Annie Felis

Then what about Dove's Campaign for Real Beauty that they started a while back? They decided that they would not use photoshopped models with unrealistic proportions/faces, and that they would use ordinary yet still beautiful women in their ads (albeit still level-adjusted/airbrushed women). I mean even now they're running this, and have a new ad out with a photoshop action they made, that's pointedly going after advertisers and the photomanipulation they use: clicky. Kind of looks like a PR stunt, though. I mean this isn't going to affect the beauty companies that demand photomanipulation in their ads, and it's not going to stop the photoshop artists who have to edit the photos for a job, because they're still going to do what their job is so they can get their paycheck. I mean you could argue that Dove is just trying to advertise to the people who are fed up with the unrealistic standard of beauty set by the beauty industry, and I'm sure there's some of that in there. But it also seems like Dove is trying to start some change, and then be ahead as that change happens so they can be in a better position in the public's eyes. They're trying to say "hey, some people may be like that, but we're not like that, okay?".

Well yeah, the "sausage fest" thing is sexist too because it excludes anybody female. I didn't spot on the page where it said "NO GIRLS GO AWAY YOU HAVE COOTIES" though, it was more subtext. I spotted more male stereotypes that made me eyeroll hard enough to see my own optic nerve. A man is not masculine due to a predetermined set of tropes, and it's damned irking to see things try to push said tropes and stereotypes on us.

I dunno, that ign page still seems sexist to me. It's sexist against men though, because it's shouting a bunch of gender stereotypes from the top of its lungs instead of just saying "hey, you guys like video games right?".

I really like the art style on this one: nice and clean with smooth animation. Not entirely sure how the battle system is going to work, but so far it looks awesome.

That can be a bad thing and it can be a good thing. If a indie game studio gets more money than the expected amount, they tend to up the quality of their products and even set aside some cash for the next project. The thing is you can always see how much money is already donated when you get to a kickstartger page. It's not like somebody gets to a 100k goal and all donations immediately stop. Sometimes people want to give money for whatever reason, even if it's past a goal. Anyway I don't know what to say about this one video of a series. So far it's a big fat stating the obvious, but it's one video. This one could suck while future ones could be better. They all could suck, I don't know. In any case I think it's a little early to pass judgement on something that's meant to be a documentive series.

My sister was playing Sim City, Sim Ant and The Sims in her gradeschool years. She was still playing The Sims when she was a teenager, since she found modding. Something simple like Sim Ant might be good, although you'll possibly need emulation to run something from Win95.

I've been married for seven years now and have a kid who is almost two. I've been lurking on these forums since about the time I was married, too.

I have to wonder if somebody at Ghibli intervened and say "no, this MUST be pure orchestrated music!" and then went with limited orchestral tracks over expansive sampled ones, because Level 5 is a good studio that knows what they're doing. Kind of sad, because if that's the case then it wouldn't be the first time the people wearing suits at the top intervening ruined some of the artistic merit of a game by saying "NO IT MUST HAVE THIS THING".

I've played a little bit more in between bouts of WoW and a Chrono Trigger DS replay, and I'm now about to go to Hamlin. I've spent most of my hours catching a second one of everything now that I've learned that the evolutions split for the final form. Such. A. Pain. But hey, because of the running around catching junk I've managed to get my main team up to its second and third forms already. Props to whomever said to go give Esther a Danglerfish, because those things are crazy strong tanks. In any case, while the quality of the music is fantastic, its usage is pretty limited and sometimes ill-suited. Joe Hisaishi is a great composer, but I don't think he really understood how many songs you need to write for a full-length JRPG these days. I don't think he understands atmosphere in a game versus atmosphere in a movie either, so that's why there's a generic battle theme, generic dungeon theme, fits-for-everywhere overworld theme, and silly-background-crap-theme for feeding your familiars. It also doesn't help that music starts over again whenever you fight a battle, exit a battle, enter the world map, ect ect. We keep hearing those same few bars over and over unless we put the game up into a menu, set the controller down, and wait to hear what interesting parts a song might have. It's really not how game music should be.

The smell of old wood paneling and the crap adhesive that glues it to the walls, because that's what my grandparents had in their place when I was more or less stuck inside and unable to ride bikes/swim/climb trees/use swings/play alone when I was epileptic and thus banned from doing fun things in summer. That was the year that I got my NES, so an awful lot of Zelda happened.

Yeah, that's why I was keeping out of the thread, but hey that's also my point: sexism is learned, even by the sex being put down. You're told what to do instead of just being you.

Skies of Arcadia is my favorite RPG, so it's more of a fan that really was not happy with a port. I played the original SoA back in college on a nice big TV with nice speakers, so I got to enjoy it with beautiful sound. Now that I have a bigger TV with nicer speakers, it shouldn't look and sound worse. The only thing I did like was that it was harder to get Vyse the Legend. Miss one chest, answer one question wrong or get knocked out in battle once and you won't get it. Really amped up the difficulty in a game that was pretty easy the first time around.

I think that's because a lot of women don't want to openly admit they like porn. It'd make them seem dirty or shameful or something, so they call it "romance". It's pretty stupid though, because porn is healthy and normal. A lot of women got into 50 shades because their friends told them to read it because "it's so good". I saw women on my Facebook page babble excitedly about the book and refer others to it, women who would otherwise not read that tripe (because while smut is okay, glorifying a toxic and abusive sexual relationship is not). If you want to see a group of sheep, watch some women and the social things they do: social reading, social cooking, social shows, social clothing. I think it's one of the reasons I like to hang with guys better: they can suggest me stuff to read/watch/play, but if I don't get into it they're not going to get on my case. Edit: and I know that sheep comment sounded horrible, but it's another problem with gender stereotyping and gender roles. Women are taught that they need to do whatever others are doing to be accepted. You're supposed to do as you're told and like it. You're not supposed to decide that you really don't want to read Twilight, and that you have absolutely no interest in it, because there's something wrong if you do. That happened to me two years ago: I was at some company party and these women were ranting and raving about the Twilight books, and when I said both that I don't like them and explained why, they told me "but there has to be some part of you that wants to like them". Uh, no. Just because I'm a woman doesn't mean I have to follow the mob and pretend to enjoy what everybody else does, kthx.

Another crappy port that really bugged me is Skies of Arcadia: Legends. The added material was not worth the terrible sound and graphic quality. Everything was compressed all to hell, so when the characters would have that stupid little "yeah!" or "uh-huh!" babble they'd say in cut scenes, it would be super-loud. The cham minigame with cupil was ruined without a UMV, and there was no Pinta's Quest at all (not that it was all that useful to begin with). Then the worst thing: the music. Skies of Arcadia had fantastic music, and the Dreamcast's on-board sound was great. When they ported it to Gamecube, they killed any level variance and all the instruments were loud and muddy. It sounded terrible, especially on tracks like The Dark Rift or Little Jack. I tried to find an example of it on YouTube, but all the "Legends" soundtracks up there are from the original Dreamcast OST. I mean, I guess the Gamecube version is better than no Skies of Arcadia at all, but it's nowhere near as awesome as the original.

Would it work with a PSP slim? That thing was annoying to hack, both between the frequent updates they ran and the fact that in order to hack it in the first place you had to overwrite the BIOS. If you fucked that up you pretty much bricked your handheld. It may be different by now, though.

Not true. John DiMaggio was pretty awesome as Wakka, even if Wakka had some awful lines just like every other FFX character.

Ugh, that one too. The FFT port to PSP is terrible. It's bad enough that my favorite character was voiced by the terrible actress that did Yuna in FFX, but then all the spell effects had serious slowdown. It was painful to play.

That's worthy of some tears, yes. The whole bird/fish background thing on the special stage was completely ruined, and the slowdown throughout stages is terrible. Gotta move real slow, I guess?

The FF7 port to PC was a wee bit obnoxious due to how the random battles were not random, and you could literally loop through the same three or four battle setups for a zone over and over. That and a midi soundtrack, which even with the FF7 midi soundfont didn't sound quite right. Also the Steam port of Divine Divnity, which is too old to play on anything over Direct X 9. I bought the damn thing and it's unplayable due to the interiors of buildings/dungeons being all black. Their solution to the problem was "update your drivers", which I found hilarious because I had just gotten a new video card.

Pretty decent, and hits on points that always bothered me in games. I could accept that Peach is always captured because frankly she seems as dumb as a stump (refer to Super Princess Peach to see how clever she is), but Zelda always irked me; especially when she was awesome as Shiek, and as soon as that pink dress went on she was suddenly hostage material. I'm looking forward to what she has to say in part two. I'm also interested to see if any upcoming examples come from western games. The Star Fox Adventures debacle happened when a japanese company wanted to alter the material that an english studio was producting, and most examples are japanese games too. There are cultural differences between various countries, so it may be interesting to look at that in a future episode. Kind of sad she has to disable comments on her videos now. It needed to be done, but it's rotten that people that felt like bullying her made it so others can't give input.

I don't know if anybody has seen the short film The Reward in the past month that it's been floating around the internet, but if you haven't I urge you to go watch it now: it's amazing. It's one of those animated things so good, they don't need a word of dialogue. This thing has become so popular that the team who produced it are looking to make a series of it. I hope that they make their goal, because their animation style oozes with personality and great storytelling skills.

This: When your party is wiped out in Chrono Trigger, you're reminded that the fate of the world is hinged on the actions of Crono and company, and that if they die then the world is boned. Sure, the death isn't final and you can easily reload an old save, but it's still a little unnerving to see Lavos destroy the world as a result of your failure.

Cr1TiKaL has the one LP channel I like to play because he doesn't finish the games. He plays obscure, terrible games and rants in a tired deadtone, and quits after a few minutes. Watching him play Slender is a joy.

Voted for you on Steam. Here's hoping it's available soon!

Best damn pokemon game I've ever played. Okay seriously, I'm at Old Smokey now and I'm really enjoying this game, even if everybody else I know has already beaten it once. I think the game's pretty, oh so pretty...the combination of the backgrounds, colorful characters and orchestrated music make this game gorgeous. Some nitpicks though: The battle UI is kind of clunky. As you're learning options and skills through your characters and your familiars, you have to memorize what's there and where it is on the list. Since battles are real-time, you can easily get hammered on while you're cycling through those damn speech balloon menus trying to find the spell or skill you need. Using items in battle is worse, it makes me think of using items in Kingdom Hearts. Secondly, this is a small nitpick, but I really don't like how Oliver bows. He's from the USA, and when he bows he does a western bow (one arm behind the back, one in front), but the writers don't understand why Americans bow. We don't bow to be polite or say thank you like the japanese do, we may just say "thanks" or nod our heads and smile instead. Because of this Oliver's bowing seems alien, because that kind of bow he's doing should be done if he's just been in a school play or something. It's just one small thing that made the Motorville parts and Oliver's character seem not quite right.