If you can't earn attention the old-fashioned way, via the exercise of merit, just kick somebody square in the socio-political principles. That's the case for many of gaming's most (in)famous characters, but how do we distinguish real evil-doers from the merely misunderstood? And do any of the former now deserve our forgiveness? In another headlong flight from real journalism, I've spent the afternoon mulling over a few recent specimens. The paragraphs of vitriol that follow aren't intended to be definitive verdicts, more materials for discussion. As always, we've probably missed an obvious candidate and you should let us know about it, in the strongest possible terms, below.

Beware plot spoilers for Mass Effect and Metal Gear.

Raiden
Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance

It's saying something about fan upset over Metal Gear Solid 2's other leading man that Kojima felt compelled to troll the reaction at the beginning of Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. Admit it, you coughed up blood when that oxygen mask came off. But Raiden won Solid Snake fans round eventually, thanks to an athletic turn in the fourth game, and now looks set to deliver the best Metal Gear spin-off to date.



Chris Redfield
Resident Evil 5

There's nothing terribly amiss with Chris Redfield himself. He's just another hearty, well-armed white guy who wants to save the world. But hearty, well-armed white guys aren't welcome everywhere. Send one to Africa to curb-stomp infected peasants, and you've got all the makings of a media frenzy.



Full disclosure: I was one of those who accused Resident Evil 5 of containing racist imagery, and as regards the specific sequences I took issue with, at least, I was completely and ashamedly wrong. But I'd still argue that the game walks a fine line, using the dirtiness and unintelligibility of its version of Africa as a means of provoking fear and alarm (Resi 4 tries much the same trick with rural Spain). Also, sub-Saharan Africa is alleged to be the birthplace of AIDS, and remains the region most affected by the disease. Depicting it as the site of a flesh-mutating viral outbreak was perhaps just the teensiest bit insensitive.

Juliet Starling
Lollipop Chainsaw

Grasshopper Manufacture intended Lollipop Chainsaw to be a giddily ironic homage to exploitation cinema, but somewhere along the line it became an action game where you can earn an achievement for staring up the lead character's skirt. That it's not a terribly good action game doesn't help.



Cole Train
Gears of War

The legendary Thrashball player responsible for such verbal gold dust as "Bring it on, sucka - this my kinda s**t", Augustus Cole is often held aloft as the ultimate in African-American typecasting. Crystal Dynamics man Morgan Gray summed up in 2008, arguing that while the portrayal is relatively good-humoured, "all it does is reinforce dumb stereotypes and it sort of reinforces casual racism".



Hard to argue with that, but it's worth noting that Cole's voice actor is real-life American footballer Lester Rasta Speight, and many of his lines are adaptations of famous Speight quotes. There's some evidence, perhaps, that Epic's most infamous shouty muscle man is more of a personal tribute than a piece of unpleasant social commentary.

Dante
Devil May Cry DMC

Once upon a time, Devil May Cry's frontman was a perfectly irreproachable specimen of vaguely effete Japanese excess. But then, the godforsaken swine over at Ninja Theory lured him into an alleyway, coloured his hair and swapped his sleek red leathers for a skanky punk rocker outfit. Thus, argue fans, everything and anything with "Devil May Cry" on it will be utter tosh from here on out. Well of course scintillating gameplay footage doesn't demonstrate otherwise. You could write "Devil May Cry" across somebody's forehead in felt tip right this instant, and he or she would immediately become tosh. Try it. The transformation process is both amusing and instructive.



In fairness, upset over the new Dante stems in part from Ninja Theory's past work. The Cambridge studio has plenty of background in third-person face-punching, but Heavenly Sword and Enslaved's combat systems aren't a patch on Capcom's finest. Still: that scintillating gameplay footage. He might look like a burned-out Robbie Williams, but the boy can move.

Liara T'soni
Mass Effect

Paris Hilton had to shoot a full-blown pornography tape to make it onto Fox News. All Mass Effect's foremost scholar of Prothean relics had to do was flash a bit of sideboob, barely exceeding the average shampoo commercial for raunchiness. But this is a videogame, isn't it? You can't put sex in a videogame. It'll make everybody teen-pregnant, or something.



To its credit, BioWare managed to navigate the controversy without sinking to the level of actually appearing on a Fox News broadcast. Lifestyle guru Cooper Lawrence wasn't quite so classy, branding the game "sexist" in a feature on the strength of something she'd apparently been told in the dressing room. Shortly after her head-to-head with Spike TV's Geoff Keighley, Mass Effect fans took to Amazon to utterly shred her book "The Cult of Perfection". God bless the internet.

The Star Child
Mass Effect 3

It's wrong to wish death and destruction on children, but what if the child in question is actually the eons-old representative of a meddling alien race, hell-bent on mulching an entire galaxy's worth of organic life, just so he/it can store everybody away in the extra-galactic equivalent of a really pushy blood bank?



And what if that eons-old representative is, in fact, a perky little bundle of deus ex machina, wheeled on to resolve a trilogy's worth of plot threads in what some consider a deeply dissatisfying, even dishonest manner? Your mileage will vary. Oh, how it will vary.

Duke Nukem
Duke Nukem Forever

If you have to ask, you've never met him. Back in the early '90s, the Duke's trademark off-the-cuff misogyny was cute in a don't-tell-your-mother kind of way. Nowadays, though, expressing an interest in his game is kind of like admitting you never got through toilet training. There's only so far we can push our tongues into our cheeks, Gearbox. Don't you dare develop a sequel.



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