T w e n t y S i d e d
This strip is titled, “Vulture Milk”. No, I’m not telling you why. You’ll have to read it yourself.
Stolen Pixels #7:
A Question for the Ladies
Yesterday’s discussion of Geralt got me thinking, which is never a good thing and should be avoided at all costs. But it’s too late now, and I can’t rest until I get the answer to a simple four-paragraph question:
We have many fetching female leads in videogames. In fact, off the top of my head I can’t think of ever seeing any plain or unattractive ladies on the cover of a videogame. Maybe my standards are low, but it seems that most are either genuinely attractive in a realistic sort of way (Alyx Vance) or idealized fantasy supermodel boob-job Maxim-style attractive. (I’m not personally such a fan of the latter, but I’m also a grouchy and possibly senile old man who has tastes out of alignment with most of the rest of our culture.) At any rate: Women protagonists in videogames are invariably attractive on some level.
(Let’s just pretend I made a “John Romero is a hot chick” joke somewhere in that last paragraph. I know I’m supposed to, but after all these years my heart just isn’t in it anymore.)
But as far as I can tell, the same doesn’t seem to be true of the men in American / European games. (We’re ignoring Japanese games, which is another whole subject entirely and will threadjack this whole discussion before it even gets going if we don’t disqualify them right off the bat.) I realize tastes vary, and answers are likely to be all over the map, but I can’t help but notice that aside from their muscles, most male videogame characters don’t look anything like the average male sex symbol. “Grizzled” is a word that can be used to describe about 90% of them. “Horribly deformed or scarred” applies to a good percentage as well. And of course there is the ever popular category of “faceless“.
But there must be a few good-looking men in the world of videogames. For my own curiosity, would you care to list who you think is attractive? And in case you’ve forgotten the title of this post already, this really is a question for women. If I wanted the clueless half-guesses of a hetrosexual male I would have just asked myself instead of typing 373 words on the subject.
The Witcher:
Meet Geralt
The Witcher is a role-playing game, as opposed to an RPG. While theoretically the same thing, the acronym “RPG” has mutated to encompass games in which you control a soulless empty shell of an avatar with no personality or history who levels up as the story goes on around him. So I’m calling The Witcher a role-playing game instead of using the slippery acronym to highlight the fact that you play a role here. Ergo, you pretend to be someone else. The problem is that this persona is set in stone before you even install the game. At the onset you are handed an immutable character, created by the designers, who then give you almost no freedom to deviate from their vision.
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| Hello ladies. Meet Geralt, the famous Witcher and even more famous sex machine. You know you want him. Kiss his leathery pockmarked face and run your fingers through his mop of stringy grey hair. He’s just like Brad Pitt, except without the good looks, wealth, talent, or personal hygiene. |
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “The Witcher:
Meet Geralt”
Charisma Penalty
So my health is not so good. Nothing I want to bore you with. If I complained every single time something went wrong with my health this blog would turn into a pathetic dribble of whining and bellyaching. None of us would enjoy that. I’m the unlucky sort to have been born with a low Constitution score. You could make the case that constitution is my dump stat. Not a wise way to distribute one’s points, but sadly we don’t really get a choice in the matter, do we?
Things took a bad turn for me a couple of weeks ago and I’m still recovering. Then my PC broke down a week later.
I was just patting myself on the back that I’d managed to get through these hardships undetected, without it lowering the quality of the content here. But I’ve noticed several posts from different people letting me know that I seem to be exceedingly grumpy, snarky, and profane in comparison to my usual self. So I guess I’m not as clever or as stoic as I’d hoped.
Ah well. Do try to enjoy this extra-spicy version of the site until I get back to normal.
At least I’m not going all emo on you. Er. Until just now.
A Counter-Offer
I’m (sigh) installing Steam, when I see a special offer pop up:
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Here’s a counter-offer, you clueless marketroids: You give me a version of the game without any of that SecuROM / Online Activation nonsense, and I’ll pay you full price. (And for those who keep forwarding news stories saying 2KGames has removed the BioShock DRM: This is not true and it breaks my heart to see 2KGames getting away with making such claims. Stop it. You’re killing me.) The game is long since cracked. You guys have nothing to gain by continuing to cling to this DRM. This is doubly true of the Steam version of the game, since you have your online activation running on top of theirs. This means that if either Steam or the BioShock servers go down, legit customers (and only legit customers) get locked out of their game.
All the pirates who want it, have it. The only people who don’t have it are potential customers like me who won’t stand for this septic nonsense.
You’re having a sale on SecuROM? How nice. Go piss up a rope.
Flooded
Aaron Acevedo is an RPG artist. According to the Podgecast, he’s worked on games like A Song of Ice & Fire, Call of Cthulhu, Deadlands, Dungeons & Dragons, Legend of the Five Rings, Solomon Kane, Suzerain, Warlord, The Wheel of Time, and World of Darkness.
Last Wednesday a flash flood struck his home. So, he’s having a print sale to help manage the costs. If you’d like to get some sweet art and help a guy out, then just stop by his site for details..
Fallout 3:
Questions
So, E3 is over. The gaming press has seen Fallout 3 and they’re all giddy with the pretty graphics and talking about how the game was one of the best in show. Everyone is excited and happy and looking forward to it, which means that now is the optimal time for me to kick the piss out of the thing.
I have other games here on my shelf. Games that are stupid, bland, boring, shallow or inane. Some of them were the most “exciting” titles in the E3’s of yesteryear. I know it’s easy to impress someone with a twenty-minute playthrough on a jumbo monitor at a convention when you can overwhelm them with spectacle and nobody has time to measure the depth of the gameplay. A good showing at E3 means your game doesn’t have any obvious fun-killing issues, but it doesn’t mean you’re ready to step into the shoes of a legendary franchise like Fallout.
The original Fallout wasn’t a sexy tech demo. It was an ass-ugly isometric game with cheap 2D sprites that offered incredible freedom, immersion, atmosphere, story, characters, and dialog. None of those attributes are things which can really be conveyed or measured within the ephemeral context of E3. I remember how things went with Oblivion, which was the last game Bethesda put out, and it’s only because of my great love for Fallout that I’m even entertaining the notion of paying attention to this game.
If I’d been at E3, here are the questions I would have asked the guys from Bethesda, probably right before I was escorted off the premises for being a pain in the ass and a killjoy:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Fallout 3:
Questions”
From The Archives:
This Scene Breaks a Character
Small changes to the animations can have a huge impact on how the audience interprets a scene.
The Game That Ruined Me
Be careful what you learn with your muscle-memory, because it will be very hard to un-learn it.
Spec Ops: The Line
A videogame that judges its audience, criticizes its genre, and hates its premise. How did this thing get made?
Black Desert Online
This Korean title would be the greatest MMO ever made if not for the horrendous monetization system. And the embarrassing translation. And the terrible progression. And the developer's general apathy towards its western audience.
Shamus Plays WOW
Ever wondered what's in all those quest boxes you've never bothered to read? Get ready: They're more insane than you might expect.
Project Frontier
A programming project where I set out to make a gigantic and complex world from simple data.
Netscape 1997
What did web browsers look like 20 years ago, and what kind of crazy features did they have?
Best. Plot Twist. Ever.
Few people remember BioWare's Jade Empire, but it had a unique setting and a really well-executed plot twist.
Quakecon Keynote 2013 Annotated
An interesting but technically dense talk about gaming technology. I translate it for the non-coders.
The Best of 2018
I called 2018 "The Year of Good News". Here is a list of the games I thought were interesting or worth talking about that year.