game I played all the way through. The open world environment combined with the awesome jungle setting made the game a must-play for me (particularly when I explored via glider). It also did the best job depicting a transition from average guy to hardened killer as the game progressed. This evolution is actually key to the game’s story as numerous characters you meet encourage you to become even more bloodthirsty in attacking the island’s pirate population. You spend the game rescuing your friends from pirates and befriending the island’s indigenous population, led by the preposterously attractive island queen. At the end of the game, the queen lets you choose to either leave with your friends or kill your friends and stay with her (letting your friends go and staying is apparently off the table). The idea that you would kill your friends after spending the entire game rescuing them is pretty silly, and – it turns out – it’s not a great idea for other reasons as well.

Spent the whole game saving her but hey, why not just kill her? Makes sense to me!

Fallout 3 – Why Not Set Off a Nuclear Device?

Fallout 3 is another fantastic game that we played for hundreds of hours. Wandering the nuclear wasteland and exploring a radioactive Washington DC is like an educational Mad Max movie. The endless quests, side missions, characters, locations and weapons is unlike anything else out there (well, maybe not anything). Unlike the other games on our list, Fallout puts its weird moral choice front and center as early in the game you’re offered the opportunity to move in to some upscale apartments. As a respite from the wasteland, this sounds pretty good. The catch, of course, is that you have to detonate the nuclear bomb at the center of the first town you’ve encountered, killing everyone there. Unless you are a stone cold homicidal maniac, it is not at all clear why you would do this. Tenpenny Tower is not that great a place, filled with typical items and annoying residents, and is easily accessible through other means later in the game. Why annihilate an entire town for such a worthless reward? We’ve spend hundreds of hours wandering the wasteland but we’ve never come across an answer to that mystery.