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Dancing Bear / Video Games

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Dancing Bears in Video Games.
  • Alpha Waves is known only for the fact that it was a 3D platformer made in the 16-bit era.
  • Amped 3 is a fairly obscure, so-so snowboarding game which managed to bomb significantly despite being a launch Xbox 360 game. However, if people know of it, they likely remember it for the completely batshit cutscenes, which featured, among other things, constant Art Shift between deliberately bad CGI, Animesque, hand puppets, handdrawn on paper, scrapbook cutouts, 8-bit Retraux, among about a dozen other styles, and for a completely insane plot that involved Mind Control, a parody of Electronic Arts, a main character being recruited into a Boy Band, russian agents, and ending with a comet colliding with Earth and causing an Earth-Shattering Kaboom. This is despite the fact that the first two games were down-to-earth, realistic, and took themselves pretty seriously.
  • Arm Joe is an adaptation of Les Misérables... as an over-the-top late-90s 2D fighting game. Though it is a fairly impressive effort for a one-man studio, it would be entirely forgotten if not for its strange choice of source material—especially since it's not an In Name Only adaptation, being surprisingly heavy on references to said source.
  • Bloodborne PSX, the Video Game Demake of Bloodborne has two dancing bears going for it: the first in it being a PS1-style remake of Bloodborne (a game released for the PlayStation 4 in 2015), and people coming to see if it can pull off the "Soulsborne" style of controls with 8-directional movement; and the second in it being a playable version of Bloodborne on the PC.
  • The first three Boktai games had UV sensors built into the cartridges, the idea being that to use The Power of the Sun in the games, you had to provide sunlight in real life. While having to stand in direct sunlight (or play with a disadvantage, if it's night, the weather isn't sunny, or you don't have an artificial source of UV light available) was an Audience-Alienating Premise, it certainly was a very unique idea, and the games are generally considered good apart from that.
  • At first, Borderlands was only really notable for the "87 Bazillion" randomly-generated guns. The sequels went a good bit beyond that.
  • While 1981's Bosconian isn't the first video game to feature voices, that title belonging to Berzerk, it was not only notable for being one of the first video games to include non-synthetic voice acting, but also for being the first space shooter to feature voices, which was a major selling point in both promotional material and home ports.
  • Brutal Mario in general. With the gimmick being lots and lots of ASM that stretches the engine to its limits. It's quite a common gimmick for Mario hacks in general, with other examples of being Mario Fantasy, Super Mario LD and the Ore World series, which also have wildly varying quality of level design.
  • Bug Fables got a decent amount of buzz (pun intended) upon release among fans of the Paper Mario franchise, as its gameplay, writing, and aesthetic was heavily inspired by that of Paper Mario 64 and Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door during a time when the Paper Mario franchise was alienating long-time fans. Thankfully after release, the game managed to gain popularity on its own merits.
  • Cave Story is a solid game in any context and did well critically, but its biggest claim to fame is that everything in the original version, from the game engine to the levels, graphics, animations, music, story, weapons, enemies, physics, etc, was all made by one person in his spare time. Taking into account the size, quality, and initial release date of the game, this was highly notable.
  • Conker's Bad Fur Day's Dancing Bear is loads of swearing, graphic violence, sexual references, Toilet Humour, Black Comedy, and pop culture references, which contrast harshly with the game's cute and cartoony aesthetics. The "mature" content was added after a kid-friendly prototype version was criticized for being too similar to Rare's previous Banjo-Kazooie. The game became a beloved Cult Classic, although it still sold poorly due to releasing on the Nintendo 64 when the next generation of consoles was becoming available.
  • The Crew has its main draw in the fact the entire U.S.A. (aside from Alaska and Hawaii, for obvious reasons) is the map, and it's an open world. As Ross Scott remarks, it's difficult to rate a game like that because even if it's unremarkable or even mediocre in the rest (with The Crew generally falling under "okay" for most things from physics to graphics and story, with a couple glaring problems), being able to drive across the entirety of the US is a huge thing by itself, but isn't really part of the usual rating process, so it's impossible to really give it a fair score.
  • CROSS×BEATS is mainly known for being the first game that Naoki Maeda of DanceDanceRevolution fame worked on since leaving Konami.
  • Opinions on Crysis as an overall product vary, but one thing most can agree on is that it's an absolutely gorgeous-looking game for its time, with even the best machines on the consumer market at the time having trouble running the game at maximum settings. For a while, Crysis served as the benchmark for people trying to build dream PCs.
  • Cuphead is primarily known for the fact that the entire game is hand drawn in the style of a 1930's rubber hose cartoon.
  • Daikatana is a bit of an absurdity. The only reason it sold any copies at all is because it had John Romero's name on it, and was from Ion Storm — and because of an infamous magazine ad which claimed that "John Romero's about to make you his bitch." The game itself was and is, as many reviewers at the time noted, a buggy, broken mess. Today, conversely, it is largely remembered because of the resulting trainwreck.
  • The obscure arcade game Daioh advertised that and is mostly known to genre enthusiasts because it's a vertical Shoot 'Em Up whose export version peliculiarly uses a 6-buttons Street Fighter-esque control layout in a genre where most games rarely feature more than 3 action buttons.
  • When Darius was first released, its main draw was the three-screen monitor setup. Dariusburst followed this up with a 32:9 setup for its arcade cabinet, along with a Chronicle mode that has over 3000 stages, with progression in the mode shared between everyone playing on a given cabinet.
  • Disney Infinity is mostly notable for two things. It has Disney characters and sets you buy as figures, and it's a toy box you can make other games in.
  • The first Donkey Kong Country, while still a fondly remembered game in its own right, is mainly known for being one of the first video games to use prerendered CG graphics, and the first game on the SNES to do so as well.
  • Donkey Kong Jungle Beat owes its fame entirely to its control scheme: the game is designed to be played exclusively with the DK Bongos, a music peripheral originally designed for the rhythm game Donkey Konga. Though by no means a bad platformer, the fact that the game is even possible to play with a pair of plastic drums, much less to the degree of the final product, is the main reason to check it out. Aside from that, its other main claim to fame is being the first game awarded the E10+ rating by the Entertainment Software Rating Board.
  • The DOOM Game Mod "Nuts" is a map that consists of two huge, rectangular rooms filled with thousands upon thousands of demons, with the first room having weaker enemies and the second one containing the biggest, strongest foes in the game. Players are given a BFG-9000, a ton of ammo, and a few invincibility power-ups to try and clear out as many enemies as possible (though many of them will be killed by infighting). The map is famous solely due to its ludicrous enemy density (to the point where even modern machines may struggle to play it), and it's inspired a few follow-ups that go for Sequel Escalation in terms of enemy counts.
  • Duke Nukem Forever, if only for the fact that it spent over twelve years in development and won numerous awards for its repeated delays, even outliving the game's own development studio after they were axed by their publishers. By the time of its release, just the fact that the game existed and could actually be played was reason enough for many to buy it, with several outlets such as Official Xbox Magazine deeming the game itself to be of such poor quality that "a chance to own a piece of gaming history" was the game's only positive.
  • Dust: An Elysian Tail was designed, programmed, and illustrated almost entirely by Dean Dodrill, with only voice-acting and music coming from other people.
  • Escape from the Coolsonian was a tie-in Web Game released in promotion for Scooby-Doo: Monsters Unleashed. An otherwise ordinary point-and-click adventure, it has achieved notoriety for the sole factor of being a game meant for children that features a nasty Screamer Prank.
  • Exterminator was the first arcade game whose visuals were entirely made with digitized graphics, in 1989. It was also housed in an elaborate cabinet shaped like a house, complete with slanted roof and chimney.
  • The budget fighting game Fight of Gods probably would have been an obscure footnote were it not for the fact that one of the playable characters is none other than Jesus Christ, which almost instantly catapulted it to internet infamy.
  • There exists a Chinese Video Game Demake of Final Fantasy VII, which manages to fit most of the game's three-discs-on-the-PSX story onto a heavily modified NES cartridge. Few people to have played it consider it an improvement on the original or even the other NES Final Fantasy games, criticizing it for extremely poor balancing and an overtuned level of difficulty (enemies just have far too much HP), but nonetheless regard it as frankly miraculous that it actually functions to begin with.
  • Fuel is mostly remembered for the massive scale of its open world at 14,400 square kilometers, even getting a Guiness world record for largest playable area because of this. However, besides that the game is largely considered So Okay, It's Average.
  • Geppy-X, released for the PlayStation in 1999, was sold primarily on its premise: an incredibly accurate homage to '70s Super Robot anime, down to the theme songs, eyecatches, and fake commercials. Reviewers of the time generally noted that it's a below-average side-scrolling shooter, but the novelty of its presentation makes it worth checking out anyway.
  • Hitman 3 was the subject of a few interviews about how it managed to cut down on the filesize of the game by over 65% at launch by using the LZ4 compression algorithmnote . Not only is Hitman 3 the final entry, and smallest entry in terms of filesize, in their World of Assassination Trilogy, but it also contains all the content from Hitman (2016) and Hitman 2, DLC and all!, meaning the prior two games are effectively redundant to keep around, and instead of being in excess of 200GB as many feared before launch, the game was 55GB!, which was just astounding. Not only that, but previous owners of the two games get those DLC's for free!
  • I=MGCM is widely known for their extremely expensive budget, and the not only vivid but surprisingly dark (but still Lighter and Softer than the infamous Puella Magi Madoka Magica, Magical Girl Raising Project and Ryukishi07's works in comparison, at least in the regular version) Magical Girl Warrior game which uses The Multiverse as the game setting. Besides that, there's an official NSFW version of it, which is called I=MGCM DX.
  • Istaria: Chronicles of the Gifted would have been treated as just another generic fantasy MMORPG... if it wasn't for the fact that it is practically the only MMORPG that has dragons as a playable race which became the only thing people know about the game. The fact that there isn't even a trope page already speaks volumes. Even the game's website has "Istaria is the best crafting MMORPG and has playable Dragons!" as its title.
  • The First-Person Shooter .kkrieger is mostly known for only needing 97,280 bytes of disk space despite having Doom³-tier graphics, through such tricks as using Windows system files as seeds to generate the content.
  • L.A. Noire was hyped on its (at the time) revolutionary motion/facial capture technique, which digitized the faces of actors onto their virtual counterparts, along with an interrogation system that forced players to figure out subtle facial cues to determine whether a suspect was lying or not.
  • Little Town Hero: Toby Fox of Undertale fame developing a release from Game Freak is enough of a Dancing Bear as is. Toby Fox later working on Pokemon is definitely a major accomplishment from a humble indie developer.
  • Lose/Lose is a Mac space shooter that permanently deletes a random file in your Home folder for every enemy you kill. The creator even admitted that the game was made as a funny little experiment and was surprised that people actually played and enjoyed it.
  • maimai is a pretty standard arcade rhythm game, but it's best known for its unusual cabinet design. It looks like a washing machine, with a circular screen that allows and encourages radial inputs.
  • The MMORPG genre (at the very least until World of Warcraft). Just the idea of playing with hundreds or millions of other people simply by plugging in your modem made even the worst balanced exposure to the most annoyingly ill-behaved players tremendously appealing.
  • Back in the 90s, Mortal Kombat was infamous due to its over-the-top violence, which led to re-evaluation of laws concerning violent content of video games and the creation of the ESRB in North America. This status wore off as games with even more graphic violence became more common and the critical reception of the franchise began to dip. With the Netherrealm Studios era beginning with the Soft Reboot in 2011, though, the gratuitous blood and gore have not only not gone away, but become a part of the series' identity that help differentiate it from other fighting games.
  • The Narc 2005 remake banked on controversy over its drug use mechanic to help sell games. Although it did get media attention, it didn't sell very well.
  • Nintendo:
    • Nintendo's very first video game was EVR Race and it isn't all that impressive from a gameplay perspective, being little more than a betting simulator. Player input consisted of nothing more than choosing a horse or car that one thought would come in first place, but it was notable anyway as the first video game to ever use Live Action Cutscenes, which was accomplished via the "Electronic Video Recording System", one of many experimental predecessors to the VHS tape.
    • M-rated Nintendo games. Nintendo is renowned for its family-friendly image, with their internal development studios never creating anything above a Teen rating. This doesn't stop them from occasionally funding and publishing M-rated exclusives from other studios though, which happens infrequently enough to catch people off-guard whenever it happens. The biggest example of this is Geist, which thanks to its middling gameplay, is only remembered for being that Nintendo M-rated GameCube game that wasn't Eternal Darkness.
    • The Nintendo DS wasn't sold on how graphically impressive its games were for a handheld device, but on its touchscreen interface. While some mocked it, claiming that it would be crushed by Sony's Playstation Portable, it ended up being an overwhelming success thanks to said touchscreen being attractive to a "blue ocean" of consumers who were intimidated by traditional control schemes, popularizing the Casual Video Game in the process. The success of the Nintendo DS (Nintendo's most-sold console and the second-best-selling console ever) lead to a general shift in Nintendo's strategy, leading them to focus more on widespread casual appeal than the much smaller hardcore audience. This has worked to their success (the Wii with its motion control and the Nintendo Switch with its "hybrid" format, both spawning imitators), detriment (the Wii U with its tablet GamePad controller is their worst-selling console), and everything in between (the Nintendo 3DS with its glasses-free 3D effects was popular, but the gimmick was only regularly used by a small fraction of consumers, leading to a cheaper budget model that ditched the functionality completely).
    • The SNES Classic's main selling point was that it contained the first release of Star Fox 2, which had been on The Shelf of Movie Languishment since 1995.
  • A lot of the initial titles that used NVIDIA's RTX features, such as ray tracing and DLSS, were seen as this. Sure it was cool to have perfect mirror-like reflections on shiny metal and glass, but for the most part, performance tanked when it was enabled. In addition DLSS was rather limited in what options you could set (one of them being you had to use a resolution of 4K or 1440p). Later iterations of both features would improve, but various games (some existing for over 20 years) were made into Dancing Bears as if to go "look, you can do this now!"
  • Palworld is primarily known for being either "Pokémon with guns" or "Pokémon with Black Comedy Animal Cruelty" depending on who you ask, due to the pre-release promotional material focusing heavily on that as its marketing gimmick. A large contributing factor to its successful early-access launch is players coming for what they thought was a silly meme game based on that pretense, only to find themselves enjoying it on its own merits.
  • Per Persona 3 Reload's release, the only reason Persona 3 Portable remained standing is the ability to play The Journey as a female protagonist, something that has not been done in any "nu-Persona" games since. Portable on its own is considered to be the worst way to play Persona 3 due to non-dungeon navigation being reduced to point-and-click interface, scenes being reduced into a Visual Novel format, and much of the quality-of-life additions and updates which put it mechanically ahead of the PlayStation 2 versions already being present in Reload anyway like the option for Direct Commands, Skill Cards, rescue requests, etc.
  • Portal started off as this, being focused on puzzles that require thinking with non-Euclidean portals, and was first released in The Orange Box compilation alongside the heavyweights of Half-Life 2, its episodic sequels, and Team Fortress 2, seeming very small by comparison. However, its easy-to-grasp gameplay, darkly witty writing, and main villain proved that there was a lot more than just a simple gimmick, and it became the most acclaimed game out of The Orange Box, eventually getting a sequel.
  • Pokémon Ranger: Many Pokémon fans bought the game just for the Manaphy egg you can get for completing it (as long as they didn't get a second-hand copy where the previous owner already redeemed it, due to the strange decision to limit the eggs to one per cartridge).
  • The Red Faction franchise became notorious for its groundbreaking GeoMod technology and physics simulation, which allowed players to blow open walls or destroy environments (to a level not normally seen in previous games) if they couldn't get through a door or obstacle.
  • The N64 port of Resident Evil 2, while delivering a slightly blurry and washed out visual experience along with low quality audio, is nothing short of a miracle for the porting devs. They managed to take the originally 1.5GB (split across 2 discs) PS1 title and used all manner of technical and artistic tricks to cram the entire game into a tiny 64MB cartridge.
  • Rubber Hose Rampage's only selling point is that it could legally get away with starring Mickey and Minnie Mouse despite having no involvement from Disney whatsoever, thanks to being released shortly after Steamboat Willie fell into the Public Domain.
  • Sad Satan has strange and mildly eerie backstory behind it (involving a Let's Player being given it by a mysterious user of The Deep Web) and some versions of it are actively dangerous to play (due to containing illegal content like child pornography and/or viruses that will destroy your computer), but that's the only reason anybody knows about it, and certainly the only reason anyone tries to play it. The actual gameplay is just wandering around endless corridors with lots of jump scares.
  • Many games and programs for the early Sinclair computers (especially the ZX80 and ZX81) fell into this category as programmers worked around their limitations.
    • 1K ZX Chess fits most of the rules and a computer-controlled player into an unexpanded Sinclair ZX81. The fact that it's missing castling, promotions and en passant and that the AI can only look one move ahead is beside the point- 1KB is a ludicrously small amount of memory. note  It's generally considered an incredible achievement, even if it's not likely to kick Garry Kasparov's backside.
    • Why is this version of Donkey Kong with blocky, monochrome, text-based graphics impressive? Because it shouldn't be possible at all. Sinclair's ZX80 (the predecessor to the better-known ZX81) would normally blank the display- however briefly- whenever it was doing any form of processing.note  This made games with any form of moving graphics intolerably flickery at best... unless you were very clever with your timing.
  • Skylanders was a fairly enjoyable series of children's action-adventure games, but the only thing that most people who were outside the target demographic know it for, aside from it initially being attached to the Spyro the Dragon brand, is that the series was the codifier for the Toys-To-Life Game. You have to purchase toys in order to play certain characters, which instantly sparked a decade-long fad that was followed by countless other developers and companies.
  • Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • Tappy Chicken is a Flappy Bird clone that derives the bulk of its appeal from being a Tech-Demo Game for the mobile app applications of the Unreal Engine.
  • The never-officially-released Tattoo Assassins would be an utterly unremarkable Mortal Kombat clone, if not for one thing: the game has 2,196 distinct fatality animations. Consequently, the main reason to play the game is to try to see as many of them as you can.
  • Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge initially drew a lot of attention not just for being a fully-original beat'em up based on the 1987 TMNT cartoon that was made decades after Konami stopped doing them, but also having its developer Tribute Games be ex-Ubisoft employees previously responsible for the Cult Classic TMNT GBA game and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World: The Game, as well as its publisher having helmed Streets of Rage 4, and both companies being staffed with fans of the cartoon. Fortunately, the game sold over one million copies on its first week, proving that the developer-publisher duo worked.
  • Temtem is an MMORPG Mon game that launched in early access during a period of heavy dissatisfaction among the Pokémon fanbase concerning the state of the series: namely everything revolving around Pokémon Sword and Shield, from the early controversy surrounding the new restriction on the Mons available for use to the underwhelming quality of said game upon release amongst long-time fans. In addition to its superb timing, temtem also had Platypet, a popular "Fakemon" that they got the rights to use in their game. As such, temtem saw tens of thousands of players in early 2020, but activity soon fell drastically as many Pokémon fans who approached ''temtem' as a replacement found it too different mechanically to truly serve as one. The game does continue to see temporary spikes in players whenever a new island gets released, however.
  • The Tetris: The Grand Master series is known for two things: its instant-drop speeds and the "invisible Tetris" segment that the player gets if they did well enough in the main course of the game.
  • Them's Fightin' Herds started off as a fangame called My Little Pony: Fighting Is Magic before getting Screwed by the Lawyers and being reworked into an original IP with the help of Lauren Faust. While it's considered a decent game with a strong following among the Fighting Game Community, outside of the fandom it's known more for the apparent absurdity of the fact that "the My Little Pony fighting game" is a thing that exists in all seriousness than for any of the game's actual merits. It's gradually breaking past this stigma, though.
  • Tobal 2 is a fairly average Japan-exclusive Tekken clone that has two big things going for it; It has character designs from the late Akira Toriyama, and it has a roster of exactly 200 playable characters, which is still the largest roster for a fighting game decades after its release.note 
  • Total Distortion has an In-Universe example as its premise: you want to make music videos, but to distinguish them from your everyday music videos, you're traveling to a dangerous alternate universe and recording footage of it to use in your videos, while braving attacks from the dimension's residents who don't like having their world exploited like this. The in-game tutorial book warns you that the media buyers won't pay you very well for your videos unless you actually go out of the tower and use your camera instead of just using the default clips you start with.
  • Ultra Custom Night is a Five Nights at Freddy's fangame most known for its extremely high number of animatronics and other hazards — over 700 in total, with more being planned to be added still. Talk about it tends to be of the number of customizable hazards over aspects of the game's quality.
  • Winnie the Pooh's Home Run Derby is a Flash game that was originally released on the Japanese Disney website back in 2007. The entire reason it has a page on here stems from achieving notoriety years afterward for being ostensibly targeted towards young children, yet featuring such an intense case of Nintendo Hard Surprise Difficulty that even grown adults have trouble playing.
  • Yu-Gi-Oh! Forbidden Memories would be largely unknown outside of the Yu-Gi-Oh! fandom (and even there, it's not considered especially great), were it not for one thing: it is considered one of the most difficult games in the world to speedrun. This is due to it combining Nintendo Hard, Luck-Based Mission, Forced Level-Grinding, and The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard—all factors that would normally drive off speedrunners, but when combined, it results in it being seen as a kind of ultimate challenge, with individual runs being wildly variable in length and 100% Completion runs routinely lasting for days.

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