Twisted Metal/YMMV

• And the Fandom Rejoiced: After David Jaffe said he was not working on a new Twisted Metal, fans had begun to declare the series dead and buried. Sony's E3 presentation was almost over and no sign at all of the game. And then?
• Base Breaker: The direction the Play Station 3 Revival took for the series; giving more engaging and complex storylines to four distinctive drivers, thus relagating the past drivers to oblivion and making their cars free for Mooks from the aforementioned quartet to drive; this rubs the wrong way for fans of the old installments where one could see each vehicle (and driver) getting a backstory, while others likes only 4 characters getting better developed stories, instead of many drivers getting Excuse Plots to force their presence in the games.
• Broken Base: The people who like 3 and 4 against the people who like the rest of the series.
• Complete Monster:
  • Needles Kane/Sweet Tooth and Calypso.
    • In the Twisted Metal 2 intro, Calypso's only regret about the death and destruction of the previous tournament was that Los Angeles was no longer a suitable site to hold Twisted Metal. He loves death and destruction, and takes delight in the ways he screws over his contestants.
    • Needles' ending in Black has him pass up on a chance to be free of his curse because killing people is just so much more "rewarding".
  • Cage, driver of Warthog in Black, is a Serial Killer who feels remorse after each kill...and wishes to get rid of said remorse.
  • Dollface in the recent game, she's obsessed with being the best super model, and would go far as to kill any other models she so as competition, and after a car accident, even though a doctor she saw managed to heal her apart from a scar on her face, she saw it as a huge deformity and killed him over not being able to remove it.
• Evil Is Sexy: Dollface in the 2012 Play Station 3 remake; see Hollywood Homely.
• Fan Dumb: One fan site will ban anyone on the forum if they talk about the third and fourth game, and insist that Twisted Metal is not "just" a game.
• Funny Aneurysm Moment: The Antarctica level in Twisted Metal 2. Back in 1996, the imagery of collapsing polar glaciers wasn't quite so unsettling.
  • Simon Whittlebone, a frustrated architect who uses an armored and heavily weaponized front loader dubbed "Mr. Slam". to wreak havoc and destruction. Marvin Heemeyer, a frustrated repair shop owner who used an armored and heavily weaponized bulldozer the press dubbed the "Killdozer" to do the same thing in a real life small town.
• Game Breaker: Playable versions of bosses tend to be these. There's a reason why they are usually not available at the start of the game, having to be unlocked either through game progress or cheat codes.
• Hollywood Homely: Deconstructed Trope with Dollface in the PS3 remake. She is a former supermodel who got a (minor) scar on her face, decided that her beauty was ruined (even though it clearly wasn't, as her doctor could plainly see), and started wearing a mask to cover up her "imperfection." David Jaffe said (about 14 minutes in) ^{[dead link]} that the character is a satire of the extreme standards of beauty that women are faced with by the media and pop culture... while flatly denying that the character was based on his ex-wife.
• Holy Shit Quotient: The final bosses in the reboot, assuming it's your first time fighting them. Bonus points for Sweet Tooth's Carnival of Carnage.
• Narm: The "Lost" endings to the original Twisted Metal, in all their live-action glory.
  • Narm Charm: Calypso's voice in the 2012 revival. It's growly as all hell, which is fine, but it's also...a little bit congested. That said, Calypso is hilariously blood thirsty, and the voice just captures that school-boy ant-burning glee so perfectly, stuffed-up-nose and all.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Most of the endings in any of the games, as well as the entire atmosphere of Black
  • That painting in Calypso's office in the 2012 version of the game. *shivers*
• Replacement Scrappy: Cousin Eddy in Head-On is often treated as a poor replacement for Minion, with many fans viewing him as an offensive hillbilly stereotype who is much weaker when you play as him than when you face him as a boss fight.
  • Few if any of the characters in 4 are liked, but Captain Grimm counts as he was a lame pirate retool of Mister Grimm.
• Special Effects Failure: The "Lost" endings are full of these, particularly whenever a contestant's winnings are raised up by Calypso... which consists of the camera panning down to them.
• Tear Jerker: Grashopper's ending in Twisted Metal 2.
• That One Boss:
  • Dark Tooth in 2. The vehicle was a larger, black-painted version of Sweet Tooth's ice cream truck that followed you relentlessly around Hong Kong and launched multiple attacks on you at the same time. Particularly frustrating was that it would freeze you while launching its specials. It even went so far as to launch the Dark Tooth head from the top. When you finally did destroy the vehicle, the head survived and continued the same search-and-destroy method.
  • Needles Kane in 4 had the Henchmen attack, which sent out three clown heads that followed you through walls, then swarmed around you and bombarded you to death with various stunning/immobilizing attacks. You pretty much had to keep running in a very specific circle around the map, leave a trail of explosives behind you, and pray to god it would kill him before you ran out of road. May be the cheapest boss in the series; this resulted in many thrown controllers.
  • This was preceded by Moon Buggy in the same game. Quasars, his special, was basically Outlaw's Tazers combined with Spectre's transparent homing abilities. He fired two or three at the player at once. The Quasars also had a bad habit of severely disorienting the gamer by throwing the car every which way. Fortunately, it doesn't last exceptionally long.
  • Both bosses in Black. Minion in particular was a pain, since his shields become very hard to hit when he's down to one or two. Then there's Warhawk, a helicopter that has the unfair advantage of aerial attacks, in addition to the first half of the fight being a Puzzle Boss where you must disable the tanker trucks, which are a Degraded Boss version of Minion, and detonate them underneath him when he flies over the helipad to destroy his shield.
• Uncanny Valley: Charlie Kane's appearance in Black deliberately invokes this to horrifying effect.