feminist blogs

I’ve been meaning to write some more game-related posts, especially in the wake of the very fun presentation that Roy and I gave at WAM! 2008. For now, however, I just have a review of Mighty Jill Off, a free downloadable PC game that I recommend you all check out. It’s bound to be one of the more notable offbeat, indie, retro, lesbian-BDSM-themed jumping games of the year. OK, so it’s probably also the only game that fits those criteria. Ever.

Let’s get the preliminaries out of the way: this is not a porn-tastic game replete with breast physics and girl-on-girl action to appeal to adolescent gamer dudes. If anything it’s closer to the opposite, and the theme actually makes a disturbing amount of sense. (And not only because the creator seems to be kind of into BDSM and fetish stuff herself.)

It’s long been noted by game scholars and humorists alike that there’s a masochistic quality inherent in many games. Hemmed in by the demands of an almost arbitary system of constraints and rules, you willingly submit to the system in search of an elusive and transitory experience of “fun,” to the extent where you let most of your thought processes be taken over.
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That’s right, I said scrubbing. Scrubbing sweat off of underage boys in a locker room. It’s central part of a new game for the Nintendo DS called Duel Love, in which you play a female transfer student who ends up as the personal trainer for a secret “Fight Club” at her new high school. That’s right, the companies that brought you Pac-Man, Tekken, Power Rangers, Tamagotchi and many more now bring you… scrubbing down sweaty boys and giving them massages!

Romance comics for girls, often featuring delicate, beautiful boys who fall in love with the plucky or cipher-like heroine — or, just as often, fall in love with each other — are nothing new in Japan. It used to be that you could pretend this was just another Or in the United States; check the Manga section of your local Barnes & Noble. Dating games based in similar scenarios (often called otome, the Japanese word for maiden) are nothing new either, but they’re getting to be bigger and bigger-budget projects. And utilizing new technology as well… as you can see in the trailer below, you have to actually scrub back and forth with the Nintendo DS styles, and here’s a picture instructing the player to blow into the microphone to clear away the steamed-up shower stalls. Why, whatever on earth for?

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Everyone probably already knows about the nude patches for The Sims. You can also pull the bed out from under your Sims with a cheat code if you can convince your horny Sims to get some nooky in bed. I remember reading of some MMORPGs having problems with groups being oriented towards sex play.

Now, someone playing the online game Second Life has filed suit against another player - for copying a sex bed, which violates copyright. According to an article about the case, "Kevin Alderman operates Eros LLC, a maker of 'adult' items such as the SexGen bed, a piece of virtual furniture that allows Second Life users to simulate more than 150 sex acts. The bed retails for 12,000 Linden dollars ($46). The 'John Doe' lawsuit accuses Volkov Catteneo of unlawfully copying the SexGen bed and selling it on for approximately 4,000 Linden dollars. The beds are sold as 'no-copy' objects, which means that avatars can use them but should not be able to copy them. Alderman has insisted that he does not know how a version of the SexGen bed which can be copied became available."

I have heard of Second Life, but I had no interest in playing it. I prefer to play God when I play with my Sims. I set them on fire. Electrocute them. Drown them. Get them into love triangles. Have them live with people they hate. All in all, good, honest fun.

The only reason the Second Life/SexGen bed caught my attention is because your avatar can engage in 150 different sex acts. Wow. 150? That beats the Kama Sutra. I looked at the Second Life site to get a better grip on what kinds of sex acts can be done on this bed. I found one bed that has 14 cuddle and 13 sex animations - whatever that means.

I found more.

One bed going for L$999 (I think that's virtual money) has 62 cuddle and sex animations, including doggy, 69, blowjob, missionary, taste, ride, and cowgirl.

Another bed included various positions for sex, bondage, and cuddling.

I'm going to take a second look at this game, if you can really do all that stuff. Does anyone who is reading play Second Life? If you do, can you give more information about how the SexGen bed works, and what else is fun about the game? Is it a live game, where you get to create an avatar?

My birthday is in five days, and I want a Myst Island birthday cake!!! I have been a major fan of the entire series of Myst games for over ten years. That would be Myst, Riven, Exile, Revelation, and Uru. I have an account on Uru, but I haven't played lately. Gotta start that up again, now that Uru Live has been resurrected.

This is such a cool-looking cake, and it has the island down pat.

[Via Boing Boing. Also check out the CakeHenge post on Boing Boing.]

The game "Grand Theft Auto" was already in trouble because of the "Hot Coffee" hidden code that had shown explicit sex. Now, prostitutes are protesting the game because it encourages the assaulting and murdering of prostitutes. According to the web page of The Sex Workers Outreach Project USA (SWOP-USA), "the group objects to the negative content and scenes in Grand Theft Auto that "encourage the denigration and destruction of prostitutes." "

There's a new Lara Croft, and her name is Karima Adebibe. I thought that Tomb Raider: The Angel Of Darkness was the last one, but apparently Tomb Raider: Legend, which is due to be released in April, is the next in line. Adebibe will play Lara in the game. I hope the controls work better than they did in the previous Tomb Raider game. I couldn't finish the game because the controls were so squiggy.

I don't think that Adebibe will play Lara in the game. She's going to portray Lara in promotions of the game. I'm most familiar with Rhona Mitra, who has also portrayed Lara in promotions. She recently had a large role in Nip/Tuck. I have one of her music CDs, called Lara Croft: Female Icon. It's not bad.

World Of Warcraft maps operate just like Google Maps. Now I can find out where the Crazy Cat Lady lives any time I like. Too bad it doesn't give driving directions. Since you ride horses, tigers, and mythical creatures in WoW, the maps would have to give those kinds of directions.

I have never played the game "Doom". I haven't seen the movie, either. I know that "Doom" is a fore-runner to other similar games, like "Resident Evil", "Half-Life", and "Silent Hill". The Washington Post is talking about the "Doom" movie. The Post interviewed members of a gaming league, and those people aren't too happy with the movie.

If the strong, boisterous reaction of 14 members of George Washington University's Gaming League is any indication, "Doom" is not quite bleh , more like blah .

"It's nothing to write home about," says Graham Musynske, the league's secretary. "The movie was all right, not Oscar-worthy or anything," adds the 20-year-old, "and thank God I didn't have to pay for it."

The league, which meets on Wednesdays for an hour and holds regular "gaming nights" at GWU's Marvin Center, attended a free advance screening of "Doom" on Tuesday night at the Cineplex Odeon near Tenleytown. The players stuck around after the show, mourning the sad, sorry state of video game movies.

"It's definitely below the 'Resident Evil' movies," Sarah Prisley, 21, the league's event coordinator, says to Paul Liao, the group's PR guy, referring to "Doom."

"I think it's below the first 'Mortal Kombat,' " opines Liao, 22, furrowing his brow, "but better than the second 'Mortal Kombat.' "

I have played "Resident Evil" and "Tomb Raider". Both games were turned into movies that apparently didn't do very well. Still, I liked them, at least the first ones. The second ones weren't anything to get excited about. One movie about video games that was actually quite good was probably the first movie of its kind - "Tron".

There has been a lot of criticism of turning video games into movies. Usually, the movies suck. The game platforms don't provide enough information about the characters to make a good movie. Other critics say that Hollywood is dumbing down and selling out by basing movies on video games. I agree with that. It's the lazy way of making a movie without taking too much effort. Plus, the movie makers are hoping that fans of the games will come out in droves to see the movies. I don't think that has happened.

"Tomb Raider" would have been a great basis for a movie, but neither movie was all that great. I did like the first one better than the second one. A lot of the appeal for me was casting Angelina Jolie as Lara Croft. Even before the movies came out, I knew that she would be perfect for the part. I am a major "Tomb Raider" fan. I own all of the dioramas, several of the action figures, mouse mats, a pewter figurine of Lara Croft, lots of comic books based on the game, and two bath towels with images from the game. The comic books could have helped provide some great ideas and background on Lara Croft and her adventures. What Jolie really needed was a good script. She portrayed Lara as darker than she seemed in the game and the comics, but I think she did a good job.

There are some games that I think would be great movies, mainly because they have well-developed leading characters and great plots. Three that come to mind are the entire "Myst" series, "The Longest Journey" and "Syberia". If you add the "Tomb Raider" games, those games are my favorites. "The Longest Journey" and "Syberia" are adventure games that are so good they've won awards. Another favorite of mine is "Silent Hill", which I understand is being made into a movie. I have no idea how that will work out.

"Myst" is interesting in that The Sci Fi Channel was going to make a miniseries based on it, but the makers of the game had backed out when they didn't like how the miniseries was going. That was probably a good thing. "Myst" fanatics such as myself cannot see anyone other than Rand Miller playing Atrus. I'm afraid that The Sci Fi Channel would cast someone terrible like Eric Roberts as the villian, Gehn (Atrus' father). While I'm sorry that there won't be a miniseries based on "Myst", I'm glad that a dreadful one isn't going to be made.

I will probably see "Doom" when it comes out on DVD. It shouldn't be too hard to find the game and play it. I'll probably enjoy it.

Small steps, small steps...

I always thought that the Holodeck was one of the better ideas from Star Trek, as the most addictive drug ever made. I mean think about it, once in the world of your dreams, you'd never come out, until the coroner came to get you.

Well, MMOs (who happen to be pretty addictive alrady) are the current small steps to the Holodeck of the future. Chalk off one more small step. Looks like there's a present day setting MMO which will focus on social relationshps coming out soon.

As MMOs move away from focusing on fantasy based themes and sword fighting and move toward "reality" themes with "reality interactions, the more mainstream these experiences will get. As an aside, the best selling PC game of all time is The Sims, which is also "reality" based, and isn't really a game by definition, it is a toy (a game restricts play since the goals a pre-defined for you,while a toy unbounds play since the players determine the goals.)

Much like a Holodeck.

To those of you with kids (or who are still kids) jumping up and down for the next best thing, be afraid, be very afraid. There's a bit 'o crack cocaine coming to you from Billy boy and the gang in Redmond, WA which will be hitting the shelf this Christmas called the Xbox 360 (Xbox 2 in simple terms.)

Caveat Emptor I: Yep, all in all it's just another console platform, but WOWZA, the out-the-door price of the base unit will be anywhere from $400 to $500, and GameStop has some bundles which will go from $700 to $2,000! The base price may actually go higher because of energy and economic disruptions compounding supply and demand.

Caveat Emptor II: I have not kept up with internal Microsoft documentation since our base closing but the last I had heard is that the Xbox 360 will not come with a hard disk (the Xbox 1 has a 10GB disk.) Why does it matter? Well, the Xbox 1 runs a core Windows Operating System and all Windows OSs use virtual memory (the disk takes the place of RAM when RAM runs out,) and I also know of a number of Xbox 1 games that need quite a bit of that disk space for non-virtual memory uses. The bottom line is that a few? some? several? many? of the Xbox 1 games may not work with the Xbox 360 and very likely you'll have to buy a hard disk addon... ka-ching again. If you already have an Xbox 1, make sure your favorite games will be compatibe before you turn it into a doorstop (a function it performs particularly well, by the way.)