Day 17- games with personality (and also sexism)
*rages*
WHYYY is it that every good popular game with personality is either mostly or entirely sexist?!
okay, so I'm actually talking about exactly three games.
1- Rayman Origins
this game is utterly, completely, devastingly beautiful. It has perfect, and I mean perfect, animations for its play style. It's a Mario-type platformer that's even more surreal than mario. Rayman, the main character, is a person with a body and a head and hands and feet. No arms, no legs. It's not that ze has a strange looking body; ze just has... invisible, I guess... arms and legs.
Maybe a picture would be more descriptive, since I don't want to spend a long time describing the characters.
So yeah. SUPER expressive and interesting characters, but NO playable female characters. That wouldn't be at all bad (the characters aren't exactly human) except that they ALL have male-assigned voices. What's worse, there are a few female characters, and they are DOA Volleyball bad. They're NPC's that you have to save- because they're female? *rages*- to get new powers. You chase this monster thing that captures them across the level, and it's fast and wonderful and a perfect difficulty, where I always got it just as it was getting frustrating...
But what's worse, is they are all in awful boobs-count-as-armor revealing clothing. In a fucking kids game.
And if that wasn't bad enough, the annoying unskipable points counter is a phallic symbol... that an NPC humps as it fills up. I love the game, but I pretty much have to walk away and mute it every time I beat a level. Not exactly a good incentive.
So I play it rarely, and love it when I do, and put it down when the sexism and phallic imagery gets to be too much for me. It's so frustrating, because it's such a beautiful game in every other way.
2- Smallworld (a board game)
Smallworld has soooo much personality! It's a fantasy game that's very vaguely like Risk: spend all night rolling dice, in that you have armies. This concludes the similarity with Risk.
It's more of a rise-and-fall-of-great-civilizations board game, and it does that FANTASTICALLY, with great rules and great images. Here's some of the faction images.
But. And there's always this but. The females are scantily clad and in ridiculous, not-possibly-functional poses. It doesn't bother me nearly as much as Rayman, but I think that's because it's not quite as in-your-face-unskippable-animated-humping. I still wish there was at least a few females in quality battle gear. Or you know, a decent ratio of male-assigned to female-assigned characters. This link is the main add for the game, and the bottom right hover-image shows how bad the characters are.
Smallworld's official website
And it's especially annoying, because the game has a wonderful mechanic, and combines the well-balanced-ness of most games that came out of Germany in the 90's (Settlers, Ticket to Ride, Power Grid) with the personality of American designer games. It's also highly re-playable, since there's a set-up randomization, and no randomness in combat, so the focus really is on the rise and fall of great civilizations. But alas, there's the bikini problem.
Also, and this is really strange, the manual always ALWAYS uses male pronouns. This bothers me even more than Dominion, which uses all male pronouns on its cards.
3- League of Legends.
Arg. I can't even start right now. League at least has decent skins for every female character I could play, though the defaults tended to be bikini-tastic. I might come back to this one later; it's such a huge game (there's probably 150 playable characters) that I seriously doubt it.
In summary, I'm tired of how blatantly sexist a lot of good games are. The first two are mentioned are serious offenders. League at least gives the option to make characters not quite so bad.
WHYYY is it that every good popular game with personality is either mostly or entirely sexist?!
okay, so I'm actually talking about exactly three games.
1- Rayman Origins
this game is utterly, completely, devastingly beautiful. It has perfect, and I mean perfect, animations for its play style. It's a Mario-type platformer that's even more surreal than mario. Rayman, the main character, is a person with a body and a head and hands and feet. No arms, no legs. It's not that ze has a strange looking body; ze just has... invisible, I guess... arms and legs.
Maybe a picture would be more descriptive, since I don't want to spend a long time describing the characters.
So yeah. SUPER expressive and interesting characters, but NO playable female characters. That wouldn't be at all bad (the characters aren't exactly human) except that they ALL have male-assigned voices. What's worse, there are a few female characters, and they are DOA Volleyball bad. They're NPC's that you have to save- because they're female? *rages*- to get new powers. You chase this monster thing that captures them across the level, and it's fast and wonderful and a perfect difficulty, where I always got it just as it was getting frustrating...
But what's worse, is they are all in awful boobs-count-as-armor revealing clothing. In a fucking kids game.
And if that wasn't bad enough, the annoying unskipable points counter is a phallic symbol... that an NPC humps as it fills up. I love the game, but I pretty much have to walk away and mute it every time I beat a level. Not exactly a good incentive.
So I play it rarely, and love it when I do, and put it down when the sexism and phallic imagery gets to be too much for me. It's so frustrating, because it's such a beautiful game in every other way.
2- Smallworld (a board game)
Smallworld has soooo much personality! It's a fantasy game that's very vaguely like Risk: spend all night rolling dice, in that you have armies. This concludes the similarity with Risk.
It's more of a rise-and-fall-of-great-civilizations board game, and it does that FANTASTICALLY, with great rules and great images. Here's some of the faction images.
But. And there's always this but. The females are scantily clad and in ridiculous, not-possibly-functional poses. It doesn't bother me nearly as much as Rayman, but I think that's because it's not quite as in-your-face-unskippable-animated-humping. I still wish there was at least a few females in quality battle gear. Or you know, a decent ratio of male-assigned to female-assigned characters. This link is the main add for the game, and the bottom right hover-image shows how bad the characters are.
Smallworld's official website
And it's especially annoying, because the game has a wonderful mechanic, and combines the well-balanced-ness of most games that came out of Germany in the 90's (Settlers, Ticket to Ride, Power Grid) with the personality of American designer games. It's also highly re-playable, since there's a set-up randomization, and no randomness in combat, so the focus really is on the rise and fall of great civilizations. But alas, there's the bikini problem.
Also, and this is really strange, the manual always ALWAYS uses male pronouns. This bothers me even more than Dominion, which uses all male pronouns on its cards.
3- League of Legends.
Arg. I can't even start right now. League at least has decent skins for every female character I could play, though the defaults tended to be bikini-tastic. I might come back to this one later; it's such a huge game (there's probably 150 playable characters) that I seriously doubt it.
In summary, I'm tired of how blatantly sexist a lot of good games are. The first two are mentioned are serious offenders. League at least gives the option to make characters not quite so bad.