Stand to attention, player! You're not in
Green Hill Zone any more! This
videogame setting suddenly has a lot of guns, bombs,
tanks, warships, soldiers, barbed wire, trenches, smoke, and mines, often in stark contrast to the rest of the game. Often seen in platformers to mix up the usual mix of generic level types.
The music will generally switch to a more sinister theme to warn you, if not a straight out military marching tune.
Don't be surprised to see
Schizo Tech,
Super Soldier enemies, a
Military Mashup Machine for a boss, and for the battlefield to resemble
Mordor.
Examples:
- The tank parade and warships of the Dark World in Super Mario Bros 3.
- The final regular level of Gnasty's World in Spyro the Dragon, and some areas in following games. (including the war betwen the Breeze Builders and Land Blubbers). Also the (ironically enough) Peace Keepers homeworld.
- The Sonic the Hedgehog games use this every now and then.
- The Rikti War Zone in City of Heroes. Also the Shadow Shard, though not as well known for it...
- Warcadia in Folklore. Particularly noticeable since you head there directly from the Faery Realm, a fairyland filled with friendly little elves, breathtaking architecture, and lots of big, green trees. Whereas Warcadia is filled with monsters based on soldiers and WWII-era weapons, craters, burning buildings and at least one Military Mashup Machine.
- When the Army comes in Half-Life, and some places of Half-Life 2.
- The War levels of Mischief Makers had lots of tanks and bombs. You even rode a missile at one point!
- The very first level in Psychonauts, Basic Braining. You're in the mind of your coach, who is obsessed with the military, and thus everything in his mind that you can see so far is war, war, war. Explosions, war-themed figments, minefields, cannons, camouflage. Even the trees are made of bullets and the rabbits are wearing soldier's helmets.
- The Kingdom of Anger, Volk, from Klonoa 2: Lunatea's Veil, a kingdom consisting entirely of people who do nothing but fight all the time.
- The War chapter of Conkers Bad Fur Day
- Wario's Battle Canyon from Mario Party.
- Technoir in Jazz Jackrabbit.
- Super Mario Galaxy has several examples of this, and becomes scrappy when it comes time to collect Purple Coins in them.
- Napalm Man from Mega Man 5 has this for the second half of his stage.
- The aptly named Planet Batalia in Ratchet & Clank (the first one).
- All Metal Gear games feature these prominently, of course.
- Sometimes Inverted in Metal Slug: while the game is about (at times wacky) war, some areas have little to no killing machines trying to kill you. Of course, there are always something else trying to kill you...
- Military base in Painkiller.
- Moon Kronor in Serious Sam II.
- Planet Norion and Pirate Homeworld in Metroid Prime 3.
- Ichor in Jet Force Gemini.
- World 2 ("Combat Island") in Rainbow Islands. With cute, cartoony-looking bomber planes and tanks, no less.
- Pretty much ALL the levels in Heavy Weapon are like this.
- The Halberd in the Kirby series. Meta Knight's airship is probably the biggest example of Mood Whiplash in the series that doesn't involve a Cosmic Horror.
