guys guys guys, let’s talk about Christine Love!

I adore Christine Love. She blogs about a lot of lovely stuff, much of it wonderfully queer-lady friendly. Er, not least because she is a queer lady! I’ve discovered many a yuri title through her blog.

My first exposure to her was via don’t take it personally, babe, it just ain’t your story, a visual novel. Now there’s some thematic weakness to it, and the very odd tangent into privacy and the future, and a creepy teacher-student relationship you may potentially pursue… but it’s just a lovely lovely thing in spite of all that. It’s well-written, well-told, quirky and sweet and insightful. It’s about adolescence and love, and mostly it’s about queer teenagers finding love (Kendall and Charlotte! oh Kendall and Charlotte), and it incorporates Internet culture in an amusing fashion with a nod to 4chan subculture. Kendall talks pretty much entirely in memes.

Forever laughing. Love at first said she kind of hated Kendall, but then discovered the opposite. Which makes me happy, because I quite enjoyed Kendall. Yes, she’s obnoxious, but on the other hand she’s bright and bold, and very forward in her pursuit of getting back together with her girlfriend.

 

Bioware, champion of social justice – JADE EMPIRE

Bioware’s often touted by fandom as one of the most–if not the most–inclusive, minority-friendly game developer. Not just in terms of orientations but also race: Isabela the Pantless from Dragon Age 2 is, after all, not white! The alienage elves are totally meaningful analogues of Jewish ghettos! The whole “final solution” allegory? Utterly classy.

For some reason, though, whenever the race thing comes up absolutely nobody brings up Jade Empire.

Gosh, I wonder why.  

I present you with “Wu the Lotus Blossom” (lolwut? I mean… well… what?):

 

DEUS EX: HUMAN RACISM – Hengsha Island and hearts of gold

This post should just be a series of screenshots because by themselves they are incredibly illuminating. But hell, why not some text to go with it.

Combat is piss-easy. I begin to see that stealth is the only way to make the game challenging. You can go sneak up to a bunch of mooks and headshot two or three before they gang up on you, at which point you merely stay behind your cover and shoot away at your leisure. This changes when you confront a boss, who does shittons of damage and doesn’t afraid of anything; Barrett, the first boss, marches forward gun blazing, frag grenade-tossing, and makes mincemeat of our boy Jensen in two minutes flat. That’s if you haven’t stocked up on some explosives or dropped a point or two into the Typhoon augmentation, in which case boss combat becomes merely a matter of “press button for Typhoon twice.” This results in total boss death. You don’t need to do anything else, though seeing that the augment requires ammo–it shoots a bunch of explosives and there’s a shockwave or something–I’m hard-pressed to imagine how precisely Jensen loads the thing. Or how it’s built into him, for that matter. All I can ascertain is that he spins around when this is activated and it looks hysterical. Much like punching through walls.

First hub finished. Jensen is shuttled off to China. Please choose from the following choices as to what we find on Hengsha Island:

1. racism
2. sexism
3. racism AND sexism
4. an enlightened portrayal of China and women

 

DEUS EX: HATE REQUIRED – first impressions

First things first: the game is hideous. I don’t mean the yellow filter–which is less ubiquitous and in-your-face than I thought–but… everything else. I’ve enabled DX11 features. I’ve turned everything up.

But it’s still ugly as sin. The textures are low-res, the characters are doubleplus Uncanny Valley, the animations are bizarre, and there is a universal blandness to the levels that makes me slightly ill at the thought of having to explore them for alternative routes. Everything about the visuals screams “DESIGNED TO BE RUN ON SHITTY CONSOLE HARDWARE.” In term of art direction, I’m hoping this will change at some point and I’ll be introduced to more interesting aesthetics in the second city hub, but we are some game-hours away from that. It’s not like AssCreed, where the graphic fidelity is likewise fucking terrible but the general aesthetic–the cities, the architecture, the wandering NPCs doing their routines–is beautiful. This is just all-around ugly, with technically competent but barring select spots imagination-deprived art direction.

 

AssCreed: Brohood!

Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood is an amazing game. It pleases me to call it AssBro. Or AssCreed Bro. The possibilities are simply endless, and my immaturity knows no limits. I eagerly await Assassin’s Creed: Revelations so I can shorten it into AssRave.

 

Planescape: Torment: or, why weird fantasy doesn’t just come in books

If you ask most people, they got into fantasy through LOTR or Narnia or even Harry Potter.

I got into it through a video game. And I’m not ashamed to admit it. At all. You see, instead of being about an orphan going off to fight the dark lord, or landed gentry joining a fellowship of classist Luddite white-supremacist aristocrats, it starts you off in a morgue. The character you’re going to play, and whom the story is about? Is dead.

This female corpse is making the rounds from slab to slab in the room. Her hair is knotted into a long braid and looped around her neck like a noose. Someone has stenciled the number “1096” onto her forehead, and her lips have been stitched closed.