Funny how Gamespot features adverts like "Hottest WAG of Each NFL Team" and "Top 15 WAGs of NBA Players" below this article. Criticising the sex appeal of Juliet Starling and Lara Croft kind of rings hollow when this site does the same thing to make money from referrals.
I supported the addition of female marines in Aliens: CM, for reasons this article went into. Gamespot posted a news story on a petition for female multiplayer characters in the middle of last year and it made sense, since the Alien franchise wouldn't have been as significant as it was without Ripley. Beyond that, however, I have no sympathy for the majority of issues feminist gamers have with modern gaming.
Take Colonial Marines as an example. Yes, it was riddled with flaws and ideally the developer would've had enough intelligence to realise the significance of women in the Alien series, but they didn't. When it came to their attention that they'd made a hash of things, however, they went out of their way to add them. And yet even that effort is criticised in articles like this one.
Same goes for the supposed objectification of female characters. Carolyn, you go from praising Samus and Lara Croft to criticising them for being "sex objects" only two paragraphs later. I've always found it bizarre that feminist video game critics would dismiss good female characters for their appearances. Think about Soul Calibur; nobody ever praises Talim, Xianghua, Seung Mina, Hilde, Amy, Cassandra and (at a push) Tira because they're too busy complaining about the appearance of Ivy, Taki and Sophitia. Three great characters, all dismissed by feminist critics because of the way they look. It baffles me that women would do that, since they're judging other women on their looks far, far more harshly than any male gamer ever would. They're the ones seeing them as sex objects to get rid of rather than interesting characters to keep.
Yet, even while Carolyn Petit writes this diatribe about Samus, Lara, Juliet Starling et al, she has the gall to refer to Ryan Creighton's sensible choice of leaving out non-male, non-white characters as "an absurd fear". Carolyn, you just wrote an entire article about the pitfalls of writing female characters, criticising some of the ones who fall into them, and you call Creighton's logical decision "absurd"?
It's like game developers can't win when trying to create female characters. The developer of Aliens: Colonial Marines tried and look what they received for their trouble; more criticism.
Oh, and this?:
"[...] women are secondary, optional, disposable."
... Women are the disposable sex? Carolyn, tell me, last time you played a game where you were slaughtering a ton of enemies without a second's thought, were they predominately male or female? Assuming they weren't monsters in a fantasy game, that is. I'm going to take a wild stab in the dark and guess that they were male. That's disposability.
So in other words, someone who has no interest in social media (like me) will still have to pay more for a more complicated controller with a button that they're never going to use.
Plenty of developers have marginalised single-player gamers by insisting on sending resources to develop needless multiplayer modes ... and now Sony seems determined to kill us off with a single button on the controller. It's hard to believe how hard I defended Sony at the start of this generation. Let's hope the other console developers don't follow suit.
Ugh, so games consoles continue to move further away from the games themselves and into social media. It's just more features aimed at the Call Of Duty crowd.
It's because of the marketing more than anything else. It's uncommon for games to get television adverts here, it's based on a franchise everybody knows and the adverts cherry-picked a few good lines to make it seem well-received.
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