Sexism logic fail

Game is perceived to be sexist due to the fact that male protagonist must rescue female from the forces of bad.  In an attempt to nullify the perceived sexism, the game is re-created (plagiarized) with the male and female roles reversed.

…and this is considered NOT sexist how?

Murdering a murderer for committing murder doesn’t solve anything.  In the end, you still have someone who committed murder that is still alive and standing in the end, and is technically probably wanted by the authorities.  It’s a little extreme of an analogy but I think it’s valid; people who hack video games they think are sexist, and make a game where females rescue males aren’t solving anything either; in the end, they’ve produced a sexist game themselves.

Over the last few weeks, there’s been some buzz on the interwebs about sexism in video games, and two particular instances where people have hacked some classic Nintendo games in an attempt to fight an imaginary fight against sexism in video games.  One guy hacked Donkey Kong, and reversed the roles of Mario and Pauline, so that the player plays as Pauline who has to jump barrels, hammer living fireballs, and climb ladders to rescue Mario, who has been kidnapped by Donkey Kong.  A week later, someone hacked The Legend of Zelda, so that you play through the entire game as Princess Zelda, in the quest to gather the pieces of the Triforce and defeat Ganon and rescue Link.

What we have here are people attempting to fight against perceived misogyny by employing misandry.

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Imagine eSports playing sports games

Yeah, I know I take a lot of time and use a lot of words to criticize professional gaming, but really it is very silly to me, and I have a hard time grasping that it’s become so big.  It’s watching people, playing video games; sure it takes talent, but I could watch people playing video games in lots of places.  And based on the frequency in which I see ads for “whatever regional world championship tournament” when I’m playing LoL, it’s hard to imagine that any one particular title has any meaning.

But the funniest thing for me is when I see pictures of the tournaments, and they’ve got these pretty grandiose graphic treatments, and they try to present the matches as if they were like an actual sport.  Out of all of the live graphics that they use, none of them stands out more to me than when a LoL tournament goes to the effort to present a startling lineup card, much like it would be in an NBA or an NCAA game, since it’s five starters.

And then it got me thinking about how LoL positions would compare to basketball positions.  I would use the analogies as such:

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Ranking the women of Resident Evil

I’d been tossing the idea for this post in my head for a little while, but I wanted to actually play through all of Resident Evil 6 before doing so. I don’t base my opinions on simply just appearance, although it does probably play a good part of it; but I also like to learn a little bit about the characters themselves, and see what kind of characters they are, and whether or not their personas, attitudes and actions are annoying or not.

That being said, I do fancy myself as a very well versed fan of the Resident Evil series in general. I’ve played just about every single one of the canon games, so I’d like to think I know what I’m talking about, but ultimately in the end, it’s still a personal opinion list, and of course, it’s objectifying women, but I don’t deny that I’ve been known to make some tasteless chauvinistic remarks before, so it’s not like it should be a surprise to anyone.

Anyway, without further ado, from worst to best, I rank the womens of Resident Evil. Also word of caution, I may give up some spoilers here and there if you, or I, am not careful with how I write this.

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Final Fantasy really is going downhill, fast

Earlier in the week, I was reading this article about the supposed slow dying of the Final Fantasy franchise, and it made me think about my own fandom in the series as I was growing up.  For the most part, I agree that the franchise as a whole is a shell of its former self, and I’m not going to pretend like I was nearly a vested fan to care so much about the writers, producers, directors, or whatever positions people held that made the old games great that when they left or moved on, yeah I guess I should have been concerned about the direction of the future games, but I didn’t.

If I were asked to pinpoint the precise spot where the series began its gradual turn downhill, I would say it was from the moment that Final Fantasy X-2 was conceived.  It was at this point did the series break a two-decade old tradition of never making a direct sequel to any one particular game, despite the potential that any one of them may have had.  Not only did FFX2 break the tradition, it ended up being a pretty shitty game by all popularly reviewed standards.  This commenter seems to have nailed how I thought about it:

But FFX-2 was where it became clear to me that Final Fantasy was dead. It was an insipid, grindy package of fan-service that not only insulted fans of the classic Final Fantasy games, but also fans of the original FFX, completely undercutting the original story by bastardizing its own characters and ruining the (ostensibly) tragic sacrifice of Tidus at the end of FFX. That’s when I really woke up and realized that the series I had fallen in love with was gone, turned into a shambling, undead mockery of itself.

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I haven’t really done this in a while

Typically whenever I write, it’s at work, and I’m on some variant of downtime.  Currently, I’m actually at home, and the urge to write about something came upon me entirely while I’m on my very own spare time.  This hasn’t really happened to me in quite some time, so I figured out why not write and see what comes out.

I don’t want to say that the last few weekends have sucked by any means, but the truth of the matter is that I haven’t had any time to myself throughout the last three weekends.  That in itself was kind of problematic, and it got to a point where it began affecting my moods very obviously, as I hadn’t really had any time to unwind, decompress, or simply relax.  Given the circumstances, I wouldn’t hesitate to do it again because that’s what friends do, but I’m also not going to deny that it really was taking its toll on me as well the longer it went on.

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This is actually logically brilliant

I don’t like to give credit to the Chinese too often, but from a logic standpoint, I have to say that this father came up with an absolutely brilliant idea: hire ringers to target, harass and deter his deadbeat son from playing an online video game.

I really do believe it’s brilliant.  Kids are such retards these days that any attempt to deter them from doing what they like by methods such as lecture, nagging, or straight up restriction would probably lead to a rebellious reaction to where their desire to do these things just to piss you off in addition to doing what they like.  But in the case of a game addict, by essentially attempting to make the game no fun for him seems to be more of an effective method to breaking the game’s hold over the player; when a game is so difficult to overcome, eventually it will become un-fun to the point where it’s not worth playing anymore.

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Initial thoughts on Resident Evil 6

If the portrayal of China in Resident Evil 6 is anything like it is in real life, I’m pretty sure I would never want to go there ever in my life.  I’m just kidding; I’ve seen enough HK cinema to already know that I’d never want to go there ever in my life already.

In spite of the fact that the general consensus on RE6 was less than positive, I know that I don’t give a rat’s ass about game reviews, and decide for myself on whether or not it’s something I like or not.  For the most part, I ignore all reviews whether they were good or bad, but it was hard to not take notice of every time RE6 was subtly mentioned whenever there were year-end articles about failed games or the year’s biggest disappointments.

I got RE6 as a Christmas gift, and I’ve been playing it recently.  I’m four chapters into Leon’s mission, and have not started anyone else’s, and I’ve just entered China.  And my impressions of the game so far?  To be perfectly honest, I’m really not that impressed so far.

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