...BALLS OF STEEL!

Her ship was a dildo? Pics or it didn’t happen.

But yeah, to be honest, their more recent game, Valkyria Chronicles, did not exactly do the most stellar job of standing up for the female gender. The setting for that game is in the midst of a continental war, and The main female protagonist, Alicia, could never shut the fuck up about how once the war was over, she wanted to go back to being a baker, and how she felt so comfortable in a kitchen. Now, I’m not saying that it’s impossible that a woman could truly be more passionate about the culinary trade than anything else in life…but I couldn’t shake this feeling that Valkyria Chronicles was trying to tell me that a woman’s true place is in the kitchen, making me a sandwich…and they had damn well better like it.

//youtu.be/YrWol0rJ2L0

Check out the side view at 1:12. Now imagine it without the guns.

I’m surprised nobody has mentioned Aya Brea from Parasite Eve. RPGC, I am disappoint. :expressionless:

I played Parasite Eve one time when I was 13, so I don’t really remember it particularly well.

http://www.andriasang.com/e/blog/2010/09/11/aya_brea_clothes_torn/

Games are sexist? Why is this a surprise to anyone? They are made under the impression that most of their players (for action games anyway) will be male and thus pander to them. Besides they are games, it’s not like they are expected to teach values.

Curiously, I’m currently playing Ar Tonelico 2, which on the surface seems like a HUGELY sexist game, and it’s intentional: in addition to all the sexual references, every single female character looks like they stepped out of a Maxim magazine cover (I actually chortled when we meet Luca’s mother AND SHE HAD A RACK BIGGER THAN LUCA’s!- Then again Luca is probably small-breasted because that’s also a fetish among some Japanese players). And yet, I find that this may be a less sexist game than it looks. First, a majority of the playable characters are female, so much of the story rotates around them; and most importantly, the Diving mechanics allow you to literally enter into a Reyvateil’s mind and get to know her AS A PERSON and not just as a hunk of meat. I actually find AT2’s Cosmosphere adventures more fair than the first game’s, with the girls mostly solving their own subconscious insecurities there with the hero just offering moral support, and not just fixing the problems for them. So if you can get past all the fanservice, I’d actually recommend this game to female players.

In the original game she actually wore clothes.

There are some pretty intense ladies in all the Elder Scrolls games, too.

The girl in Killzone 1 is pretty realistic. I only played through half the story.

  1. This discussion was not started by a surprised epiphany that games are sexist; rather, it was started by the surprising revelation that Trillian, a woman whom I believed to be pretty self-aware and independent, was lauding the comeback of the most ridiculously misogynistic gaming icon in history. I think that’s legitimately a shocker.

  2. The “It’s just a game” mentality is absolutely going to hold video games back as a culturally and artistically significant medium. I would talk about this, but there’s tons of editorials that have talked this subject to death on the internet. All I’m gonna say is, if you’ve ever been annoyed, upset, saddened, felt ostracized, or stereotyped by any sort of stigma surrounding the hobby of video games, you are propagating the stigma by downplaying their significance when you label them as “just games.”

  1. I was being facetious, but I guess I was too subtle. But thanks for standing for your ideals SG. :slight_smile:

Yeah, just to throw this out there, I don’t believe he’s a particularly good role model as far as videogame characters go, if for some insane reason, that’s what you think I’m implying. It’s pretty obvious that Mr. Nukem is a non-politically correct caricature that, if he were a real guy, would be that douchebag at the beach that would kick sand in the face of Gordon Freeman because Mr. Nukem has no real understanding of theoretical physics and/or he was never truly loved as a child. I understand that, as I am capable of grasping abstract concepts as well as knowing the difference between reality and the simulacrum thereof.

As for me, I like shooters as well as RPGs. About the only games I DON’T play are World of Warcraft and other pay-to-play games, because I personally think it’s stupid to keep paying for something you’ve already bought, but I digress. My point is, if I like it, I’ll play it, if I derive pleasure from taking out NPCs with rocket launchers and bathing in the pixellated blood of my enemies, or take my sweet time playing an online game of chess, it’s a preference on my own part. I’m not out to make a fuckin’ sociological statement on how fucked up it is or not that I just happen to be female. I’ll play whatever the fuck I want, demographics be damned.

/end rant

It is neither my place, nor was it my intention to question your judgment or personal ethics. It just seemed funny to me, is all. :stuck_out_tongue: Of course, I guess it would have been better if I had written “believe” as in the present tense in my previous post, so my bad on that.

Sometimes, the absurdly un-PC characters are fun to play as precisely because of that reason. If handled well, and made funny, it’s a kind of refuge in audacity. If you know to not take them seriously, you can sometimes see them as a kind of indictment of people that hold those opinions for real.

Apart from the general risqueness, DN3D was a good shooter when it came out. I admit people have already gotten a good story out of the odyssey that is the making of DNF, but if it wants to leave any further legacy, it too ought to be a good game.

I feel like the ridiculous misogyny of Duke sort of turns it inside out; his super-macho, one-liner spewing, cigar-chomping, gun-toting, lady-ogling image mocks the traditional action hero, both in video games and throughout media. He’s a titanically (emphasis on the “tit”) exaggerated parody of the hypermasculine hero, and the games are similarly parodies of his world, in which ladies are just there for massive boobs when they get rescued. If anything, I’d say it’s less sexist than a lot of games, simply because the sexism is entirely intentional for its own comedic value; it’s a satire of what a lot of video games/action movies do entirely genuinely.

I said as such in much fewer words.

MORE WORDS THE BETTER!!!

Well, yeah, but titanically wasn’t one of them.