A thought on Zelda's writing

One of the main reasons I've noticed that Majora's Mask is way, way darker is because it doesn't have the need to cherry-coat everything. When the girl from the farm gets abducted by aliens, she's broken mentally, completely shattered. When Kafei vanishes, she's devastated. People die, and everyone seems really upset about it.

Meanwhile you look at Ocarina of Time, such as when the Gorons have been herded up to be fed to Volvagia, and they all cower in the prisons. "Please...don't...eat...me..." they whimper, not looking up to realize that you're trying to save them. "If you eat me you'll get a stomachache, and you'll be sorry!"

I understand we're making this an E for Everyone game and I don't take issue with what they did, but it does strike me as one of those surprising moves that Majora's Mask was not doled equally with heaping spoonfuls of sugar. Majora's Mask was really miraculous in several ways, the most specific being that we even got the game as it exists now at all.

Tae Kim is fucking stupid

So there's that Other M review that Abbie did on G4 where she gave it a 2/5 and called it a sexist portrayal of Samus. So Tae Kim asks, does gender affect game reviews? 

It dawned on me that if Abbie hadn’t pointed it out, I would never have thought of Other M that way. I simply didn’t have the necessary perspective to see the larger implications of the narrative decisions Team Ninja and Nintendo had made. I began to wonder how differently GamePro’s review would’ve turned out, had I assigned the game to a woman instead of doing it myself. For that matter, how different would reviews of games like Mirror's Edge, Heavenly Sword, and Guardian of Light have been under the same conditions?

Wow, that was really stupid. 

I absolutely fucking hate this backwards-ass notion that somehow women are able to bring a new light to all sorts of angles of everything by virtue of having vaginas. Being female is not a perspective. It is an identity. It may affect your outlook but Other M's portrayal of Samus has nothing to do with gender. Gender politics, yes, but not gender roles.

I mean, sure you might have a higher chance of meeting women who agree with the sexist portrayal of Samus, but that doesn't mean it's a blanket statement you can tack onto the female populous. I'm sure there are women who are sexist and think rape jokes are funny. 

It's especially ridiculous considering you can look at, ohhh, I dunno, Gamepad Dojo and see me and Noncon both tearing it a new one. Or even Yahtzee looked at it and went, "That's pretty sexist." We are not women - this is just our perspective. You don't have to be gay to see homophobia. Aggie is feminist and looked right at the sexism and called it out. Other reviewers did not see it. 

Even this is probably giving it more attention than it deserves considering a few paragraphs in he basically runs off the rails and talks about how "these things need to be considered equally" and "you don't always need these things in a game review" etc etc etc. It's just outright ridiculous that he asks if gender affects reviews, and he says yes because everything affects reviews. Well yes that's true...but you haven't really answered the question. Reminds me of when you accuse someone of stealing and they talk about how all property is theft. 

It's just a backhanded-ass sexism to treat women gamers as though they have this entirely different set of credentials based on being born with a vagina. We're going to get a lot further on in our collective chosen hobby if we stop treating women differently - not better or worse, but differently - and just keep in mind at all times that they're gamers like us. 

Oh god nevermind, DMC is going to be awful

http://www.giantbomb.com/news/ninja-theory-is-definitely-developing-a-new-devil-may-cry/2544/

Set against a contemporary backdrop, DmC will depict a duplicitous world where nothing is ever as it seems and the line between good and evil is constantly blurred. Spurred into action by the promises of a trusted relation, Dante bursts into this world intent on revenge at any cost.

Wow. That's...impressively terrible. I wonder if by the end the demons like Dante will be the good guys and the humans will be the bad guys (what with the imprisoning and torturing and all).

Thoughts on the new DMC trailer

Capcom I get that grimdark is 'the new thing' and all but you seriously don't need to insert it into everything.

Devil May Cry is a ridiculous over-the-top franchise where a hot dude with silver hair runs around shooting demons in the face in Gothic architecture castles. I'm mostly down with showing Dante as a teenager because I always wondered how he got by after his mom was killed and Vergil took off and seeing him as a street-slum teenager has potential, but I've never been one to tout how great Devil May Cry's story is, least not after #4. Trying to, I dunno, torture him and find out about his half-demon hybrid status is a pretty desperate grasp at legitimacy. 

If you basically gut all that and leave a trailer where Dante's kicking demons in the head and throwing cars and putting out cigarettes in their faces I'm pretty much down, and hey the music was rad, but I'm tentatively disappointed thus far. 

This is why I don't mind Facebook

Friend I haven't talked to in over ten years found me on Facebook and told me that he recently played Lufia II, because he remembered me talking about it back in fourth grade and now he agrees that it is, in fact, totally awesome.

I don't know why but that's just badass to me. Both that he remembered and that I've been a huge fucking dork for my entire life. 

Mortal Kombat

http://iplaywinner.com/news/2010/9/4/pax-mortal-kombat-tag-team-walkthrough-video.html

I'm really glad WB was able to acquire the Mortal Kombat franchise, because you have a kinda cool world with really weirdass characters with cool powers. For the last decade and a half the only people with this franchise have basically sat around and balanced pencils on their noses instead of producing decent products. 

What I'm liking is that it's showing a lot of the same growth and understanding of Mortal Kombat in this video. It's gory but in a way that's hilarious and awesome and ridiculous rather than just MORE BLOOD AND FEMURS!!! and focuses on combos and fluid combat mechanics. I've been saying for eons that if they want their game to be taken seriously they need to stop with the useless shit like Konquest mode or Motor Kombat and all the other token-ass side missions to make the game more sellable and instead focus on having a good game. I really think that this is what they're doing, and Mortal Kombat vs DC Universe was a great show of them learning that process.

I like Mortal Kombat. The character concepts are just cool by themselves, and I want them to try and use it carefully. I'm glad that, finally, they seem to be doing that.

I don't care how many games feature it

I will never get over how Goddamn silly it looks to have a big, scarred, rugged barbarian warrior clad in full leather swinging a greatsword bigger than he is, and right next to him is a wispy lingerie model wearing a leather bellyshirt with deep cleavage. 

I mean I get that Hunted: The Demon Forge is going for the Boris Vallejo look run through a grainy gritty filter and everything but good lord. Every time you put a female into a skimpy top in a place where it's painfully obvious that it does nothing except paint a big target right where your heart/guts are, I groan and facepalm. 

It looks fucking ridiculous. Knock it the fuck off. 

Oh and re:Tycho again

So I went ahead and read that post from Tycho...

"What I have said is that the end result of that purchase from a developer perspective must be indistinguishable. Isn't it? That is the question I couldn't answer. I still can't answer it. And because I couldn't, I had to change the way I invested my leisure dollar."

Well, that's not so bad...

"People want to talk about used cars, or libraries, or any other thing really, but I'm not talking about the universe in general - I'm talking about the tiny part of it I have any control over.  That bit up there is the part I can't resolve: the moral dimension contained within the purchase. Yes, I'm giving somebody money when I buy used. Is that sufficient? What is the end result, and what systems am I sustaining by doing so?"

Well, okay, it looks like he's just saying that he's not trying to claim the moral high ground, he's just, y'know, choosing to spend his dollar a bit more carefully re: gaming industry. That seems-

"I'd rather not think about things like this, believe me. I'd rather be Mr. Perpetual Good Times, but I'm not built that way. On the whole, I'd say thinking has been a tremendous inconvenience."

Oh you goddamn two-faced motherfucker. As if it isn't bad enough you've essentially boiled down every used game purchaser to a pseudo-pirate via thinly-veiled insults of if you want to support developers then you're a thief, now you're just upfront calling us all oblivious idiots. We just don't think about these sort of things - we're not blessed with your kind of brilliant intelligence and fat stacks of cash, so we're just humble peasants.

I suppose Penny Arcade's own pompous-ass class treatment of the remainder of the world isn't anything new - they do seem to make fun of everyone who isn't themselves - but as a pair of everyday gamers who create a comic strip about video games I would have hoped their own origins would keep them from being snidely condescending, but nope, instead their own  gender/class/race privileges are so convenient and nice, so lets chide others for not having them. 

As I said - the secondhand market is nothing new. It's a staple part of any production of materials for entertainment such as books, CDs, comics, and yes gaming. Gamestop gets crazy amounts of money via the trade-in system, money that could otherwise go to the developers, and some of their business practices are less than reputable. But blaming me - the everyday consumer - for going with the path that is most beneficial for me paints me as a criminal because I'm not blessed with Tycho's altruism (which is to say, disposable income) is an asshole thing to do, and both men are assholes for saying it.

Lesbians are only okay if they're pretty

So I've been going about this lately on Twitter but I only recently came upon enough material for a blog post relation to Mass Effect.

Why are the asari women? 

Don't get me wrong - the asari race is a really cool concept. They're a race of blue aliens that psychically link their nervous systems with their partners to reproduce, and often are encouraged (to the point of disgust at those that aren't born of a non-asari partner) to do so with as many species as possible. They're effeminate in speech, as well as facial/body structure, IE, wider hips, smaller waists, likely redundant breasts, and smooth skin. All of these are beautiful traits to humans, with the obvious exceptions of blue/teal color and the tail-heads, which of course everyone got used to forty years ago with Star Wars.  

I was under the impression that asari were a ungendered race, and this is supported early on with Liara's own words, IE, "mono-gendered" and "not precisely a woman." But I started playing Mass Effect 2, and right under their section in the game's own codex, it says "all-female." Even if this weren't in here, they're obviously women. There's not even a good example to point out about how ridiculous this is, because genders are so specific. Too many concepts of femininity line up with the entire asari species traits for it to be anything other than a species of women. 

Again, let me say that this is a very cool idea; like the Amazons if they were psychics instead of warriors. Amazons, however, were a nation of female warrios, where as this is an entire species. The entire concept of them needlessly being bisexual women, indeed the big Mass Effect selling point is getting Liara naked along with either manShep or femShep, enforces this ridiculous mindset of 'pretty lesbians are okay' via having the only viable gay relationship be an alien species that identifies as 'female' to human perceptions of beauty. You can sleep with Liara as a man, but it's obviously heterosexual. 

My point is, why couldn't they be completely gender-ambiguous? They're aliens - they don't have sexes. The fluff even describes that asari have some sort of supernatural resonance that makes them attractive to all races. Mordin surmises 'neurochemical,' and I've had theories that it's a subconcious biotic power. 

So here's my theory - make them androgynous. Take away the big hips and breasts, and smudge the facial features. Maybe keep the voices higher-pitched, but switch voice actors around so they aren't all women and some are just very high-pitched men. If you make them unisex you can still keep the origins and reproduction, and still have the relationship, but there's no big flaming honking sign that says HEY LESBIAN SEX THIS WAY, PICK FEMSHEP AND LIARA TO SEE SEXY BUTTS TOUCHING!!

I shouldn't be so uppity about this but it just smacks as more sexism/homophobia to consider pretty lesbians okay for absolutely no reason.  It's nice to look at, therefore it's alright. I've known women to be more accepting and appreciative of female beauty but that's purely because of this kind of thing - you don't get that kind of reaction out of men these days. If a man observed another man's being attractive, most of the time he'll be called gay faster than you can say, 'Flamingly Homophobic Chestbump.' Enforcing and encouraging 'pretty lesbians' is just more disgusting homophobia; it all melts away the moment you have elderly lesbians, or overweight lesbians, or anything that doesn't fit this male-driven perception of 'sexy.'

It's the same kind of thing that's propagated in Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines. VV, bless her wonderful heart, is bisexual. All the women you can pick up in bars are bisexual, to the point of where nobody even mentions that you, the protagonist, are a woman hitting on these random and all-too-willing ladies. The options for men seducing men, even with powers/Seduction skill are almost nil, to the point of where some men are given the seduction option and recoil in horror. Women seducing women is practically equaling that of hetero. More backwards-ass double standard bullshit. 

It's especially ridiculous since turians are basically cricket humanoids with carapace skin and krogans are giant space hunchback lizard-orcs. You never even see females of either of these species, or salarians for that matter. What's with the underrepresentation of the ladies of other species? The only time I even hear about female turians is Garrus's fantastic story in Mass Effect 2. Why can't we get a female turian in ME3? 

Now to be fair I'm not crying out sexism or homophobia in Mass Effect (okay, Miranda's blatant ass-shot in ME2, yes, most definite sexism). FemShep is probably my favorite version of Shepard and her voice actor rules. The relationship you can have with Garrus is brilliantly written, portraying him as an charming man and a total sweetheart. The relationship with Tali was fantastic, especially that subtle line of how she rambles 'since her face is always covered and people can't read facial expression.' Ashley, racism aside, was a great character to have a romantic fling with. But these are just small gender/sexism nitpicks that, while fine taken alone, continue to reflect a double-standard in our society's perception of homosexuality. 

AFTEREDIT : I think there definitely is more sexism in Mass Effect upon closer inspection. I really shouldn't have been so quick to dismiss it just based on how ME is a good game series.