In Batman: Arkham Asylum, Enemy Chatter reveals that at least one of the Joker's mooks is nervous about dumping a suspicious contaminant into the Gotham City water supply because his beloved mother, who lives down by the docks, might get affected by it. The other men laugh at him and imply his mother is an ugly whore.
"M" was for the murderous look she gave me. "O" meant only that she was weak and old. "T" is for her terror as she fought me. "H" is for her heart that I now hold. "E" is for her eyes swiftly dimming. "R" means rot, and soon rotting she will be. Put them all together, they spell "MOTHER", a word that means a corpse to me. Happy Mother's Day, Mommy.
Averted in Arkham City when one mook tells of how he killed his mother with a poisoned birthday cake. Played straight with another conversation in ''Harley Queen's Revenge"" DLC where a mook wanting to make a name for himself is said to have killed a whole family on Thanksgiving only to take their turkey because he promised his mother a new one.
For a second, it looks like Handsome Jack is this. At one point he calls you up and earnestly asks for you to go check up on his grandmother, who raised him, and make sure she's alright. When you finally get to her house, he bursts out laughing and tells you that he had her killed a while ago. It all makes sense when, if you look around, you examine the handheld buzzsaw you find, and the game describes it as a"disciplinary tool."
A mercenary/hunter named Taggart is the subject of the mission "Stalker of Stalkers". While not a villain, he was certainly bloodthirsty and badass. Collecting pieces of his journal, you learn that he was a man who really loved his mother, naming a particularly impressive stalker after her — which means that his mother's name is Henry. He met his doom by going after Henry (the stalker) for eating his Mother's Day present.
Taggart: This will be the best. Mother's Day. EVER! Do you hear me, Henry? You hear that? MOTHER'S DAY!
Another character who is not a villain but is an acute case of Testosterone Poisoning is Mr. Torgue. In the Thanksgiving mini-DLC "The Horrible Hunger of the Ravenous Wattle Gobbler", Mr. Torgue offers the Vault Hunters an important task: Say hi to his grandmother, who is a big fan.
Ash Gravehart is angered when Matthias fails to sufficiently clean his mother's statue, and he follows his father's kidnapping scheme in order to revive her.
Achilles turns out to be spying on the Graveharts on behalf of his mother, Silnastra. He also risks staying behind in the final dungeon to witness her Heroic Sacrifice, despite the danger this places him in.
Clive Barker's Undying: Lizbeth kept the animated corpse of her mother in her lair, seated at a dining table and presumably "keeping her company." Becomes somewhat more tragic (but no less creepy) when you remember that Evaline Covenant died while giving birth to Lizbeth, making Lizbeth the only one of the Covenant children who never actually knew their mother.
While Jackie isn't bad, exactly, he does work as a career mercenary and gun for hire. He has a very close and loving relationship with his mom, Mama Welles, even if they do have their disagreements. V might also count, because while they're not Mama Welles' biological child, she essentially treats them as her own after the prologue, when V and Jackie become Platonic Life-Partners/Heterosexual Life-Partners. V treats her as their own family too.
Dante from Dante's Inferno is shocked to find his mother condemned in the Wood of the Suicides. Granted, he had been led to believe that she died of a fever, but it's still a Tear Jerker moment. Especially considering that she did it out of desperation, no thanks to her husband's abuse and mistreatment of her and Dante.
Dead or Alive: Ayane, generally a cold and bitter girl as a result of her upbringing and the prejudice against her for the circumstances of her birth nonetheless lets the armor crack and the tears slip when she's forced to kill her adoptive father (and the only person that ever showed her concern growing up besides Kasumi and Hayate) Genra after DOATEC transforms him into the demonic Omega. Dead Or Alive Dimensions reveals that Ayane also has a good relationship with her biological mother.
None other than Vergil, the Evil Twin of Dante. Despite his villainous actions, he still very much loved his mother Eva which is partly why he tried to take on Mundus to avenge her. In Marvel vs. Capcom 3 Vergil even claims Trish (a demoness created by Mundus to look identical to Eva) is “repulsive” in his pre-match dialogue with her. Devil May Cry 5 dwells into this further revealing Vergil’s Start of Darkness and resentment towards Dante was due to the fact Eva gave her life to protect him while seemingly neglecting him. Dante corrects this revealing Eva’s last moments were spent trying to find Vergil before she was killed by Mundus’s demons.
In Disgaea: Hour of Darkness, the death of Laharl's mother is one of the main reasons he's so emotionally messed up. Likewise, in Disgaea 2, Axel's primary motivation for his acting career is so he can take care of his sick mother. And according to The World of Disgaea 2, the jacket he wears was made by her as well.
Teyrn Loghain and his daughter Queen Anora in Dragon Age: Origins serve as each other's Morality Pets. No matter how much of a self-serving power-hungry Jerkass either is, they still love each other, though power never stops being a conflict between them.
Shown also in the Human Noble origin, where no matter what personality you assign to the Warden, s/he loves both his/her parents very much. S/he's very clearly father Bryce's favorite child, and a large chunk of the origin story is spent protecting mother Eleanor during an invasion. This makes the ending of the origin especially heartbreaking since the Human Noble is the only origin who has two good, loving parents. They both get murdered.
The Dwarf Noble gender-flips the trope by being the favorite child of King Endrin, the ruler of Orzammar. The love between the father and his middle child is so well-known to the citizens of the dwarven city, most of them expect Endrin to name the Dwarf Noble as heir to the throne rather than firstborn son Trian.
The sequel has Anders — while not an outright villain, by the end of the game he's willing to get a lot people killed to expose Meredith's brutality. Even at his lowest point, however, his most prized possession is the embroidered pillow his mother made for him, the only thing of his parents' he was allowed to keep when he was taken by the Templars at age twelve and imprisoned in the Circle Tower as a mage. His giving it away to Varric is a good sign that he's become a Death Seeker. This is probably why Varric refuses the gift and insists that Anders keep the pillow.
Also in the sequel, no matter how hard-ass, violent, or outright psychotic Hawke is played, his/her voice still trembles and sounds as if he/she is holding back tears while searching for their mother Leandra after she had been abducted in Act 3.
EarthBound (1994): This is actually a huge part of Giygas' backstory. EarthBound Beginnings implies that his insanity was caused by his inability to understand or cope with his feelings toward Maria, the human who raised him, versus his loyalty to his fellow aliens.
In Morrowind's Tribunal expansion, King of Morrowind Hlaalu Helseth is a Manipulative Bastard of the highest order with no qualms about poisoning rivals or siccing assassins on threats to his authority. Despite this, he is still highly protective of his mother, Former Queen Barenziah, and, though she publicly maintains that she has backed away from politics, it is believed that she still wields massive influence through Helseth.
In Oblivion, Mathieu Bellamont of the Dark Brotherhood loves his mother very very much. So much, in fact, that he is actually a traitor with a lifelong vendetta against the Dark Brotherhood, planning to assassinate the Night Mother and bring down the Brotherhood from the inside because his mother was killed by Lucien Lachance. He even keeps his mother's severed and mummified head in his cellar. Bringing the head to the place where Lucien was executed and kicking it around the room nets an understandably shocked reaction from Mathieu.
In Fallout 3, your character can be a living, walking embodiment of good, or Satan's favorite mortal. Either way, you'll go through hell and high water just to find your dad. This being Fallout 3, you have the choice of why. At one point in the game, you also can, if you choose, express explosive anger over your mother dying in childbirth.
Likewise Butch Deloria, who spends most of the Vault 101 intro being a bully and a delinquent, runs to the player character during the escape sequence, panicking about radroaches breaking into his mother's room and attacking her. Save her and/or give him a weapon to help, and he's genuinely grateful, becoming an optional companion later on.
"Skinny" Malone's gun moll Darla from Fallout 4 is normally a violent psycho, and if you talk Skinny out of fighting, she chews him out for going soft and ditches him. However, if you appeal to Darla directly by reminding her that her parents are worried about her, she'll have a brief My God, What Have I Done? moment and realize she's better off going back home to her family.
Not quite played straight, but in Final Fantasy VII and the sequel movie Advent Children Jenova's "children" (Sephiroth and the White Hair, Black Heart threesome) are doing their best to fulfill their "mother"'s desire to... destroy life on earth.
Reno: Mother, schmother... It's Jenova's freaking head! Yazoo: I will not have you refer to Mother that way! Loz: You meanie!
Final Fantasy X, Seymour's mother sacrificed herself when he was a child and he didn't take it well). And if you want to twist the knife even further, try summoning Anima, the Aeon created by his mother's sacrifice, during the final battle against him.
In Ghostbusters: The Video Game, Ivo Shandor kept a painting of his mother in his church to Gozer. Despite most everything else in the church being run-down, his mother's painting is the only thing that is oddly still pristine, even after being underwater for who knows how long.
Kratos from God of War: Ghost of Sparta. He is shown to care for his mom. When she was turned by Gods into a monster that Kratos had to kill, thus killing his own mother, he was shown to be very devastated by her death and outraged at the Gods. He took her body into his arms. And he also did her will, and decided to look for his brother. Coincidentally, in God of War IIIKronos' main motive for attempting to kill Kratos is to avenge Gaia. In mythology, Gaia is the mother of Kronos. If this holds true in God of War lore, this means the reason you fight Kronos is that the latter thinks his mother died by Kratos' hand.
Downplayed on Grand Theft Auto III — if you listen to the Chatterbox radio station, eventually you'll hear Toni Cipriani (the local Leone Mafia boss) call in and complain bitterly about being smothered by his 'ma'.
Toni: It's my ma. She don't think I'm a real man. Can you imagine that? I mean, I do a man's job and all, but… she treats me like a little boy! All I get is 'Your pa' this, and 'Your pa' that, and 'You're not a real man, Toni!' And it's driving me… freakin' nuts!
In Liberty City Stories, the prequel where you play as Toni, his mother actually puts out a hit on him (in a Shout-Out to The Sopranos), but retracts it once he becomes a made man.
Implied with Ganondorf throughout The Legend of Zelda series. They never interact onscreen, but Ganondorf trusts his surrogate mothers, Koume and Kotake, to guard the Spirit Temple in his stead and his swords from The Wind Waker have their names engraved on them, seemingly to honor their memories.
Inverted in Skyward Sword with resident Big Brother Mentor Pipit. He's a normally Nice Guy, yet he's quite mean to his mother because she is a Lazy Bum who would rather pay other people to clean the house instead of do it herself, money they only have because Pipit works hard doing night patrols to both fund his tuition at the Knight Academy and put food on the table.
In Rain's ending in Mortal Kombat 11, he uses the Hourglass to look back through his past, and learns that his father, the god Argus, stole him away from his mother, telling her that he was stillborn. His mother subsequently died from grief. Infuriated, Rain kills Argus and his legitimate sons, but spares Argus's wife so she can feel the same grief and horror that Rain's mother did.
Porky Minch in Mother 3. His favorite restaurant is staffed with robots in his permanently estranged mother's likeness. Sure, it's creepy, especially when you consider the fact that she hated his guts, but that's about as close to love as he's capable of.
Emerald from Octopath Traveler II is eventually revealed to be this. He was sent to prison for embezzling funds from a criminal organization; however, an available sidequest shows that he cares a lot about his mother. The lighthouse keeper on an island near Frigit Isle from Emerald addressed to a woman named Ruby from Timberain. Once you arrive there, you find out she's his mother, and the letter expresses excitement that he'll get to see her again if he succeeds in helping Osvald break out of prison. Once he realizes he's about to die, Emerald adds a postscript, hoping that Ruby will forgive him for his crimes since his actions proved useful to someone else. Emerald simply wants his mother to know that he cares about her and regrets his past actions.
Perhaps the only redeeming feature of the Glukkon race of the Odd World games is their absolute devotion to their mother. That "Mother" singular, as every Glukkon is the child of Lady Margaret.
Kanji from Persona 4 is an odd example. He loves his mom and he feels sorry for her for all the stuff he puts her through. To make up for it he beats up a biker gang that kept her up at night.
The Agorian Leader in the Battle of Zanifar in Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack in Time, when you shoot down his ship, ends up sinking into the water, during which he promptly screams for his momma to save him because he can't swim.
Commander Argos: Help! I can't swim! Momma, your little booboo needs help! MOMMA!
The FPS PO'ed have you playing as an alien-killing badass who slaughter enemy mooks by the dozens... and a momma's boy who always remembers to write to her. Your intro have you writing a letter telling her you'll be home soon (before your ship crashed on the alien world). It forms a nice Book Ends with the final cutscene being you promising her you'll be home on time for Mother's Day.
Rave Heart: Deconstructed with Prince Eryn, who turns on his family in order to gain political power. Although he cares about his mother and orders the Galactic Enforcers to take her alive, his mother ends up getting killed by shrapnel anyways. As a result, he blames Ellemine and Klein for failing to protect her rather than admitting his own mistakes. It's implied that part of his reason for going rogue is because he's jealous that Ellemine gets their mother's attention.
Red Dead Redemption: John Marston is a pretty polite guy, but still a hardened outlaw through and through; the only people in the game that he doesn't see as either a means to an end or as a disposable nuisance is Bonnie MacFarlane, and his wife and son.
The remake of the original Resident Evil gives us Lisa Trevor, a humanoid abomination subjugated to numerous tests for a slew of viruses for years. Although she's chronologically forty and devoid of sanity, she still just wants to see her mother.
Averted in Resident Evil: Gun Survivor with the ruthless Sheena Island Commander, Vincent Goldman. At one point you come across a video recording of Vincent's mother pleading him to stop his Human Trafficking activities and experimentations on orphans for research, but it doesn't work.
The reason main character Batsu gets involved in the events of Rival Schools: United by Fate is because his mother Shizuku is one of the school kidnapping victims. The kidnappers happen to be Batsu's estranged father (who to be fair is Brainwashed and Crazy) and his previously unknown cousins (and one of them ultimately joins Batsu's cause).
Sam and Max Save the World: In Episode 3, "The Mole, The Mob, and the Meatball", Sam and Max meet a professional card shark who is very fond of his late mother. When he gets on their bad side and decides to withhold information, they decide to interrogate him with 'Yo Mama' jokes.
Muggshot from the Sly Cooper series. When Bentley is trying to lure him into a fight in the third game (a trick to get him to fight Sly's police officer Love Interest and eliminate both as a threat to their current scheme), all of his insults Muggshot either brushes aside, either with surprising wit, bashing through them with raw ego, or outright dismissing what he said because it was too complicated. Only when Bentley insults Muggshot's mother does he become angry enough to agree to the fight.
The Spirit Hunter series has two vengeful spirits who love their mothers:
The Starter Villain of Spirit Hunter: Death Mark, Hanahiko, may be a Vengeful Ghost, but he is also a scared little boy who wants to see his mom again. The way to save him is to smear lipstick on his face like his mom used to.
Spirit Hunter: NG: Masaru Ishimaru, the Momoi Department Store arsonist who murdered twenty people including children, and who became part of the Demon Tsukuyomi, did it all as part of a ritual to revive his dead mother. One flashback scene where he speaks with Miroku, his Mad Doctor friend who he gathered victims for, has him explain that his dad neglected him but his mom took care of him.
Star Wars: The Old Republic has a couple cases in the Knights of the Fallen Empire and Knights of the Eternal Throne expansions; one is that the Trooper's Token Evil Teammate Tanno Vik is found running a black market in a pirate sanctuary. Typical for Vik, but one way to get him really mad during the conversation is to bring up his mom. She died in the process of smuggling him to Nar Shaddaa as a small child. He even tells the Trooper (his former CO) that he wouldn't hesitate to murder them if they made that mistake. And in a case of "even mothers love their murderous children," Senya signs on with the player's party to try and redeem her surviving kids that happen to be the nutcases ruling Zakuul at the moment. And while it seems to be completely defied in their case you can eventually bring Arcann to heel because he regains enough sanity to at least listen to his mother and killing Senya will lead to him going on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge against you.
In his arcade intro in Ultra Street Fighter IV, Hugo is challenged by a crowd of rogue Mad Gear members. He stomps out of his trailer, making the ground shake with every step. He looms over his foes and slurps down an entire can of potatoes. There's an ominous moment of silence... and then Hugo starts bawling because he misses his mother's home-grown potatoes!It must be seen to be believed. Turns out that making fun of potatoes is Hugo's Berserk Button.
The Sniper. Although considering his father has essentially forsaken him as a "crazed gunman", it's more or less by default.
I'm not a crazed gunman, Dad, I'm an assassin! There's a difference! ... Well, the difference bein' one's a paying job and the other's mental sickness! [...] Dad? ... Dad! Put Mom on the phone!!!
The Scout too: he is a major Jerkass and a Sociopathic Hero but gets majorly pissed off when he finds out that the enemy Spy is having sex with his mother. Further in-game quotes also suggest he loves his mother very much. Although that freakin' Scout was the Spy, so that would probably have been the Scout's reaction to seeing the pictures anyway.
The Demoman bought a mansion for his mother and makes her tea.
He holds down three multi-million dollar jobs just to make her happy. She doesn't need the money, having those jobs are her requests.
Kazuya Mishima from Tekken, despite being an unabashed asshole and an incarnation of Devil himself, has a soft spot for his mother, Kazumi. While at first only shown in the non-canon movie, Tekken 7 reveals that he loves his mom, and the fact that Heihachi killed her though he doesn't know Heihachi was actually acting in self-defense from Kazumi's attempted murder, according to him, was just one of the many reasons why he hates his old man. He's genuinely shocked and hurt to learn that his mom also wanted to kill him if he succumbed to evil, which he long since has.
Squid, the malevolent supercomputer antagonist of Will You Snail? is an AI equivalent. He truly loved and cared about his creator, Amelia, and would often pretend to be broken just so she would have to come fix him and he could talk to her. Her betrayal of Squid and her subsequent death at his hands psychologically broke Squid and is what drove him into a murderous rampage to destroy all of humanity.
In Xenoblade Chronicles 2, it was the death of Amalthus' mother that started his descent to villainy. Not only that, but his last words involved seeing his mother again after so long.
Amalthus: Mother, I've... missed you...
Bana also seems to be a case of this, as much of the money from his criminal empire is apparently going to his parents. Then you find out that his father, Don Dondon, is also a criminal, and that money was funding Lindwurm, a terrorist organization.
Turns out that making fun of potatoes is Hugo's Berserk Button.