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YMMV / Twisted Metal

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  • Alternate Character Interpretation:
    • Calypso both in and out of universe. His portrayals and personality vary, as does the origin of his powers, and one's interpretation can come from whether or not one considers the games to be in canon with one another. In the first game and Black, he's fairly stoic and doesn't go out of his way to twist the contestants' wishes (even if he's still something of a Literal Genie), and a number of contestants even get precisely what they wanted, but in the other games, he's very hammy and a straight-up Jackass Genie. His powers came from a demon named Black in the first game, he stole them from the demon Minion in the second, the fourth had them come from a magic ring, and in the reboot, the preacher implies that he is the Devil himself. His interactions with his daughter in the second game and Head-On seem to cast him as a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds, and the control he has over his power of wishes is put into question.
    • There's also his treatment of Mortimer in Head-On. Was it a genuine Pet the Dog moment, or a calculated move to get rid of a supernatural Wild Card? Especially seeing as how, in the second game, Mortimer actually posed a threat to him and successfully turned the tables on him.
    • Then there's his interaction with Mike & Stu in the second game. Did he purposefully trick them into jumping head-first off a building, or was he willing to give them the plane tickets and just have their disappointment be the deception, only to be genuinely shocked at their stupidity? In the first game, he gave Hammerhead's drivers, Dave & Mike, what they wanted without bothering to trick them (be it his harem in the Lost ending or expensive tires in the canonical one, another mundane monetary loss that Calypso could cope with just like the tickets).
  • Anti-Climax Boss:
    • Dark Tooth's head in 2. Once you destroy the truck, your health is restored and the head is the same boss as the truck, only with a lot less health.
    • Primeval in 3 is a challenging opponent, but unlike other bosses, you fight him in an arena with instant death pitfalls, which can be used to kill him instantly.
  • Audience-Alienating Era: Twisted Metal 3 and 4 drop the dark satirical tone for a Denser and Wackier one, with a focus on goofy character traits, a step down in the art department, and silly bad endings for nearly every character until Black revived the franchise. Small Brawl notably averted this reception and has a small cult following from those who have played it.
  • Awesome Music: The series' use of licensed music is pretty well respected.
    • The Rolling Stones' "Paint It, Black", which served as the theme song to Twisted Metal: Black.
    • The third and fourth games had a selection of music from the likes of One Minute Silence, Rob Zombie, Pitch Shifter, and Cirrus, among others, that is generally agreed to be among the few redeeming factors of that era in the franchise.
    • The second game had an outstanding original soundtrack of songs evocative of '80s and early '90s hard rock and heavy metal. The Los Angeles level gives us "Quake Zone Rumble, while the theme music for Antarctica is suitably intense. Zack Zwiesen, writing for Kotaku, has sung its praises.
  • Breather Boss: Minion in 4 is one of these, not only compared to his level, but also the Slamm and Auger double team before him and Sweet Tooth himself afterwards. His difficulties navigating his own maze and a special weapon that tends to whiff (especially against small cars) make for a pretty laughable fight.
  • Breather Level: Snowy Roads from Black is a cakewalk compared to Drive-In Movie, the other option for level six. It's a lot bigger so retreating is less risky, it actually has a health recharge station, and a large chunk of the map is under a thundercloud that is the environmental weapon, allowing you to damage several opponents at once without directly engaging them.
  • Broken Base:
    • The direction the PS3 revival took for the series. Giving more engaging and complex storylines to three distinctive drivers, thus relegating the past drivers to oblivion and making their cars free for Mooks from the aforementioned trio to drive, robbed a lot of fans of the older games the wrong way, as in those games, each vehicle (and driver) got a backstory. Others liked having only a few characters get better developed stories, instead of many drivers getting Excuse Plots to force their presence in the games.
    • The people who like the third and fourth games against the people who like the rest of the series. There's also people who like one (usually TM4, which is sometimes seen as an improvement from TM3), but not the other.
  • Common Knowledge: It's commonly said that Catfish, the driver of Hammerhead in Head-On, has the true first name of Zeke, due to his ending having Calypso saying that name. However, Calypso was referring to the assistant who helped him set up the decoy Catfish shot rather than Catfish himself.
  • Complete Monster:
    • Black: Needles Kane, better known as Sweet Tooth, is a sadistic Serial Killer who lacks his humorous nature from the classic games. Developing a lust for blood after making his first kill with precise skill and no remorse, Sweet Tooth goes on a massive killing spree, murdering his victims, which includes people who were unlucky to have crossed his path, in incredibly gruesome manners. One of these murders includes Axel's wife, in which Sweet Tooth mailed Axel his wife's body, piece by piece. He's also implied to have murdered his father, Charlie Kane, who was trying to keep the latter's son away from him due to his nature. After being cursed by a preacher to suffer pain that grew every day, and then locked up in Blackfield Asylum, he agrees to Calypso's offer of competing in Twisted Metal in exchange for lifting the curse, planning to kill Calypso afterward. After winning the contest, which he took great pleasure in due to all the killing, he is given a vial to lift the curse, but at the price of no longer being able to kill. Choosing to live with the curse rather than giving up killing, he smashes the vial and then proceeds to fatally slash Calypso's throat, before declaring his intentions of becoming the greatest killer of all time.
    • The 2012 reboot gives two characters Adaptational Villainy:
      • This adaption of Calypso lacks the humor of the original, and is strongly implied to be the Devil. Calypso is the creator and host of Twisted Metal, a demolition derby that attracts some of the vilest people with the lure of a wish. This tournament has killed numerous innocent bystanders through its destruction around public places. Calypso completely intended this, loving the carnage and destruction it leaves. He even instigates some of his contestants to participate, manipulating them in situations that would make them desperate enough for a wish. What they don't know is that whatever this wish is, Calypso intends to use it to kill the victim in some way after they finished entertaining him, and then trap their souls in his painting where he enjoys the screams of pain and agony. A sadistic entity, this version of Calypso brutally kills thousands out of entertainment.
      • Dollface, real name Krista Sparks, is a vain and selfish model who, in order to get to the top, sabotages several models on a catwalk and outright murders one of them with a sledgehammer after said model is chosen for a prize photo shoot. After an accident which badly damages her face, and which her doctor was only able to mostly fix after several surgeries—leaving only a small scar on her face—Dollface decapitates him with a chainsaw. Before joining Twisted Metal in order to remove her mask and become beautiful again, she gained several mooks with the same thinking as her, and when one of her mooks asks Dollface if most of them will get their wishes, Dollface shoots her.
  • Ensemble Dark Horse:
    • Quatro and Orbital are probably the only characters introduced in 4 that fans like, though this is attributed to either making a wish that was worth a damn, or being a badass bounty hunter that doesn't fall for the traps of Twisted Metal, and many fans wish his ending wasn't as brief as it was.
    • Mr. Ash, the original driver of Darkside, only had a story mode in the original Twisted Metal, but he's still easily one of the fan favorites to this day. It probably has something to do with being actually Satan, and also seemingly the source of Calypso's powers in the first place. One of the few complaints people had with Black is the fact he wasn't the driver of Darkside.
    • Mike and Stu from Twisted Metal 2 (and to a lesser extent, Jeff and Mike from the original Twisted Metal), for being Those Two Guys that provide comic relief — oh, and driving a giant-ass monster truck that can crush other cars under its wheels alone.
    • Raven, the driver of Shadow from Twisted Metal: Black. While a good deal of the new or revisioned characters from Black were generally approved of by the fandom, Raven gets this taken up to eleven, often being used in fanworks as Shadow's driver beyond the Black universe. Her goth style, sympathetic backstory and motive, and similarities to Carrie White don't hurt, and neither does her Twisted Metal: Lost profile stating how she became a hero to Midtown, using her ocultic powers to protect the innocent and deliver vengeance upon the Ax-Crazy Serial Killers terrorizing the streets.
    • Also from Black are other one-of characters No-Face for being both pitiable for his condition and being a genuinely funny Deadpan Snarker, with his Bond One-Liner in his ending being likely the funniest thing in the entire game, Billy Ray Stillwell for being an interesting take on Hillbilly Horrors with an entertaining voice actor, and Dollface who proved popular enough that her character design was reused in the 2010 remake alongside Mr. Grimm and Needles Kain.
    • Agent Shepard, the latest driver of Crimson Fury in Twisted Metal: Head On, for being savvy enough to straight-up arrest Calypso instead of trying to make a wish, and also by defying Calypso's Hannibal Lecture before giving him "The Reason You Suck" Speech.
  • Esoteric Happy Ending: Inverted with Carl/Buzz and Jamie Roberts' ending in III; The two of them wish for a world free of crime, and Calypso seemingly grants it without repercussions… with the only "catch" that the two police officers are out of a job, seemingly completely ignoring the fact that police officers do more than just arrest criminals or they can just get new jobs. This is the reason their ending is often cited as one of if not the worst ending in a game that's already chock-full of some of the worst endings in the series.
  • Evil Is Cool: Both Sweet Tooth and Calypso. Sure, one's a Monster Clown, and the other's a Jackass Genie, but they're so damn awesome about it.
  • Franchise Original Sin: The 989 games are often believed to be when the name "Sweet Tooth" started being used to refer to Needles Kane, as opposed to his ice cream truck. In actuality, Needles has been called "Sweet Tooth" during Yellow Jacket's ending in Twisted Metal 1 and his own Twisted Metal 2 ending.
  • Game-Breaker:
    • Playable versions of bosses tend to be these. There's a reason why they are usually not available at the start of the game, having to be unlocked either through game progress or cheat codes.
    • Minion in Twisted Metal 2. He's not as strong as the boss version of him, but even with that, he's still easily the best character in the game. His vehicle is the most durable vehicle in the game and one of the fastest, while also having good handling. On top of this, there is his special, which is extremely powerful, homes in on the enemy, freezes them, and charges more quickly than normal special weapons. Minion doesn't get any passwords that let players use him to skip levels, but he doesn't need them. You can see a player use him here (skip to 11:36) against Dark Tooth and win without much difficulty. For most of the same reasons, he's still overpowered in Twisted Metal 3.
    • Twisted Metal 4, however, is notable with its super variants of the previous characters (Super Axel's shockwave for example, knocked all enemies REALLY far away, had 360 degree coverage, and set fire to them as well), or just plain cheap like Moon Buggy's Quasars.
      • Sweet Tooth in 4 is the undisputed most overpowered, gamebreakingly ridiculous character in the entire series. This is due to his Special Attack, which can practically destroy weaker cars with 1 shot, and traps the target in an electrical surge, rendering movement almost impossible. This in turn, makes the targets sitting ducks for a second hit. It is so powerful that landing just one, and mind you it has homing capability and very long range, essentially guarantees a kill.
  • Good Bad Bugs: Twisted Metal 4 had a glitch where, if all but one weapon was used up, then using that last weapon followed by using the rear fire command, the weapon could be fired even if there was nothing in your inventory albeit backwards. This made the environmental weapon and the playable bosses' specials, especially Sweet Tooth's special, extremely spam friendly.
  • Growing the Beard: While the first game got decent reviews, the second was considered a vast improvement and is still ranked by many fans as one of the best games in the series. The gameplay was smoother and more refined, Calypso took on his Jackass Genie traits, the atmosphere gained a streak of Black Comedy, the production values on the endings were punched up from just scrolling text to Motion Comics with full voice acting, and the vehicles, characters, and levels grew both more numerous and more distinctive.
  • Harsher in Hindsight: Simon Whittlebone, a frustrated architect who uses an armored and heavily weaponized front loader dubbed "Mr. Slam". to wreak havoc and destruction. Marvin Heemeyer, a frustrated repair shop owner, used an armored and heavily weaponized bulldozer the press dubbed the "Killdozer" to do the same thing in a real life small townnote .
  • High-Tier Scrappy: While Spectre isn't a particularly strong car for single-player, it has a reputation for being very annoying to face in multiplayer, as its ghost missiles and high speed allow it to play unrivaled games of keep away. This may have been the reason why the car was excluded from the online focused Playstation 3 game despite being a series regular up to that point.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight: Mr. Grimm's ending in the second game sees Calypso start a massive, non-stop Purge on a global scale.
  • Hollywood Homely:
  • It Was His Sled: Marcus (driver of Roadkill) and Needles (driver of Sweet Tooth) being the same person.
  • Jerkass Woobie:
    • Just about every character in Black with the exceptions of Sweet Tooth, Black, and Cage (and Agent Stone, the Token Good Teammate). By the end of the story, most of the characters end up killing a person out of Revenge or they snapped already and killed someone in the past. Even some of the more seemingly benign characters like John Doe and Dollface have psychatric profiles that, at face value, suggest they are uncooperative. But they are all painted as Sympathetic Murderers due to having a truly Dark and Troubled Past.
    • Calypso is this, Depending on the Writer. Not only is he a Jerkass Genie, but he also hosts a world-shattering death tournament. When interacting with his daughter in 2 and Head-On, however, his sympathetic traits come out. Head-On particularly wants his daughter to win so she could bring herself back to life, but she starts Calling the Old Man Out, and he was forced to twist her words with clear sorrow and regret.
  • Memetic Mutation:
  • Narm:
    • Raven's backstory in Black, which features the Death Tarot card flying towards the camera in slow-motion, just to hammer into your skull how bad everything is. You know, because the scene of a teenage girl being drowned isn't dramatic enough.
    • Due to budget issues, the endings of the unlockable characters in Black are mainly 2D slideshows compared to the 3D cutscenes the main characters sport, which takes away quite a bit of the drama inside them. Axel's ending suffers this the worst; what would normally be a Moment Of Awesome of Axel taking out Needles is more or less completely tarnished by the extremely limited animation.
  • Narm Charm:
    • Conner "Pizza Boy" Nazang from 4 is basically built on this trope. His Totally Radical persona makes him stand out from his fellow participants in a So Bad, It's Good way, and many people say that he's one of if not their favorite character in the game.
    • Sweet Tooth's voice in the 2012 revival. It's growly as all hell, which is fine, but it's also... a little bit congested. That said, Sweet Tooth is hilariously bloodthirsty, and the voice just captures that school-boy ant-burning glee so perfectly, stuffed-up-nose and all.
  • Nightmare Fuel: Has its own page.
  • Only the Creator Does It Right: One of the reasons why III and 4 did poorly with fans was due to the radically different development team who didn't quite "get" what made Twisted Metal fun. Since Scott Campbell was involved with the series' creation, it would make sense that the games handled under his care would fare much better in comparison, with many preferring the Gaiden Game Small Brawl over the 989 Studio games, and Black was seen as a return to form in gameplay and tone despite its Darker and Edgier nature.
  • Play the Game, Skip the Story: While Twisted Metal 4 is often considered as one of the lesser games in the series due to its nonsensical storyline and deliberate bad endings, people who dislike the installment's story mode would at least still play it for its more or less balanced Player Versus Player mode and the opportunity for players to create their own vehicles. See Audience-Alienating Era above.
  • Porting Disaster: The extremely limited PC port of 2. Better textures aside, the game is much more buggy than the PS1 original, to the point where some weapons and items don't work like they supposed to, and has pretty terrible controller support to boot. The only reason why anyone would bother with this version is for the online multiplayer mod.
  • The Scrappy: The clowns in Twisted Metal 4, which served as a painful reminder that the series was getting more and more cartoonish... at least until Black.
  • Replacement Scrappy:
    • Buster Cobb and his car Auger in III is seen as this compared to Simon Whittlebone and Mr. Slam from 2, with the former being seen a far worse duplicate. Doesn't help that, compared to Simon's ending being one of the most iconic endings in the series, Buster's is often seen as one of the worst thanks to the extremely blatant Motive Decay on his part.
    • Cousin Eddy in Head-On is often treated as a poor replacement for Minion, with many fans viewing him as an offensive hillbilly stereotype who is much weaker when you play as him than when you face him as a boss fight.
    • Few if any of the characters in 4 are liked, but Captain Grimm is especially unpopular, as he was a lame pirate retool of Mr. Grimm.
    • Dollface has been criticized by fans for filling in for Ensemble Dark Horse Mr. Ash as the driver for Darkside in Black and the 2012 reboot. That said, the version from Black does have her fans, mainly for her generally pleasant demeanor, her tragic backstory, and the fact that she's among the few characters who gets a legitimately happy ending.
    • Which is why many of her fans in turn expressed disgust for the 2012 version's Dollface, who retained none of her predecessor's sympathetic traits or redeeming qualities and came off as little more than a one-dimensional, psychopathic Alpha Bitch. Even worse, her name, Krista Sparks, is taken from the driver of Grasshopper in 2 and Head-On, who many fans regard as one of the most sympathetic characters in the franchise. The fact that they changed her into that did not sit well with fans.
  • Scrappy Mechanic:
    • The Antarctica level in Twisted Metal 2, with large sections of the glacier falling into the sea, is quite awesome... in single-player. Its awesomeness is limited in versus mode by the very same mechanic. You don't have very long with the full level, as within a few minutes, you will find that you and your friend are duking it out on the one remaining piece of ice. It would have made more sense to not have the glacier fall apart in multiplayer mode, or to slow the breakup considerably.
    • The Freeze attack from the 2012 reboot. Everyone can do it, and it homes in on the cars, meaning that you will constantly be getting frozen without warning throughout a battle and forced to mash buttons to restart your engine. It's especially frustrating if you're playing as Darkside, who attacks by ramming.
    • III is the first Twisted Metal game to have bosses you fight at then end of each stage... for half of the stages. The other half has a frustrating Regeneration mechanic where downed enemies suddenly become Back from the Dead, artificially extending stage length by having you fight everyone in that given stage twice. The final stage takes this further, as all enemies will keep respawning no matter what until you take out Calypso's regeneration generator... which the game never tells you beforehand.
  • Sequel Difficulty Spike: Black is considered harder than any Twisted Metal game that came before it (and the one that came immediately after) due the faster pace of the combat and the AI taking Gang Up on the Human to all new levels. The game does lighten up on this a bit by being the first in the series to restore your lives upon getting to the next level, but that only means so much when it's that much harder to avoid dying in the first place.
  • Shocking Moments: The final bosses in the reboot, assuming it's your first time fighting them. Bonus points for Sweet Tooth's Carnival of Carnage.
  • SNK Boss: Sweet Tooth in 4. If a single Special Attack from him connects, you're basically dead.
  • So Bad, It's Good: The "Lost" endings to the original Twisted Metal, in all their live-action glory are laden with Special Effect Failure and hilariously cheesy acting, and they are hilarious to watch.
  • Special Effect Failure: The "Lost" endings are full of these, particularly whenever a contestant's winnings are raised up by Calypso... which consists of the camera panning down to them. Bonus points for Needles Kane's ending were, upon further inspection, the "doors" are being held by visible hands.
  • Spiritual Successor: After making Twisted Metal 2, Singletrac was bought by GT Interactive and lost the Twisted Metal license. This lead them to create two stand-alone vehicular combat games: Rogue Trip: Vacation 2012 and Critical Depth. Both games ended up leaving their mark on the series - Black adopted the visible damage indicator and slightly more involved storytelling of Critical Depth, and Rogue Trip's faster pace and more interactive arenas.
  • Surprisingly Improved Sequel: Out of the two 989 Studios games, 4 is seen as a surprising step-up to the near reviled III. While it's still not up to the standards to the SingleTrac/Incognito Entertainment games by any means, it's a lot more controllable compared to the prior game's floaty physics, have characters with consistent motivations as opposed to the previous casts' Motive Decay, the wishes are on-brand to how they played out in 2 compared to III's wishes often running on Insane Troll Logic, and the stage designs are much more interesting and involved with combat being much more balanced outside of bosses.
  • Take That, Scrappy!: The Joneses from 4, even in their limited screentime, are very easy to see as extremely obnoxious, constantly interrupting both Melvin and each other when asking for their wish. As such, no tears are shed when Sweet Tooth drives their new RV off a cliff, with many YouTube comments saying they would’ve done the same thing.
  • Tear Jerker: Has its own page.
  • That One Boss:
    • Dark Tooth in 2. The vehicle was a larger, black-painted version of Sweet Tooth's ice cream truck that followed you relentlessly around Hong Kong and launched multiple attacks on you at the same time. Particularly frustrating was that it would freeze you while launching its specials. It even went so far as to launch the Dark Tooth head from the top. When you finally did destroy the vehicle, the head survived and continued the same search-and-destroy method.
    • Needles Kane in 4 had the Henchmen attack, which sent out three clown heads that followed you through walls, then swarmed around you and bombarded you to death with various stunning/immobilizing attacks. You pretty much had to keep running in a very specific circle around the map, leave a trail of explosives behind you, and pray to god it would kill him before you ran out of road. May be the cheapest boss in the series, resulting in many thrown controllers.
    • This was preceded by Moon Buggy in the same game. Quasars, his special, was basically Outlaw's Tazers combined with Spectre's transparent homing abilities. He fired two or three at the player at once. The Quasars also severely disoriented the gamer by throwing the car every which way. Fortunately, it doesn't last exceptionally long.
    • Both bosses in Twisted Metal: Black. Minion in particular was a pain, since his shields become very hard to hit when he's down to one or two. Then there's Warhawk, a helicopter that has the unfair advantage of aerial attacks, in addition to the first half of the fight being a Puzzle Boss where you must disable the tanker trucks, which are a Degraded Boss version of Minion, and detonate them underneath him when he flies over the helipad to destroy his shield.
  • That One Level:
    • Calypso's Blimp from Twisted Metal 3. All the enemies respawn after death infinitely, unless you destroy all the switches. One may not realize this is what needs to be done to prevent the enemies from respawning without a little research online. If that wasn't enough, the final boss, Primeval, proves to be quite the challenge.
    • The racing levels in 2012. The vehicles are not balanced for a race, meaning that cars like Darkside will always come last, while Crimson Fury or Reaper will always win if you don't destroy them at the first chance you get. What's really strange is that the game seems to realise this, because the next race only requires you to come in the top four, making it much easier.
    • Drive-In Movie from Black. Not only are you facing 8 enemies in this absolutely tiny arena with nowhere to hide, but it's the only non-boss level in the game to not have a health recharge station, forcing you to rely on the measly health pickups to stay alive. Letting your guard down once is a one way ticket to losing a life. Thankfully, this level isn't required, as you can just pick Snowy Roads instead.
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
    • The reboot introduces a number of new cars, but with its focus on a singular story, none of them get quirky drivers to give them a little more personality.
    • Preacher has a recurring role throughout the story mode and is playable in Multiplayer. Not only is he not involved in any of the story missions, but after a cut scene ending with him promising that Calypso's reign of terror will end that night, he is next seen trapped in Calypso's painting at the very end of the game. Presumably a whole year later, too.
    • Sweet Tooth in Twisted Metal 4. Despite being promoted to Big Bad, he's inexplicably turned into a mute and needs another clown to speak for him. Unless the ending wish directly involves him, he's usually juggling in the background, no more significant than the other clowns.
    • Also from 4 is Quatro, a Super Cop alien Bounty Hunter who was sent to apprehend several Twisted Metal contestants and Sweet Tooth. His ending, while cool, concludes with an all too brief Bolivian Army Ending and the character, just like every other character made for 4, was never seen again.
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
    • Some believe Calypso's ending in Twisted Metal 4 should have concluded with him retaking his throne from Sweet Tooth and saying his usual catchphrase to the player ("I am Calypso, and thank you for playing Twisted Metal.").
    • Head-On officially canonizes that Needles/Sweet Tooth Kane is a Split Personality of Marcus Kane. Upon their halves being split and meeting each other, they decide to make a Split-Personality Team... and it is not followed up on aside from serving as the final boss for the player to kill.
  • Values Dissonance:
    • The fourth game's depiction of Petunia, the driver of Drag Queen, is very much a product of the time. While she is one of the few contestants who gets her wish granted with no strings attached, the game manual refers to her exclusively by male pronouns, and her entire character is treated as a gross-out joke, a Camp Gay man in skimpy women's clothes who was so shockingly ugly that she was kicked out of the Hot Rod Association for going to meets in drag. Tactical Bacon Productions, when ranking every ending in the series, introduced Drag Queen's ending with the words "Ladies and Gentlemen, The '90s" when ranking it near the bottom of his list.
    • The Statue of Liberty gag in the New York level of Twisted Metal 2, where shooting it with missiles either turns it into a thin woman in a bikini or a morbidly obese woman comes off as fatphobic.
  • Viewer Name Confusion:
    • The Monster Clown is Needles Kane. His car is Sweet Tooth. The third and fourth games screw this up and call the clown Sweet Tooth, but Incog Inc. makes a point of having characters only ever call him Needles. A few fan trailers for movies make this mistake, using the character titles to identify the cars instead of the drivers. Then again, considering just how integral those Cool Cars are to the series, and how some have their drivers shifted out for newcomers, it's somewhat forgivable. Furthermore, the fandom often uses "Sweet Tooth" as an In-Series Nickname for how people identify Needles as a Serial Killer, akin to the "BTK Killer" or the "Boston Strangler".
    • Making the whole Needles/Sweet Tooth confusion even worse is the reboot, where his followers call him Needles Kane, but everyone else calls him Sweet Tooth. Hell, even Calypso calls him Sweet Tooth. PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale fares no better considering that he's referred to as Sweet Tooth there, too.
  • Visual Effects of Awesome: In a good display of attention to detail, Black and Head-On introduced the cars' various weapons appearing on the vehicles themselves, each materializing from special compartments scattered around the frame as you scrolled through the list.
  • What Do You Mean, It's Not Symbolic?:
    • The fact that Needles and Marcus Kane, despite being split personalities (Needles being a violent, psychotic half and Marcus being his sanity and reason), exist as two separate entities, drive two separate vehicles, and constantly battle each other until the Dark Tooth ending from Head On where Needles and Marcus meet in the middle of a field curious about seeing the other but ultimately decide to work together, resulting in an unstoppable force of destruction.
    • David Jaffe was accused of this by some members of Sony when he was making Twisted Metal: Black, which he hilariously shot down in the Twisted Metal: The Dark Past documentary.
    David Jaffe: "It was an opportunity for people to act like I wanted to say something and I wanted to make a statement and I was like 'Please, get the (BLEEP) out of my kitchen, I'm trying to cook this mother-(BLEEP)ing stew.'"
  • The Woobie: Dollface in Black, as she gets locked into a mask that she can't get off by her boss all because she accidentally spilled coffee on his files, and ends up getting locked in a Bedlam House.

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