Cowboy Be Bop At His Computer / Video Games

Examples of factual errors about video games.

Companies and franchises with their own pages:

• Nintendo
  • Pokémon

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• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • Several fans (and one commercial when it was released) for some reason refer to Sonic Adventure 2 Battle as "Sonic Adventure Battle 2". There was no "Sonic Adventure Battle 1", and SA2B is actually a Nintendo GameCube Updated Re-release of Sonic Adventure 2. The "Battle" in the title refers to the slight improvements made to the two-player mode of the game.
  • Gameplay footage on G4 which labeled the game as "Sonic Battle", which isn't helped by the fact that there actually is a game (for Game Boy Advance) called Sonic Battle.
  • Speaking of the actual game titled Sonic Battle, X-Play made an error on their review of it, where Rouge the Bat was referred to as "Rogue the Bat", inverting the usual rouge/rogue error.
  • The word "Chao" (pronounced "chow") is both singular and plural, and thus can describe any number of the creatures it refers to. In spite of this, people still try to make it plural by adding an "s" on the end, making it a different word. Futhermore, the same game that introduced Chao also introduced a character named Chaos (pronounced "kay-os"), who is also directly related to the Chao, which causes even more confusion!
  • At least in Brazil, most times Sonic is brought in on any kind of media, he's referred as a porcupine, not as a hedgehog. Translating "hedgehog" correctly should not be that difficult.
    • Worse, because of Sonic's color, a few actually believe he's an urchin. The fact that the word for "hedgehog" and "urchin" in Brazilian Portuguese, "ouriço", is exactly the same doesn't help matters.
    • This 1991 TV article called Sonic a cat.
    • Ditto with the Spanish Sonic X dub. In fact, it's pretty common for Spanish-speaking people and sources to refer to Sonic as a porcupine.
    • Italian translations of games always refer to Sonic as a porcupine, with "hedgehog" being used only in the cartoon shows.
  • Even Good Game: Spawn Point, a spinoff of an Australian game review show, messes up. While reviewing Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Episode II, they said that Tails was introduced in Sonic 2. What's the problem? They accompanied this with a video of the start of Angel Island Zone, which is from Sonic 3. They really should know better.
    • In 2015, the show introduced the 'Noobwatch' segment, where the viewers call out the hosts for invoking this trope by mistake. If caught, they have to drink from the Noob cup.
  • This page◊ from the Tiger Electronics 1992 catalog lists the Sonic the Hedgehog wrist game as an adaptation of "The popular NES game."
  • The UK's free daily newspaper The Metro stated that Mike Pollock was appearing at an anime convention in London. Mike, of course, provides the voice of Sonic's greatest nemesis "Dr. Eggplant". Pollock himself stated: "You had one job!"
  • On an episode of Nick Arcade showcasing an early build of Sonic 2, the host refers to the game's Big Bad as "Dr. Robonik" (for lack of a T).
  • This page from an Entertainment Earth catalog has a picture of a plush of Silver the Hedgehog, with the description for Silver Sonic from the Game Gear and Sega Master System version of Sonic 2 next to it.
  • This Cracked article erroneously claims that the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise is comprised almost entirely of spin-offs. More egregiously, the article goes on to claim that Sega renamed Sonic "Shadow" and redesigned him at one point in an attempt to make him cooler; apparently, the author of the article was unaware that Sonic and Shadow are different characters ^note additionally, Shadow had already appeared in multiple games and adaptions by the time he starred in his own game, despite the article claiming otherwise, despite the fact that they're frequently seen interacting with each other, including in both the trailer and first level of Shadow the Hedgehog, which was the game being allegedly described at the time. The Black Arms aliens are also referred to as "odious demons". The article also claims that Sonic Unleashed was released after Sonic and the Black Knight, and that Shadow the Hedgehog was released after that; these games were respectively released in 2008, 2009, and 2005.
  • An ad for Swiss Maid Dairy Food featuring Sonic and Tails has Tails mentioning "level 10" (referring to Death Egg Zone). Sonic the Hedgehog 2 has "Zones", most of which are divided into multiple "Acts". The game doesn't use the term "level" anywhere, and the Zones themselves are not numbered. Using the term "level" can be acceptable in some informal contexts, but it's not the official term and should not be used in an ad. It's especially awkward as Hill Top Zone Act 2 could also be considered to be level 10, and if each zone is a different level, then "level 10" would actually be Wing Fortress Zone, not Death Egg.
  • Numerous sources claimed that either a Sega CD-exclusive game titled "Super Sonic" or an enhanced port of Sonic 2 for said add-on had been under development, and cited some screenshots of Sonic standing on a large floating CD as proof. Although it was coincidentally true that a Sonic game was being made for the Sega CD, these rumors were unrelated to that title. The alleged "game", complete with said scene, was actually a 5 minute tech demo full of random imagery which barely featured Sonic at all.
  • The documentary series High Score has a bizarre tendency to use footage of a short fanmade ROM hack called "Sonic the Hedgehog: The Next Level", up to and including the title screen for said hack, when discussing the early Sonic games.
  • Stay Sonic was an early guide book that, among other features, was one of the main publications to use the "Kintobor origin" from the Sonic Bible, and would inform the backstory of Sonic the Comic. It also features a guide for Sonic the Hedgehog 2 that describes Mecha Sonic (without a name) as "an evil looking Sonic made of stone"!
  • In a similar vein to the Zelda guidebooks discussed above, fans have noted that the Sonic the Hedgehog Encyclo-speed-ia released by Dark Horse in 2021 has a fair amount of typos and errors. Here are some examples:
    • The number of rings needed to enter a Special Stage in Sonic the Hedgehog 2 is described as being twenty, as opposed to fifty. The entry for Sonic 3 & Knuckles also claims that it was Super Sonic that defeated the Death Egg Robot, even though Sonic only went Super in the Good Ending after destroying it and the Death Egg (and how, in-game, the Death Egg stage has no rings to use to transform).
    • Speaking of Sonic 3 & Knuckles, the book claims that it was the Flying Battery that set fire to the Angel Island jungle, while the game shows it to be an army of Fire Breath.
    • Regarding Sonic Chaos, as opposed to the book's claim that the player needs to make it to the end goal with 100 rings in order to enter the Special Stage, the game itself automatically sends Sonic to them anyway when he collects that amount.
    • Regarding Sonic Triple Trouble, Fang's home dimension is described as the "Special Stage of subspace", whereas the game's Japanese manual (and even the later manual for the Japanese version of Sonic 3D Blast) makes it clear that "subspace" and the Special Stage are one and the same. The entry for the game also states that Fang is only fought after the maze-like Special Stages, whereas he's fought after both the aforementioned and the Tornado-themed Special Stages. It's also erroneously stated that Knuckles is the boss of South Island (he's not, he's the boss of Tidal Plant Zone), and that Sunset Park is a "sprawling railway" instead of an abandoned amusement park. Lastly, every instance of Meta Junglira Zone is consistently misspelled as "Meta Jungura Zone".
    • The book also states that the Sound Test mode in Knuckles Chaotix where Amy Rose cameos was scrapped; it can be accessed in the final game via a cheat code.
    • The bird that Amy helps throughout Sonic Adventure has had his family captured by Eggman, which the book claims are his parents, despite the Japanese version of the game instead indicating them to be his siblings (a fact which Sonic X also went with, even in English). The book also states the Egg Hornet is fought after Windy Valley instead of before, and Twinkle Circuit is said to be an Action Stage that Sonic needs to complete to enter Twinkle Park— in truth, it's a completely optional mini-game with no bearing on the main game's progression.
    • For Sonic Adventure 2, the book speculates that Maria Robotnik was made to live on board the Space Colony ARK because her terminal NIDS was kept "in remission". Aside from failing to account for how most of the colony's interior areas had no discernible difference in gravity to that of the Earth (discounting some stages where Gravity Screw was in effect), prior supplementary material for the game has stated that Maria's presence on the ARK was purely so that her condition could be effectively treated by the scientists working there, and that Gerald was desperate enough to begin work on the Ultimate Life Form project because she still showed no sign of recovery. The original scenario writer for the game, Shiro Maekawa, has also stated that the story's intention was for the ARK to be a sterile place free from any of the Earth's pathogens, given that Maria's disease was heavily implied to be a degenerative one that afflicted her with an especially weak immune system.
    • For Sonic Battle, the book claims that Tails found Emerl after he was thrown out by Eggman, despite the game showing that Sonic was actually the one to find Emerl himself. Emerl is also referred to as a Gizoid. While the decidedly non-canon Sonic Chronicles indeed showed multiple Gizoids, the original game treated "Gizoid" as Emerl's original name as opposed to the name of his robot model.
    • Black Doom's transformation into Devil Doom is said to be due to the powers of the Chaos Emeralds. There's no indication that it's not an inherent ability of his, and in-game he transforms after teleporting away and leaving the Chaos Emeralds with Shadow.
    • It's said that King Shahryar of Sonic and the Secret Rings mistook Sonic for being one of Erazor Djinn's minions. In actuality, Shahryar was infuriated at Sonic for his insolent behavior (since Sonic mistook him for Dr. Eggman), with no implication of what the book claims. To a lesser degree, the book claims the World Rings to be "crystalline"— according to Japanese promotional material, they're made of glass.
    • The book states that Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood has a quest where you need to collect Omega's pieces and reassemble him in order to recruit him into your party. There is no such quest; Tails simply finds him destroyed and fixes him in the same scene.
    • The first Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games title is claimed to not have any Dream Events— in truth, it does, they just aren't set in any Super Mario or Sonic locations like they are in the following games.
    • A particularly glaring example from the Sonic and the Black Knight entry is the comparison of the Mist Dragon's color scheme to Dulcy the Dragon from Sonic the Hedgehog (SatAM), and that Sir Lancelot compares the Red Dragon to the Biolizard from Adventure 2. Putting aside the fact that any similarities shared between the Mist Dragon and Dulcy are unlikely to be anything more than a coincidence on Sonic Team's part, it's actually Sonic that makes an indirect reference to his and Shadow's fight against the Biolizard when faced with the Red Dragon (since Lancelot would have no way to know about the Biolizard even existing).
    • It states that Sonic Runners Adventure is a "lukewarm revival" of Sonic Runners, while in actuality Runners Adventure is its own standalone game with a completely different story.
    • The book claims Sonic Mania to feature the real Fang, Bean or Bark at the start of Mirage Saloon Act 2, whereas the game itself only shows them as being illusory disguises for Heavy Magician to assume. Heavy Rider is also assumed to be male, despite the game's manual confirming her to be female.
    • It's stated that all species of the Custom Hero from Sonic Forces play similarly, though this is only partially true: the Bird can double jump by themselves, the Bear's Wire Attack can blow enemies away, and the Wolf can draw in rings and collectibles from a further distance.
    • There are also some examples of image mismatching: the Sonic the Hedgehog 2 entry uses a piece of fan art to represent the "Micky" animal; the Knuckles Chaotix entry uses a screenshot for Techno Tower to represent Marina Madness; several of the enemy and level images for Tails Adventure are swapped around; and the Sonic Heroes entry takes two of its Seaside Hill screenshots from a fan-made mod for Sonic the Hedgehog (2006).
  • This CBR article on Canon Foreigners they wished were part of the Sonic canon mistook Nack the Weasel as a character exclusive to the Archie series.
  • This Gamespot article on "Weird Sonic characters that actually exist". The most glaring factual error on display is that the author treats Antoine D'Coolette's Archie Comics and SatAM counterparts as two separate characters, even going so far as to state that "Antoine D'Coolette" (the current Archie Comics version) is not to be confused with "the other weirdly French-influenced Antoine Depardieu" (his original SatAM incarnation). He's also identified as a fox (he's a coyote) to top it off.
• Cracked.com made one of the most common errors of the criticisms at Final Fantasy X. In the article "The 7 Commandments All Video Games Should Obey", one of the alternatives they gave for the number 1 commandment, "Better graphics do not equal innovation and/or creativity", is - after hiring competent writers to write a good story for the game - hiring competent voice actors to say the lines, providing a video example. Problem? The example was taken out of context, and was one of the most misblamed things ever: the "laughing scene". Anyone who had been playing the game at that point (or even read the script) and not just taking the scene out of context like everyone else in the entire world would have known that Tidus and Yuna did the fake laughing on purpose. Not only do Auron, Lulu, and Wakka stare at the two with an odd look on their faces, but Wakka even says, "We thought you had gone crazy!" afterwards. What the journalists didn't seem to realize was that the laughing scene sounds just as weird in Japanese, as well. Ironically, Tidus and Yuna break out in real laughter immediately afterwards, which sounds entirely different.
  • Another article, "The 11 Most Idiotic Fictional Weapons", lists the gunblade as one of fiction's weapons that wouldn't work in real life. While good arguments could be made about it anyway, the article treats it as a literal gun with a blade, as in, something that shoots bullets at a distance - something else three different writers in a later article preached as being incredibly awesome - while in the game it's simply a blade with a trigger that causes a small explosion to vibrate the blade at the moment of impact, increasing the damage you deal with your regular melee attack. This concept actually exists, although it's antiquated and differs notably.
• A magazine was trying to establish a link between the shootings at Columbine and video games. They used an interview with a survivor's family, while the survivor was playing the video game Diablo... which was described as "just shooting" and was punctuated by the survivor's character being blown up. The only shooting in Diablo is with a bow; most of the time, your weapon is a sword or other melee weapon.
• British teenage science magazine Flipside ran a small article on Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, listing a handful of returning characters as being "Solid Snake, Roy Campbell, and Quinton Flynn". The last one is the name of the voice actor for one of the characters (Raiden).
• The BBC once did a report on Halo 3, and used footage from Killzone 2.
  • It's not unheard of for written articles or players talking about the series to put an "and" in the middle of "Master Chief," giving it the connotation that it's not one term and he is thus extra-badass for being both master and chief of something. In reality, "Master Chief" is short for the naval rank of "Master Chief Petty Officer," which is, indeed, his rank.
  • The "pretty cool guy" meme does exactly this, with Halo's Master Chief being the original.
• Any video game article on the satirical website Christwire.org will usually play with this trope, though most people have taken the site at face value.
• A PC Gamer review of the Half-Life 2 mod MINERVA: Metastasis reported that it was created by a "team." Another review by PC Zone stated that "even Valve [the creators of the Half-Life series] should doff their caps and might want to take notes." Adam Foster, who singlehandedly created Minerva (aside from the music, which was by Joseph Toscano) actively sought out Valve's help in creating the last chapter, and got feedback on how to improve what he'd done so far (he'd been going to a modders' conference, which had gotten cancelled).
• The official German PlayStation Magazine reported that Final Fantasy IX was a continuation with a new character named Skylar Goodsworth. Turns out they were tricked by a fanfiction on what was then a rather obscure site, which not only lacked any form of professionalism, but came from a website hosted by Beepworld.
• An early preview of Final Fantasy IX stated that it was to be a remake of the first game in the series. A writer clearly unfamiliar with Roman numerals claimed that Square had started development on "Final Fantasy 1 X".
  • Over Christmas 2003, a reporter on CNBC told the viewers, that the hit game for that season was "Final Fantasy times two" (Final Fantasy X-2).
• A while back, the Official Nintendo Magazine in the UK described one of the Final Fantasy games as being in the top 150 of games. No problem? Well, they say it's Final Fantasy III and it's getting a DS remake, but the picture beside it is unmistakably Kefka. The magazine apparently got Japan's Final Fantasy III (which actually got a DS remake) and North America's Final Fantasy III (which was Final Fantasy VI) confused.
• Following Manhunt 2 being banned in the UK, an article ran in a local newspaper accompanied by a screenshot from Resident Evil 4.
• The Fox News Mass Effect fiasco. Turns out that Cooper Lawrence, their invited speaker and a self-help author, hadn't even seen the game, and based her entire rant about the game's numerous, hardcore sex scenes and obsession with objectifying women on somebody in the studio telling her it was "like pornography". That comment was her entire exposure to the game. She finally apologised after watching someone play the game for two and a half hours, and after hundreds of scathing reviews of her latest book were posted on Amazon by gamers who had, of course, never read it. Another pundit on the same show referred to it as "Luke Skywalker meets Debbie Does Dallas." Hilariously enough, Jack Thompson, the guy who claimed Microsoft Flight Simulator was used to train the 9/11 hijackers, said there was nothing to this.
  • The Fox News Mass Effect fiasco also came on the heels of an article by conservative columnist Kevin McCullough that described the game's "virtual orgasmic rape." Uh... you go with that.
  • Fox News never really learned from any of this and they still routinely give air time to the standard complement of Moral Guardians in order to sling mud at games that they've never played but heard were controversial.
  • To add to the ridiculousness of the whole fiasco, Fox looped nearly all the sex scenes, unedited, as the B-Roll of the broadcast.
  • Fox and Friends co-host Elizabeth Hasselback claimed that the Sept. 2013 Navy Yard shooting incident was evidence that a national registry should be made for anyone who purchases a video game, claiming that a link exists between young male gamers and gun violence. Though many studies have been conducted, this has never been definitively proven and many researches believe it to be a complete fallacy.
• There is also Piotr Natanek, a controversial Polish priest (he has been officially suspended by the Catholic Church, but it didn't scare off his followers). In his infamous sermon (available on Youtube) about the occult, he warns the believers against playing "demonic computer games" such as: Diabolo, Dagones Drank, Quake, RPG (yeah, it seems to be a title, not a genre), Pookemons and Kieszonkowe potwory (pocket monsters in Polish – not to be confused with the manga).
• Popular Science once had a short article on upcoming first person shooter games that showed a screenshot that was said to be from Doom³. The problem? Not only was the screenshot from Quake III: Arena, but Doom 3 hadn't even been announced yet.
• The Perot Museum in Dallas, Texas has an exhibit dedicated to technology. On display is a timeline showing various advances in computer tech. It features a panel discussing id Software and its prominence in the The '90s with games such as Doom and Quake, and a screenshot with the caption "Doom's first-person perspective and detailed graphics created a new immersive game experience." There's a reason why those graphics look so detailed: the screenshot is from Doom 3, not the original Doom.
• English newspaper The Daily Mail wrote an article about CG images of Washington DC destroyed, claiming they were made by terrorists as a "terrifying vision". The reality? The images were promo shots for Fallout 3.
• A video game advert was banned for containing the sexually suggestive tagline: "Get your worm out for the birds." The game being advertised, according to the newscasters, was the curiously named Earthworm Joe.
• GamePro magazine is notoriously bad at this:
  • In a preview article for Resident Evil 5, GamePro stated that the story takes place ten years after Resident Evil 4, when it's actually set ten years after the first three games and the prequel Resident Evil Zero.
  • In the letters section of GamePro, a reader asked whether the 64DD add-on for the N64 would have the same advantages that a CD-based system did over cartridges. The GamePro writer rudely informed the reader that it would have the same advantages since the 64DD is a CD based system. The 64DD actually used magnetic disks, not CDs.
• In this press release for Nicktoons Nitro (somewhat related to the Nicktoons Unite! series) they refer to one of the characters as "Avatar", even though that's the title of the character, not his actual name.
• A St. Louis judge reviewed footage from four videogames to determine whether they (and, by extension, all games) were protected under First Amendment rights. Among the games he evaluated: "Mortal Combat" and, hilariously, "The Resident of Evil Creek."
• A news report on video game violence in late 2000 pronounced the title Deus Ex as "Deuce Ecks" and said that it was controversial because it allows the player to become the killer. First of all, Deus Ex is not a great choice to epitomize video game violence. Secondly, the report acted like murdering civilians was the whole point and completely ignored the Wide-Open Sandbox format of the game, including the moral choices the player can make with varying consequences.
• The German report "Frontal 21" is quite famous for this. In "Videogemetzel im Kinderzimmer" (video slaughter in the nursery), "Gewalt ohne Grenzen" (violence without borders) and "Töten am Bildschirm" (killing at the screen), they said, between other things, that you can chop off the arms of grannies in Grand Theft Auto and described World of Warcraft as a WW2-type shooter (apparently mistaking it for World at War). That games in Germany are heavily censored (for example: no blood and no chopped-off body parts in GTA) did not stop them: they simply displayed the uncensored original versions, which are not legal in Germany, at least not for anyone below the age of 18. This all gets worse if you realize that this was hosted on a paid-through-taxes, publicly-owned television station, ZDF, which has a governmental duty (at least on paper) to educate, not wildly exaggerate.
  • They also described the GTA: San Andreas' Hot Coffee mod with the words "Like this game: whoever rapes the most women wins", later arguing on a message board that the player's ability to choose positions was where the rape part came in.
• A report about violence in videogames by the German show Focus TV also showed what was going on at a LAN party. They first tried to convince the public that the freeware shooter "Cube" was outlawed in Germany and then went on to say that now the participants of the LAN had switched to Warcraft III, which they described as "Ballern bis die Aliens kommen!" ("Shoot until the aliens come", paraphrasing the German saying "X tun bis der Arzt kommt" ("Do X until the doctor arrives!", an equivalent to "Party hard!"). The kicker? The footage shown was from StarCraft: Brood War. Then they had an interview with the CEO at Crytek, who at the time had exactly two games under their belt, and claimed that this was the developer responsible for 90% of the violent games published (or rather not published) in Germany.
  • The German media at that time really enjoyed purposefully giving out false claims about video games. The Bild-Zeitung (a newspaper about as "good" as "The Sun") showed a picture taken out of the uncut version of Soldier of Fortune 2 (which is outlawed in Germany, by the way, and the version actually sold there has all the blood and gore removed and the enemies replaced with robots) taking heavy advantage of the damage system, and said that it was a screenshot of Counter-Strike 2, a game that at the time didn't even exist (not even Condition Zero existed at the time SOF2 released).
• Not even Disney Adventures, the official magazine for The Walt Disney Company, was any good on their review of Kingdom Hearts, a game developed by, y'know, Disney and Square. Their blurb states that the Disney villains want to change the endings of their stories so the bad guys win. Already done in Disney's Villains' Revenge, but firstly, that's not the premise, and second, the story's even deeper and darker than how they described.
  • In Italy, Disney's official stuff (articles on the Italian Mickey Mouse and their strategy guide) about the first game of the series kept saying that Darkside (the giant Heartless Sora fights at the beginning of the game and later before the final boss) is the Big Bad of the game (even referring at him as "the invincible Heartless prince"), and implied that the game ends with Sora fighting him inside Big Ben. This is probably an honest misunderstanding, since a Darkside (there's more than one) does show up in the middle of fighting the real Big Bad, Ansem, and the game doesn't do much to explain that the two are separate entities. Also, while Big Ben does show up in the game (as part of the Neverland world), Ansem and Darkside aren't fought there (instead you fight them in the remains of Sora's Doomed Hometown, Destiny Islands).
• According to this Die Zeit article, Grand Theft Auto is a Racing Game. Not entirely untrue, however, though most of the racing missions in the series tend to be optional and extremely frustrating.
• The Quebec newspaper 24 Heures claims that Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars is focused on "the Asian gang" (The Triad) from Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City... Even if they meant Liberty City Stories, CW is part of the Grand Theft Auto IV era, which is as unrelated as possible (plotwise, anyways) to the Grand Theft Auto III era (which LCS is a part of; and for the record, the Triad did appear briefly in GTAIV). They also managed to switch around the text caption for the Resident Evil 5 and Final Fantasy XIII screenshots on the same article as said goof.
• Also GTA: an article from a British paper claimed that the goal of the game was 'to kill as many people as possible'. Any player can tell you that doing so is actually a detriment to the actual goals.
• Yet again from GTA, a news report in Australia on the release of Grand Theft Auto V mentioned its R18+ rating due to "extreme violence". While it is true it received that rating, it was due to drug use, not violence. (If you're going to be Moral Guardians about it, at least get the issue right) They also said it was the first game to get the R18+ rating in Australia, which isn't true. (That would be Ninja Gaiden 3: Razor's Edge, released many months earlier)
• This article probably sums up the major problems pertaining to video games quite well.
• The Limbaugh Letter rails against Burnout Paradise for its hardline stance on global warming. Its what?
• A TV report on Kwari, an MMO FPS in which you would actually earn real money for frags (at the cost of paying for ammunition via microtransactions) and other stuff. Said TV report used Crysis footage.
• This British newspaper article talks about the then titled Metal Gear Solid : Rising starring Raiden, "the baddie from MGS2". He may have been unpopular with the fanbase, but that's still taking it a little far.
• One would expect mainstream journalists to make this sort of mistake, when online gamestores do it the results can be hilarious. Some of them only Warhammer players will spot, but others are rather more blatant. They've listed player characters as enemies and NPCs, they've got place names wrong, called an Orc a troll and hilariously, called a Dwarf an Elf.
  • Online stores selling "Knights of the Old Republic" claim that you play as freedom fighters fighting the "last war" between the Sith and the Jedi.
• Count the number of mass media outlets that claim Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 to be a terrorism simulator just from taking the Wham Level "No Russian" out of context.
  • Ask a fan someone to name the armaments of the AC-130U from Call of Duty 4's "Death from Above" level, and they will tell you its smallest weapons are a pair of M61 Vulcans. Even though the intro to the level blatantly tells you that is not what it's using.
  • Some people mistakenly believe that the Big Bad of Call of Duty 4, Imran Zakhaev, uses a gold-plated Desert Eagle. The golden Desert Eagle is only in the multiplayer of the game, but apparently some people conflate its existence (being the only one of the golden weapons in multiplayer that a player is guaranteed to get with regular gameplay) with Zakhaev being the only character in the singleplayer portion to use a Deagle.
• According to the study "The Mural as Graffiti Deterrence", "All Your Base Are Belong To Us" is a "name of a Korean computer game popular in the 1980s". (Zero Wing was released in late 1989, so even the time period is wrong.)
• The "Grog XD" report. Some dim-witted Argentine journalists found the famous "grog recipe" from The Secret of Monkey Island on Facebook and presented it as an example of "evil harmful alcoholic recipes available on the interwebs, that teenagers could drink before going out to dance!". They didn't realize it was tongue-in-cheek, nor noticed "XD" is an emoticon. Later on, a vending machine with "Grog XD" showed up in the finale of Tales of Monkey Island.
• President of Venezuela Hugo Chavez once said on his radio show that "Those games they call 'PlayStation' are poison. Some games teach you to kill. They once put my face on a game, 'you've got to find Chavez to kill him.'" No mainstream games existed at that point in time that featured Hugo Chavez's likeness.^note Postal III featured him as one potential option for the Final Boss, but that was in 2011, a few years after his statement. This was in relation to Mercenaries 2: World in Flames, in which the player must battle Venezuelan soldiers and ultimately assassinate the nation's leader, though said in-game leader is still not Chavez, or even a No Celebrities Were Harmed version of him.
• There was a very egregiously inaccurate documentary about video games on the Discovery Channel once (this was in Poland, so maybe it was localisation problems). The documentary stated for example that Nintendo systems were never ever released in Europe, that Nintendo and Mario went dead, forgotten and extinct just when the PlayStation was released (despite showing GameCube and Wii footage, consoles which came out years after the original PlayStation), that Grand Theft Auto III was the first GTA game, that Microsoft began its console gaming business with a gaming console called "Xbox Live", and such.
• An old defunct Polish video game magazine for kids, CyberMycha, would avoid reviewing games with violent or otherwise harmful content to children, however, it made two exceptions in order to warn children about their violent content: The Simpsons Hit & Run and Tom and Jerry: Fists of Furry, both of which got instant negative reviews regardless of their quality. The reviews in question were entirely fueled by moral panic, with the reviewer talking utter nonsense: in the former case, the reviewer claims to be a huge fan of the show, and was outraged that the game, instead of taking him into the "wonderful, colorful world of the Simpsons" is a violent GTA clone which rewards the player for vandalism - which leads one to wonder if he watched a different show, as The Simpsons is hardly a wholesome kids show (it doesn't help that the show at one point aired on Fox Kids's Polish feed), and the game's content was definitely in line with it. With the latter game, the reviewer was outraged about its level of violence, including the fact that it was a fighting game at all - as if Tom and Jerry was not entirely founded on cartoon violence in the first place.
• This "What if Video Games Were Real" sketch features a joke based on Metal Gear Solid, in which Snake is instructed to "Infiltrate Otacon's new base". For those not versed on the Metal Gear series, Otacon is one of the few characters who is always on the same side as the player. Nor has he ever had a base, unless the airship they live in in Metal Gear Solid 4 counts. It's entirely possible they meant Ocelot, The Dragon in Metal Gear Solid.
• During a competition to win a copy of Mass Effect 2, a Midwest Radio DJ referred to the game - constantly, and presumably never realizing his mistake and/or not having any of his colleagues point it out to him (either that, or he did realize and just hoped that no-one would notice) - as "Mass 2 Effect".
• This Fox News article states that Infiniminer was made by Markus Persson (Notch) as a prototype to Minecraft. Infiniminer was actually made by Zachtronics; Notch only drew inspiration from it.
• CBS reports on the 2011 Sega Pass hack incident: "Sega Genesis Hacked!" The console doesn't have anything to do with the incident, and hasn't even been in production since 1997!
• Public network France 2 gives us this helpful report on the perils of "meuporg" addiction.
  Reporter: Young people spend their days in front of a screen, stuffing themselves on "meuporg." ... "Meuporg" is the barbarian name of online role-playing games where we can meet virtual friends. That's the actual name, I'm sorry.
  Anchor: But how do you spell it?
  Reporter: We spell it M-M-M-P-O-R-P-G.
• When Rule of Rose was released in Italy, people started talking about it everywhere as a game where little girls bury alive other little girls to win. The main character is not a little girl, the bad guys are. There was also outrage over the assumption that the player would be murdering children in the game, derived from the fact that the villains are indeed children. While child deaths occur in the game, they all happen off-screen, and the player isn't responsible for a single one of them. Incidentally, it's also the player character who gets (briefly) sealed in a coffin — she's the victim, not the instigator. Even when you get past the perversion of the game's premise, you still get this. Apparently, Jennifer has to bury a little girl alive to continue; this never happens, the game is about finding items for little girls (who are in control all of the time). It's easy to see where this comes from, though: every chapter's events are explained by "storybooks". The storybook for The Funeral explains that "a girl" (after reading the other storybooks, it should be obvious that this is Jennifer), who has to bury her best friend to survive. There are three problems: first, the little girl who apparently has to be buried alive is Wendy, who isn't Jennifer's best friend. Second, this storybook is the most vague of them all, only hinting at the chapter's events instead of outright spoiling them. Third, Jennifer's actual best friend, Brown, is killed so that Jennifer can survive, but Jennifer doesn't actually kill him, and he's a dog.
  • And when the rumour spread to the UK people began assuming that the game promoted pedophilia, even leading to a criminal investigation in Poland. While the infamous trailer shows some disturbing, sexualized implications, their whole point is to be disturbing, and none are present in the game itself. The game opaquely hints at sexual abuse of a 16-year old girl, but it's played for pure horror.
  • It's worth noting, however, that Punchline did this intentionally. They spread rumours about the game being sexual and sinister that weren't true just for publicity.
• Shin Megami Tensei:
  • In the Official PlayStation Magazine, they printed a picture of the main character from Digital Devil Saga 2 over a fan review of Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne.
  • Kotaku's article about a Fan Translation of the card game from the 90s refers to it as its spinoff series, Persona. Must be because Persona entered the Western mainstream after Joker's debut in Super Smash Bros. while its parent series remains a small niche.
  • An article on Game Rant about the list of Persona 3 Portable achievements compared the achievement mechanics for the remastered port and the original PlayStation Portable release. Anyone familiar with the handheld can tell this is wrong. There is only one official list, the PSP does not have its own Achievement System, and the supposed "original" list is actually a fan-made one for emulation via RetroArch. That article is a newer revision, by the way, since originally it listed said RetroAchievements as the official achievements, which in turn was mistakenly but very briefly picked up by Persona-centric content creators.
• At the time of its release, it was not uncommon to read about a game called "Jack and Dexter". There were even video game stores that carried it under that title. And it still happens: this video game blog for example uses the erroneous names. Twice. Likewise, there is a good number of reviews to be found on YouTube that consistently refer to Jak as Jax.
• The author of this article on Dungeons of Dredmor made two simple mistakes. She assumed that all fantasy RPGs are also MMORPGs, and she also believed the flavor text in a Roguelike. The 'secret vegan cults' mentioned in the skill selection screen don't actually appear in the game, which is single player only.
• This article which calls Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine a Gears of War rip-off, pointing out similarities like the bulky armor of Space Marines, presence of the chainsword,^note Both of which appeared in Warhammer 40,000 long before Gears of War the size of targeting reticle and the appearance of blood spatters. It caused quite a lot of internet backlash. The writer later had to add a quite lengthy update to the article in which he acknowledged that he knows little about 40K and that he was primarily referring to gameplay rather than setting in the original article, though this is equally absurd given Gears of War is a cover-based shooter while Space Marine's entire marketing was based around the concept of 'cover is for cowards.'
• If you see Warframe on any sort of list or review article, especially early on in the game's development, there's a rather high chance the game will be described something along the lines of 'Space ninjas shooting aliens'. There are no aliens in Warframe. The two main antagonistic factions are both effectively humans. The Grineer are an empire of clones that are remnant from a transhuman ancient civilization, and while their bulky armor and their freaky faces makes them SEEM like aliens, it's more due to genetic deformations caused by cloning and cybernetic enhancements, while the Corpus is a MegaCorp made up of brainwashed (human) crewmen and robot proxies. The only faction that can actually apply to the term of 'alien' are the Infested, but it's very unlikely the articles referred to those.
• A while back, one of The Daily Telegraph's weekend magazines had an issue with the main article being about cosplay. One of the photos accompanying said article was of a cosplayer dressed as Genesis, with the caption listing him as being from "Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Call".
• Gamedaily's article about Asian female video characters: They said that Hsien-Ko "had good looks, despite her oversized hands." Those are not her hands, those are giant claw gauntlets. While she can control them like they are her hands, she does show her real hands in several of her moves and poses.
• Ace Attorney:
  • This review of the live action movie based on the first game made for the International Film Festival of Rotterdam was written by someone who clearly has no idea what Gyakuten Saiban really is about. While his summary of the movie is quite accurate, he's made several inaccurate statements regarding Ace Attorney. He stated that Ace Attorney Online is where you can find a "free trial package". As in, you can find free trials sponsored by Capcom. Capcom does not sponsor fansites, and the owner of the fansite has always said that the site was never sponsored by Capcom. This reviewer also implies that Ace Attorney Online is the official site for the Ace Attorney series. This caused a bit of a panic that the owner of the site had to make it doubly clear that the website is neither affiliated with Capcom nor is it the official site for Ace Attorney. The reviewer also claimed that Ace Attorney resembles a "non-digital board game" akin to Settlers of Catan. Also he claims that it kinda made him understand why someone would turn "a game, which is not very visual, into a film." Ace Attorney is certainly not a "non-digital board game". And the very nature of Visual Novels (which Ace Attorney really is) make this a very visual game.
  • The description of Maya's alternate color scheme based on Kay Faraday on the official Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 website claims that Kay assisted Phoenix Wright, though she actually has never even met Phoenix and assisted only Edgeworth.
    • The Italian Official Nintendo Magazine's review of Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth stated that Kay was a recurring character from the franchise who appears once again in this title, when in fact this game was her first appearance.
• A Newsweek article claimed that Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik "trained daily on the online shooting game World of Warcraft." World of Warcraft is an MMORPG, not a shooter. Furthermore, only one out of ten classes available at the time of the article spends much time shooting anything, while the rest focus on melee weapons or spells, and as an MMORPG the only shooting available does nothing to teach people how to shoot real guns - the only thing playing WoW trains people to do is how to play WoW.
• Mega Man:
  • Many sources dealing with Mega Man (such as the Wii Virtual Console description) often claim the six Robot Masters were created by Dr. Wily, and not Dr. Light, though you wouldn't know that from just playing the game itself. A similar example happens with Mega Man V - some English sources (usually early ones) claim that Wily created the Stardroids using Sunstar as a basis, whereas the truth is they are ancient alien robots with little to no relation to Sunstar.
  • Capcom did this to itself when it came to the North American instruction manual of the original Mega Man Legends game. On page 16 and 17, the info about the Bonne Family pirates was correct for the most part, but some of it was flat-out wrong. The 2 pages were character bios of Teisel Bonne, Tron Bonne, Bon Bonne, and the Servbots. Instead of being referred to as the "Bonne Family" (or just the "Bonnes"), they're continuously referred to as the "Bonne Brothers", Teisel's name is misspelled as "Teasel", Tron is referred to as Teisel's "eldest daughter" (in reality, they're siblings), Bon's name is given as "Bomb", and "Servbots" is misspelled as "Servebots"... and yes, it's correct without the second "e".
  • On pages 14 and 15, they misspelled the surname of Roll and Barrell as "Casket" (it's actually "Caskett"). Barrell's name was also misspelled as "Barrel".
  • Then, there's the North American instruction manual for Mega Man Legends 2. The Casketts' surname was misspelled again as "Casket", though they got Barrell's given name right this time. Teisel is still "Teasel", Tron is called the "eldest daughter in the Bonne family" even though she's the only daughter, Bon is still "Bomb", and finally, Von Bluecher and Klaymoor are called Von Muller and Bancoscus, respectively (which are actually their names in Japan).
  • There was a German Nintendo magazine that was available to fans (in the beginning, then not, then again) free-of-charge. When doing Mega Man X they wrote about "Die hübsche Reploidin Zero" (the beautiful female reploid Zero) helping X. Zero is male. Booblights and long blonde hair notwithstanding.
  • One magazine got a few things about Mega Man X2 wrong. Most notably that Mega Man is fighting reploids in space who kidnapped his robo-dog, Zero.
  • One strip of Penny Arcade got its facts wrong about Mega Man X's place in the series. This started a back and forth in their rants before Gabe was able to set the record straight.
  • A listing for a plush replica of the classic Mega Man's Mega Buster warns "Reploids beware!". Reploids don't exist when the classic series takes place; rather, they're advanced human-like robots that live about a century later in the Mega Man X series. On top of that, "Reploid" only refers to their race and doesn't mean anything about hostility towards humans; the ones who are hostile are called "Mavericks", and are fought by X and Zero (who may or may not qualify as Reploids themselves) anyway. Classic Mega Man never actually gets to use his Mega Buster on any Reploid, good or bad.
  • The Brazilian kids' magazine Recreio (recess in english) had a section dedicated to advertising recently-released games, one of which was for Mega Man Battle Network 5. Were anyone to find that page, it would surely live in internet infamy forever: Firstly, the article prominently displayed artwork of Mega Man X instead of Megaman.EXE, the actual protagonist. Secondly, the game was released with dual versions, one called Team Protoman and the other named Team Colonel, yet the article mentioned nothing of this and referred to the game with the Team Colonel subtitle, not only making it confusing to those who were in the know, but thus not even advertising half the game they were supposed to promote. Finally, there's this gem of advice: "To gain Proto Man's emblem and defeat Blizzard Man, you must beat Neubla Grey." Blizzard Man is the first boss who requires no emblems to defeat, Nebula Grey is the final boss, and he DOES give you Proto Man's emblem in the title screen, but only in the Team Proto Man version. Wasn't this ad for the Colonel version? This 'tip' borders on "You must defeat Sheng Long to stand a chance" territory.
  • While Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is usually extremely accurate with its Spirits, the depiction of Zero from Mega Man Zero is simply called "Mega Man Zero", despite Zero not being an incarnation of Mega Man.
• Crash Bandicoot:
  • One children's atlas, in its section on Japan, lists video games as a notable part of the country's culture, including an image of an iconic game character. This'd all be fine and dandy if they hadn't used Crash, who hails from an American video game^note the Crash Bandicoot series is hugely popular in Japan, which is where the confusion stems from.
  • In an article talking about rumors involving a new game along with Nintendo Switch and PC ports of Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy, Christian Today claims that, "'Crash Bandicoot' originally came out in 1996 on the PlayStation. Developed by Naughty Dog, the game follows the adventures of a mutated bandicoot named Crash as he fights the evil Doctor Nitrus." The actual villain is Dr. Neo Cortex. Dr. Nitrus Brio was simply The Dragon to Cortex's Big Bad.
• An official Sony press release describes Final Fantasy VII as "bringing back characters from previous games", listing Cloud, Cid Highwind, and Chocobos as examples, while featuring new characters like Aeris and Barret. In actuality, as each Final Fantasy game takes place in its own separate universe, the game does not truly feature any characters from previous games. Chocobos can be considered valid as they're a series mainstay (though they are a race, not a character), and the confusion for Cid possibly stems from the fact that he both is an airship-related man named Cid (another series mainstay) and has a last name calling back to Kain Highwind from IV and Ricard Highwind from II. Saying that Cloud is an older character, however, is just plain wrong.
• After a British Special Boat Service action to rescue hostages in Afghanistan, the Sunday Times ran a picture of an "elite SBS soldier" with his face blacked out "to protect his identity." This was unnecessary, however, as his identity was already known to millions of gamers around the world: it was actually a picture of John "Soap" MacTavish, who is in the SAS (later Task Force 141), not the SBS, who is only once shown doing anything special involving a boat, and perhaps most obviously, who is a fictional character. And the picture wasn't one of those cinematic promotional images that might, in the dark, after a double shot of Scotch and with your eyes closed, look like a photograph—it was a clumsily done screencap, with visible pixels and his equipment clipping through his gun.
• Another one from Cracked, "The 6 Most Baffling Video Game Spinoffs", has... quite a few.
  • Bomberman: Act Zero is a(n ill-conceived, granted) rehash of the original NES game's plot; the article phrases it to sound like an original concept.
  • Shadow the Hedgehog was released before Sonic and the Black Knight and Unleashed, not after as the article claims.
  • Shadow and Sonic are different characters (granted, Shadow could easily be mistaken for a Superpowered Evil Side, and the plot of the game he first appeared in hinges on how they're so similar-looking they could be confused by the media and government).
  • For there to be more spin-offs than actual games in the series, the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise would need to consist of somewhere in the vicinity of three games - Fanon Discontinuity notwithstanding.
• You would think that a store specialising in selling games wouldn't make this kind of mistake, but shortly after the release of the N64 in the UK at least one store advertised Turok the Dinosaur for sale...
• One DanceDanceRevolution player celebrated his 800th AAA rank by posting a picture of it on his Facebook timeline. A Facebook page picks this image up and posts it, congratulating him...but erroneously calls the song "Xepher Tatsh"◊. The most embarrassing part about it? Said page is the official DDR Facebook page!
  • Even "better", the same page mistakes◊ a Pump It Up cabinet for a DDR cab. The admin of the DDR page mistook DDR's rival series (which has had a long legal history involving Konami, to boot) for DDR.
• Cracked again, this time for getting Knights of the Old Republic mixed up with its spinoff Star Wars: The Old Republic. In "5 Bizarre Ways Online Gaming Is Affecting the Real World" (scroll down to #3), they called KOTOR an MMORPG in a Take That! presumably meant for SWTOR.
• Before and around its release, several articles claimed the Wii U to be "a new controller for the Wii". First of all, the tablet device is not the console, it's just the main controller that comes with it. And secondly, it's a new console, and its controller and games cannot be used on the Wii (though Wii games can run on the new console and use the new controller's screen while doing so). This led to criticism...but not of the media outlets, but of Nintendo. It's a widely held belief, even by Nintendo themselves, that the company should have given the system a different name to avoid the confusion, with said confusion being partly to blame for the system's failure.
• LSD: Dream Emulator is quite famous for being based on a dream journal. But on whose dreams was the game based? It must be Osamu Sato, the lead designer! Bonus points because Wikipedia rightly claims that the dream journal was kept by Hiroko Nishikawa, a fellow employee at the development studio...but gaming websites (who should know more about video games) claim it was kept by Sato.
• One review of Hatoful Boyfriend didn't like the player character's name, "Cloaca Mahoney"... a deliberate joke name used by Angie Gallant's "Let's Play" walkthrough of the game. The player character is named by the player at the start of the game, and the default name is Hiyoko Tousaka. They'd have known if they'd played the game... or even watched the Let's Play, really.
• When the South Park FPS was released on the Nintendo 64 in the UK, The Guardian newspaper chastised Nintendo for bleeping out all the swearwords. What they didn't know was that this was the norm for the show at that time: F and S words were bleeped out, even on UK channels where they didn't have to be after 9pm (the show was never on any earlier than that anyway) and PAL VHS releases at the time were still censored in this way, essentially meaning the game was just following the format of the show. Matt and Trey were interviewed on a documentary on Channel 4 where they even stated themselves that they thought the show was funnier with the bleeps and had been happy to leave them in. Though later episodes have been allowed to have more of these words to go uncensored, as well as being released on DVD without any bleeps, back in 1998 that wasn't the case at all. And Nintendo would publish Conker's Bad Fur Day three years later, so they probably would have allowed the game to be uncensored.
• Gamers and some gaming media alike tend to believe that most PC games run on the Source engine just because other game engines look similar to it (and apparently the only popular games are ones made by Valve). In actuality, the Source engine is mostly used only by Valve, though they do license it. Other game engines such as Unity and Unreal see far more use by developers across PC and consoles.
• A news channel did a report claiming that Roblox contained “pornographic content”, and pronounced the game’s name as “Raw blocks”. Konekokitten has a video on the topic.
• Don Reisinger of Slash Gear said Nintendo would have no choice but to go multi-platform in light of the Wii U's failure and that Activision has no plans for Wii U titles. Ignoring that Nintendo's departure from making hardware very clearly didn't come to pass, had he ever set foot in a game store, he might have noticed the fact that Activision's statement about no longer making Wii U games only applied to their more mature titles like Call of Duty. Activision would actually be one of the few AAA developers to continue regularly developing games for the console (notably, the Skylanders series) until the end of its lifespan.
• Near the end of this Lore in a Minute video, they say that in Mirror's Edge, "Faith must follow all things inexplicably painted red". They aren't really red; it's a visual representation of how Faith can easily spot something to... do parkour stuff on. Not only do things only turn red after you come close enough anyway, but this "Runner Vision" can be turned off (and the Hard difficulty setting omits it entirely).
  • In Lore in a Minute's video of Phoenix Wright, it is stated that "Miles took over his father and became an esteemed prosecutor". In actuality, Miles Edgeworth's father was a defense attorney.
  • The Lore in a Minute video on South Park: The Fractured But Whole ends with the narrator claiming that the plot of the game is to infiltrate the Freedom Pals. While the plot for a large majority of the game involves competing with them, Cartman only asks the New Kid to infiltrate them during Day 3.
• A story claims that an 8-year-old is facing felony charges after charging $800 to his grandmother's credit card in Minecraft. Minecraft itself costs around $30, has no in-game store (or, at least not at the time of the report), and even if you are talking about the Xbox 360 version, has nowhere near $800 worth of skin packs to purchase. Guilty of this trope are: the grandmother, the boy's father, the police, and the (non-gaming/tech) news outlets who are repeating the story.
• Cracked again. This article complains about you dying in Assassin's Creed III (which itself is not correct. You get desynchronised) if you don't skin the animals you kill, yet you get away with murdering political figures. In doing this they miss the whole point of the series, where the Animus machine you're in allows you to see an interactive recording of the past, so you can kill these political figures because your ancestor actually did it. So you get desynchronised from this recording because your ancestor skinned all the animals he killed, and by not doing it yourself, you're straying too far from the recording.
  • In the same article, they claim that in Sonic the Hedgehog CD, the "I'm outta here!" Idle Animation "ends your game. As in you go back to the main menu and start from Level 1 with no Chaos Emeralds". While Chaos Emeralds are the staple Bonus Stage Collectables of the series, this game has Time Stones instead. Either way, unlike the first two cartridge-based games on the Genesis, all versions of Sonic CD have a save feature, so a game over won't send you back to the beginning of the game.
• On the Pat Campbell radio show, he discusses “The Slaying of Sandy Hook Elementary.” This is a fan-created Flash game available to play for free on some web sites. While discussing the game, Pat said "Any of you with teenage boys...is that on their Christmas list?", implying that he believes this game is available to purchase in stores.
• Find an Italian review of Ape Escape: On the Loose. Any short, non-professional one, coming from some magazine for kids. You will surely find only one screenshot of the game, more precisely this one... which comes from Ape Escape 3.
• Upon the release of Tekken 5, a Spanish magazine launched an article about the characters of the game. The article had Craig Marduk labeled as "Marshall Law" (a completely unrelated and very different character), presented Ling Xiayou as come from the future (presumably a misunderstanding from her goal to build a time machine to change the past, and does happen in her ending) and said that Yoshimitsu was Ogre's son.
• White Day: A Labyrinth Named School was featured in GameSpot's House of Horrors, and one of the commentators stated the game was made by Unnamed. This is entirely false and shows that they did not research the game beforehand. The game was developed by a small Korean game development team called Sonnori, and Unnamed was the person who translated and patched the game so it can be played on modern operating systems.
• Absolutely every gaming 'fixes' article posted on Chaos Hour.com, seen here. Why? Because the people running it didn't actually write the articles specifically for each game. They just wrote a generic article and presumably replaced a bunch of names with mail merge or something. As a result:
  • In a blatant attempt to rank higher on search engines, every single article has 'Wii U', 'PS3', '360' and 'PC' in the URL, even if the game in question is for only one of those systems... or something else like the original Game Boy.
  • They mention unreadable discs, for games not on discs.
  • DLC codes and online multiplayer servers are mentioned, for games with neither. So you get stuff like 'Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon DLC code not valid' despite the game having no DLC. Or 'Cant Connect to 'The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons and Oracle of Ages' Online / Multiplayer / Server'.
  • These articles exist (and are identical) for every game under the sun.
• Bully was widely criticized for glamorizing and rewarding schoolyard bullying. While Jimmy Hopkins is by no means a model student, the entire storyline revolves around him trying to put a stop to the bullying at Bullworth - but since most of the critics made their comments based purely on the name before game content was available, this isn't surprising. Jack Thompson even claimed the game was a Columbine massacre simulator. Even if you ignore the objectives in the game and do your own thing, murder isn't possible.
  • Similarly, when Bully was banned in Brazil, a certain sunday night news show describe it as "a game about beating up and humiliating your schoolmates", when, as stated above, the whole plot of the game revolves around stopping the Bullworth cliques from bullying non-clique students. While you can beat up other students and practice a few acts of bullying (i.e. stuffing people into trash cans) in the sandbox mode, this is entirely optional and it would be the same as saying that the Grand Theft Auto franchise is about murdering prostitutes and running over old ladies.
• This LA Times headline◊ reports on "Nintendo's White PlayStation 4", and includes a picture of Kyle Dodson holding a Wii U controller and playing the "Nintendo Splatoon" Sony creates the PlayStation line of consoles, not Nintendo, and while Splatoon is a Nintendo product, it's a game, not a console.
• Cracked again! In this article, they talk about a part of Ratchet and Clank 2, in which you're able to a make an alien girl's boobs grow. While you can do this at one point in the franchise, it's not in the second game, it's in the first.
• In Cr1TiKaL's Five Nights at Freddy's video, he refers to Bonnie the bunny as a bear multiple times (he probably confused him with the eponymous Freddy Fazbear).
• At least two Italian articles about the E3 presentation of Rayman Legends said that Murphy is a new character created for this game, when he actually debuted in the second chapter of the original trilogy. You know, the one Ubisoft kept rereleasing at the launch of nearly every Nintendo portable console since its release.
• IMDb thinks that The Clone Wars: Lightsaber Duels and The Clone Wars: Jedi Alliance are one and the same. They are completely distinct games that don't have anything in common except for the source material and being released at the same time. The former is a Fighting Game reenacting some scenes from the series, and the latter is an Action-Adventure with an original plot.
• The website of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, one of the most prominent newspapers in Germany, once did a report on Remedy Entertainment. It described their Breakthrough Hit Max Payne (a Third-Person Shooter) as being considered less violent than First Person Shooters such as World of Warcraft. Max Payne 2 is rated 18+ in Germany, and the first game had been outright indexed (restricted), whereas World of Warcraft is rated 12+ and a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game, not a shooter at all. The article went on to state that Alan Wake would only be available for Microsoft's X-Box and not for the "Nintendo Playstation", confirming that the author had no clue whatsoever about video games. The "World of Warcraft" and "Nintendo" blunders were fixed following a lot of ridicule, but the part about violence was not.
• Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein's Brain, pg 173: "In Japan, Einstein's image is used in a commercial for a video game called 3DO..." 3DO is a video game system, Einstein, not a video game.
• Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture: "Carmack's first project was to explore the burgeoning hardware for 3-D computer graphics. In the past, only arcade machines had been designed specifically to improve or accelerate 3-D graphics. With robust computer games like Doom and Quake, however, start-up companies saw an opportunity finally to bring 3-D acceleration to home machines. This would be done by putting powerful graphics processing chips onto special cards that could be inserted into an existing PC. One manufacturer, called 3Dfx, convinced Carmack to port a version of Quake in a programming language called OpenGL, which could run with its debut line of 3-D accelerator cards. Carmack completed the task in a weekend and uploaded the OpenGL version to the Web for free." The description has just enough context for the reader to extrapolate a chapter's worth of computer hardware and software history:
  • OpenGL is not a programming language. It uses a programming language for its instructions. OpenGL is an API (a set of routines, protocols, and tools for building software applications) for interacting with a 3D graphics accelerator card's GPU to achieve hardware-accelerated rendering. An API comes in the form of a library of pre-written code, subroutines, classes, etc, hence the GL in OpenGL standing for graphics library. As an open standard, cross-language, multi-platform API, choosing OpenGL meant support for more than one operating system, instead of Microsoft's Windows dependent Direct3D API, and more than one line of 3D graphics accelerator cards, instead of 3Dfx's proprietary and hardware dependent Glide API.
  • 3Dfx's Voodoo Graphics chipset and Glide API were both used for 3D hardware acceleration in arcade machines before being used in home computers. "3dfx gained initial fame in the arcade market. The first arcade machine that 3Dfx Voodoo Graphics hardware was used in was ICE Home Run Derby, a game released in 1996. Later that year it was featured in more popular titles, such as Atari's San Francisco Rush and Wayne Gretzky's 3D Hockey." (''3dfx Interactive, TOW'')
  • In the 3D accelerator market for home computers, there were several competitors to 3dfx's Voodoo Graphics chipset, such as the S3 ViRGE, ATI 3D Rage, Nvidia RIVA 128 and RIVA TNT. No consumer chipset had full OpenGL support. You couldn't find a graphics card dedicated to OpenGL, so OpenGL implementations like MiniGL were used by 3dfx, PowerVR and Rendition. By the time of the Voodoo 3 generation, 3dfx went bankrupt, and its hardware and API were obsolete.
  • The term software mode can be used to indicate software is not using hardware acceleration, instead relying on the CPU for processing and graphics rendering. The original DOS version of Quake, and WinQuake, the official source port for Windows, both do not use hardware acceleration for 3D graphics rendering, while GLQuake, the source port of Quake that uses OpenGL (an API, not a programming language), does use hardware acceleration, has a higher resolution (1920x1080) and has graphical features the other versions lack: 32-bit color, dynamic shadows, colored lighting and less pixelated textures. From the Quake wiki: "GLQuake is a source port of Quake that uses the OpenGL graphics library... it is the only official rendition of Quake that is hardware accelerated." From TOW: "GLQuake came with a driver enabling the subset of OpenGL used by the game to function on the 3dfx Voodoo Graphics card, the only consumer-level card at the time capable of running GLQuake well." ^note The exception is vQuake for Rendition’s Speedy3D API: Rendition was one of the first 3D chipset makers to work directly with Carmack to make a hardware-accelerated version of Quake, vQuake (TOW); Carmack vowed not to write another proprietary port after frustration with Rendition’s Speedy3D API (Quake Wiki). One concludes vQuake was not an official rendition and did not run as well.
  • The book glosses over the graphics card, chipset and API competition of the time in Broad Strokes. The time periods of the Voodoo (1996), Voodoo 2 (1998) and Voodoo 3 (1999) correspond to the release of Quake (1996), Quake 2 (1997), and Quake 3 (1999). Someone who played the 3D accelerated games of the time would be familiar with Voodoo cards or their competition, having to purchase and install the cards to run the games in the first place. The book treats the reader as someone who has experience with neither, when those very same people might be the ones interested in picking up such a book. The next paragraph begins: "The hard-core gamers flipped at the results, which made the game at least 20 percent faster and smoother. Once they saw 3-D acceleration, they would never go back, and they eagerly spent the few hundred dollars to upgrade their machines."
• Red Eye's review for Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel! identified it as "Borderlands: the Prequel".
• ITV documentary Exposure: Gaddafi and the IRA showed footage of a 1988 attack on a helicopter by IRA forces. Eagle-eyed viewers pointed out the footage was actually close to 2009; ARMA II, to be precise. Even if you take into account that someone was obvious filming the screen to get the footage, this shouldn't have been mistaken for reality.
• The Jehovah's Witness magazine Awake! once claimed that Halo 2 is a game where you play as an "assassin" who goes around stabbing humans in the back. There's quite a few games out there that would fit the bill, but Halo is not one of them.
• The PAL back cover for Streets of Rage 3 states that Axel has been arrested for a crime he didn't commit and you have to prove his innocence. The revelation that "Axel" is a suspect for kidnapping the Chief doesn't take place until the end of Stage 2, and the subject is only touched upon again in the Easy Mode ending. The Japanese version implies that the team are in constant contact with the police, and so the Axel robot is nothing more than Mr X setting a diversion to slow the team down.
• A flyer for BattleTech: The Crescent Hawks' Revenge announces the Crescent Hawks will be confronting the Clans. The date of the announcement says the year is 3029, the date of the prior game, BattleTech: The Crescent Hawks' Inception, set in the Succession Wars era, the era prior to the 3049 Clan Invasion. There was no Inner Sphere knowledge of the Clans in 3029, spawning an Epileptic Trees theory that was shot down by Word of God.
• In "The 5 Most Unbelievably Sexist Quests in Video Game History", Cracked complains that a quest in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim quest involves you slut-shaming a woman (Haelga) for having lots of sex. They fail to mention the bit where all the men Haelga slept with were married, and she knew it.
• This review of Doom from the Protestant website ChristianAnswers.net greatly exaggerates the violence in the game, claiming that "when you end up being killed ... the screen pans back to show your dying body crumpled to the ground and the bloodthirsty demons eating you like a piece of meat" — nothing like this ever happens in the game. Also, completing each level supposedly takes "scores if not hundreds of hours" (in reality, the levels take maybe 10 to 30 minutes for a first-time player), and "extra points are given for a shot in the head" (there's no such things as "points" in the game, and there's no way to make headshots, either). Interestingly, a lot of these features are in the popular Brutal Doom mod (fatalities both for the player and for enemies, and the ability to score headshots with the starting rifle), which the review precedes by ten years.
• The back of the "Series of Unfortunate Events" PS2 game calls Olaf an "evil uncle". Olaf is stated to be the Baudelaire's fourth cousin thrice removed, or third cousin four times removed, but he's definitely not an uncle.
• The Connecticut news station WTNH made a particularly embarrassing gaffe when reporting on the PSN and Xbox Live hacks during Christmas 2014. Sony does not operate the online services for Microsoft's console, and those services aren't simple websites like the reporter erroneously claims. What makes this mistake even more baffling is that the captions and the accompanying AP press release get the details right. Seeing as how the reporter noticeably editorializes a bit when talking about the related Sony Pictures hack, the blame is solely on him.
• Sears catalogs had some different game descriptions. Bubble Bobble is a "younger children's game". Legacy of the Wizard is a game where you "Destroy the planet Naju and its evil creatures as the Guardian of Earth", which is the plot for The Guardian Legend. Legend of Zelda is a game where you "gather crystals to stop warlords." Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is an adventure game where you can "Team up with these terrific turtles to knock heads with the nasty Ninjitsus". There are games spelled Bad Dude, Hydelide, Mega Man II^note there is a Mega Man II game that uses Roman numerals instead of Arabic, but that was released on Game Boy, not the Nintendo Entertainment System, Ninja Gai-Den, Shootin' Range, and Super Mario Bros. II.
• This news report seems to be talking about the Corrupted Blood Incident in World of Warcraft, which really has been studied by scientists to gain insight to how people might react to large scale outbreaks in real life, but claims that it was caused by "someone planting a computer virus inside the game", which is wrong on every possible level. Corrupted Blood wasn't a "computer virus", it was a debuff that acted like a communicable disease, and it wasn't "planted" by some unknown troublemaker; it was put in by Blizzard as an intentional part of a high-level boss fight, and due to an oversight on Blizzard's part could be carried out of the dungeon and spread to other players and NPCs. Finally, the statement belies a fundamental misunderstanding of how computer viruses or the game in question work.
• Graffiti Entertainment's official press release promoting Windy X Windam touts the game as being based on an unidentified "Japanese anime series". Though some of the characters are transparently based on other characters from a more famous fighting game series, Windy has no connection to any anime or manga series, accidental or otherwise.
• Funko Pop released the Red Knight figure from Dark Souls III, while it is cool to finally have a knight figure from the cover box, the description in the official blog led to a Mood Whiplash if you actually completed the game, and this enters an unintentional Misaimed Marketing territory due to FromSoftware deliberately hiding details about the Red Knight's real identity. Not only the Red Knight is not the Player Character, it is everything but the hope of humanity. Specifically, he's the Final Boss and the manifestation of every last unfortunate Lords of Cinder doomed to live inside an Animated Armor for eternity.
  "Return to the unforgiving terrain of the Dark Souls series as Red Knight and take down a Lord of Cinder! The Age of Fire is upon us and the Red Knight is our only hope!"
• In the Malcolm in the Middle episode "Francis Escapes", Hal says the final boss in Mortal Kombat is Sub-Zero when it's actually Shang Tsung.
• An episode of the NHK World show Imagine-Nation had a segment on Touhou Project. Said segment referred to Seija Kijin as male.
  • As well as calling Gensokyo "a youkai that roams the world of the game", which is the land where the games take place, and Reimu a "danmaku", which is the Japanese term for the genre. The first one can be excused as a possible mistranslation of something along the lines of "Gensokyo, the world of youkai visited in the game" (an accurate if simplified description), but the second one is just plain wrong.
• System 16 once had listings for Namco Arcade Games allegedly titled Don Bear Near, Rhinoceros Bar Command and Rhinoceros Berth Lead-Lead. These are nothing but Blind Idiot Translations of the actual titles of Dunk Mania, Cyber Commando and Cyber Sled; apparently a Japanese source that listed game titles in katakana was run through a machine translation that mistook parts of the titles as the Japanese words for "bear" (kuma) and "rhinoceros" (sai). Mockup screenshots of the first two mistaken games were later added to a "Fake, Wrong, Made Up" section.
• At least the Finnish translation of Guinness World Records: Gamer's Edition 2008 mentions "Crash and Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex". However, it is mentioned on the Jak and Daxter page, making it likely that the writer made a simple error, especially as the name is written correctly everywhere else.
• Although Guinness World Records has a dedicated video game section, it tends to get some details about games wrong:
  • When Guinness World Records: Gamer's Edition 2018 named Junko Enoshima from Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc the Most Cosplayed Video Game Character, it claimed the game "challenges players to investigate a fight club overseen by a robot bear." It's actually about a Deadly Game in which the goal is to commit a murder and get away with it to escape, overseen by a Killer Teddy Bear. Also, while it shows a sprite of Junko, the cosplay pictured is actually of Mukuro Ikusaba's outfit while disguised as her.
  • The 2020 edition includes a section about Kingdom Hearts and Sora, wherein it lists some Disney villains who have appeared in the games and served as bosses. Of the listed villains, Randall is never actually directly fought in the game and Emperor Zurg does not appear in III's Toy Story world nor has he appeared in any other Kingdom Hearts game to date (let alone been able to be fought as a boss).
  • beatmania held the world record for best-selling DJ game in editions around 2000 (when very few such games existed at the time), and was described as being controlled with "two turntables and an effector button". This is incorrect for several reasons:
    • Both turntables are operated with one player only when playing in Double Play mode, which is much less-played than Single Play mode due to its higher skill floor and, until later versions of beatmania IIDX, costing twice as many credits. In Single Play, only one turntable is used.
    • The Effector button exists, but it is not mandatory when playing songs. It just adds audio filters like echo and reverb.
    • The turntable is used for one specific type of note; the game also has 5 keys per player (or 7 in IIDX). The majority of notes will be key notes, and only in certain gimmick charts does the turntable-to-total-notes ratio approach anything more than 20%.
• The article "Video Games—Not so Much Fun After All" implies that Grand Theft Auto, the "most popular game of all time", is a rape simulator, and that "it's not the only one". You cannot actually rape anyone in Grand Theft Auto, nor is it the most popular game of all time.
• This review of Eversion by Indie Game Magazine makes it painfully clear that the reviewer didn't play past the first level, if they even played it at all.
• A certain Polish review of Zero Time Dilemma mistakenly claims that Carlos and Q are returning characters, when both appeared in the Zero Escape series for the first time. It also claims that game takes place on Mars. The test site where game takes place is supposed to simulate conditions on Mars and is in fact placed in the Nevada desert, something everyone is well aware of.
• The PSN store description for Blazing Angels: Secret Missions of WWII states that "During this mission you and your team discover that the bad guys also have an elite team of their own.". This does not happen at any point, and while there are two missions where killing an enemy ace is a bonus objective, it is purely an optional gameplay challenge and the enemy ace has no characterization or importance to the plot. Oddly enough, this bit does apply to Blazing Angel's obvious inspiration Secret Weapons Over Normandy, and the description as a whole is vague enough it could also apply to that game.
• The website Common Sense Media has slipped up a few times when reporting on certain games:
  • The "parent's guide" for War Craft III makes the game out to be nothing but violence and dirty jokes, mentioning absolutely nothing about the actual story. The review below the guide at least mentions some of the game's broader themes.
  • When describing the sexual content in No More Heroes, the writer says "The main character rubs oil on a bikini-clad woman. He asks another to "do it" with him." In both cases, Travis Touchdown (the main character in question) is interacting with the same woman (supporting character Sylvia Christel).
  • Aside from mentioning nothing about some of the game's scarier parts, the review for Undertale has a sentence that runs thusly: "There's one "boss" battle where you must repeatedly plead for your own life, dodge spears, and then run away, only to repeat this process several times before your oppressor runs out of breath and you can go get him a glass of water and make amends." This is describing the boss encounter with Undyne, but the character in question isn't a "him". She doesn't "run out of breath", either—she passes out from heat exhaustion, having just chased you across the border into Hotland while wearing heavy metal armor.
  • Their review of Eliminate Pro claims that the game has no blood. Anyone that had played it while it was active and available would tell you otherwise.
• GameStop Germany heavily promoted Halo: Reach, except that they constantly called it "Halo 4 Reach".
• You wouldn't have thought it was possible to make a critical research failure in a listicle that consists of screenshots of video games and a single sentence of "This was definitely a game people played". But Buzzfeed managed it, with "28 Old-School PC Games That'll Make Desi Kids Scream "OMG, I Used To Play That"" which includes a handful of console games that never got released on PC, namely Donkey Kong Country, Duck Hunt^note Although there was at least one unofficial DOS conversion, the screenshot in the article clearly comes from the NES game and Tekken. ^note None of the mainline Tekken games were released on the PC until 2017, with the release of Tekken 7. The headline quietly had the "PC" removed but the Twitter link still bears witness.
  • However, contrary to what you may think, the inclusion of Mario & Luigi in the list is not an error—there actually was a DOS fangame by that name which was quite widespread back in the nineties.
• A lot of gaming websites (including IGN) and Youtubers get the Harvest Moon games mixed up. Harvest Moon: The Lost Valley and its sequels are not the Harvest Moon that gamers know of. They're original titles by the series' old translator Natsume. The Japanese games are now translated as Story of Seasons by xSeed. Yet, outlets always show off Natsume-made titles when they mention "new" Harvest Moon games.
• Even close to a decade later, most fan-based outlets discussing the James Bond game Blood Stone seem convinced that Greece is a major part of the plot and that the terrorist Bond takes care of there, Greco, is the Big Bad - in the actual game that is the tutorial level, and nothing from it comes up again. Grimly appropriate in that Blood Stone was the last game its developers made, and people are still unintentionally showing why that is.
• Konami instruction manuals back in the late '80s and early '90s dabbled in this trope, evidently seen as so unimportant that the translators decided to just make shit up for them. The NES version of Metal Gear, for instance, mentioned on the cover and the manual the Big Bad was named Vernon CaTaffy (a parody of Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi). Nowhere in the actual game is there a character by this name, and the actual main villain is Big Boss (who, incidentally, was inexplicably renamed Commander South in the manual).
• Banjo-Kazooie:
  • The description for the Banjo figure in Toy Biz's Diddy Kong Racing line mentions something called "the Kazools" getting involved in his life, and goes on to say that Banjo is always eager to answer the Call to Adventure. Word of God confirms that someone just misread the name "Kazooie" as "Kazools", and that Banjo's supposed character trait about the Call to Adventure was meant to be Kazooie's.
  • This CNET article seems to believe that Banjo and Kazooie are horrific Siamese Twins attached by the back. They are two separate entities, one of whom wears a backpack that the other frequently sits in.
• Doki Doki Literature Club! was accused of causing the suicide of a 15 year old boy by the boy's father and some British tabloids. Said tabloids referred to it as an "online game" which would supposedly ask the player for their phone number and send them text messages. DDLC is a purely offline game, and while it reads certain information about the user's computer to mess with their head (which it never actually asks for), it doesn't interact with their phone in any way.
• The US cover for Secret of Mana (and subsequently other international releases) calls it the "first game in a new action/adventure series". That's two blatant errors in one line by the local subsidiary of the company who made the game. It's already the second game in the series – in fact, it was originally released in Japan as "Seiken Densetsu 2", and had first been announced in America as "Final Fantasy Adventure 2". And while Final Fantasy Adventure had been a hybrid Action-Adventure/Eastern RPG, Secret of Mana is a pure RPG – while the fighting is still done in real-time, it is slow-paced, and there are barely any puzzles anymore.
• An article by CVG states that F1 Super Lap is a sequel to Virtua Racing and uses polygon graphics, while the actual game has barely anything to do with Virtua Racing and uses sprite-based graphics.
• An article by SCMP states that Call of Duty: Black Ops II has a mission set in Tiananmen Square and caused outrage in China, when in fact, no such mission existed in the first place.
• After the announcement of Devil May Cry 5, the official channel uploaded Dante's new theme "Subhuman" by the band Suicide Silence. The description labeled Dante as a "foul-mouthed antihero", indicating that they accidentally wrote the song for the reboot version of Dante. The lyrics and vocals reflected this, and the video was taken down after receiving a large amount of dislikes.
• An article praising LGBT characters in video games included a screenshot of two male characters in their underwear looking at each other. The picture is correctly captioned as coming from Dragon Age: Origins, and out of context, it did kind of look like they were about to get it on. The scene features the player character with party member Alistair, but of the two potential male love interests, he is the one who isn't a Gay Option. And the scene has nothing to do with sex; the two were arrested and stripped of their gear and were simply talking in their cell about how to escape.
• Family Friendly Gaming seems to think The Sims 3 is about living out your dreams in a fantasy world and questions why people would want to do that instead of living it in the real world. While there are people who do that, there are just as many who play the game for storytelling and other reasons, as anyone in the Sims fandom could have told them.
• Game On! 2017 stated Undertale is 6 hours long, but has 3 endings. That is, if you count all the Neutral Endings as a single ending.
  • They also mislabled Just Dance 2017 images for "Don't Stop Me Now" and "Titanium" as ones for "Whenever I Go" and "PoPiPo"
  • Game On! 2021 includes multiple instances of Sephiroth being spelled Sepiroth (With only one H) and claimed Lucina had a tipper (the difference between her and Marth is that Lucina doesn't have them, while Marth does).
• Edge Studios has a profile for Dan Green, who works for them as a voice instructor. In said profile, they mention his video game work including "the critically acclaimed All Saints Row 2". The game they are referring to is probably meant to be Saints Row 2. The misnaming seems to have risen from them somehow getting it mixed up with a girl band named All Saints. Another error is that Dan Green actually isn't in Saints Row 2, but instead in Saints Row: The Third, as one of the radio voices.
• On Volition's website, they marked Lin from Saints Row as dying in 2008, despite the fact that the game had taken place two years prior.
• After Google unveiled Google Stadia on March 19, 2019, many sources erroneously reported that it was a gaming console, when it in fact is a Cloud Gaming service.
• STTR1 (the original (unauthorized) Star Trek game, which launched a thousand clones) contains the following line which the unfortunate player gets for completely running out of energy: "The Enterprise is dead in space. If you survive all remaining attacks you will be reduced to the rank of private." Author Mike Mayfield was still in high school at the time, which may explain the problems with this:
  • Starfleet is a naval organisation; "private" should have read "Seaman" or "Crewman."
  • The "captain" of a naval vessel is a "commissioned officer," who has gone to a military academy and received special training; a "private" / "crewman" is an "enlisted" personnel who has gone through boot camp (or the naval equivalent). They're different ranking systems; for a "captain" to be demoted to "private" is a little like a medical doctor losing their license and being demoted to archaeologist.
• A Buzzfeed article on "forgotten" early 2000s trends mentioned Farmville. Not only is Farmville a late 2000s trend, but they used a screencap from Harvest Moon: Back to Nature.
• This Anime News Network article about an upcoming The King of Fighters animated film adaptation erroneously refers to Goenitz as the leader of the NESTS organization, the Big Bads of the games' "NESTS Saga". The problem comes from the fact that Goenitz isn't affiliated with NESTS in any way, but is in fact a servant of Orochi, the Big Bad of the games' previous arc, the Orochi Saga, let alone that Goenitz was long dead by the time of KoF '99, when the NESTS Saga had officially started. The NESTS organization was in fact led by the eponymous Nests, until his own son Igniz usurped his position during the climax of KoF 2001. Fortunately, the article has since been corrected.
• This PopMatters article talking about Undertale makes a few errors in describing the game's contents. Aside from misspelling Flowey and Asriel's names as "Flowery" and "Asreal", it claims that Papyrus is the first major opponent in the game, implies that the player is intentionally trying to drain Mettaton's batteries in their boss encounter with him, implies that all of the Amalgamates have Reaper Bird's "words stacked on top of each other" speech quirk, and says that Flowey is the final boss of the True Pacifist route. In actuality, Toriel is the game's first major opponent; the player's "spare" goal during Mettaton's fight is to increase his ratings, with his battery not even mentioned until after the requirements for sparing have already been met; the Amalgamates each have their own speech patterns, with one (Endogeny) not speaking at all; and while the last point is technically true, the character has at this point assumed his original form and identity of Asriel Dreemurr.
• Puyo Puyo, particularly in the 1990s and 2000s, had a tendency to attract inaccurate information from English-speaking sources, particularly those not fluent in Japanese (as the majority of the series was stuck in No Export for You limbo at the time):
  • One gaming magazine referred to the main protagonist of the Compile-era games as "Puyo". Her name is Arle Nadja; Puyos are the colorful slime creatures matched by the player.
  • A British magazine failed to recognize that the series' logo was written in Japanese when reviewing Puyo Puyo Sun as an import title, and labeled it "Ijidkijidk Sun". The review also described the plot as being about "three characters travelling through the countryside trying to save the heat from the sun being sapped away by an evil goblin [sic]", but there are three problems with this. Firstly, the "evil goblin" is Satan, who is not a goblin. Secondly, Satan does not drain the heat from the sun, but rather the opposite - he makes the sun bigger and hotter. Lastly, only two of the three main playable characters (Arle and Schezo) try to stop Satan from messing with the sun, while the third (Draco) enjoys the artificial heat wave and takes the opportunity to get a tan.
• The website Jezebel had an article asking why Chun-Li is not in the new Mortal Kombat movie. Well, Chun-Li is from a completely different fighting series, for one. To their credit, they would later issue a correction pointing that out less than twenty minutes later.
• Red Dead Redemption II: This IGN article claims that MacFarlane's Ranch is located just outside New Austin. New Austin is a state, and MacFarlane's Ranch is firmly inside of it.
• Dragon Age: Origins: A German Dr videogame publication claimed in multiple previews that the game is about "fighting the undead Blight". While undead are fought in the game, they have nothing to do with the blight and - outside one main quest - never come close to have any impact on the plot.
• And that same German publication also dedicated a substantial part of their review of Mass Effect 3 to a column by that magazines secondary Editor-in-Chief talking at length why he doesn't agree with the controversy about its ending and urging people to give it a chance despite not having a ... happy ending. Only, as most people who played Mass Effect 3 (especially before the Extended Cut was released) know very well, the ending not being happy was, if at all, only a tiny part of why it was controversial.
• That same publication in 2020 also ran an article about Grand Theft Auto VI which turned out to be based entirely on rumors - despite one of their own journalists working for Rockstar's German marketing team (which is a whole different can of worms).
• Sony's infamous E3 2006 presentation had a guy present Genji 2 who was clearly unprepared for the role. He referred to it as an action game featuring famous battles from Japanese history, and then made history by showing the Giant Enemy Crab boss. The actual game is based on The Tale of the Heike, a fictional novel based on the Genji and Heike war.
• The German pop science TV show Galileo once produced a feature on the alleged correlation between violent video games and school shootings (and, predictably enough, the feature careened into Murder Simulators territory from the get-go). To illustrate its point about video game violence, Galileo curiously showed gameplay footage from Swat 4, which - while technically a First-Person Shooter - is more to the point a police procedural simulator that both actively penalises players for shooting and killing their 'enemies' and incentivises them obeying professional police protocol (that is, taking suspects into custody with minimal violence) at all times. In other words, Galileo used one of the worst possible examples for video game violence in the then-contemporary FPS landscape.
• ArcadeCloud's video the Entire Mortal Kombat Franchise in 3 Minutes is chock-full of blatantly incorrect information about the Mortal Kombat franchise on the most fundamental levels. The allegiances of several characters are gotten wrong. It claims both Kano and Scorpion are fighting for Earthrealm when they are fighting for Outworld and the Neatherrealm, respectively. It claims Shao Kahn was the one overseeing the first tournament when it was Shang Tsung, Quan Chi was the ruler of the Neatherrealm when it was Shinnok, Johnny Cage was resurrected by the Elder Gods when there is no proof of that in the games, and more. The comments right away tore this video apart for how many inaccuracies it contained. ArcadeCloud appears to have gotten the message, as they later released an updated video that, while not perfect, was much more accurate.
• A 1991 review of Fantastic Night Dreams Cotton from CVG UK features a bizarre mangled plot summary of the game. The game is about a Jerkass witch named Cotton being recruited by a fairy to collect the magical Willows candies and rescue a kingdom besieged by monsters, but the writer was somehow under the impression the game is about a girl named Maki (having apparently seen the 牧 character in the opening scroll and assumed it to be a character's name) having recurring nightmares and being eventually thrust into a nightmare world. The baffling part is that even the Japanese version of the Turbo CD port reviewed has a complete English translation available in the option settings, which would've cleared things up.
• One Jeopardy! clue on October 8, 2019 asked for a video game whose rotatable blocks have names such as "Orange Ricky, Hero, and Smashboy". While a contestant does provide the correct reponse of Tetris, the names are actually incorrect, having originated from a Twitter meme post showing these names in a supposed copy of the NES version's manual. Even the game's official Twitter account called the show out on it.
• City Connection: Destructoid claims that the game’s soundtrack consists of multiple unique licensed soundtracks, including Deep Purple's "Highway Star". Apparently they had not played more than 5 seconds of each of the stage (read: they have only watched the demo, which rarely lasts more than 5 seconds), or they would've realized that this is absolutely untrue. Sadly, The Other Wiki chose to parrot this incorrect fact and fends off any attempt to correct this.
• During the NFT craze in 2021-2022 some tech-based sources somehow mistook Battle Racing Stars for another (now discontinued) mobile game (which incidentally, also started life in 2018 and had public release in 2020) with a similar name, Battle Racers, which had NFTs. This caused a small Newbie Boom and several misinformed and confused people wondering how to get NFTs in Battle Racing Stars, when it never had any. Halfbrick Studios eventually made several official◊ statements that they are against using NFT technologies in their games, including Battle Racing Stars.
• The Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair article on Russian Wikipedia says that Nekomaru has a digestion problem. It's actually a heart problem. The misconception is owed to Nekomaru's obsession with shitting.
• Some European magazines that were covering the Arcade version of Strider reported the name of the Big Bad as...Lord Eurasia. Meio does say the word during one of the cutscenes ("He will never leave Eurasia alive!"), but how in the world can someone hear that line and determine he's talking about himself will forever be a mystery. And that's leaving out the fact "Eurasia" is an actual word referring to the whole Europe/Asia land mass, which Meio rules over in-game!!
• This Screen Rant article denigrates Hollow Knight as buggy, lacking development for the main character (a silent protagonist who is revealed to be a mindless husk), and having little side content (most of the game's content is completely optional, and there are several areas that players might never visit). It also claims that the game has difficulty settings in its options menu (no such settings exist), and that the final area of the game is a gauntlet of buzzsaws that kill the player in one hit (the actual final area is a dangerless corridor, the area being referred to is completely optional and in fact does not kill the player in one hit). The article closes by referring to the main character as "the titular player" (he's simply referred to as the Knight).
• Shelley Blond, the original voice actor of Lara Croft, once claimed in an interview with the BBC that Lara was "the first female lead in a video game" even though there have been many before her, such as Ms. Pac-Man and Samus Aran. The BBC later fixed their article after realising the error.
• Steam background for Supreme Commander is taken from a Revamp Expansion mod — for Supreme Commander 2. As the game was added to the platform at a later date, its new license holder was Square Enix, which evidently knew nothing about the game.

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