Uncanny Valley/Video Games



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"(Creepy, distorted laughter) "Good news: I figured out what that thing you just incinerated did. It was they installed after I flooded the enrichment center with a deadly neurotoxin, to make me stop flooding the enrichment center with a deadly neurotoxin.""
 * A more generic/meta example: As mentioned by Jim Sterling, many of the reasons a lot of games that, for their times, were considered the most beautiful games on the market fall right into the Uncanny Valley and as technology improved, stayed there. This didn't happen as much with Handheld titles since they rarely tried to strive for photorealism.
 * Brink combines very realistic, high-detailed graphics with horrifically distorted (Team Fortress 2 style) bodies. Players have extremely long necks and torsos, huge noses, and very thick legs.
 * This early look at the Dance Dance Revolution Wii game is very, very, creepy.
 * While most of Manhunt 2 is well animated and clean, it also gives us a very creepy taste of bad graphics porn.
 * This video is all about this trope and how it applies to video games.
 * As does this one. Though it's more about video games in general than just people in said games. Skip to 3:30 to get to the part actually about the Uncanny Valley.
 * A rare example in which the trope is invoked in the story, the Replicas in Tales of the Abyss. Despite that they are quite stylized and thankfully don't try for realism (Which would definitely create the Uncanny Valley), they don't appear this way to the player. But to the characters in the world? They look exactly like someone they know, only they speak in a Creepy Monotone thanks to not having any memories of emotion (Like did), and don't even remember you. Just about anyone would be freaked if their friend died...and a clone of them showed up at their funeral, or your long-dead grandfather walks into your house, doesn't recognize anyone and doesn't even know how to act socially.
 * Thief: Deadly Shadows gives us the fabulously creepy Shalebridge Cradle, an orphanage turned asylum . Inside, Garrett encounters the puppets, reanimated corpses of the worst inmates in the Cradle. Their rasping breathing is creepy by itself, but the true horror lies in their jerky, Jacob's Ladder-esque movements. It's just...wrong...brrr...
 * In The Sims 2, you can change the parameters of character's faces, often causing this effect.
 * The sequel even causes uncanny faces when you design them properly, since the lighting in many situations leads to every Sim transforming into Doughboy-faced monstrosities.
 * Made even worse by 3rd party "realistic" skin textures that only highlight the fact the underlying 3D models are butt ugly.
 * Even regular Sims can look weird, depending on their expressions. Sims are prone to acting like there's something wrong with them, and it shows; especially with certain NPCs, like post-childhood Mortimer.
 * There's something terribly wrong with the dogs in The Sims 3 Pets, especially when they move in Create-A-Pet. Their facial expressions are too human, and many don't look like their actual breeds.
 * Likely done deliberately, the M from the first Fallout game crashes right into the Valley at '. It's bad enough that he has a h <, but his voice cinches the deal. '. Mainly the fact t, one gruff evil sounding one, one ' that's always shouting, one < voice, and one ', and he < between them m, even repeating certain words in multiple voices < '.
 * Oblivion and Fallout 3 both fall into this trap, as Bethesda's attempts at creating realism and a more immersive world end up having exactly the opposite effect, to the point where a game with chocolate-stained 2002 graphics and text boxes for dialogue (Morrowind) actually manages to be more immersive despite the latter two games' more technically advanced graphics. Or where the Khajiit and Argonians don't fall into the valley.
 * Bethesda is pretty notorious among game fans for making really good games with scary bad humanoid models and animations.
 * There are mods to correct that.
 * YMMV, though. for some, most of the beautifying mods are be even further into the Uncanny Valley than the original game. Everyone turns into porcelain Final Fantasy people.
 * This can extend to the NPC behaviour as well, resulting in Artificial Atmospheric Actions. For example, Oblivion has many NPCs have schedules that tell them where to be and when, but the pool possible actions is so small that they repeat the same thing over and over again. This leads to the feeling that the entire population is made up of automations whose only purpose is to mindlessly chatter about the same nonsense all day. It becomes even more jarring with characters that need to be found in a specific location such as shopkeepers, whose job involves standing behind the counter starting unblinkingly at the door all day.
 * A deliberate example of Uncanny Valley in the Fallout: New Vegas DLC, Lonesome Road, is Ulysses. He wears a mask over the bottom half of his face and he never, ever blinks. He was also more detailed than the regular character model, so the effect looks quite eerie overall.
 * That's not to say Morrowind didn't have it. Argonians and Khajiit walk like they broke their ankles. And everyone else looks like they have broken knees. And their jaws sometimes make a weird flapping when they talk. Or the game freezes to dispaly text with their mouth open in a weird way...
 * Averted with Skyrim, which makes them at least look believable. However, they go the Dragon Age example with Elves. (See below.)
 * However, someone modded the horses in the game to look like they came from My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic. And they just replaced the skin with theirs...making it look like they tried to realistically render a My Little Pony. To make matters worse, they even have huge eyes put on their skin, with the horse's real eyes STILL THERE.
 * Pokémon: Jynx looks too much like a human-Pokémon hybrid to not be Nightmare Fuel.
 * Many players have the same opinion of Mr. Mime.
 * Several of the Pokémon categorized as "humanshape" can fall into the Uncanny Valley. Several of the Fighting-Types are particularly creepy due to their strange proportions (this troper loves most of the Black & White Mons, but finds Throh and Sawk seriously creepy).
 * Many of the Nancy Drew games have been this. The more recent ones have been better about this, but some of the early ones (past Secrets can Kill, which averted this trope by having little 2D Animations act as the characters) but some early ones like Stay Tuned for Danger tend to fall a bit into the valley with the rather stiff and oddly shiny characters that seem to never move. (...granted it would be a bit creepier if they did stuff like breathed) Some of the stuff in Stay Tuned for Danger are possibly the worst, since they take pictures of real-life people and photoshop characters' faces on them, making it look QUITE unnatural. Why is that? Namely because they took the character models' heads.
 * Somewhat averted with Secret of the old Clock though. Despite that they put in old photos from the 30s, they actually don't animate the scenes that take place in these so it does look out of place, but thankfully not uncanny. Some also argued it added a nice effect, since the game actually is set in the 1930s and having real-life photographs of the buildings at the time only added to it.
 * In Guitar Hero III, the graphics are notably improved from previous installments. Not all of the characters look different from previous versions, but the male singer in particular stands out. While he now mouths the words more realistically, his jaw is enormous. He nearly looks muppetesque, or what the Mouth of Sauron from the extended edition of Return of the King might look like during a period of youthful rebellion against the Dark Lord, man, and his cramping the Mouth's style. Especially strange given that he looks perfectly normal in the animated cinematics. Let's not forget the drummer, who acts like he's part of the animatronic band at a Chuck E. Cheese style restaurant.
 * Characters in the Wii and PS 2 versions of World Tour an Smash Hits are prone to having dead-looking facial expressions. This was fixed in Warriors of Rock, where the characters are often too stylized to be mistaken for a real person or show enough emotion that it's not creepy.
 * Rock Band 3 (speaking of threes, though technically GHIII was the first from Neversoft) has this problem more than the first two games. Some characters have it worse than others. The Beatles game before it had shades of it too, particularly around the eyes.
 * The Grotesqueries from Drakengard, partly due to Barbie Doll Anatomy, although the Uncanny Valley is what the game's makers were going for.
 * In Dragon Age, there's a scene where your resident Spoony Bard sings. Without breathing. It's kind of funny and kind of terrifying. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSh86CNCgDY&NR=1
 * It doesn't help that the face models in that game can't really contort themselves to resemble singing, so it looks as if she's just holding her mouth open whilst breathy opera music plays in the background.
 * Forget the singing. What's WAY more in the Uncanny Valley are some of the combinations you can make for your character's face. But that's optional. One that is unavoidable (And definitely not intentional) for mages is what happens when an Arcane Warrior Mage uses Combat Magic with Fade Shroud. Because of the way models are rendered in the game, the mouth and eyes are modeled separately...unfortunately, the entire body appears transparent and ghostly with Fade Shroud on...and then this causes the eyes and mouth to appear to be floating, and it's even visible from BEHIND. Unavoidable for an arcane warrior, but given the fact that the Arcane Warrior is arguably one of the best classes in the game thanks to the amount of possible Game Breaker combinations with it....yeeeeaaaaahhhh....There any mods that cancel that effect out, Modders?
 * Not only the singing, even laughing seems to be beyond their facial muscles' ability. Which makes it creepy every time someone does laugh in a dialogue. (Flemeth does this a lot)
 * The redesigned elves for Dragon Age II were given a number of small but subtle changes to distinguish them from humans. For example, they have thin nose bridges that extend out from their faces (most clearly visible in profile) and unusually-large irises in their eyes. the effect is simultaneously attractive yet eerie, and does a good job making it clear that as humanlike as elves are, they are distinctly not human.
 * In Awakening, Justice falls right into the Uncanny Valley...however, this differs because it's actually invoked - he's an animated corpse possessed by a spirit from the Fade. Of course he'll look like a corpse!
 * Mass Effect largely avoids this, in-game -- the facial models are of excellent quality and generally look very real. However, the facial customization section during character creation can be disturbing -- the facial image is animated, moving and breathing naturally even as you alter it, and the sight of it mutating as you alter the parameters is somewhat disturbing. It's also possible to end up with rather odd-looking results if you set multiple features to the extremes of the available scales.
 * All the attention to detail however can be ruined during some of the conversations where a character's head will stop too suddenly during a head turn. The living breathing character suddenly becomes an animatronic robot. Occurs most often with Garrus but happens to most characters at least once when they are in the scene but aren't the ones speaking.
 * Mass Effect 2 hits the valley hard in its character narration trailers, most notably those for Miranda and Subject Zero. In-game, however, the majority of faces are even better than in the first game.
 * While the close-up shots aren't so bad in the cutscenes, the way the body movements and gestures are animated in the long-shots make the characters look like string-puppets or zombies.
 * Brought up to Creepy Awesome levels by the acting troupe Crabcat Industries, when they preform a live-action medley of their favorite cutscenes.
 * Miranda does still have this problem in-game from time to time, just the way she looks at you, or the way her face is set at certain points. Word of God puts this down to glitching in the game's rendering system that causes her features to be very frozen and unmoving.
 * An odd glitch of the graphics engine can cause faces to be lit very starkly from below, emulating that flashlight-face look. It can be jarring.
 * There also appears to be a problem with the default Male!Shepard facial animation, in that he cannot smile properly. High Octane Nightmare Fuel only begins to describe it.
 * In one of the trailers for Mass Effect 3 we have this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Esung 4 vd TCI
 * The Death Jr. Series naturally has more to cause fear than this, but its offering toward the Uncanny Valley is Pandora Boxley. A sweet and well-meaning goth girl (which, in the grander scheme of the game's cast, makes her relatively normal), she is very cute despite having empty eye-sockets -- IN THE OFFICIAL ART! The version of her in the in-game graphics resembles a chillingly soulless zombie far more frightening in appearance than the title hero -- and he's a skeleton!
 * Western-made "adult" PC games (read: porn) tend to not sell very well, even on the direct download market. Publishers are baffled by this. They would do well to look at their misguided attempts at "realism" and the intensely creepy female... things, that result. A particular example is Active Dolls (NSFW), where the mannequin-like Creepazons are designed to lock their eyes onto the camera at all times and angles when not engaged in... other activities. Given the "models'" unchanging expressions and dead eyes, one wonders how the programmers considered this anything other than the wrong end of Uncanny Valley?
 * Japanese-made porn games usually manage to avoid the Valley by giving the girls anime eyes and faces and making the male character faces (if not his whole body) invisible or impossible to see directly. 3D 'love simulator' maker Illusion has gained large notoriety and a wide fanbase for their Biko, Sexy Beach and Artificial Girl series.
 * School Mate goes a step further with real-time cel-shading and thick figure outlines that resemble hand-inked illustration. Many fans deride other Illusion games for looking 'unrealistic', but never have this complaint about their cherished Schoolmate.
 * However, the recently released Real Kanojo 3D went for a more realistic look and fell into this trap, particularly on the parts when the girl is speaking and you use your hands to interact with her face.
 * And then, if your configuration isn't up to snuff, you end up with stuff like THIS.
 * Final Fantasy X dips in and out of this trope, particularly with the character Tidus. Depending on the angle and lighting, he can either be real-looking enough to, well, look real, or look like his face is a mask. Partially due to the fact that the animators used the default in-game model, present in gameplay, in most scenes, but used a much higher quality version with a fully expressive face whenever a character was the centerpiece of a cutscene. Sounds great in practice, but their habits of forgetting to use the high-quality model, or even worse have a HQ-model and a gameplay model in the same cutscene at the same time made this quite jarring and unimmersive. There is a particularly jarring scene in Final Fantasy X 2 where Yuna and Rikku are trying to puzzle something out ("Key-Mon?" "Monkey!"), and there's a close up shot of Rikku's low-quality face as she says something. It is, by far, the most disturbing thing: passionate speech, dead face.
 * During the scene, the faces are completely static, despite it being a prerendered high-quality video. Ugh.
 * Then, of course, there's the infamous laughing cutscene.
 * The infamous "Pixel Mouth" in both Kingdom Hearts game falls into the same category. It's particularly noticeable in one of KH 1's crowning moments, . Some of the best lines in the game can be found here, but the because the characters are using in-game models, their mouths shift only from open to closed and back (as opposed to the cutscene models, which are properly lip-synched).
 * This trope is probably why the Pirates of the Caribbean level looks so out of place in Kingdom Hearts II. Sora is rendered in his normal anime style, with slightly exaggerated features, while the Pirates characters are more realistically detailed and proportioned.
 * Organization XIII's members are supposed to be deliberately made examples of this trope. The fanfic writers don't seem to mind.
 * Particularly Xion, whose creepiness has sometimes been mistaken for outright technical glitches. As the game goes on, though, it becomes very clear that despite the cute face, the little things that aren't quite right were very intentional. And when they all come together, we find an alcove in the Valley home to both Nightmare Fuel and Fetish Fuel.
 * Larxene's voice, at least, succeeds - if only because of the perky, cheerful tone she manages to hold even when she isn't pretending that her personality matches it, though this may only hold true in the dub for Re: Chain of Memories. It doesn't really help that she comes the closest to showing real emotion (or shows the most, depending on one's interpretation) out of all the Nobodies - disregarding Roxas.
 * The Nobodies did succeed at this at one point... but not where it was intended; in the opening of Kingdom Hearts II. Look at Namine at 2:43 and 3:37 It's tricky to explain, but something about her face just looks off. Her brief appearance in the high-quality CGI at the end of the game was better, though.
 * There's also where . Nothing wrong with proportions...but to people familiar with those characters? It feels unnerving.
 * Kingdom Hearts 3D features The World Ends With You characters that would be rendered in 3D. They all make the transition veryw ell, being made by Nomura. Except for Shiki. It's not her face that's the problem; it's her body. It looks so unnaturally thin! Oh, and there's also a Tron Legacy level, and it's not just CGI'ed Jeff Bridges as Clu being off as in the movie this time 'round, thanks to the presence of Sora.
 * In Shadow Hearts Covenant, there is the (in)famous "Miracle" scene. Granted, many consider it to be a Tear Jerker...but some actually suddenly found themselves ready to cry...and then laughing because when Yuri is about to burst into tears... his face proceeds to skew into something quite...atrociously funny as tears literally flow from his eyes. (Around 2:48) Something that would ordinarily look creepy actually turned into a candidate for Crowning Moment of Funny? interesting...
 * And somebody on deviantART even did something funny...because the avatar for "Bawplz" is a shot from that very scene...of course, wabplz is merely the "sad mouth" flipped upside down, making it actually look either...disturbing with how wide his cheeks are, or funny with how friggin ridiculous his mouth looks.
 * Speaking of which, in World of Warcraft, there also are the high/blood elf placeholder models from before the Burning Crusade expansion pack of, a gallery of which can be seen here. They were modified night elf models, which meant that the male one had this creepy emotionless face, and the female ones had their eyes slanted at an almost disturbing angle. Combined with a blocky, ungainly appearance, both gender models kind of gave the impression their faces were too narrow.
 * Fandom is divided on the Forsaken. some consider the female Forsaken to be Cute Monster Girls, other consider both sexes to reside deep in the Uncanny Valley. Both sides are right, to at least some degree, owing to variations in personal tastes and the range of appearance options for Forsaken faces, from "cute green skinned girl" to "where's your jaw, and who stitched the leather X over your eyes?" Then again, they are zombies (i.e. the lowest point on the graph), just in varying states of decay.
 * The human children's faces are all unbelievably creepy. Something about their eyes...
 * Anduin Wrynn's new model from Cataclysm may be even further into this. He looks almost like an unusually tall 10-year-old with his father's Lantern Jaw of Justice.
 * The Taunka are arguably the worst offenders. Due to sloppy modeling, their faces are too flat and unanimated, making them look as if they are wearing cardboard masks with soulless, frozen eyes.
 * Hilde on the Xbox 360 boxart of Soulcalibur IV. It's her eyes... her soulless eyes.
 * Ashlotte in the game itself. A CGI animated model of a realistic human-like clockwork robot is just overkill. Thankfully, her movement and voice are very human, with nothing "off" or "mechanical" about them.
 * Interestingly, her personality and the non-CGI artwork of her can have her loop around from vaguely unsettling (as a clockwork doll with a halberd should be in the 1500s or today) to, well, cute.
 * On the other hand, some human characters suffer from these problems. Like in Tira's story mode, when she says "Can I use him? Naw, he's useless!" in that exaggerated, strained voice of hers, combined with her face locked in an unnatural Creepy Smile with equally unnatural Mouth Flaps... *shudders*
 * Princess Elise from Sonic the Hedgehog 2006: Princess of Uncanny Valley. Being alongside characters that are modeled after Felix the Cat punctuated it even further. The other humans in the game don't help it, with their random arm flailings in grotesque parody of actual body language. Sonic Team seems to have understood this, and made the humans in Sonic Unleashed look like they came straight out of Ratatouille.
 * Also, realistic!Eggman from the same game, where we even get some shots of his eyes. Do not want!
 * The Funny Animal's in the game look off, due to the realism of everyone else and due to the less-cartoony look with them. It really makes it apparent that they're giant multicolored, sapient animals.
 * The way the FunnyAnimals move is disturbing. Sega put highly detailed human expressions and motions onto cartoon animals.
 * Deliberately invoked in Metal Gear Solid 4, where a not-quite-human all-female unit was modelled by scanning in the physiques and faces of four real-life actresses, whose slightly too detailed faces jarred horribly against the more stylised look of the entirely digitally made 'human' characters. Even more deliberate when you consider that, according to their back-stories, those girls have all suffered from really heavy Mind Rape and only got worse from there. Thus the impression that they're dead on the inside.
 * Sunny also freaks me out.
 * MGS2's, anyone?
 * The game Bio Shock seems to make intentional use of this phenomenon - the grotesque, ex-human Splicers are even more unnerving for how human they still look. The first ghost you encounter subtly lampshades this: "I'm too spliced up! I'm too spliced up! Now nobody's gonna want me...."
 * The little sisters in Bio Shock are also examples of the trope.
 * Bio Shock 2 has redesigned the Little Sisters to make them cuter and more cartoony because the player character's viewpoint is a Big Daddy, who cares for them more than anything else; he doesn't find them creepy, neither should the player. Splicers, on the other hand, are still in the valley, because the PC sees them as threats to his Little Sisters.
 * BioShock 2 brings up the valley when a journal of Andrew Ryan describes an animatronic replica of him built for a theme park as a "lurching, waxen nightmare" and wonders how children are supposed to respond to that. Indeed, the first time one of the animatronics is encountered can be startling because it appears to be a slightly less than normal human sitting completely still. Then you attack it and it breaks apart completely.
 * Unfortunately the little sisters in the final cut-scene look like they are wearing porcelain masks, putting them back in the valley.
 * When unmasked, Samus Aran certainly invoked this in the original Metroid Prime. In subsequent 3D appearances, she was toned down in this regard. Although in ''[[http://www.thisischris.com/feature/2005/img/Samus
 * Largely averted in Half-Life 2, with realistic lip-synching and largely realistic character movements, but deliberately invoked in the G-Man, who it's implied isn't entirely human. His speech is littered with awkward pauses and misemphases, his way of standing and walking are oddly rigid, and his "humanizing" gestures -- like brushing dust from his suit or straightening his tie -- are unconvincingly stiff. He behaves as though he's had to learn 'human' behavior out of books and films.
 * G-Man's mannerisms begin to look realistic only in the Episodes -- the point at which he's caught off-guard for the first time in the series. His sole scene in Episode 1 has him look genuinely confused, then genuinely angry. When he appears again in Episode 2, a touch of actual nervousness and urgency seems to be creeping into his formerly affectless voice.
 * Sony's first-party PS 3 sports games (MLB the Show and NBA 0x) have technically excellent 1080p graphics. Except every arena looks to be made entirely of plastic, and every player looks like a wax doll.
 * Avoided in Heavenly Sword where the game designers had real-life actors give real performances with motion capture sensors in order to have their real facial expressions tell the animated characters how to look. The result was lively animation that dodged the valley entirely and was praised for its stunning cutscenes.
 * Clock Tower 3 often has this happen, although it looks a little more like a somewhat-stylized PS 2 game when it's moving. A Let's Play of it on Something Awful pretty much makes the game seem a lot more Uncanny then it actually does until the FMV endings. The Dark Id probably took screenshots at the worst (or best) possible moments to make the characters seem a lot more uncanny. (Although this sometimes may result in it being funny, such as this shot of Dennis where his mouth is unbelievably round, and this shot where his eyes seem to go somewhere else.
 * Also invoked when you consider that the game actually does show corpses.
 * "Adult" video game Strip Fighter 2 almost averted this by making all the detailed pictures of women be scans of actual pictures of women. Then someone got the bright idea to make the pictures wink. Without moving any other part of the face.
 * The intro to Silent Hill 4: The Room was quite a bit more terrifying than the game proper. Never Trust a Trailer.
 * Twin Victims. Dear god, Twin Victims.
 * Speaking of Silent Hill, in Silent Hill 2 there was a scene in which James encounters Maria in a jail cell. After almost a minute of in-game graphics there is a sudden Animation Bump, combined with the shading, makes Maria look disturbingly realistic.
 * Actually, most of the characters in Silent Hill 2 fall into this at times, and it's probably intentional, given the atmosphere of the game--as Angela puts it, there's "something...wrong" about the town and the people in it.
 * At the end of the intro for Silent Hill 4, there is a closeup with Big Bad Walter's face, where you can see him blinking, and, similar to the Strip Fighter 2 example, there's an overall lack of movement in the rest of his face that makes it look just wrong. Probably intentional on the developers' part. This wrongness leads you to ask the disturbing question, "Do video game characters have eyelids?''
 * Then there's this little number.
 * The Uncanny Valley is invoked in Portal with GLaDOS Robo Speak and its sudden human shift after

Zombie Jeff Gordon.
 * Chell may also count, though she's rarely seen in-game. Just... Those EYES.
 * If you fail at the Boss Rush in Sexy Parodius, you're treated to a rather frightening image of the final boss laughing at your misfortune.
 * Roughly half the cast (the energetic ones) of the Dynasty Warriors series avoid this trope (they instead sometimes border on being too cartoony, especially really big guffawing guys like Meng Huo), but the 'serene' or 'contemplative' characters like Da Qiao, Zhuge Liang, Xu Huang, and Yue Ying more than make up for them. Yue herself is a bit of a shift as the emotion in her lines show she was meant to have Action Girl expressions. She just comes off as very very strange when speaking, almost like a period automaton from an old German sci-fi movie. Compare with the Rikku example up above. Strangely, Lu Bu also falls into the second catagory depending on the game involved, as sometimes his voice is bizarrely low-pitched in comparison with his roaring angryface. Methinks Koei had different modelers working on different sets of people which resulted in the discrepancies between believable and non. Does not seem to happen as often in the Samurai Warriors universe.
 * In case 3 of Apollo Justice Ace Attorney, there's a cutscene involving a concert performance. While the entire game series is in 2-D point-and-click, the concert is in moving 3-D and not that well detailed. It's very unnerving.
 * Another particular (2-D) example popped up in that case - Machi Tobaye with his glasses off. Just... *shudders*
 * YMMV. You have to sit and stare at those sprites, because his eyes are beautiful
 * Calisto Yew from Ace Attorney Investigations falls into the trope because of how she behaves in the courtroom. Edgeworth himself finds her to be creepy.
 * If just voices can qualify for Uncanny Valley, then Manfred, Quercus Alba, and the aforementioned Calisto Yew's voices definitely do (though Yew's is slightly less bad than the other two). Manfred and Alba's voice clips sound horribly low and drawn out like they're not even real voices.
 * Much like the Basement Jaxx example, Halo 3 has an easter egg of a family of either monkeys or cavemen with human looking faces that sill creeps me out to think about.
 * Early 3D games like The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time and Megaman Legends tend to suffer from this trope. The player character and the most important NPCs usually look great -- but the other NPCs are often horrific. The worst are like dolls made by someone who's only seen actual humans through a kaleidoscope. Those carpenters in Ocarina... * shudder*
 * The carpenters were more due to the weird way they moved. They'd move faster than their legs moved, hammer stuff weirdly and generally freak you out. In fact, many old 3D games suffered from this issue.
 * Speaking of Zelda, Link's in The Legend of Zelda Majoras Mask. It seems to be an effigy of Shigeru Miyamoto dressed as Link, but was likely much creepier than intended. So creepy, it represents the Eldritch Abomination that is BEN in the ARG Ben Drowned.
 * The Happy Mask Salesman is a deliberate version of this, the main reason being that instead of moving normally, he instead violently jerks from one position/animation to another with no transition animation whatsoever.
 * And Twilight Princess has the Oocca, basically a bizarre race of chickens with extremely creepy human heads.
 * Ooccoo Jr. is just a floating child's head with wings sticking out of the sides. That's even worse.
 * Don't forget about Fi from Skyward Sword. When unlocking the various tunes for the Goddess Harp, she sings. That... mouth... shouldn't move like that.
 * It is less "Fi sings" than "Fi screams in pain while you play unfitting music."
 * Alma is made of this.
 * As are the Replica soldiers, especially with their masks off.
 * New International Track & Field contains some hideous Super Deformed characters as contestants. All look pretty dreadful, but the worst ones are the characters from other Konami games with a more serious feel. See them all here
 * Tales of Symphonia Dawn of the New World invoked this for many people, simply by giving the anime-style character designs realistic motion-captured movements in the cutscenes.
 * Wario Land games are usually too cartoony in art style to fit this usually, but I swear some of the clown-based bosses would probably head far enough into the valley to give Coulrophobics nightmares. There's Clown-a-Round in Wario World, which looks just human and somewhat CGI-like to creep someone out before they even realize it has multiple detachments heads and his real one is on his stomach: picture for reference and possibly Chortlebot from Shake It, which is at least somewhat disturbing in the least (it freaking laughs when using a flamethrower type attack for goodness sake, and the music getting faster and faster can't help much).
 * While we're on the topic of Wario World, there's Mean Emcee, who has an incredibly garbled voice, jerky movements, and just barely human features, falls squarely into this trope.
 * Not to mention the Brawl Doll. Yes, it's a giant, almost sickening looking cupid type plush toy you fight as a boss. One look at those eyes will freak you out something weird, and it apparently fires laser beams.
 * Then there's the Winter Windster, the boss of Shivering Mountains. It's almost frostbitten flesh-colored, small, stubby limbs, and... the face. Honestly, the picture on that link actually makes it seem worse than its actual in-game appearance... which is really an in-game picture.
 * This trope is among one of the many many problems with Limbo of the Lost. The normal people end up looking far scarier than the ghoulish ones due to creepy Poser models and jerky animation.
 * Whoever designed Doc Louis' eyes in the new Nintendo Wii version of Punch Out! needs to honestly be charged with something. The game itself is silly enough and cartoony, but whenever a round ends and it shows Little Mac in his corner with Doc, his eyes are always disturbingly fixed upon you... not your in-game character, but staring at the screen at YOU. And the eyes appear to follow you... * shudder*.
 * Speaking of Punch-Out, there's also the Super Punch-Out protagonist's appearance in Fight Night Round 2. I shudder thinking of... it..
 * There's something creepily wrong with that protagonist period, even in 2D. His prototypical version lacked said Uncanny Valley.
 * The crowds in pretty much any 7th-gen sports title. In the past, crowds were nothing more than a flat, multi-coloured blur, maybe with a couple of frames of 'animation' and no-one ever questioned it. Now individual crowd members can be picked out, with their own animations and perhaps rendered in 3D. Sounds great, except that wide-shots show the same 50 or so crowd members copy-pasted to fill a 60,000-seater stadium, and it just looks weird.
 * Mario's floating head in Mario Teaches Typing 2. Everything, from the movement of the mouth to the shape of the eyes, is slightly off, resulting in Mario looking downright creepy. It doesn't help that Mario's missing his body and he seems aware of this.
 * Speaking of Mario and the Uncanny Valley, pray that Nintendo never renders him realistically.
 * Not sure about the Play Station 3 and Xbox 360 versions, but the Wii, PSP and PS 2 versions of Star Wars: The Force Unleashed have some really awkward human models. As a reviewer put it, they have pretty much a single expression and don't show any emotion, which becomes very uncomfortable in some parts of the game with high emphasis on character development.
 * The PS360 version is better with expression and emotion, but the skin textures still look wrong. There are also other issues, particularly with Juno Eclipse's mouth: sometimes, when speaking, it's like her upper lip gets caught on the top of her teeth and just stays there. That description probably makes no sense because the image makes no sense. In fact, everyone in that game seems to have a mouth that's too large for their face, which really only becomes apparent when they're speaking.
 * NED, the main antagonist of Albion, is a highly developed supercomputer, that communicates with the ship's crew through an android body, that pretty much falls into this. His permanent facial expression is a blank stare. Not to mention the one occasion where it malfunctions and starts walking around aimlessly. And near the end of the game, there's an entire army of these things. Pretty creepy.
 * Starting around Shin Megami Tensei II, Kazuma Kaneko's human artwork for Shin Megami Tensei took a turn for the eerie. Most of the character's skins are frighteningly pale white and many have dark eyes, or dark rings around their eyes.
 * Given that the series is known for being Darker and Edgier than other RPGs, and tends to play with some very creepy subject matter, this may be intentional.
 * Good thing Jokers aren't rendered realistically...imagine what they would look like if they were...no eyes or other facial features, just an evil grin...* shudder*
 * This quality is given to Mitsuo Kubo of Persona 4, whose natural Black Eyes of Evil are portrayed as rather dead, which is shown to be fitting as his shadow portrays that he's practically dead inside as well as making him look like creepily Gonkish.
 * The Characters in Brave Story New Traveller look like love dolls. It's disconcerting, to say the least. In fact, everything about this children's RPG is frightening.
 * Garrys Mod tends to inadvertantly invoke this trope as you manipulate and pose your favorite Half-Life 2 characters...as flopping, corpselike ragdolls. Bonus Squick is easily achieved if you import the Left 4 Dead models.
 * On the other hand, the things that you can do with the ragdolls that should be creepy thanks to this trope become downright hilarious.
 * Ys VI uses CGI in its opening movie that's much more realistic than the rest of the game's art design. This isn't a problem with the human characters, because they're careful to keep them on the better side of it. But then we meet Olha and Isha. They're Rehda, Petting Zoo People with fox tails and (the important part) elongated ears. In the CGI, they look extremely disturbing thanks to those ears - the ears help that sense of "SOMETHING VERY WRONG" so important to the Uncanny Valley effect. Thankfully, the game's use of CGI is minimal after that point.
 * Earlier Tenchu games had weird, generic, corpsey CGI scenes that were actually more unconfortable to watch than the blocky game-rendered cutscenes. Fortunately, ever since the Play Station 2 era they got less awkward.
 * This trope may have contributed to why commercials of Assassin's Creed II are so damn creepy.
 * To be fair, those people are supposed to be dead.
 * The Nobleman from Brotherhood is made of this. His face is artificial enough to avoid it, but the rest of him, with the hunched back and the too-small limbs - it doesn't help that one is artificial and ends in a claw - makes him decidedly wrong-looking.
 * Although Your Mileage May Vary as to how successful the game animation was, in Harry Potter and The Order of The Phoenix, a series of cast interviews reveal that at the very least the cast thought this was true of their face scanned models.
 * Canister users in Geneforge are described like this in-game. It's particularly prominent at the higher levels of power when they start to glow and get a near-constant Psychotic Smirk, and particularly particularly prominent when they take a bad canister and their skin starts flaking off.
 * The horse-like enemies in Parasite Eve. With human faces. Granted, the enemies were suposed to scare you and intentionally fall into this trope to an extent, but those things really drove it home.
 * THIS trailer for the (second?) Bakugan Battle Brawlers video game falls squarely into this catagory. Whilst Dragonoid and Hydranoid might look brilliantly rendered, they went just a tad too far with Dan... Thankfully Masqeruade has his headgear on, so we are saved from how he could have looked.
 * The animated portraits for the children in War Craft III. Forget the undead horde, can I slaughter some of those little abominations? PLEASE?!
 * Actually, yes; you can.
 * All the people in the Myst series tend towards this, especially in the earlier games (the fact that encountering them is so rare doesn't help). But by far the scariest is that little girl in Riven. She appears out of nowhere on the path and looks more like a creepy little ghost than anything else... * shudders*
 * It probably helps that the original Myst was known for taking place entirely in uninhabited areas; you don't meet your first character in person until the end of the game. So suddenly finding out that people actually live in Riven is a surprise.
 * The original Siren. Characters had animated images of actors as their face textures, with their expressions made through frames instead of actual polygon animation. It made it all seem slightly real, but also unnatural, and added to the dreamy feeling the game had.
 * Hacking Super Smash Bros Brawl to swap character movesets can have some pretty strange effects on character models and animations. Hacking Pikachu with Ganondorf's moveset gives us Pikaman (or Longchu), a Pikachu with human proportions. It's creepy, to say the least. Giving Toon Link Meta Knight's moveset is also quite creepy, but is more Body Horror than Uncanny Valley. Perhaps worst of all, though, is Peach with Sonic's moveset - arms always bent at strange angles, long, clawlike fingers and long, floppy legs, not to mention the awkward and stiff clothing animation.
 * Mario with Olimar's moveset looks a little cute to some, however. Maybe it's because he looks so similar to Small Mario from the 2D games?
 * Heavy Rain has characters who look fine in stills, and others who crash into the valley so hard you may forget the normal-looking ones. Any close-ups of character faces in motion are consistently creepy. Gamers are polarized enough over the gameplay to give this issue little thought, and many in the "like it" camp won't even deny it anyway.
 * This is also actually a problem with characters using/abusing normal maps that make them look very shiny to the point of making them appear as if made of plastic or rubber especially when on the skin.
 * Spore can really run into this if a person doesn't know how to work with the creature creator (or just any other creator) very well. An even more special mention can go to people who've actually tried to make humans with the game's tools, which is not only downright creepy, but also very, very hideous.
 * As are most attempts at re-creating pre-existing characters from cartoons, video games, etc.
 * Final Ninja doesn't initially fit this, as it's a standard case of Super Deformed. Then you throw your first shuriken, and your foe goes flying in several pieces. Without bleeding at all.
 * When looked closely, the bystanders of Street Fighter IV fall into this, since they clearly used motion capture for animating them and they have the detail of plain mannequins, its jarring to see them performing the same movements over and over again.
 * I used to think the uncanny valley was a lie. Boy, did Final Fantasy XIII prove me wrong! Sazh's son Dahj is adorable... or would be, if he didn't look like a living plastic doll. Even Sazh himself sometimes looks weird (but we don't care since we all love him).
 * April Ryan from The Longest Journey looks very ugly, especially compared with modern games. Link
 * The title character of the Dreamcast virtual life simulator Seaman is a rather ugly humanesque head... on a fish's body (which eventually evolves into a frog's body). And it talks to you, providing an unnervingly large number of possible responses. Enough said!
 * Initial D 4 had a major change to its presentation; for the first time ever, Legend of the Streets would not only have voicework, but the characters in the pre- and post-race scenes would be animated. Since the franchise belongs to Sega...y'know, the company that pioneered 3D graphics in arcade games, and has refined the process over many years to create amazingly smooth, lifelike human characters...you'd think that they'd make the characters in 3D, right? Even more so for the opportunity to make original clothing, poses, gestures, etc. instead of having to rehash the same manga rips endlessly. Unfortunately what we got instead was the same manga rips, but very crudely animated; basically the same technique used for those Get Your War On videos. They look like garishly colored animatronic puppets. (Initial D 5 was an improvement, however...now they look like skillfully colored animatronic puppets.)
 * The characters in Starcraft cinematics had that weird Claymation vibe about them, that made them look rather creepy. Starcraft II fixed that, and brought us this ...THING to compensate.
 * On the other hand, the Banshee pilot is cute.
 * Most of the portraits are smaller than in the video, focusing on the heads. Which is good, since when zoomed out you realize most of the units lack arms. Or, in the Hellion and Goliath's case, have absurdly skinny arms.
 * Some cinematics are marred by the portraits going back to whatever emotion they were expressing to neutral for less than a second, just enough to be jarring.
 * In widget game Help Wanted, a minigame game where you have to work to buy stuff from the Home Shopping Network to save the Earth, you have a place called Memorial Hall to keep all your memorials for jobs, and there are visitors. One visitor, Mike the security guard, look's so realistic, but incredibly creepy. Especially when he's mad...
 * Star Control 3 replaced Star Control 2's 2D animation with filmed claymation models. The humans and humanlike aliens look creepiest of all, much more so than the non-human aliens. The likely worst case is the formerly sexy Syreen.
 * City of Heroes: Invoked in game. Nemesis' Automatons look almost exactly like real humans, "until you get close." It's also kinda creepy when the innocent-looking office workers pull gigantic guns from Hammerspace and blast you, all the while engaging in water-cooler conversation.
 * There's a mission in City of Villains where Automatons are posing as Arachnos agents. When they start spouting lines straight out of Stupid Evil, you know something's up. But once you get over the fact that they're robots, it just gets funny.
 * Captain Novolin has two realistically-sprited doctors in the game... and their stares and smiles are rather unsettling to some people. Sadly, you'll be seeing at least one of them after beating every level.
 * LA Noire by Rockstar has this. Watch this.
 * YMMV. Can be considered averted by some in that, while facial animations are extremely realistic, the graphics are just stylized enough that it borders the uncanny valley without crossing over
 * Subverted to great effect in System Shock 2, in which the enemies no longer look human, but some still have just enough humanity left to apologize while attacking you. And then there are the cyborg midwives. In some cases, you know that the cyborg midwife you're fighting was once a crew member who you've gotten to know through the audio logs they've left behind.
 * It happens to characters in Deadly Premonition due to imperfect animation, especially when said characters smile.
 * Oh the horror, when they smile. The recycled, generic animations across all characters are bad enough, but Francis York Morgan's smile is particularly ghoulish. Reminds one of the days of Square Enix's heavily recycled animations... in a bad way.
 * Xenosaga Episode I used very stylized, anime-esque graphics that fell clearly to the left of the valley. However, Episode II used a slightly more... realistic... style, which ranged from mildly creepy to downright disturbing. See here. Thankfully, they switched back to stylized graphics for Episode III.
 * The Telltale Jurassic Park Games. Freakishly bad: The Girl in the car looks like a doll!
 * Used in X-Wing on the face of the medical droid, during the medical-treatment scene.
 * With their pasty skin and their inanimate, mannequin-like faces, the trainers in Wii Fit can be... unnerving to say the least.
 * The Nintendo DS game Brain Age has the floating head of Ryuta Kawashima. YMMV, but here's
 * The Ghasts in Minecraft make a sound that sounds ALMOST like babies. That "almost" aspect however makes them horrifying, especially when there are several all making that same sound. Thus if there is a "sound" version to Uncanny Valley... these creatures make it.
 * No More Heroes 2 has Charlie Mcdonald's cheerleaders. They all look alike. All 25 of them. Also, on a side note, there's a store in Pizza Batt tower that's actually called "Uncanny Valley".
 * Dissidia Final Fantasy is typically very good about avoiding this, but in the prequel, there's just something about Vaan's face reminiscent of fish.
 * In the .hack//Games, Aura's artwork ended up looking creepy. Maybe it's her striking eyes or her apparent lack of a body.
 * When this troper was younger, she played a video game (name long since forgotten) at one of her friend's houses. It was a pretty generic fighting game for most of it, but there was one level where you had to fight this... THING. It's arms were too long, and it moved in a really creepy, jerky way, like a ragdoll mixed with the girl from The Ring. She got so freaked out that she actually dropped the controller and ran out of the room.
 * If you're old enough to remember The Secret Island of Dr. Quandary, chances are you remember this about it, especially with the dolls Lifelike Action Figures and the more realistic NPCs.
 * Presumably what the makers of Chrono Cross were going for with Harle. As with most deliberate attempts to do so, it didn't work.
 * Orianna in League of Legends is considered this in-universe, a clockwork parody of a teenage girl with a clearly artificial happy attitude. When reliving her original self's death, her reaction is "It was fun. I like memories."
 * Miku Hatsune looks just fine and dandy in the PSP version of Project DIVA, but when you pop in the high-definition PS 3 version, all of a sudden the advanced shaders and more detailed character model turn her into something that looks like a gangly woman with stiff, impossible joints and very bizarre facial proportions, as if she were wearing a kigurumi mask.
 * Guillo from Baten Kaitos Origins seems to deliberately invoke this trope. Its movements are humanlike, but just a little off. Watch it when and you'll see; it's downright frightening.
 * In other Baten Kaitos weirdness, check out the character models from the first game. They look alright when they stand still, but as soon as they start moving or the camera zooms in, they look like marionettes with invisible strings. The sequel mostly avoided this.
 * Runescape uses a cartoony, yet somewhat realistic art style and stays well away from the uncanny valley. The sole exception being human children models. There's no better way to describe it then to just show you a picture of a runescape child staring into your soul.
 * Gran Turismo 5 gave us the little number that is
 * Earnest Evans constructed the title character out of many sprites moving together, in an attempt to create a Platform Game hero who would move more realistically than any before. The result looks nowhere near natural.