Shown Their Work/Video Games


 * Sid Meier. Reading his manuals for the original Railroad Tycoon and Pirates!, for example, was downright educational. The original Pirates! even forced the player to figure out where they were by using a sextant to identify only their latitude and land masses to get their bearing. See Alpha Centauri below for more evidence of Meier's diligence.
 * Shadow Hearts: Covenant has the Gallery of the Dead, which could also be called "Learn Cyrillic! With Princess Anastasia".
 * Which just seems odd compared to the game's approach to history, which has all of the accuracy of A Knight's Tale.
 * Artistic License, yo.
 * Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri shows off all the work they put on creating plausible future technology through the detailed descriptions of the Tech Tree's scientific advancements, as well as through the fictional quotes of books written by the faction leaders.
 * Not to mention the huge amounts of data collected to make the general idea of the planet and its lifeforms plausible.
 * The fascinating part is that very little of the actual science has been outright disproven yet.
 * The designers of Assassin's Creed put a huge amount of effort into studying the layout of the 12th century cities the characters would be exploring, including a lot of still-recognisable landmarks.
 * The sequel goes even farther: every noteworthy person in Ezio's life and every important or noteworthy location in the various cities has a small database entry that you can view when near that person/place. They're not needed for completing the game, nor are they required for any reason at all, but they're interesting to read and sometimes contain funny/snarky commentary.
 * The flying machine is also based on Leonardo's designs.
 * Likewise, the sequel had extensive attention paid to depicting late-fifteenth-century Florence, and Venice (San Gimignano and Forli being far less prominent), with several players and their friends/families commenting on how they'd visited those very locations in real life only to find them accurately (for the time) replicated in the game.
 * Leonardo's War Machines in Brotherhood were based on his actual designs. As were the flying machine and parachutes.
 * Cappadocia, as we see it rendered in Assassin's Creed Revelations is also particularly impressive.
 * Similarly, Mass Effect has reams of encyclopedic info on how everything in the Mass Effect universe works. It's clear that a lot of work went into understanding the ramifications of the mass effect, even if the effect itself (gravitational fields arising from currents flowing through a new element) is impossible given current works of physics. If it could exist, a lot of the things described in the game are very plausible.
 * Pokémon Ruby, Sapphire, and Emerald have a side-quest to catch the legendary golems (Regirock, Regice, and Registeel) which involves reading the Braille language. The Pokémon games have a tendency to drop little educational bits in, like museums and space launch centers. In addition, many Pokémon have Pokédex entries that refer to real-life animals.
 * FireRed and LeafGreen also have Braille plaques in dungeons.
 * If you read the credits, you will notice that they actually consult real organizations for the blind for all their Braille plaques.
 * The series also generally averts Somewhere a Paleontologist Is Crying, design details aside, as given information is accurate and the series draws upon a somewhat wider range of species than most media (an anomalocaris-like biped, a eurypterid, crinoids, Archelon, etc.).
 * The makers of Quest for Glory 4 have a lot of knowledge regarding Tarot cards, so you get several lengthy (though fairly impressive) fortune telling sequences giving the proper card combinations for the hero's past, present, and future, most of the important characters in the game, and the possible endings.
 * Metal Gear Solid loves doing this to the point where it starts messing with the dialog. We know you researched Aleut languages. In retrospect, it was probably a bad decision, because any attempt to write this knowledge into the story makes for some really awkward dialog.
 * Less annoyingly, the military tends to get a realistic presentation in the games, though it goes back and forth. Solid/Naked Snake's CQC is completely ridiculous, but it's pleasing to watch the normal soldiers move and act as whole squads, with the squad leader even giving them hand signals. In Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, the advantages conferred by the SOP system are logical extensions of basic teamwork and squad tactics instead of magical gamebreakers, to the point where experienced veterans, or even well-trained newbies without SOP can defeat less experienced combatants who are using it.
 * Actually, the CQC featured in the games was developed by the series' military advisor, Motosada Mori, a former mercenary and SWAT instructor. He explains in an interview that it is best used in built-up areas during situations where there are multiple enemies close to you. He goes on to explain that it is a high level professional tactic that requires extensive experience with knives and firearms and will not necessarily work to your advantage in a fight. He also stated that it is best suited for use by Special Forces personnel. In other words, while it is a very useful technique, it doesn't make you nigh invincible in hand-to-hand combat as portrayed in the games.
 * The Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty credits include a team of people under "Research/Justification". Which means they hire people specifically to put this trope in.
 * Metal Gear Solid 2 also delves so deeply into meme theory that some institutions use it to teach meme theory. And your mom said video games would never teach you anything.
 * Sometimes, it gets to the point where a character's only purpose is to demonstrate the amount of research that went into making the game. Nastasha from Metal Gear Solid was pretty much there to spout off technical info on nuclear weapons and the equipment you picked up, as well as ranting about nuclear proliferation. Sigint got this role in the third game as well. Both characters have worked for intelligence agencies and are on hand as experts, and, so it makes sense that their role is pretty much to spout random facts.
 * While a lot of the information about genes in MGS is inaccurate, it's justified by the fact that Liquid does most of the ranting (according to Word of God, he doesn't have a very firm grasp on the subject matter), and the ultimate point of Naomi's personal story is that she's putting too much faith in genetics because it's her only hope of finding out who she is and where she came from. The stuff that they didn't get wrong is astoundingly well-researched.
 * Apparently writer/director Hideo Kojima is excessively fond of this trope, as his prior work Policenauts, in addition to being unavailable in English, deterred fan translations because of the precise technical terminology used in the Japanese release of the game, including the results of research in biology, astronautics, and history. In fact, an independent translator named Marc Laidlaw (the same guy who wrote the entire plot of Half Life), spent time with a number of textbooks and other sources of research in an attempt to decipher the decidedly native-centric text dump which included college level colloquialisms and kanji.
 * The head admin of the MMO Lusternia is a writer, and he is very good at researching the aspects of real-world mythology that were incorporated into the game. For example, the skillset known as "Highmagic" is an extended love-letter to Kabbalah, with each individual skill accurately corresponding to an aspect of the Sephirot (Hod, Keter, Yesod, etc).
 * It may not be particularly useful information you're learning, but the fictional language of the Myst games isn't a cypher or random gibberish- it's an actual consistent, working language with its own syntax, suffixes, prefixes, etc. It's apparently somewhat similar in structure to Hebrew.
 * The sequel, Riven, requires you to figure out the D'ni numeral system (which uses a base 25 counting system) as part of solving a puzzle.
 * Even more impressive, the D'ni numbering system is actually a multiple-base number system, which utilizes a base-5 system to construct its numerals, and a base 25 system to allow for the concatenation of numerals to create numbers over 25.
 * Persona 3's class sequences involve being lectured (and often quizzed) on actual grammar, history, and the like (although on a 6th or 7th grade level); in FES, this is expanded to include a real discussion of tarot cards and paganism that's mostly on the level.
 * Additionally, the personas you can obtain in the same game are all real mythological figures, drawn from everything from Vodou gods, to Judeo-Christian figures, to creatures and characters of Greek and Roman legends. The in-game compendium offers short descriptions of where each persona comes from.
 * The artwork by Atlus' master designer and prolific series artist Kazuma Kaneko makes it even more delightful, giving every single monster its own spin while retaining a deep and clear understanding of who they are supposed to be. Even when Shin Megami Tensei games choose to derive its characters from popular culture, such as the Hell Biker, or Alice, they're treated with care and attention to detail.
 * This has the added effect of people learning sometimes shocking truths about popular deities that appear in other games. Like, say, Shiva.
 * Both Persona 3 and Persona 4 are also highly notable for getting one specific thing right that so many works across multiple mediums get wrong: Tarot Motifs. The "Social Links" are all built around specific major tarot arcana, and if you play them out and pay attention, you'll realize that, yes, these are in fact accurate representations of what the arcana are meant to reflect, even for the often misrepresented ones.
 * And this does include
 * The accuracy is also prevalent in how the different meanings are portrayed differently in both 3 and 4, but still being accurate. Even further, Persona 3 Portable's female route (that some would dismiss as fanservice) still sticks to the representations of the arcana in the new social links. Notably, it gives a new and deeper meaning for the Fortune, Moon and Strength (Koromaru) Arcana.
 * The Persona series also shows a sound grasp of Jungian psychiatric theory. "Persona" and "Shadow" are obvious, but Philemon being named after a character from Jung's Red Book (and serving much the same purpose!) makes it clear that the developers paid attention.
 * And the main Shin Megami Tensei series uses a fair bit of actual Gnostic mythology. As much as the setting's Fantasy Kitchen Sink allows them to.
 * They tend to show their work on most of the other mythology as well. In addition to the demon/persona designs mentioned above, they sometimes work it into the plot; for instance, one sidequest in Strange Journey involves Hariti getting a hankering for babies and requesting that you find a pomegranate to keep her cravings in check, since she's sworn off them. And the person who gives you said fruit for Hariti? Why, it's none other than Persephone. And they're just two of many denizens in the Shin Megami Tensei universe.
 * The original visual novel of Phantom of Inferno went into obsessive detail on the guns the characters used. Obsessive. It's borderline disturbing. It was toned down in the US DVD-play release of the game (which removed the option of letting you choose which gun you wanted to use) and was (thankfully) skipped in the anime.
 * SimAnt has two lengthy, chapters on ants in the User's Manual, plus famous quotes about ants and an appendix full of scientific terms. To top it off, they included an unreasonable number of ant puns. It's freaking fantastic.
 * Moving away from all this antagonism, other early Sim games such as SimEarth, A-Train and SimFarm have lengthy sections at the ends of their manuals devoted to the subject of the game (Earth science, the history of railways, a study of farming...). And they're all pretty damn awesome.
 * This seemed to be more common in the '90s, as Lords of the Realm and Jane's Fighters Anthology both came with a pamplet describing certain 12th century castles and their histories in the case of the former, and flight and air combat tactics and principles in the case of the latter (in fact the "pamphlet" was a book a few hundred pages long in the case of the Jane's game, which is not suprising given Jane's role in the game).
 * This was also for Copy Protection purposes: the game would ask you to enter a certain word on a certain line on a certain page to keep playing.
 * In certain countries such as Japan, the game 'Gran Turismo 4' came with a booklet a couple hundred pages long, that was filled with expertise from professional drivers describing basic racing strategies, and car dynamics and so on.
 * Speaking of 'Gran Turismo'', the creator of the game was a former professional driver himself, who just won 1st place in his class of sports cars.
 * Astro Boy: Omega Factor for the GBA sets itself up as prime Adaptation Distillation through this trope, including as many characters from the original works as narratively possible, along with an extended character biography section, which includes information about their first appearances, and sensical justifications for any changes that have been made for appearance in the game.
 * The 90's Windows game Odell Down Under has surprisingly detailed information on a number of aquatic species found in the Great Barrier Reef. Every time you start a game or a new round in a game there's an info screen which gives you details about the fish you're playing as. The whole point of the game, in fact, is to keep your fish alive by having it eat what it actually eats, avoid predators, and get cleaned by cleaner fish. The sharks didn't always need cleaner fish however, thanks to the remoras that live on sharks and eat their parasites. There was even an in-game fish encyclopedia on the title screen that gave detail on other lifeforms you couldn't play as like plankton and algae.
 * Jigsaw, a time-travel Interactive Fiction game, includes extensive footnotes regarding the history (and Artistic License) involved. Several of the puzzles require or strongly encourage detailed knowledge of the Enigma machine, the works of Marcel Proust, and how to fly a B-29 bomber.
 * Deus Ex knew its paranoid conspiracies. Not only was it chock full of every conceivable conspiracy theory from MJ-12 to the Illuminati to aliens at Area 51, but it was also crammed full of real philosophical concepts and ideals, from Santayana to Nietzsche. Visit the AI in Morgan Everett's base if you need a small example of the research involved.
 * The Call of Duty series tends to focus on real historical military operations. Even the entirely fictional Modern Warfare inserted some historical realism by using real buildings and structures featured in a level set in Pripyat, in the Chernobyl evacuation zone, and factoring them into the gameplay. After, the player and his spotter must move through the abandoned city's cultural center and streets, at the end going from the public swimming pool to the Pripyat Ferris wheel.
 * On the subject of Pripyat, the STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl team definitely did the research (including several trips to the exclusion zone). Overlay the map of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant from the game and the real one from Google Earth, for instance. Also, Pripyat is * almost* dead on. Other locations (Agroprom, for instance) are uncanny. Seeing photographs of the building that Agroprom is based on is chilling. Even the faded mural on a side wall is the same as in game
 * Xenogears did more than their share of homework when it comes to depicting the Gnostic religion. Extra surprising when you consider Japan's usual accuracy when it comes to Christian topics.
 * The Xenosaga games have vast in-game databases that are updated with both real world and fictional information on matters biographical, historical and scientific.
 * More importantly, nearly all of the Techno Babble in Xenosaga is real or at least researched - you couldn't really use the EPR paradox for FTL communication, but how many RPGs would even suggest you could?
 * Eternal Sonata has, between chapters, historical accounts of Chopin's life, with real life photographs of scenery in the background.
 * Silicon Knights redid a level in Eternal Darkness because they found out that stained glass didn't exist in the time period it took place in.
 * Fallout 1, particularly, features this trope, as well as Lampshading the setting's resident mutants; many are specifically assumed to be artificial. Sufficient (and rewarding) exploration reveals a detailed and clear description of how a mutagenic artificial virus designed to combat biological warfare interferes with the anaphase stage of cell division; this is, in many ways, the single most unrealistic and fantastic element of this plot point, but the game clearly takes its biology very seriously. Well, up to a point.
 * This was also the game that began its manual with three pages on the precise effects, graded by the scale of the bomb, of a nuclear detonation. Biology wasn't the only thing Fallout took seriously.
 * When Bethesda Studios took over the production of Fallout 3, they based it in Washington DC. Their studios are based in a suburb of Washington, DC (Bethesda, Maryland; yes, we know, not a very creative name). This is why the landscape is so detailed: they know the area. Gamers based in the DC metro area noticed and praised Bethesda for it.
 * This is a map of the real Washington, D.C. subway system. This is a map of the Fallout 3 version. The game wasn't meant to be perfect in its representation of D.C. (the real National Mall is much, much larger than the in-game version, for example, and there's a practical explanation for that), but Bethesda nailed little details beautifully, right down to the architectural styles of random buildings. Please pay a visit to D.C. and then go back to play the game. Scenery Porn.
 * Actually, Bethesda was founded in Bethesda MD, but has since moved to Rockville MD. The attention to detail isn't just in the map, take a look at the western horizon in the game. Those gently rolling mountains don't just look like the Appalachian and Blue Ridge...
 * Fallout: New Vegas: Caesar's Legion, full stop. Their founder and leader, a former New California Republic citizen and member of a society that was dedicated to preserving knowledge in the post-apocalyptic wasteland, explicitly modeled them on the Roman Empire, and he did his homework.
 * He formed the Legion by uniting several tribes and forming them into a militaristic government and state.
 * He compares his conquests in Arizona to the historical Caesar's conquest of Gaul, and his return to conquer the NCR to the crossing of the Rubicon.
 * The Legion not only all speak Latin, but also pronounce it correctly, using only hard Cs and pronouncing Vs as Ws. All but the most educated people west of the Colorado continue to call Caesar "See-zer," but the Legionaries use the historically accurate "Kai-zar."
 * The Legion uses historical Roman Legion ranks and organization, not just the more famous centurions and their centuries, but also more obscure ranks, such as the decanus, commander of the eight-man contubernium.
 * They also portrayed the Frumentarii, Roman 'military intelligence', an organization very rarely mentioned in fiction or popular books about Imperial Rome and usually known only by people interested in ancient history. Sure, the Frumentarii in game are much more sinister than their real-life counterparts (who were more intelligence analysts and tax collectors than secret police) but then again, they had to fit a 'tribal' nature of Ceasar's Legion.
 * They use the denarius silver coin as their currency, as well as the golden aureus, which is worth 25 denarii in-game, just as it was in ancient Rome.
 * They practice historical punishments such as crucifixion and decimation.
 * The makers of Gabriel Knight appear to love research more than life itself. While the information is both useful and interesting, you'll be very glad that the game has provided you with a tape recorder that allows you to play back all the conversations that Gabriel has had with various Voodoo experts.
 * Developers of Command & Conquer Tiberium Wars contacted MIT students for input on the propagation of Tiberium, and even have a mocked-up scientific paper on the subject.
 * The original Age of Empires I allowed you to click on any unit, piece of rock, shrub etc - then expand into an encyclopediac background history of said unit/rock/shrub. From a longboat to an elm tree, every item was meticulously mapped out in depth.
 * Similarly, its successor Age of Mythology has a massive encyclopaedia dedicated to the mythological creatures. Right down to listing not just the names of the original Valkyries, but what each name meant.
 * World in Conflict does a frankly superb job of depicting downtown Seattle circa 1989. This would be expected if Massive Entertainment was one of the multiple developers based in the area, but they're Swedish. They even play with it by having the invading Soviets
 * In The Conduit, there was a crapload of research to find all of the conspiracy theories that were used to tie the story together.
 * Similarly, the Washington DC settings in the game are duplicated with surprising fidelity, down to the signage for the Metro subway system.
 * Infinity the Quest For Earth features newtonian flight physics (no Space Friction here!) and includes, within it's procedurally generated 200-400 billion stars, the several dozen thousand that we know of, in an accurate position. However, it does occasionally fail physics forever in that it ignores most of the effect of relativity, notably time dilatation when approaching the speed of light. However, this probably constitutes an Acceptable Breaks From Reality, as there is probably no way to simulate time dilatation without making everyone else move in slo-mo - and if you introduce various people, all moving at the speed of light in their frame of reference, it's probably impossible to accurately represent it to everyone involved.
 * Dwarf Fortress is probably the only game in existence for which a geology textbook is a good substitute for a strategy guide. The steps for creating alloys and certain types of glass are also 100% accurate, and most existing abstractions are temporary or deliberate.
 * If you look at the game files, it actually accounts for the specific heat of rocks and metals. (Some of which are actually wrong as of the current version, but will be fixed with the next release.) Talk about science!
 * Temperature has been implemented. Toady is now working on developing a magic system and making your livestock require food, and has indicated a longer-term goal of fixing the economy mechanics to account for things like supply/demand and inflation.
 * The person who made Hymmnos for Ar tonelico put some seriously extreme effort at making a language. See here.
 * By the end of the Wii survival horror game Cursed Mountain, you'll probably know all about the Tibetan afterlife.
 * The shipwreck-diving game Sea Rogue has a manual which lists hundreds of shipwrecks ranging from Viking boats from circa 1000 AD to the Titanic. The developers themselves include a disclaimer that this is not, and cannot be, all completely accurate information, but it is very impressive.
 * The achievement list for Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing. Someone at Sumo Digital clearly had too much fun delving into Sega lore to write up their names.
 * Brothers in Arms series, the games show off an incredible amount of historical documents in their extras section, on-site photo of rural France areas (and comparision between their own in-game buildings and their real life counterparts). The military advisor for Gearbox Software is a retired veteran general.
 * Europa Universalis (the third one at least) is both played straight and subverted. Go to Europe, and you find an amazingly accurate map of 1400s Europe, complete with a plethora of Holy Roman Empire one-province minor nations. Go to Asia, and you find a Japan that is not only consistently unified from 1399 to 1821, but lumped into an "East Asian" (whatever that means) culture group with China and Korea. You can tell why it's called Europa Universalis.
 * Even in Europe, though, there are errors - Hungary is included in the "West Slavic" culture group, and a few things are changed for balance reasons.
 * There are many game mods that help fix most of the Did Not Do the Research, most notably Magna Mundi (which is made of Shown Their Work).
 * Spider-Man: Web of Shadows showed a bit too much work. At one point, Wolverine suspects Spider-Man is an imposter. During the following boss fight, he stops periodically to ask trivia questions. Said trivia questions are very obscure references to continuity...which can lead to problems since your answers will effect the Karma Meter.
 * Obligatory film link here. And when Spidey says "That's not in my online wiki entry." he isn't even lying. As per typing this, his parent's names are not in the Spider-Man article.
 * Tatsunoko vs. Capcom does a lot of research in regards to the material of Tatsunoko, which is a given, considering that the people who worked were fans of the shows.
 * Epic Mickey is built on this. The secondary protagonist hasn't had a film appearance in 70 years (neither has one of the villains, Dr. XXX), your allies the Gremlins haven't even been in a finished Disney film, and even things as insignificant as the barrels are based on Disney history.
 * LEGO Batman does a lot of it, the Bat Computer has a lot of information on it, showing facts about the Rogues Gallery and even facts about Villains you don't even know about, such as Penguin's father dying from pneumonia on a rainy day, and Penguin's mom forced him to carry an umbrella.
 * Touhou: The amount of mythology that ZUN is familiar with isn't generally apparent in the main games, where the emphasis is more on creating something fun. But in the side materials it can get a bit nuts, with plots based on obscure Shinto rituals (and now Bhuddism, too).
 * And the fandom takes this Up to Eleven, with doujinshi plots often hinging on or driven by more obscure pieces of the lore about the youkai characters.
 * Umineko no Naku Koro ni. OK, cabbala doesn't work exactly that way, but the author obviously did some research, as he uses some basic and not well-known concepts of magic (like, "a part equals the whole").
 * He sure did read up on the Key Of Solomon. The magic circles used in the series do show the meaning they're suppose to represent.
 * THQ are huge wrestling fans and they put in a staggering amount of work to get the storylines and angles as accurate as possible. No Mercy faithfully recreated the McMahon\Helmsley era, Smackdown! had accurate depictions of everything from the draft to Booker T and Golddust, and Smackdown vs Raw? Well, the Legends Tour begins with Foreign Wrestling Heel Mohammed Hassan being detained at the airport, then goes on to make digs at the Montreal Screwjob, a recreation of the legendary Hell in a Cell with Mankind and The Undertaker, Stone Cold Steve Austin playing to the crowd, the list goes on.
 * In Halo 3, there is a cutscene near the end of the level "The Ark," where 343 Guilty Spark mentions how they are "218 light-years from the galactic core" (of the Milky Way). This adds up 262,144 light-years. The Milky Way is only 100,000 light-years in diameter. Nerds rejoiced.
 * Although it can be a bit of Well Duh statement, as if they were 1/2 the light-years closer to the Milky Way, they would be burnt up by the Halo Array.
 * Despite what the games would have you belive at first glance, the entire universe is well thought out, such as with the workings of all weapons, in the novels.
 * Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors: A lot of concepts:
 * The Gigantic was an actual sister ship to the Titanic, along with William Thomas Stead and Morgan Robertson.
 * Portal 2: Valve did extensive period research to accurately recreate the look and feel of the 50's, 70's, and 80's-era Aperture Laboratories facilities deep beneath the modern Enrichment Center. They also initially located the facility in a real abandoned salt mine in Cleveland, Ohio, although the game itself mysteriously retcons this to be in Michigan. But the ultimate example is found in the Final Boss battle, where it is an important detail (that very nearly fell victim to Reality Is Unrealistic) that the portal gun's "shots" travel at the speed of light. Also, the amount of experimentation and research they put into deducing that smooth jazz is in fact the funniest type of music.
 * Age of Mythology has an entire in game encyclopedia that has some pretty in depth descriptionf for all soldiers, buildings, heroes, monsters, trees, animals, technologies and pretty much everyhing that can be selected. Fictional characters and joke units have corresponding descriptions, but the rest are pretty accurate.
 * Golden Sun: Dark Dawn's summon sequences include several notable corrections to the... erm... liberties they'd taken with the first two games' summons, though most are still quite inaccurate.
 * The Golden Sun series in general is very good at geography and history. Many of the Wacky Wayside Tribes and villages are Fantasy Counterpart Culture versions of real historical places and cultures, with reasonably-authentic architecture and, if you looked at the stoves/ovens, local cuisine.
 * For LA Noire, Team Bondi and Rockstar used over 180,000 photographs to map out and detail 1947 Los Angeles.
 * The team behind the Red Baron series did a considerable amount of research into World War One combat aviation, and it shows in the attention to detail given to the physics engine and the aircraft designs. They also included a great deal of supplementary information. Much of it is solely educational flavor, but a significant portion consists of tactics and maneuvers which are quite useful in-game.
 * At times, Mother 3 takes a little time out to justify some 'Reality Is Unrealistic' moments (which, in a game that is very much a Widget Series, is saying something), such as explaining that there are types of frog that can survive in desert climates, or that mole tunnels actually can be incredibly complex in real life (even encouraging the player to go and do some mole-watching sometime).
 * There's a PlayStation 2 game called Dogs's Life, where you play as a dog named Jake and can control other dogs. A focus point about the game was making sure the dogs act like dogs, instead of the cartoony dogs we're used to. The dogs are quite accurate both in design, size, and behavior. They trot like they should, move like they should, and generally act like dogs aside from a few Rule of Funny moments.
 * Shogun 2: Total War uses a woodblock printing art style all over the place. Creative Assembly had their artists study traditional techniques for over a year to get it right.
 * The two Buffy games on Xbox, the first in particular, are very accurate in capturing the look, feel, and humor of the series. Numerous references, Call Backs, and Call Forwards are used, as are most of the voice actors.
 * Two of the Kim Possible games for the Game Boy Advance; Drakken's Demise and especially Team Possible, play almost as lost episodes of the series. It starts with the same type of zany plot the show is famous for (a plot to steal Kim's photo album to lead her into a trap set by Monkey Fist, then the album taken by the Senors to a night club in space) and it goes uphill from there.
 * Westwood's Dune Games depart heavily from the Duniverse with regards to storyline, factions and characterisation. That said, the dialogue in particular is so chock full of tiny references and nods to the books that one gets the feeling that with all the liberties taken, the makers still knew the books by heart.
 * They also managed to replicate David Lynch's style to a tee during cutscenes.
 * Cyber Connect 2 and Asura's Wrath, most definitely: This page describes the extensive amounts of Buddhist symbolism in the game, and inspirations for its visuals. Just for example, the way the Demigods are injured is made to resemble the damage done to old Buddhist gilt lacquer statues.
 * The Second and The third parts get even more specific.
 * The aftermath of using white phosphorus “Spec-Ops: The Line” is actually as graphic as you would image. If anyone has been to a war or area where such weapon was used and played the game,  it’s clear how awful it can be  One of the soldiers tries to protest the decision on using white phosphorus, and another gets into an augment over it. To sum it up, just do a search on white phosphorus and play the game to see how bad the substance can be.
 * They also managed to replicate David Lynch's style to a tee during cutscenes.
 * Cyber Connect 2 and Asura's Wrath, most definitely: This page describes the extensive amounts of Buddhist symbolism in the game, and inspirations for its visuals. Just for example, the way the Demigods are injured is made to resemble the damage done to old Buddhist gilt lacquer statues.
 * The Second and The third parts get even more specific.
 * The aftermath of using white phosphorus “Spec-Ops: The Line” is actually as graphic as you would image. If anyone has been to a war or area where such weapon was used and played the game,  it’s clear how awful it can be  One of the soldiers tries to protest the decision on using white phosphorus, and another gets into an augment over it. To sum it up, just do a search on white phosphorus and play the game to see how bad the substance can be.