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The most nausea-inducing video games

Jazzpunk for me at the default settings. Something about the FOV, the mouse smoothing and the lack of a crosshairs/static point on the screen made it playable for about 45 minutes at a time before it was too much. Felt sick to my stomach and head for hours after, wasn't until I looked up suggestions for settings to change to reduce the effect before it became tolerable. Still feel a bit woozy looking at screenshots or thinking about my time with the game.
 
Let's not forget the all time gaming nausea champ: the Sega R360.

GLocR360_Arcade_Cabinet.jpg


Okay, so that's cheating, but it's still true.

FnordChan
 
The first time I experienced game induced nausea was Turok on n64. It doesn't bother me anymore. The worst is Marathon on XBLA. I still cant play it.
 
The evil within. Extremely tight FOV coupled with tons of screen bob = me turning off the game. Not sure if I can finish it at all, since I barely even started it :(
 
The other thread about game nausea in first-person games inspired this. What are some specific games that make you want a barf bag?

Mohawk and Headphone Jack is one of these games for me. It might be the only game that's ever made me feel sick to my stomach. I say this as someone who's unfazed by FPSes and who loved Descent and Elite..

That title screen looks seizure-inducing. Wow, how did that pass QA?
 
The Space Harrier style rocket sections in Bayonetta left me feeling pretty sick. Never had any problems with anything else.
This and the boss you fight in the in the water while riding on a plank got me. Also 3D Galaxy Force 2, can't play it on my 3ds at all, waste of money :(
 
All the Spyro games. To this age and day it's impossible for me to play/watch any of them for more than minutes before getting dizzy. Sly Cooper and Ratchet make me feel sick too if I play them for too long. I guess the jumping camera in 3D platformers is culprit. :/

Me too. Ratchet and Clank on the PS2 would give me headaches I never knew why. It's strange because it was only the first Ratchet and not any of the other PS2 ones, PS3 games. I never understood why.
 
Yeah, that's what happens when you screw up parallax scrolling.
It's kinda cool how the Amiga version of JP still has the best (horizontal) parallax scrolling. It does advanced sprite trickery (multiplexing) to pull off the overlapping in the BG layer. So you get what looks like four layers in total on a machine that was only able pull off two with a ton of color limitations.

The (unreleased) Genesis port seems to shy away from this and resorts to using tons of linescrolling and only seems to do overlapping in a later spaceship stage without any enemies around.

Then they decide to port the game to the SNES which can do three true background layers in hardware (although the third one is kind of color-starved which is why most games decided to use it for HUDs and the likes), but decide to make it vomit-inducing.
 
Older 3d stuff can be a killer. A few of the levels in the original Dark Forces (especially the sewer level) would absolutely make me feel sick. Any old 3d game with maze-like design that means you're going to be turning around and backtracking a lot might qualify, though.

Also, Elebits for the Wii could get...pretty bad after a while. It's something about the rapid turning you're probably going to end up doing combined with the relatively confined spaces, I think.
 
Me and a friend of mine played Super Mario Kart for the SNES a little while back and it's the only game I could think of that actually made me feel ill. I eventually got used to it, but there's something about the way you turn in that game that just assaulted my senses. Too much Mode 7 all at once. It's weird because I can play FZero just fine.
 
Unfinished Swan. It got so bad I had to lay down after playing lol. No game has ever done that to me. Too bad as I really wanted to finish.
 
Mirror's Edge. I grew up playing FPS and only got motion sick one time in my life. But both times I tried to play Mirror's Edge I got motion sick very quickly and had to lay down for a while.
 

Yeah, I heard it was basically just a glitch that made the parallax layers go in the opposite direction. Shame, because the video you posted actually looks pretty good.

I never heard of this game before, but after watching this for a minute my eyes feel like they are going to pop out of my head and I want to vomit. So yeah this.

Wow, is the background moving forward faster than the character?

holy shit that's horrible

Thinking about the perspective, where the hell is he running? The second parallax layer with the trees are moving forward with him but the mountain and the trees are moving back when he runs forward. Is he running in a goddamn circle and the camera is pointing toward some center? I'm not even nauseous, just confused.

Want your mind blown?

It's intentional. The game is designed to be worn with special glasses, and when they are used the game is displayed in 3D. The fast scrolling is an odd way to acheieve it, but you need the glasses.

I think I read you can duplicate it by using just one side of a pair of dark glasses, or something.
 
Mirror's Edge. I felt motion sickness while playing Doom II or Half Life but I could force my way through it. But I couldn't even finish the Mirrors Edge demo. It's a pity because I'm sure I would have enjoyed the full game.
 
The narrow FOV and exagerated camera bobbing in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat made me feel very sick. Less than fifteen minutes were enough to give me the strongest headache and nausea I can remember.

Aside from FPS games I have experienced motion sickness with Mass Effect 3, Batman Arkham Asylum and Tomb Raider.
 
Oh dear the developer doesn't know how to use parallax scrolling properly. Feeling like I'm rotating around a tight cylinder

Wolfenstein 3D

Was the only game that ever made me feel sick, but loved that game so much I adapted to it. Nothing has ever made me sick since

This! Can't play more than a few minutes without feeling like barfing.

Found this speed run of Half Life to be pretty bad as well (watch fullscreen) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtI5HM7GVGY
 
Unfinished Swan - the first level in particular. It's the only game that made me feel motion sickness (other than the oculus rift dk1). Not sure if it was the black and white color scheme, or the fact that I could run around in the level without seeing changes on the screen without putting paint down.

This also. I played it last night and spent the next hour lying in bed trying not to throw up. This has never happened before, it's extremely nausea inducing. Something about the lack of reference points got me badly.
 
With The Last Remnant I really suffered some nausea. Combat was very repetitive as well as animations and music, after a while I started to not feel good :|
 
The Unfinished Swan is the only game to ever give me nausea. The game is beautiful and I really want to finish it, but I'm having a hard time dealing with it.
 
Deus Ex: Human Revolution. A brain cannot handle that much piss yellow. It's like watching the entire world through a beer bottle. Thank God for mods.

I want to get it on PC, but the Steam version is a mess because it's based on an older build which is full of bugs.

On topic, GTA V on next gen, driving in first person is harder than third person and can be disorientating at times.
 
I played Alien:Isolation recently. For some reason it made me feel weird when I played it, like it wanted to give me a headache or something. So I had to take a break for a couple of minutes. I still manage to beat the game.
 
Half-Life 2 and Portal were major culprits and I haven't touched those since.
Timesplitters 2 didn't go down too well either.

Timesplitters 2 was especially bad. HL2 I could get through, but barely. Doom was pretty rough. For me it's almost always FOV.
 
With The Last Remnant I really suffered some nausea. Combat was very repetitive as well as animations and music, after a while I started to not feel good :|

I could only play it in small doses as well. But I thought it's because I was on a PC (so quite close to the screen) and the game had horrendous screen tearing despite the V-sync for whatever reason.

Hotline Miami

Ugh. I watched a buddy play this once for 15 minutes and I felt like my eyes were melting. Never even coming near it again.

Shame as I hear it's a damn fine game (certainly looked like one).
 
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