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RBA Starblade posted:For reference, back when Super Metroid came out, Samus looked like this. This is also probably the last time the armor looks like it could fit a human being in it, too. Later on the arms don't appear to attach to her shoulders and instead come straight out of the pauldrons, and the waist can't fit a human in it. Height 6'3 nearly 200 pounds, this lady can kick rear end all day. I think the closest they've gotten is her suit in Fusion, which to be fair was basically her skin. Oh and what's that the zero suit doesn't have loving heels built in goddamn what a novel idea. frank.club fucked around with this message at 02:08 on Jan 19, 2014 |
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Jan 19, 2014 02:06
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When you get the Dead or Alive people to do your game you get what you pay for.
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Jan 19, 2014 02:11
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The Dead or Alive guys only did the actual 'game design' part, not the character designs or writing. Correct me if I'm wrong, though.
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Jan 19, 2014 02:12
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Endorph posted:The Dead or Alive guys only did the actual 'game design' part, not the character designs or writing. Correct me if I'm wrong, though. You are correct. The game design wasn't bad, really. It's just everything else was so loving trash. It's easy to blame those guys I think because the dude in charge of direction also worked on Super Metroid.
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Jan 19, 2014 02:15
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Didn't know that. I guess I just assumed since it seemed like the obvious answer.
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Jan 19, 2014 02:18
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Acquire Currency! posted:Height 6'3 nearly 200 pounds, this lady can kick rear end all day. 
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Jan 19, 2014 02:26
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Thank you so much Panzer and Peach Style for submitting wonderful terrible games! There is somewhat of a derail about Metroid going on here, so I thought I'd weigh in and say that Metroid is not a "game for girls" as I am defining it for this thread, it is a game with a female protagonist. What Other M and "girl games" have in common is that they are both sexist, but Other M is still outside the scope of this thread. What I mean is, given the set of all sexist games S, and the set of all games marketed exclusively at little girls G, G is a subset of S, not the other way around.
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Jan 19, 2014 02:36
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Would games like tie-ins for "girl media", like the Twilight franchise, be considered "girl games"? I recently played through a lovely licensed Wii game for Mary Kate and Ashley because I hate myself, and it was quite the experience, let me tell you. I'd love to see that in here.
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Jan 19, 2014 02:40
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Kloro posted:This pretty excellent Polygon article about the rise of games and game marketing being specifically targeted at boys (and men) posits that it happened in the 90s, around the time the PS1 came along. So arguably before that girl games were just games. Why do marketing professionals always talk like that? You'd think they of all people could avoid presenting themselves like goddamn cartoon villains.
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Jan 19, 2014 02:42
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Really Pants posted:Why do marketing professionals always talk like that? You'd think they of all people could avoid presenting themselves like goddamn cartoon villains. I've heard that a common warning for people getting into marketing is "your social circle must include people not in marketing", because otherwise you will go completely insane and not even realize it.
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Jan 19, 2014 02:56
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Small Frozen Thing posted:I've heard that a common warning for people getting into marketing is "your social circle must include people not in marketing", because otherwise you will go completely insane and not even realize it. I think that applies to all industries. I work in insurance IT, and I know a few professional actuaries who are incapable of seeing the world in anything other than terms of risk and probability. Also, as a male person, I know several male people who do not have any female friends. These are the male people I tend not to bother talking about gender politics with. In summary: not having diversity in your life makes your brain rubbish.
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Jan 19, 2014 03:07
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Suspicious Dish posted:Would games like tie-ins for "girl media", like the Twilight franchise, be considered "girl games"? I recently played through a lovely licensed Wii game for Mary Kate and Ashley because I hate myself, and it was quite the experience, let me tell you. I'm pretty sure one of my associates is trying to record that game as we speak! Or something similar, because he had it running on Dolphin. That definitely counts for this thread, as we've already seen with stuff like Selena Gomez and some other games I have in store as well.
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Jan 19, 2014 03:26
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This thread is pretty great. Anyway, when you were talking about dress up games for boys, my first thought was HeroMachine. Goofing off with this thing (back when it didn't have all those spinoffs) was one of the prime time wasters at my school.
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Jan 19, 2014 03:29
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Suspicious Dish posted:Would games like tie-ins for "girl media", like the Twilight franchise, be considered "girl games"? I recently played through a lovely licensed Wii game for Mary Kate and Ashley because I hate myself, and it was quite the experience, let me tell you. The only Twilight game I can remember off the top of my head is Scene It? Twilight, though I don't know if it really counts as a girl game because it's just trivia of the movie franchise if anything. Just unremarkable. What sticks out to me is that it's the only Scene It? game published by Konami, as if they wanted to get to the Twilight license first. Locked it down before another publisher got to it.
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Jan 19, 2014 03:43
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Agent Interrobang posted:Imagine how double-awkward all this poo poo is when you're transgendered, too. The conflicting, contradictory messages of what culture says you should be get pretty maddening and upsetting because you're 1) not sure if you're being a girl 'right,' and 2) because even if you get it 'right,' you're still signing up for an endless cycle of having to obsess over your weight, appearance, skin tone, dress sense, and whatever else. As someone who's gone through some troubles with gender (or rather, sex) dysphoria more recently than as a kid, I wish I understood what it would have been like. Today, I definitely feel disheartened by people telling me the "right" ways (for other people) to be a girl (or to be a guy, as directed at me). And I've played some dress-up "games" and normal games with character creation to ignore real life and dream of how I wish I could be. Even the crappy sexism-pushing junk out there can be a means of imagining myself different to how I am. That is, of course, not to say that the same kinds of games couldn't be made without promoting awful stereotypes and the like. Edit: Hell, most of the time I feel like I'm not even being transgender "right". chocolatekake fucked around with this message at 05:04 on Jan 19, 2014 |
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Jan 19, 2014 04:32
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Captain_duck posted:I'm thinking of doing a video on the history of girl games, in which i show girl games from different console era's to see how the graphics and gameplay (d)evolves. But I'm having problems finding interesting games to show, especially in the pre-PS1 days. I can think of a couple: I hate adding input to the thread because like with all feminist topics, as a male, I have a tendency to stick my EDIT: looking things up, there are even fewer nes "girl games" than I thought. There's the Barbie and Little Mermaid games mentioned, and Beauty and the Beast, which has you play as the Beast anyways, but I would bet good money no boy at the time would ask for it (having been one at the time.) You might find more if you're willing to go into non-American games, like the Hello Kitty franchise games, but I suspect that's beyond the scope of the thread. Choco1980 fucked around with this message at 05:10 on Jan 19, 2014 |
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Jan 19, 2014 04:37
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This thread is a good thread. Sorry for potentially re-treading old ground (haven't read the whole thread), but if it hasn't already been brought up, then I feel that Chocolate Donuts' LP of Petz: Horsez 2 deserves a mention in here 
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Jan 19, 2014 05:00
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It's weird, I had zero interest in actual dolls as a kid (which I'm sure my parents appreciated because we were always broke anyway) and I wasted many many hours outside with my brother building fortresses for his army men out of literal sticks and rocks, but hoooly gently caress did I go absolutely crazy over KiSS Dolls when we got our first computer. There was no actual game, just anime girls (often poorly drawn) that had to be individually downloaded with huge elaborate wardrobes, but I must have had hundreds of the things and even learned to make really lovely ones myself with MSPaint. To this day I still can't understand it but it was a terrible addiction.
Zoe fucked around with this message at 05:32 on Jan 19, 2014 |
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Jan 19, 2014 05:28
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This thread reminded me of feministfrequency's look at heavily gendered advertising aimed at children. The context is toys but the themes carry across to computer games fairly well, I think. It brings to mind the concept of 'play' in children (human or otherwise) existing in part as practice or training for adulthood. And then of course the traditional patriarchal/misogynist/etc ideal is "women raise children, men raise money", so you get toys and games aimed at reinforcing these strict gender roles. Dolls for practicing child-rearing, for example. It always seemed so weird to me. "No, you're a boy; you can't play with dolls!" (Nevermind that dolls and 'action figures' are objectively-speaking the same thing.) It's like we don't value men being good fathers.
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Jan 19, 2014 06:06
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Fenrir posted:Yeah, that jumped out at me too. We're not talking about some dainty little princess here, Samus is (was, anyway) one big bad motherfucker. Too bad they later slimmed her down and put heels on her loving suit I see this and it bothers me because I remember reading about this Metroid Zero Mission concept art  original japanese Edit: Apparently for Zero Mission the designer was Kiyotake Hiroji, and the designer for Super Metroid which had the art posed last page was Yamane Tomomi. Kiyotake Hiroji still shows up in the credits for Other M, though not as lead, so. Maybe Yamane was the best at keeping things sane before. booksnake fucked around with this message at 07:53 on Jan 19, 2014 |
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Jan 19, 2014 06:47
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But if she's not in high heels, how will you know she's a girl? I stand by my theory that Other M was a Galactic Federation ploy to discredit Samus for...some reason or other. Edit: Also hmm. To do Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble for this thread or not, hmm. Has the (dis)advantage of being a blind run. Hillarious failure ahead!
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Jan 19, 2014 07:54
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I've been playing the free otome games on the android market on and off. They're not the least bit deep or really that interesting, but it's something that's easy to pick up and drop during downtime. Sometimes the awkward translations can be pretty amusing and they pretty much keep me playing, plus the "romance" can sure be a thing. There have been multiple companies steadily releasing these types of games for iOS and android, so I'm guessing they're relatively popular and people are spending money on them. The ones that you have to pay for typically have a free prologue to set up the story, and then each route is about $3.99. I haven't bought any but they look like a standard visual novel. With the free ones, you're given a limit with how many chapters you can complete a day, and then you can buy tickets or whatever through microtransactions if you want to see more. The free ones also have pretty dress up with your avatars, and customizing a room where you and your boo hang out. There are ways to earn points to buy these customization options through some game, or gacha/gambling system, or you can buy them with real dollars. From what I've played, eventually there are required clothing your avatar has to have in order to progress the story, so you can't just ignore it. I really can't see why anyone would spend money on these apps though. I'm just on cruise-control when I go through them, but if I actually try to engage I feel myself getting bored and falling asleep. The romances are just so vapid and skin-deep, not to mention there's this weird trend of the protagonist drawn without eyes. Not the type of product I would give money to. I'm guessing the target audience are tween to teen girls, but do they have the expendable money for this stuff? I don't want to think adults would pay for this. Anyway, there are also some yaoi/gay games. I recently heard about this one, where you can also dress up your twink vampire avatar. And it being an anime vampire game, you can probably guess what the romance is like. I don't know if these would be any fun to LP but I thought to bring them up as more examples of gamez4girlz? Other free-things-with-microtransactions in this type of vein of dressup and dating are My Candy Love and Edit: Oh yeah, there was one more app I wanted to share. Boyfriend Maker, a prettied up bishounen version of Cleverbot. It can lead to some interesting results. And was taken off the Apple store because some responses, while hilarious, can be NSFW. klee fucked around with this message at 08:45 on Jan 19, 2014 |
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Jan 19, 2014 08:16
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Veloxyll posted:
It's an interesting game and it certainly touches on gender elements (and I never got past the first big case myself) but it's certainly not a free flash game, not covered in pink, and not sold to a young girl market. Or even the casual market (which is stereotypically older women). It got banned from the casual market entirely because people objected to the mechanics, thinking it sounded like the 'dangerous' girls were promoting bullying. As for the phone otome games, the two most interesting ones I know about are the one that starts out with the protagonist recently married to a man who's mysteriously ignoring her, then discovering he's having an affair. Drama! (You can choose to win him over, or find COMFORT ROMANCE in the arms of another while still married, or get a divorce right away and find a rebound) and the one that starts out with the protagonist plotting murder. Yes really! gegi fucked around with this message at 13:26 on Jan 19, 2014 |
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Jan 19, 2014 13:13
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It wasn't released in English, but my favorite otome game concept is one where all the guys were in their mid-40s or older, and the protagonist was in her early 20s.
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Jan 19, 2014 13:32
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I feel like the Kim Possible games for the GBA and DS should get a mention for being 'girl games' that are actually games and actually good. It helps that the cartoon was fantastic too.
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Jan 19, 2014 15:01
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Zoe posted:To this day I still can't understand it but it was a terrible addiction. To be fair, some of them were pretty amazing. That one even has actual gameplay!
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Jan 19, 2014 16:20
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Zoe posted:It's weird, I had zero interest in actual dolls as a kid (which I'm sure my parents appreciated because we were always broke anyway) and I wasted many many hours outside with my brother building fortresses for his army men out of literal sticks and rocks, but hoooly gently caress did I go absolutely crazy over KiSS Dolls when we got our first computer. There was no actual game, just anime girls (often poorly drawn) that had to be individually downloaded with huge elaborate wardrobes, but I must have had hundreds of the things and even learned to make really lovely ones myself with MSPaint. To this day I still can't understand it but it was a terrible addiction. I was the same way because my computer was too lovely to run anything else. Then of course browsing around the main site led to Jennifer Diane Reitz, who... Well, if you haven't already heard about her there's of course an overly detailed Encyclopedia Dramatica page out there. And the site design hasn't changed at all since the 90's, either. Nice. Nick Buntline posted:To be fair, some of them were pretty amazing. That one even has actual gameplay! The only KISS things with gameplay I found was this series of games made by a creepy middle-aged dude featuring the same underaged looking anime girl. One had you spying on her, another had you trying to make a scarecrow into a real girl. The things you had to click to progress were very specific, so I thankfully never got to the "true reward" endings. As to why I played those games, any KISS game that managed to feature story progression was pretty amazing. Then thirteen year old me was treated to... all that. Anoia fucked around with this message at 16:48 on Jan 19, 2014 |
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Jan 19, 2014 16:46
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Nick Buntline posted:To be fair, some of them were pretty amazing. That one even has actual gameplay! Look, we all knew Cloud liked to wear dresses, though I am slightly bemused by the fact that he looks kind of pregnant in that picture.  But after checking out that link there's actually a much bigger 'playable games' section than I remember, people making actual board games and stuff, huh.Anoia posted:I was the same way because my computer was too lovely to run anything else. Then of course browsing around the main site led to Jennifer Diane Reitz, who... Well, if you haven't already heard about her there's of course an overly detailed Encyclopedia Dramatica page out there. And the site design hasn't changed at all since the 90's, either. Nice. Oh God, that's that crazy Unicorn Jelly chick, isn't it? Well, I didn't see anything of hers on the KiSS sight at a casual glance, and I'm sure not going to look any harder than that.
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Jan 19, 2014 17:23
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Zoe posted:Oh God, that's that crazy Unicorn Jelly chick, isn't it? Well, I didn't see anything of hers on the KiSS sight at a casual glance, and I'm sure not going to look any harder than that. I don't think she ever made KISS dolls herself, actually. I think she just hosted them on Otaku World to try and lure more people into seeing the shrine to herself on the main page, given KISS was otherwise the only reason to go there. She did try to make a game called Kokoro Wish, but didn't know coding so she made crazy demands on a fellow site admin who did. Later she made a comic in which he apologized to her for failing to But enough about that mess. I just remembered a game called Legend of Lotus Spring, made by a team called Women Wise. The box touted their "by women, for women" game philosophy, so I was really interested to try it. What I got was a rather drab Myst like exploration game. The story, which involves you chasing after a mysterious man, kind of gets bogged down by every drat thing you interact with including a history lesson. The information overload made it hard to focus on the game's actual goal, which was catching that man.  But hey, I learned a lot about the Qing dynasty!
Anoia fucked around with this message at 18:55 on Jan 19, 2014 |
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Jan 19, 2014 17:53
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You know what's a really solid qualifier for the "Video Games girls would enjoy that aren't pandering trash" category? Rhythm Games. You can play the poo poo out of dress-up,as much as you want, but then you get to see that character that you just spent 20 minutes agonizing about the right t-shirt, actually DO something. Usually, rock the gently caress out. But it's not just the Guitar Heros and the Rock Bands that I'd recommend. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KItV7ldG5Rw Yea, they're in some lovely outfits, but gently caress that noise They Save The World Through The Power Of Their Rocking. Games on the DS are weird like that, they're somewhat sexist (look the only female agents in the entire game are super skinny in skimpy rear end outfits!) but at the same time, are literally able to save the world by building up a giant beam of Positive Energy. But there's a game for the DS, that's also a rhythm game, but might be the best "girl game" ever made. Mainly, cause it's a Hannah Montana game. I know,I know, What could possibly make a licensed game staring Miley before she was even Miley the best of anything? Just watch this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQUw84ObJ7E Just for clarification, this is Jam Sessions https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAqX--OoFO8 a stand alone game that's supposed to do everything he just demoed. Except it doesn't do things like individual guitar strings, and it's just a guitar. So a Hannah Montana game manages to have, as just part of the overall game, the best music creation system for the DS.
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Jan 19, 2014 18:15
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gegi posted:It's an interesting game and it certainly touches on gender elements (and I never got past the first big case myself) but it's certainly not a free flash game, not covered in pink, and not sold to a young girl market. Or even the casual market (which is stereotypically older women). It got banned from the casual market entirely because people objected to the mechanics, thinking it sounded like the 'dangerous' girls were promoting bullying. I would expect it to get banned for the PLOT TWEEST near the ending, but... well. I guess they didn't play that far.
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Jan 19, 2014 18:39
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Midnight Voyager posted:I would expect it to get banned for the PLOT TWEEST near the ending, but... well. I guess they didn't play that far. As I recall, the sort of people who kneejerk scream for bannings are not usually the sort of people who give a game a thorough playthrough first. The plot issue didn't get brought up until the fight was already ongoing and I honestly don't think that was the reason it got pulled, but it probably didn't help. Anyway, nowadays it's sold on Steam as a quirky indie thing instead of trying to push into casual circles.
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Jan 19, 2014 18:54
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I know the subject of how much boys also like to play dress up has been done to death already, but I'm surprised no one has brought up Team Fortress 2 yet. Every single playable character in that game is male, and what is the most infamous thing about it? Hats.  Let me quote the wiki for you. tf2wiki posted:There are currently a total of 432 hats and 306 Miscellaneous items. 107 can be obtained in Vintage quality, 13 can be obtained in Strange quality, 133 can be obtained in Genuine quality (see item quality distribution), and 342 of the hats can be painted 29 colors using different varieties of Paint Cans. There are hundreds of hats in the Valve store, most of which are community-made, and Valve makes hundreds of dollars per day selling pretty pixels for your favorite psychopathic mercenaries. That's just one of the ways they have to charge you for cosmetic stuff, but let's not get into that.  In the past three years, each cosmetic item has earned its creator an average of 4348 dollars. At 661 creators that's an average of 3.5 accepted hats per contributor, for a total well over 15000 dollars or 5000 per year per person. It sure beats working full time for minimum wage (which is slightly less money than that) and the numbers only keep going up.  Particularly rare and good looking hats that cannot be purchased from the store are worth thousands of dollars on the secondary market alone. There's entire servers full of people who sit around and show off, trade, buy and sell hats instead of shooting other men with guns and trying to win the game. It is the craziest thing in a game full of crazy things. I call tf2 a 'Barbies with Guns Simulator', and do so mostly without irony. What I'm trying to say here is that all these 'girl games' that only have dressup options could stand to make boatloads of money just by adding a mediocre but still fun game on top of that. But it seems that no, even that would be trying too hard for them.
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Jan 19, 2014 20:38
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TK-31 posted:I know the subject of how much boys also like to play dress up has been done to death already, but I'm surprised no one has brought up Team Fortress 2 yet. Every single playable character in that game is male, and what is the most infamous thing about it? Hats. Excuse me, Pyro could totally be a lady under all that fireproofing. You can't prove she isn't! (I also have a female model for Heavy and Medic. But those are not quite as canon)
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Jan 19, 2014 20:57
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I'm really curious about the companies (individuals?) that make these cheap free-to-play "girl" games. Where are they located, and what are the demographics of the programmers?
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Jan 19, 2014 21:00
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TK-31 posted:What I'm trying to say here is that all these 'girl games' that only have dressup options could stand to make boatloads of money just by adding a mediocre but still fun game on top of that. But it seems that no, even that would be trying too hard for them. Building an entire online marketplace with multiplayer and online trading is not exactly a simple snap-of-the-fingers job (especially if you're specifically aiming at very young people, in which case various protective laws come into play with signing up for accounts and making transactions). The major flash network behind these things isn't trying to sell games, just to get ad views. Totally different business model. My Candy Love would be an example of an online 'game' that has somewhat more game elements (although it's a dating sim, which some people still think isn't gamey enough) alongside the dressup, and makes money as far as I know, although they make it by doling out the advancement through the plot. I don't think they have any method of paying specifically to get more hats and other character options. How does Gaia Online work? I know there are people who make money doing Gaia-related commissions somehow or other, but I'm not sure if you can actually create items to go into the game. I have the impression that the Gaia audience skews female and does enjoy dressing up their avatars but I've never played the game myself.
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Jan 19, 2014 21:00
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TK-31 posted:What I'm trying to say here is that all these 'girl games' that only have dressup options could stand to make boatloads of money just by adding a mediocre but still fun game on top of that. But it seems that no, even that would be trying too hard for them. gegi posted:How does Gaia Online work? I know there are people who make money doing Gaia-related commissions somehow or other, but I'm not sure if you can actually create items to go into the game. I have the impression that the Gaia audience skews female and does enjoy dressing up their avatars but I've never played the game myself. Oh speaking of minigames/dressup hybrids, what would we classify Neopets as? I believe that one was much more gender neutral but I haven't seen it in the longest time. EDIT: Okay just checked the site and Neopets has a stock market now. 
Ramengank fucked around with this message at 21:23 on Jan 19, 2014 |
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Jan 19, 2014 21:20
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Acquire Currency! posted:Re: Samus talk earlier. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the dude what made metroid hated the prime series because it did so well. So much so that he made all of them non-cannon. It's sad that a pretty unique girl character got turned into generic space anime babe 102125. [e] I though "The Scared Groom" was a roguelike when I was quickly scrolling down. DrManiac fucked around with this message at 22:01 on Jan 19, 2014 |
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Jan 19, 2014 21:57
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gegi posted:Building an entire online marketplace with multiplayer and online trading is not exactly a simple snap-of-the-fingers job (especially if you're specifically aiming at very young people, in which case various protective laws come into play with signing up for accounts and making transactions). The major flash network behind these things isn't trying to sell games, just to get ad views. Totally different business model. This is a fair point, though part of what I was saying is that there's clearly no interest in aiming higher of that business model.
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Jan 19, 2014 22:26
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DrManiac posted:Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the dude what made metroid hated the prime series because it did so well. So much so that he made all of them non-cannon. It's sad that a pretty unique girl character got turned into generic space anime babe 102125. You're thinking of Sakamoto, and from what I understand the idea that he doesn't feel Prime was canon is wrong. There was a (probably poorly translated) interview he did where he was talking about Other M, and basically said that Prime was a self-contained story which wouldn't have any effect on his game's plot. People, for some reason, thought he meant that he was disavowing the games entirely. But yes, Other M's existence is basically inexcuseable.
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Jan 19, 2014 23:10
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