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Stellar Blade became rather controversial with critics in large part due to the sexualization of its protagonist Eve. They argued that the game's marketing leaned heavily into Eve's sexual appeal by focusing on elements such as revealing costumes and suggestive character designs for its promotional strategy. This got to the point where the South Korean version of the game received an "Adults-Only" rating due to suggestive images, nudity, and violence. Hyung-Tae Kim, the game's director, defended these design choices, stating:
"When it comes to the design, we put special attention on the back of the character because the player is always facing the back of the character when they're playing. That's what they see the most of, so we thought this was pretty important."
This controversy culminated when the game released with a Day 1 patch that patched out unintentionally offensive graffiti, and censored two revealing outfits Eve can wear in the game, the Holiday Rabbit and the Cybernetic Bondage, but these are not the only censored outfits left in the game. When the player finds their first unlockable Nano Suit blueprint on the overworld, a tutorial pop-up appears featuring a video that scrolls through a montage of the other Nano Suits you can unlock in the game, and among them is an uncensored version of the Moutan Peony, an outfit that features dark pantyhose covering Eve's skin up to her waist in both the base game and the Day 1 patch. It appears that the developers forgot to remove this video when changing the costumes during development, and it's currently not known if other outfits in this video were changed in the final game.
These changes are in contrast to a claim from the game's official Twitter account stating that all versions of the game worldwide would be released uncensored, leading to the changes being widely criticized by players on social media and speculation that the game's publisher Sony Interactive Entertainment mandated the changes after addressing the offensive graffiti. However, Kim addressed the matter during a Q&A at a launch event for the game, stating:
"Understandably we also recognize about[sic] the issue. However, the final costume that we wanted to show you is indeed the costume in version 1.0.0.2. I want to clarify that is our final product. However, I know this answer is not enough to convince our users. There is an internal discussion ongoing regarding this. So I think we'll have a chance to answer it soon."
The speculated tensions between Shift Up and Sony during development were actually highlighted by Drakengard and Nier: Automata creator Yoko Taro, a developer with a history of tensions with Sony, during a joint interview with him and Kim for IGN published a little over a week before the game's release:
Yoko Taro: "[...] Mr. Kim, I wanted to ask you if there were any fights with Sony Interactive Enteratainment (SIE), since they are publishing Stellar Blade."
Hyung-Tae Kim: "(Glances at SIE staff members in the room and laughs.) The people at SIE are... very, very nice!"
Taro: "SIE's staff members are pulling faces I've never seen before. I wish the readers of this article could see it!"
Compilation of outfits in base game before Day 1 patch (uncensored versions of Cybernetic Bondage at 2:30, and Holiday Rabbit at 4:52): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMT6z9xejeA
Compilation of outfits after Day 1 patch (censored versions of Cybernetic Bondage at 1:03, Holiday Rabbit at 2:19, and Moutan Peony at 3:02): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAcvYBGPoGk
Nano Suit tutorial pop-up montage with uncensored Moutan Peony costume (this is the only footage I could find of anyone sitting through this video start to finish): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHJhViruQKM?t=3761
Mario & Luigi, with their appearances from the promo art for the Atari 2600 version of Mario Bros., are featured on the box art of 32-in-1, but no Mario-related games are included. The rough drawing of the art, believed by some to be a rough sketch for, or traced from, an "Atari Advantage" poster promoting the Atari 7800 and other products, led some to believe the compilation was a bootleg.
The US NES cover art portrays a human pilot, which seems misleading as the game's main characters, Red Baron and Blue Max, are actual birds along with the whole game taking place during World War I in the country of Bird Land which is inhabited by birds, and not the actual United States as depicted on the box cover.
The Lion King 1 1/2 for Game Boy Advance was released in European territories not as as the movie's European title The Lion King 3, but rather simply The Lion King, with a large image of cub Simba added to the box art, despite not being playable in-game. The blurb does specify that the game is based on The Lion King 3 and alludes towards only Timon and Pumbaa being playable however.
The original US box art could also be considered misleading to a much lesser degree. While being open about what movie it is an adaptation of and having a giant Timon and Pumbaa ripping through the paper at the top, it uses a modified version of the first film's promo art, featuring Mufasa's spirit head, with cub Simba also present in silhouette (albeit significantly smaller relative to Timon and Pumbaa than on the European box art). This imagery that was not used to market The Lion King 1 1/2 anywhere else. Both boxes' blurbs also feature a screenshot where Simba, as an NPC, is in the center.
Atari Corporation wanted to license out the likeness of hockey player Mario Lemieux for a Lynx game that would've been titled "Super Mario Hockey" as a jab at Nintendo and their Super Mario franchise disguised as a reference to Lemieux's nickname. The game was never made, but eventually Lemieux's likeness would be licensed out to Sega for a 1991 hockey game.
Action 52 came with a leaflet explaining that the games Alfred and the Fetucini's[sic] and Jigsaw could only be unlocked by completing Ooze. In reality, the prior two games are not playable on NES hardware and the latter game is unwinnable.
Norbetina does not become a ninja by the end of No. 11 Downing Street: The Adventures of Ninja Nanny & Sherrlock Sheltie. The ending of the game teases that she will become a ninja in the second instalment, which never released.
Despite being marketed as one of the two-games-in-one packs that were popular on the Game Boy Advance, neither game included in Looney Tunes Double Pack was ever released separately. The game's copyright information before the title screen lists both of the included games as separate copyrighted entities, meaning they may have been intended to be released as separate, more expansive titles at some point.
In four separate 1989 issues of Video Games & Computer Entertainment, the mail-in game order service Play It Again put up an advertisement featuring a list of games customers could order. Among these is a mysterious title, Yeah Yeah Beebiss 1, which is not the name of any one game - this title would reappear in a separate advert for FuncoLand, under the name "Yeah Beebiss 1". To add further mystery to this game, it was placed between W and X games alphabetically instead of with Y games. There are multiple theories on the status of Beebiss:
•Some believe that Beebiss is a baby-themed game like Baby Boomer, Rai Rai Kyonshis: Baby Kyonshi no Amida Daibouken, or Bio Miracle Bokutte Upa, given that "baby" sounds like "Beebiss" - with Rai Rai Kyonshis being considered the most likely candidate of the 3 for "Rai Rai"'s (A Japanese onomatopoeia associated with China) similarity to "Yeah Yeah", the game's release in 1989, and the presence of other import games on the listing. Rai Rai Kyonshis is generally the most accepted identity of the game. •One theory proposes that the game was made as a copyright trap to catch which retailers are stealing game lists, something one of the founders of Play It Again confessed to doing, albeit without confirming if Beebiss was among those games. •A rather strange theory proposes that the game was somehow related to exploring, possibly being Atlantis no Nazo's cancelled US release Super Pitfall II, named for Charles William Beebe, a famous explorer and naturalist •Another theory suggests that the title was simply a bizarre, elaborate in-joke that both Play It Again and FuncoLand employees were in on.
The myth of Beebiss would inspire the game Yeah Yeah Beebiss II, developed by popular retro gaming YouTuber John Riggs and based on the aesthetic of Rai Rai Kyonshis.
The box art of the game depicts Snow White, the Dwarves, and the Evil Queen as looking like poorly modelled versions of their Disney counterparts. However, their in-game designs are all completely different.
Kiss of War has been criticized for its advertising campaign, which primarily focuses on sexualizing the female cast of the game and depicts gameplay that is nothing like in the actual game.
Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is the first game in the "Batman: Arkham" series to not feature Batman as the main protagonist, though he does still appear in the game. At The Game Awards 2022, a trailer for the game was released which ended with a brief tribute to longtime Batman voice actor Kevin Conroy, who passed away on November 10, 2022. Host Geoff Keighley then confirmed that Conroy would be voicing Batman "one final time" in Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League; this game being Conroy's final performance as Batman was a major promotional point in online articles. However, on January 30, 2024, days prior to the game's release, IGN reported that there were two additional projects he recorded lines for as Batman prior to his death that would be released posthumously. While one of those projects, "Batman: Caped Crusader", ultimately did not feature Conroy, the other reported project, "Justice League: Crisis on Infinite Earths – Part 3", was later confirmed to be Conroy's actual final performance as Batman, making his purported last performance in Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League false advertising.
The PlayStation 3 Greatest Hits version of the game's box cover suggests that trophies can be obtained in-game. However, the game did not have any trophy system implemented due to the game being ported to the PlayStation 3 a year before Sony adopted the console's trophy system.
The original version of StarCraft developed prior to 1996 was considered to be inferior to other games shown at the time, most notably the real-time strategy (RTS) game Dominion: Storm Over Gift 3 being developed by Ion Storm Dallas, which was also shown at E3 and the Consumer Electronics Show that year. The game appeared to be miles ahead of what StarCraft was, with consumers responding to the latter game weakly as "Warcraft in space". Realizing that the version of StarCraft they had was worse than they had thought, following the release of Diablo at the end of that year, Blizzard began to "lick [their] wounds and plan for the future" by restarting development on StarCraft and completely overhauling their development process as a whole. StarCraft eventually released in March of 1998 to critical and commercial success, and was retrospectively dubbed as one of the defining games of the RTS genre.
However, after Ion Storm Dallas closed in 2001, a few of their former employees were scooped up by Blizzard and two of them later revealed to former Blizzard executive Patrick Wyatt that the demos Ion Storm presented of Dominion: Storm Over Gift 3 were actually pre-rendered trailers, and the players "presenting" the game's demos were actors pretending to play the game. This meant that the only reason why StarCraft was released in the form it was was because Blizzard got tricked into raising their standards to compete with a pre-rendered video, resulting in the creation of one of their most successful games.