Tensei

Yeah I'm not too sold on this game aside from the music. The 3D environments look downright lazy and clash with the 2D characters (which are nicely animated, though). It's obviously not fair to compare an indie remake with something like Rayman Legends, but well... there are better modern 2D platformers out there.

twitch.tv/dota2ti Valve outdoing themselves with esports production once again.

A wonderful live performance of Dota 2 music at VGL.

75% off for a few month old AAA game is an absolute steal.

http://blog.dota2.com/2013/07/the-beta-is-over/ Game is officially out, free to play, everything. 10 heroes left to port, Mac/Linux clients are in the testing phase, Korean/Chinese servers still in beta.

^ I've been enjoying this one. The guy is very laidback considering the game he's playing and I like having it on in the background.

Uh, have you played Dark Souls? You initially rescue Dusk of Oolacile from inside a Crystal golem, she gives some background exposition, then promptly gets kidnapped by Manus, and the entire DLC is about saving her again. Reah of Thorolund instantly turns into a damsel the moment her two bodyguards go hollow in the Tomb of Giants, and will actually die if you don't kill Petrus afterwards too. Are you saying that for it to count as a DiD trope, it has to be the *main* motivator of the plot? You're trying to apply the standards of games of 20 years ago to modern games, which is incorrect, and I'm sure that Anita's next video will highlight this difference as well (as I said in an earlier post). I don't think a modern example has to have a complete lack of characterization to count. The point is that at some point in the game, in spite of any strengths or character depth, a female character is helpless to save herself and requires the (male) hero to rescue her.

This is the criterium I used, all the examples I listed fit it. You can come up with your own list using your own definitions.

Yeah and that's where the whole 'moving the goalposts' thing I touched upon comes in. All these games fit the criterium, because in all of these games you have to save a female character who is helpless to save herself at some point. That is literally the trope. I didn't actually comment on the quality of the games themselves, and in fact quite a few of these games do a good job with characterization and equality despite still using the trope. Dark Souls arguably has some of the most sensible female character and armor design of any game, but that doesn't take away the fact that Dusk of Oolacile and Reah of Thorolund fit the trope pretty well. I think that's pretty much going to be the point of the distinction between the first video and the next one. To show that things nowadays are better overall and that there are far less cardboard cutouts, but that the trope still sees quite some unfortunate use in one form or another.

Sure, do you want them just off the top of my head or should I make an alphabetic list? - Devil May Cry 4 - Max Payne 3 - Resident Evil 4 - Resident Evil 5 - Monkey Island 3 - Eversion - Super Meat Boy - Prototype - Alpha Protocol - Borderlands 2 - Star Fox Adventures - Sonic 2006 - Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow - Dark Souls - Alan Wake - Bioshock Infinite - Asura's Wrath - Duke Nukem Forever - Far Cry 3 - Overlord 1/2 - Scribblenauts Unlimited - Final Fantasy VIII There's bound to be more comprehensive lists out there, this is just what I could quickly think of on the fly. But yeah, I'm suuuure Anita has trouble coming up with examples, good 'theory'! I'm eagerly awaiting the motion of goalposts and excluded scotsmen.

Sorry for the metaposting, but I think it would be for the best if we could refrain from making posts along the lines of Not only is it phrased extremely suggestively, but it's also something that, to my knowledge, nobody in this thread has actually said, i.e. a strawman. If you're going to make an argument against something that has been said, just quote them directly in order to avoid this.

What is the 'feminist agenda' you are talking about? Who in this thread was in favor of creating a 'bland, inoffensive, homogenized representation of the sexes' that you seem to be arguing against?

E: You know what? It doesn't even matter. This thread is about the video series in specific, not about the person behind it. It doesn't matter if Anita Sarkeesian eats babies or the entire kickstarter is one big ponzi scheme. I'm here to talk about the contents of this video series, so I'm not gonna post til we're back on topic.

Found this excellent analysis of the games themes and how they tie into the overall plot: http://peripsuche.blogspot.nl/2013/03/bioshock-infinite-thematic-analysis.html Obviously full of spoilers.

http://www.gamespot.com/bioshock-infinite/forum/this-game-is-anti-american-and-as-such-we-should-not-endorse-it-59916583/ This post would've made me buy this game if I hadn't gotten it already.

Well there's also the fact that being able to backtrack to any place locks you into a particular narrative where all of the levels you pass through have to remain unchanged. Things like the statue getting partially destroyed, or permanently passing through tears to alternate realities don't gel with that. Also, implying that the recordings in this game aren't useful for expanding the story is just ridiculous. You won't even know half of what's going on if you don't listen to the recordings, and they touch upon some major plot points. The world building and the characters are generally much denser and thought-out than the original. I'll give you the lack of optional Big Daddies (even though Handimen are very similar). 90% of the enemies in the original, however, were leadhead splicers (shoot at you from a distance) or thuggish splicers (run at you with a melee weapon). There was a small amount of special enemies such as Houdini or spider splicers, but nowhere near the variation presented by firemen, patriots, crows, boys of silence and all the different variations on the standard vox/policemen enemies. Maybe you're playing the game wrong or you lack the imagination to use the vigors creatively if you're playing it as an actual military shooter? I used most of my vigors throughout the game, and I don't actually see how you can finish the game on Hard difficulty without doing so. Bucking Bronco, Possession, Charge, Crows, the bullet reflector and the water tentacles all were lots of fun and offered a lot of options. In fact, Bucking Bronco is a vigor that specifically counters the whole "hide behind cover and shoot" aspect of the game. Devils Kiss and Lightning Jockey were kinda generic but needed for a lot of fights as well. I don't understand why you would limit yourself from using half of your arsenal and then claim that the game is bland.

What do you consider backtracking if it's not the ability to walk to the beginning of a level from any point? It's not necessarily even level-bound. You can have a locked safe in Battleship Bay, go do the entire Hall of Heroes section, and come back with enough lockpicks for the safe. Areas like the Fink factory and the entire section before the Comstock House consist of multiple interconnected levels that allow you to travel around freely between them. What modern FPS are you comparing it to when you say that it has no openness? Also, I don't see how you can say that the combat is any worse than the original. This game has a greater variety of weapons, a big number of QoL improvements (such as the ability to use vigors and weapons at the same time), and generally less claustrophobic areas which allow you to vary your approaches, not to mention the mobility you get from Hooks, Skyrails and the Charge vigor. Combat is still the weakest aspect of the game, enemies have shitty AI and too much HP, but claiming that the original was any better takes some huge rose-tinted glasses.

Fair enough, but Bioshock 1 was a game from the start of this console cycle. We're 6 years further now, graphical standards have increased correspondingly, but we're still on the same consoles. I guess what I'm saying is that considering the limitations of consoles and the current trend in FPS level design, it's impressive that they went and made such a beautiful-looking game that has nonetheless relatively open level design, allowing for significant backtracking and a lot of optional side-areas. Also Bioshock 2 was a far better game than the first one, it just had a worse story and characters. Maybe you haven't played the first one in a long time but its general gameplay/combat was pretty mediocre, even for the time. 2 improved on the combat a lot, and Infinite is an evolution thereof. Also I refuse to believe that you think this game would have worked better as a visual novel. Like, seriously?

I think it really is a fantastic game. Not perfect by any means, with combat arguably being the weakest link, but just the feeling of virtually walking through such an exquisitely crafted world makes up for a lot. And I really have to appreciate the game for that. Modern FPSes have this tendency to put all the graphical luster on a single angle right in front of the player, and make sure that they never turn around or take a detour in order to save on graphical resources. Maybe my standards are low, but in a day and age where FPSes block off the way you came every five steps you take, it's a breath of fresh air to be able to save up 5 lockpicks and then backtrack to the start of the level in order to open a safe. I still don't see how it's any more limiting than the original game. The combat really is just Bioshock 2 with skyrails and tear-objects, which I guess is adequate enough for me. I guess I have the benefit of not having watched any PR on the game whatsoever, so I didn't come into the game expecting dynamic Zeppelin appearances (as opposed to scripted ones) and whatever else the demo showed off. The real strength lies in the graphics, aesthetics and the worldbuilding: there's so many memorable setpieces and symbolism/foreshadowing all over the place. Again, you can really feel that a lot of time was put into polishing absolutely everything. Plot is good, pretty ambitious, and a bit sloppy towards the end, but resolves satisfyingly enough.

I don't know at which stage of the game you are, but there is actually a lot to explore (including side missions) and you can absolutely backtrack through an entire level. I don't think it's very fair to say that it has the same amount of railroading as a CoD game, and level design-wise it really does remind me of a Bioshock game. I think that in the end, the choices (HUGE FUCKING SPOILERS THAT ACTUALLY MATTER UNLIKE THE FACT THAT THE LIGHTHOUSE AT THE START IS A CALLBACK TO THE ORIGINAL)don't matter, but only serve to illustrate the infinite alternate timelines/universes that slightly diverge. That's where the whole constants and variables thing comes from. Unrelated, but be sure to listen to every song in the game when it starts playing (especially the calliope song at the beach), you might recognize some interesting things. Also from what I hear this game runs/looks kinda shit on consoles.

Really? How is that a spoiler? I'm not apologizing for that. It's a purely symbolic callback that doesn't have any bearing on the plot or anything.

I went in mostly blind (haven't watched any dev videos or previews). Loved the callback to Bioshock 1 in the intro (going up the lighthouse instead of down). The 'prize' for winning the raffle was a real holy shit moment for me because I had no idea what this game was going to be about up to that point.

But you just said it yourself when you reversed my quote about theorizing about Anita's agenda to be about game developers. I don't see the merit in talking about intentions, because you can't come up with a conclusive answer anyway unless you can somehow contact every game developer and ask them what they were thinking when they wrote their plot. But she isn't doing this. Where is she doing this? You're implying that at some point in the video she says something along the lines of "Game developers put this trope in because they're all sexist pigs." I don't know how to make this any clearer. She never delves into the game developers intentions, and certainly makes no definite statement about them. I don't think so. Male power fantasies can be (and probably usually are) created without even being aware that they are a thing. Granted, 'in order to sell more games' is a pretty obvious statement of intent, but not a particularly farfetched one, so I'll give you that.

She's not saying "developers are bad" or "games are bad" or even implying something like that. It's exactly what it is. She *is* listing examples that any consistent gamer could come up with and pointing out where she thinks the problem lies. I think it's good if only for the amount of attention it generates because it also creates discussions, people are talking about what they think about the trope. I also wouldn't overanalyze too much of her intentions based on just this first video and at least see how it ties into the next one. If anything, I can imagine that she will make a lot of comparisons between older and modern iterations of the trope, so for that reason it would be necessary to first have a video about the trope in older games, even if to you and me the examples might seem a bit obvious. I didn't intend to be as dismissive, I just thought that it would be too much of a derail to bring up my own interpretation of each of her quotes. I think that if we're at the point where we are picking apart the etymology and exact phrasing of what are, from my perspective, reasonably well-defined concepts such as the male power fantasy, it might be time to take a step back.

@ DJP I don't know if it would be beneficial to try and pick apart your analysis of the direct quotes, and I guess that I can agree that at points she starts to sound a bit buzzwordy. It might be more accurate to say that she uses a lot of rhetoric that is common in feminist discourse but might not be as well defined outside of it. For example regarding the 'adolescent male power fantasy', that's something I feel I have a decent understanding of, but at the same time I can see how out of context it can sound like a bunch of buzzwords. This would almost be clever if it wasn't a complete nonsequitur. What are you even talking about here? The video and by extension this thread is about examples of the trope in videogames. Intentions and agendas of the developers behind the games are really not touched upon at all. So I really have no idea what you are getting at here. Fairness and balance aren't necessarily integral parts of documentaries, as I'm sure you could find in many films made in totalitarian countries, or even in things done by people like Michael Moore. That is not the point though, my point is that similarly to a documentary, her primary stated goal is to be informative. That is not my defense. I am saying that you shouldn't pin things on people that haven't actually been said. If she hasn't actually openly stated her agenda, well then you can only kind of guess, right?