Thank you, David Gaider

I have played video games since I was a little girl.  I was a wizard at Tetris.  I can still hum the Kid Icarus theme.  My brother and I even stopped trying to psychologically torment each other for two whole months while we put together the money to buy a Super Nintendo and Final Fantasy III.

But sometime around my high school years, I started to realize that my affection for video games was off-putting to people in a way that an interest in sports or trucks or other typical “boy” stuff wasn’t.  The problem was that the video game industry was starting to get a (not undeserved) reputation for misogyny and video games were aggressively and exclusively marketed to horny straight guys.  Lara Croft “posed” topless to advertise the latest “Tomb Raider” game.  The excellent fighting game “Dead or Alive” had a “bouncing breasts” mode.*  “Grand Theft Auto” had the infamous “kill a prostitute” option.

This was not an industry interested in reaching out to its female customers.  This was an industry that had no notion that such customers existed.

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What I’m hoping for in Dragon Age 2

So I’ve been a little cranky recently. Actually, scratch “a little cranky” and replace it with “borderline homicidal.”  (I ask you, internet, how am I supposed to feel when PDU administrators saddle me with RAs who do not know how to insert footnotes into a Microsoft Word document?)  But whenever I start feeling stabby, I simply recite my mantra:

Image from Amazon.com

“You can’t kill anyone right now.  Dragon Age 2 comes out in March.”

Yes.  I’m that excited.

I am a big fan of Dragon Age: Origins, as this post will attest.  If Dragon Age 2 is as good as Origins, or even almost as good, I will be a happy gamer.  But I have to admit that I also have a wishlist of things I think the sequel could do even better than its predecessor.  Here’s what I’m hoping for from Dragon Age 2.

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I’m cheating … on my operating system

I’ve been a devoted Mac girl since 2005, when I replaced my creaking, crash-happy Dell laptop with a shiny new PowerBook. That PowerBook, by the way, is still going strong, and I’ve since added an iMac desktop to my little Mac family.

But last week, I partitioned my desktop’s hard drive and installed Windows XP on my Mac. Why would I do such a thing? Why would I ever consider booting my computer in XP when I have the beauty of Snow Leopard available to me?

Two words: Mass Effect.

The biggest drawback to owning a Mac, by far, is the lack of gaming options. A few games, like Bioshock and Dragon Age: Origins, have released Mac versions, and I hope this becomes a trend.  But unfortunately, based on the reviews and research I’ve read, Mac versions of computer games are usually inferior to their PC counterparts.*  The general consensus is that if you want to play games on a Mac, your graphics card and processor need to blow the minimum specs out of the water, otherwise the game will freeze, crash, and be painfully slow. And many games are still not available for Mac, including Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2.

So now I have two operating systems on my computer.  I still use OS X for all of my dissertation work, but at the end of the day, when my brain has been thoroughly re-fried, I’ll reboot in XP and play some Mass Effect as I wait for my hardworking husband to come home so we can fix dinner.  I feel like I’m cheating on OS X, but really, my occasional forays into infidelity ultimately reaffirm my commitment to my true partner.  Gaming ability aside, I kind of hate XP.  What kind of operating system downloads updates to the F drive and then gets angry when it can’t install the downloaded files from the C drive?  You didn’t save the files on the C drive, genius!

Also, I do like the “Windows 7 was my idea” ad campaign, but if I see them bragging about their fabulously innovative task bar one more time, I’m going to throw something at the TV.  I’ve had a task bar in OS X for the past five years.

Straw poll: are you a Mac or a PC?  Why?

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* Blizzard, the company behind World of Warcraft and Diablo, is an exception here.

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The end of civilization is near

Last Wednesday, I made my usual visit to Penny Arcade, little suspecting that I was about to be confronted with irrefutable evidence that the earth is doomed.  But I regret to inform you that the apocalypse draws near.  A company called GameCrush is making money by charging guys for the privilege of playing games with attractive women over XBox Live.

Look, GameCrush users.  Here’s the thing.  There actually are plenty of women who would play Halo with you for free, if the guys on XBox Live stopped acting like such creeps.  Any woman on a game server whose username or profile picture indicates that she’s a female will be instantly inundated with annoying friend requests (“u sound hawt, r u hawt????  friend mee!1!”), sexually explicit come-ons, and sexist garbage from guys who think video games are their turf and girls don’t belong.  Guess what?  None of these things make us want to talk to you.  They make us cancel our XBox Live subscriptions.

So instead of paying money for what is essentially a glorified phone sex line, you could, I don’t know, work on improving your interactions with women you’re *not* paying to talk to you.  They are out there!  Just avoid saying any of the ten things on Hawty McBloggy’s list, and you’re already several standard deviations above the mean on the gamer behavior bell curve.  If you really want to contribute, start calling your friends on it when they say the things on the list.  Then maybe female gamers won’t feel quite so compelled to hide behind usernames like “FrankBobJones42,” eschew the use of profile photos, and/or close their accounts in exasperation.

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Game Review: Final Fantasy XIII

If you’ve followed my video game blogging, you probably know that I am a huge fan of the Final Fantasy series of role-playing games.  Final Fantasy III is still one of my all-time favorite games, and Econo Man and I currently use Final Fantasy XII as our benchmark for all RPGs.  So, naturally, we ordered Final Fantasy XIII immediately after its release on March 16, and joyfully popped the game into our PlayStation 3 mere hours after it arrived on our doorstep.

Image from Amazon.com

And?  I like it.  But I don’t love it.

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