Xanfel

You link that, as if it's meant to prove you right. I do not fully understand.

Nintendo era Rare frowns at your implications, good sir. But not Xbox Rare. They just have empty smiles and empty minds.

It -is- meant to be a rhetorical question, because in its most basic and universal form, sexism is merely treating someone of a certain sex differently than the other(/s if they're aliens, clearly). Obviously there is a big problem in that people perhaps trivialise sexism in sinister ways - most problems don't really start off catastrophic, after all - but I'd be genuinely surprised if, after a brief chat and some fairly unbiased analysis of what is said to who and how, a lot of people still chose to suggest it isn't in some way discriminatory. Then again, rationale and gamers often seem to have a disconnect that saddens me. On a side not: I'd be worried that you to try and take a more balanced approach to sexism. Yes, it's more severe for women at the moment - but positive and negative discrimination exists in the male spectrum as well in the gaming community. Ignoring either one in the middle of a discussion is as much a discredit to your argument as ignoring both. How else can you find the balance that needs to be found if you don't consider both issues? EDIT: Reading that above paragraph -about male sexism-, I feel I should probably apologise. It's a bit self-important and preachy, and I don't want to suggest that anyone here is actively choosing to pick a side, as opposed to trying to articulate their thoughts as fairly and logically as possible. (Also, reading back a bit, this little piece of tedium has been covered already. I'll leave it there as a monument to my silliness, but please don't take it as a personal insult!)

Man, this thread is going all over the place. Hell, I'm not even sure if you're all talking about the same things you started out on. For my own thoughts on the matter? Does sexism exist in games? Absolutely, who in their right mind wouldn't think so? What can we do about it? Aside from the economic pressure already being suggested, there isn't much you CAN do about it, except of course making the women part of the solution. If they do fid it so distasteful, you should be encouraging them to raise their own voices just as much as you're encouraged to champion the cause. To be perfectly honest I think that games have simultaneously gotten much more and much less sexist over the years. The sheer amount of shovelware and/or 'casual games' (Dear God, that term) seems a good enough example of that. For every Uncharted Blockbuster with their Nathan Drakes, there are plenty of horrendously inoffensive party games that don't objectify anything other than questionable colour schemes. Or are we going to dismiss that aspect of the games market which has treated Nintendo quite well recently? In regards to the larger issue of -why- more girls don't play games. It's almost certainly in some way affected by sexism. Not because gamers are sexist, but because everyone is. In my humble opinion it's practically impossible to separate any issue from certain amount of imbalance in how multiple demographics are treated. I'm not going to say that this is how it should be, in fact I've always tried to treat women with the same courtesy and respect that I treat men (or lack thereof, in certain instance), but as has already been conceded in this thread - Who here can honestly say they do not harbour some sort of discriminatory habits? And you all need to be careful about what you label as 'appealing and unappealing' to girl gamers. Most of you aren't, so even your most educated guesses are just that.

I liked all three on Facebook, I'll kinda repeat what I said there. If I win the competition and get some free stuff, cool beans, but ultimately I'm more than happy to just spread the word about all three groups. OCRemix has been hella good to a despicable lurker like myself, and Nobuo's scored some of my favourite games <3

I feel your pain, Zircon. Flame Lurker is probably the hardest boss in the game for me, in relation to everything else. That said, you're being a bit extreme in your criticisms, methinks. You don't need a magic weapon to beat him, you don't even need fire resist. Admittedly, the make things much easier, and that's no bad thing, but it's not as grim as you'd think. I myself was forced to kill him with a Halberd +2 and Mirdan Leggings. And nothing else. Totally my fault for not upping Stamina, but there ya go. The hardest thing about Demon's Souls is fighting things for the first few times. Once you know how the boss fights, they're hardly as daunting. If you want some other advice... The Brushwood Shield complete nullifies fire damage when blocking, so you'd not need to use Water Veil anymore (It can be found in 1-1) When he does a high jump towards you, run towards him (or dodge) and his back will make a nice target If you find yourself getting into a corner, run past him. And I mean Sprint. Generally you can actually run past him before his attack connects, and he's left going 'wtf?' Also. If you do want to skip to 4-1, bring a Bow for the first Boss