People still play Farmville?

@hey: Hmmm, those aren't even that cheap.

Personally I know Waking Mars and McPixel. Waking Mars I can wholeheartedly recommend. That game is just grand. McPixel is just extremely silly, but amusing if you like that sort of humor.

Official Trailer for GTA just got released. I'm super fucking excited for this game and am frothing at the mouth up until it's released. Anyone else keen?

I admit I haven't paid much attention to all the teaser things, but I'll wait a little bit for it, GTA IV left a very, very bitter taste in my mouth, pretty much single handedly killed my fanboyism of the series.

After five years on the East Coast, it was time to go home.

Guys. Far Cry 3 is really really fun.

A part of me always wished that they would bring back CJ and The Truth...

Reposting for the people who skipped the end of the last threadpage.

Yeah. I won't be playing it for some time though, my ps3 lost all the data I had of this game.

*perusing Playstation Store*

"Man, there isn't much that's jumping out to me. Even the PS+ free games are looking kind of dull. There's nothing new I want to play, and I don't feel like shelling out money for an older game right now. I mean look, Kessen III, that game was cool, but I'm not paying ten bucks for any game right now.

*sees Katamari Damacy*

*immediately buys it for ten bucks*

I can tell you're a man of distinguished taste BastardHead.

Firing up Secret of Mana again.

Katamari Damacy is a perfectly valid reason to spend $10.

To be frank I found very little of it pertinent to the discussion, and I could pose you the same question exactly. "What's considered an ideal woman at the time by men = a male fantasy"? No shit, Sherlock, except what constitutes a male fantasy and what doesn't has little to do with the topic since I was never talking about manifestation, only motivation (but I don't blame you for not getting it as I do have a tendency to be a little vague with conveying my points). The ways women depicted in video games is, indeed, a manifestation of some males' fantasy, but that doesn't mean the motivation behind said depiction was fulfillment of said fantasy but rather something else (or, put in more simple terms - you say the derogatory depiction of women stems from the devs' and audience's crave for wank material; I say the derogatory depiction of women is a result of a lousy trendhopping), and pinning the blame on "male fantasies" not only puts men in bad light, it also does nothing to address the problem - you need to find the source. You need to break the trend and not just brush it off as "well, males...". Hope it clarifies things, and in any case, for another illustration please refer to:


I agree with what you wrote being complete and utter nonsense. Except I never said anything like that. If you fancy an analogy, inhumanist basically blamed guns for [insert a murder case here]. I chimed in to point out that people were killing people before there were guns, thus it's not guns that are the source of the problem but something different (accessibility of guns, bad education, mental health, shitty parents...).


P.S: Sorry for the late response, I was away from the computer for a couple of days.

You are still not making much sense. The depiction of women in games is a cultural phenomenon. The first step of addressing cultural wrongs is identifying the core of the issue which is without doubt that certain sexual ideals have the primacy over all other factors (such as realism, good characterization etc.) when it comes to most female character design/ that certain athletic ideals have the primacy when it comes to male character design. It doesn't matter if the majority does it as perverts or as trendhoppers or because for some reason they believe there is a causal link between artistic value and oversexualization. The only sensible way to adress it is to make people who have influence on these decisions (both in the gamer community and in the industry) realize that it is a manifestation of cultural poverty. We also need vanguards that show that it's possible to do it differently. We need games like like Beyond Good and Evil and Mirror's Edge because their examples ultimately lead to there being more games like that.

The source of the problem is patriarchy. Men - primarily men - get to infuse culture with their ideals because patriarchy is still in effect to some degree and the patriarchal past still resonates through modern society. Changing that requires both enlightenment and creating counterexamples, which is a dialectic process.

So in other words, you take issue not with scantily clad big boobed women being the product of a male fantasy, but rather with the compulsive shoehorning of said male fantasies into games, is that right?

Of course.

And with big jiggly boobs, "boob plate" armor, skin-tight space suits, vapid personalities, damsels in distress and other ways of sexually objectifying women being the default way for women to be depicted in video games. I assume, anyway.

Then we were on totally different pages. Makes more sense now?

I just finished XCOM Enemy Unknown. Wow, that's a badass game. Best thing about it is how you fall in love with your squad and those soldiers who fall tend to have an incredible story about how they died. And the ending where

I, for one, long to see women rendered in long, full clothing, with little to no shape or form showing. I also want to see fat women as the norm. That's reality in America, and I want it in my video games, too. I also don't want to play sports games as professional athletes. I want slow, fat, unskilled average joes under my control. I don't want LeBron James, I want Stanley from The Office. I want Heavy Rain's diaper scene as the basis of every game ever.

Don't worry, even though a lot of western devs are total pussies, you'll always have Japanese games for sexualised content. No amount of political thinking will change that.

Did I just read the biggest strawman ever?

This is obviously not about banning idealized characters from gaming but making the ones available more inclusive to people who aren't stereotypical straight males.


I suspected we were talking past each other.

Wasn't trying to say that it wasn't worth $10. I'd be willing to pay far more for it than that.

So I recently watched an Unskippable episode what might be the weirdest JRPG I've ever seen. http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/ ... ory-Part-1

Hyperdimension Neptunia. Featuring four anime girls in skimpy cyber corsets with each of them representing a different console. "Lowee, Leanbox, Lastation", guess which goes with which. The fourth apparently represents some old Sega console called the Neptune, though the guys on Unskippable thought it might have been the PC (probably a more clever choice to be honest).

I love how they commentate this video. "'That peace did not last long...' Then came E3! 'Now the curtains rise on four CPUs about to engage in a new war...' Press conferences. PR junkies. Developer documentaries. Retractions and clarifications of things said at earlier press conferences."

I also love how the girl representing the Wii is the one with the foul mouth in these cut scenes.

playing through all 3 mass effect games again, the 3rd one is so frustrating because in the first 2 you make so many choices, they dont bother with choices in the 3rd, you rarely make choices but its jarring going from the 2nd to the 3rd because of that

Anyone playing/will be playing Tales of Xillia? I didn't even notice this came out until today, but I loved Tales of Vesperia and this looks obviously better. Vesperia was one of the best RPGs I'd played since the SNES days.

Today I installed a little distro called EmulationStation on my Raspberry Pi, turning it into a multi-system retro gaming console controllable via gamepad. Ouya can suck it. Unfortunately while it can do PSx, N64 is apparently harder to emulate for some reason and therefore not supported on the Pi, so sadly no Mario Kart 64 tournaments in the foreseeable future. Comforted myself by playing some Donkey Kong Country. Thing has a great chiptune sequencer btw. Pure David Wise bliss.

I'm a few hours into it and I've been enjoying it for the most part. I've always been a fan of the Tales series but JRPGs are a bit difficult for me to play these days.

The Donkey Kong series (on the SNES at least) has an amazing soundtrack just short of Castlevania perfection and are by far the best platformers ever made. I love the sense of adventure and discovery that the games create, one that remains unmatched to this day. DK2 was particularly great but I treasure the 1st and 3rd ones.

Agree 100% with the above comment. DKC2 is a masterpiece.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J67nkzoJ_2M

Hard to pick a track because they were all solid, but Stickerbrush Symphony always gets the nostalgia flowing.

DKC2 is timeless. My pick's that carnival one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QasPiQtkfr8

I'm back in 1996!!!

Not liking Stickerbrush Symphony = not having a soul

I wish there was like an official soundtrack for the second game (especially if I didn't have to give an arm for it...)

Seeing the environments and playing through the incredible stages with that soundtrack... there are no words.

I recall a DKC Trilogy OST set that Nintendo Power sold through its catalog in the 90s, but I don't even want to think about what that would cost now.

I remember when I was a kid, I was stuck on Bramble Scramble for-freaking-ever, and yet I didn't even mind because of Stickerbrush Friggin' Symphony.

Stickerbrush is okay, it isn't that great. Just sayin'.

The song I always enjoyed most from DKC2 was "Lockjaw's Saga" as it is pretty oppressive and makes you nervous as you're going through those stages.

EDIT: I lied. It's "Flight of the Zinger," which is also a pretty intense and unnerving tune.

I know what you mean, but sometimes nothing is better than an awesome JRPG to break up the constant shooting, killing, hack n slash type games. I'm going to pick up Xillia soon, but I just got into Ni No Kuni recently and it may be totally un-metal, but it's a freaking awesome game both graphics and play style wise plus it is actually quite challenging at times.

^ That's Killer Instinct goodness. I must play this series again.

Right now I'm just remembering that part in DKC2 where you go through a hornet nest level, you're feeling pretty good, tearing through the hive and you feel like you're near the end...and then suddenly, you drop down right in front of a gargantuan Zinger and this starts playing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXv2y5vrLBI

I think you're playing as Rambi at that part, which is nice because you need to book it the hell out of dodge. I don't remember that part being very difficult (if you keep moving forward, he's probably not going to catch up), but damn that was cool.