What Games get the Girls?

I hear you fellow gamers of the male variety; you’ve got a girlfriend and she wants your time, but you’ve also got a console, and that wants your time too. What’s a man to do? Forsaking one for the other isn’t ideal, seeing as they're both awesome, so how do you tackle this?

Get her into gaming of course, that way you can most certainly have your cake and eat the living bejeesus out of it. So here are my top 5 games to entice those lovely ladies of yours to join you in the boudoir. Of gaming.

But first, a tip: I won't include any FPSs here because more often than not, they scare the girls away. They’re not good starting games. If you whip out Call of Duty, she’s going to run a mile. For someone who isn’t a gamer, they’re far too full on and pretty complicated for a beginner and even if you say, “But Minnie, l’ll lead her through it!” I don’t believe you, you’ll probably end up getting frustrated at her failure to grasp things as fast as you like. And believe me, I’ve tried this. I got my girl friends playing CoD and it wasn’t really fun for them; they were confused and all they did was die a lot and get disheartened. As well as ramming far too many RCXDs into walls.  

I loathe bringing it back to sex again but think of FPSs as fourth base. You can't jump straight into that.

Number 5: Dragon Age: Origins



Who WOULDN'T want to woo this little
bundle of social ineptitude? I sure as heck did.

Customisability has a lot to do with a girl’s enjoyment of a game and Dragon Age excells in this because you can not only customise your gender, your face and your voice, but also your backstory, choosing one of six unique starting points that changes the subsequent story in subtle and unique ways. Unless you’re me, most girls wouldn’t elect to play as a man, so being able to play as a woman is a big bonus. Dragon Age has great customisability, a great story and lots of interesting characters, including romance options. The combat is simple but also a lot of fun to plan, with all the spells and levelling up available and you can also change the difficulty level if things start going a little awry for your lovely lady friend. I’m certainly not saying that girls can’t handle difficult games but everyone has to start somewhere and the ladder to gaming prowess is a pretty difficult one to scale. It’s quite a long game but with any luck, she’ll get really into it! I know I did! In fact, when the exams are done, I'm going to play it again!

Number 4: Pokémon Leaf Green. (Or Fire Red or Mud Brown or Sickly Yellow. Whichever takes your fancy, they’re pretty similar...)



If you don't want to hug this,
you're dead inside.



Everyone knows about Pokémon, it’s basically like god; omnipresent but awkward to talk about. These games are so easy to get into and the desire to ‘catch ‘em all’ is pretty all encompassing and weirdly, a lot of fun. And let’s face it, there’s a cuteness factor involved too, even I’ll admit to that. The plot couldn’t be any more linear unless the game played itself but this works in the non-gamers favour. The visuals are simple and easy on the eye but still very colourful and engaging. It's also incredibly easy to pick up and universally loved by all ages, colours and creeds. It's just one of those games. I would consider this as Base 1 in the base/game analogy. It’s short, sweet and fun and a good entry level game for all your lady friends, and with any luck it will lead to greater things.



Number 3: Kameo Elements of Power



If you don't like her,
you're also dead inside.

This is one of my favourite games and I was gutted when it went largely unnoticed. It has a fantastic premise: you are in charge of finding and utilizing 10 elemental warriors, each of whom have their own unique powers. The combat is fantastically good fun because of this as you’re able to swap between warriors to use the most effective attacks. The graphics and landscapes are beautiful and riotously coloured and it has a solid story and one of the best soundtracks I’ve ever heard in a game. It’s an instant hit with its relatively short length, as well as being easy without being totally unchallenging. Girls will love this and if they don’t, they’re probably dead so you need to get yourself a new lady friend. In fact, same goes for anyone. You should all like this game. If you don’t, feel free to flame me mercilessly but I urge you to try it!

Number 2: Mass Effect.



This game looks damned fine
as well. (Ok, so this is from
Mass Effect 2. Sue me)

Perhaps a little controversial because shooters can be quite tough when you have no experience with them, but Mass Effect is one of the easier third person shooters I can think of and a fantastic entry into the shooting genre. I suggest it mostly because of the incredible story and the amazing customisability available to you. With Mass Effect, your lady friend can play as an incredibly strong, tough and awesome woman, something a little too rare in the gaming world. Unless your lady friend is me (which would be odd seeing as I don’t know about it) because I play as Man Shepard. And will continue to do so because I’ve developed a fondness for his face. It’s also pretty short by RPG standards so it won’t put her off from finishing it, plus you also get the option to bang someone and the sex scene isn’t awkward! Win win!

P.S Please make sure she realises that there are Assault Rifles available, not just pistols. I literally couldn’t shoot anything until about 3 hours in when I realised I could equip different weapons (In my defence, I had equipped it; I just hadn’t selected it from the weapons wheel during combat…)

Number 1: L.A Noire.

An interesting medium
between games and movies. 

This game is practically made for ladies and our superior emotional capacity! Generally, women are better at detecting subtle emotions. It ‘aint sexist, it’s science! L.A Noire is perfect for girls to start off with because it has next to no real combat, and if what combat there is becomes a problem, she can just stick auto-aim on. There is also the option to skip action sections if they’re becoming a problem, which is pretty awesome when you think about it, especially as I’m sure we’ve all felt the utter frustration of not being able to perform a certain task or kill a certain boss, yet we had to keep on trying until we either managed it or threw our console out a third story window. The technology also can't fail to impress. If she's someone who considers games to be immature or badly animated, let her see L.A Noire and she shall be forced to nom her words. The satisfaction you feel when you manage to answer all the questions right and interpret all their reactions correctly is astounding and you’ll soon have your lady friends gnashing their teeth in anguish when they misinterpret someone’s reaction wrongly. And this is the aim: it brings out the gaming competitiveness in her, which you’ll need for when you finally manage to get her to play that round of Team Deathmatch with you on Black Ops!

These games aren't by any means 'girly', they just have attributes that appeal to girls aswell, so you can both enjoy them together!

And of course, this isn’t a comprehensive list, I'd add many more if I could but I'm limiting myself! And if the girl don’t wanna game, she don’t wanna game! It’s not the hobby for everyone so I suppose an unlucky few of you are going to have to split your time up. Sucks to be you.

Please leave a comment and follow me on twitter @minnieliddell, I'd love to hear your thoughts!

My Gaming Mansformation

I’ve noticed throughout my fairly expansive gaming career that if I play as a male character, my behaviour is perceptibly different. I start thinking like a man. I occupy the odd transient position of omniscient overseer. I can split myself in two and come at problems from both gender angles. I take the relationships very seriously, even though I’m a woman wooing another woman but it doesn’t feel weird to me because I’m in the mindset of a man. And although games don’t really make it hard to initiate the romances (I think the differences between “Wow, you sure look beautiful with the moonlight glistening off your luminous cheeks” and “SHUT UP BITCH!” are quite plain to anyone…), in-game romances are a piece of piss for me because I can see both sides very plainly.

But in this position I have to admit to conforming to the most hegemonic roles of each sex. When I’m playing as a man, I tend to choose the more aggressive responses but as a women, I choose the more diplomatic ones. If I see a response that I would have gone for in real life but I’m playing as a man, I take a little moment to reconsider what a man might say and will sometimes tweak my response. It’s odd and I don’t really mean to but it has become very instinctive, especially for someone like me who’s very much a tomboy. Well, my girlfriends tell me that if I was a lesbian, I’d be the manlier one. So that means the same thing, right? RIGHT?

To give you a little example, I’ve just finished Mass Effect for the first time and had to go through a part where I was required to choose between saving one of my crew members, one a man and one a woman. I saved the woman and let the man die. And I’m playing as a male Shepard. I know that if I was playing as a woman, I’d have saved the man, I could tell as soon as I’d made the decision that I’d have done something different as the other sex. I remember feeling that: I was a man; I had to do the decent thing and save the woman. I felt like the male crew member and I had an understanding that saving the woman was the honourable option. That’s what men do. It’s like holding a door open, except that it’s taking a Geth bullet to the face. Same difference.
   

Shepard and I become one. He he he he...

I think this stems from many things but primarily because a) I suffer from crippling empathy and b) I put too much faith in games. I suck up peoples’ feelings like an overenthusiastic, sentient sponge; I see everything from everyone else’s point of view and it comes very naturally and extends into every part of my life, including video games. Which leads me to my second point; games aren’t as clever as I think they are. Whatever response I choose will ultimately make no difference, man or woman, yet who I am means that I want to be all that I can for my pixel buddies. Perhaps that’s a testament to how good games are these days; the writing is so emotive and the characters look and act so realistically that I feel the need to treat them like I would a real person.

Or perhaps I’m just utterly mental.

Please leave a comment and follow me on twitter @minnieliddell, I'd love to hear your thoughts!

REVIEW: The First Templar

How I came upon this game is a story in itself; so indulge me for a moment. On the sunny morning of Friday 6^th of May, I strolled in to my local GAME store to peruse their offerings, even though I didn’t have any cash and I was only doing it to tempt myself. There I was drawn to a game that I’d never seen that had Knights on the front. I like Knights. I read the back, thought it looked pretty cool, but was reminded of the fact that I’ve just pre-ordered L.A. Noire.

I came home, melancholy, disheartened and somehow with a bag of chocolate buttons. I don’t know how that happened. I logged onto Twitter, which seems to be my knee-jerk reaction to turning on my PC and saw that GAME were doing a twitter competition to win this exact game. “What a co-inkidink!” I thought to myself, so I did a bit of answering of questions and re-tweeting of things, you know the drill until…YES YOU’VE GUESSED IT. I won the game. Awesome stuff. So I have GAME @gamedigitalto thank for this offering. If you’re still with me, the review is actually going to start now.

I had utterly no idea what to expect with this game. I’ve deduced that either I was living under a rock or the marketing on this game was non-existent. I’d never heard of it; never seen any previews or screenshots; never found a single paragraph on any website or magazine that would attest to its existence. It’s developed by Haemimont Games, a Bulgarian company who’ve made nothing I’ve ever heard of. Not that that means they can’t blow us away with their most recent offering (Spoiler Alert: they won’t).

It tells the tale of a French Templar Knight, Celian, with an odd English accent and his suitably anachronistic, under-clothed female companion, Maria, as they set out on a decidedly medieval/fantasy-style adventure, complete with swords, fugly monsters and mythical powers. They’re looking for the Holy Grail, as Templars are so prone to do.

"Do I, at any point, get to see thy boobies?"

What I can say about The First Templar is that it has lofty aspirations. But of course, that doesn’t mean they amount to anything. It’s trying very hard to be many things but doesn’t manage to do any of them well. It has a character driven story and levelling up system based around an RPG but only a very simple one. It has lever puzzles and trap levels à la Prince of Persia but they’re uninspiring and merely require you to walk around them. Its fighting draws upon common elements from action-adventure games such as combo’s and cinematic finishing moves but the animation is jerky and dull so they fall rather flat.

 Speaking of other games, it isn’t hard to see from where The First Templar has drawn its inspiration. It evokes a decidedly Prince of Persia: Sands of Time feel, from the traps to the female companion. In PoP, this worked wonderfully because Farah and the Prince were very well written, well rounded and witty characters. Sadly in The First Templar, the dialogue between our two protagonists ranges from lame to excruciating. It just isn’t funny and I’m having trouble deciding whether it’s the writing, the voice acting or both. The dialogue and characters are verging on hilarious. Our protagonist, Celian starts out with his brother as his companion. There’s no real character development so when his brother chooses to stay behind and face certain death while Celian escapes with Maria, his new companion, it has utterly no gravitas. Basically, you don’t give two hoots. And then there’s some fantastically rushed dialogue where Celian’s all like, “I must go back and save him!” and Maria’s all like, “He’ll totally be dead by now.” And Celian’s reply is along the lines of, “Oh, okay. Well… I’LL AVENGE YOU BROTHER! Now let’s get some treasure!” Classic.

There’s also a hint of Assassin’s Creed going on here. Not due to the time period because two games can draw from the same era without being a copy of one another but because of things like the cinematic finishing moves in combat, or stealth missions where you have to creep around (Except with Altaïr, it seemed a little more plausible because he was creeping through a crowd and wearing robes. In The First Templar, you’re behind bookshelves in one room, wearing clunky metal armour and sneaking around about 3ft away from the most unobservant guards ever.) Also, holding down LB will initiate stealth mode, much like how holding down RB in Assassin’s Creed would put you in a ‘high profile’ state.

You gain XP from fights and you can use it to upgrade your attack moves or your health and ‘zeal’ orbs (Zeal being used for executing more complex and special moves). To this effect, it has that rather nice combo system but I never used it because alternating between mashing X to attack and holding LB to block were all that I needed for every single enemy. The AI has all the intelligence of a wet biscuit and with far less charm. Enemies will crowd round you in such large quantities that they could quite easily start the hokey cokey and crush you but instead, they all wait around for you to hand them their ass. Although to its credit, your companion’s AI is slightly less thick. If you go to replenish your health (which you do by finding food and water on the road side), Maria will do the same; if you go up behind a guard in stealth mode and press X to silently kill them, she’ll do the same to the one next to you without prompting (thank god they only ever seem to go around in twos…) But that’s about all the nice things I can say.

It’s quite linear in progression but that’s not necessarily a bad point. However, it feels linear too because the environments and vistas are not great. Unlike in some pretty linear games; the sort of games where a twig sits in the middle of the road but you can’t go around it, (*ahem* Final Fantasy XIII or Lost Odyssey) the environments are so crisp, beautiful and wonderfully rendered that it doesn’t matter; you FEEL like you could go anywhere. In The First Templar, the graphics quite honestly look like something off a PSP; they’re blocky and cartoonish. Although, graphics certainly aren’t the be all and end all of a game; if the story is really strong or the game play is really good, you can sometimes forgive poor graphics but with The First Templar, it doesn’t have any other legs to stand on and bad graphics are the last nail in its ill-fated coffin.

To be honest, this picture has done the graphics more justice than they deserve...

All in all, it’s a very unpolished experience. For example, there are bonus missions tacked on to the main ones and I usually like bonus missions because they allow you to explore more of the world and more of the characters but sadly, in this game they are very flat and futile because they have utterly no effect on the outcome of the mission. One bonus task saw me burning enemy food supplies but it was totally pointless because it didn’t make the enemy weaker or fewer in number. It’s just burning things for burnings sake. What it really means is that you have no desire to complete side quests because not only will they amount to nothing, but the world you’ve been given to explore isn’t worth the time it would take to explore it. It’s also just far too simple and hand-holdy. Next to aforementioned food supplies were a conveniently placed brazier and set of torches to light. It just feels insipid.

I will tell you now that I haven’t finished it and to be honest, haven’t really got that far into it at all. This is for a number of reasons, the most blinding one being that I seem to have experience a humongous glitch in one of the early levels that causes my screen to go dark and give me the option ‘restart’ or ‘main menu’ if I cross the imaginary threshold between two buildings. Although annoying, this wouldn’t have been a problem unless my next objective wasn’t RIGHT BETWEEN THOSE TWO BUILDINGS.

So I’m only about five or six hours in and have no intention of completing it. For the sake of the review, I tried seven times to cross this particular point and seven more times crossing various other points but to no avail.

(EDIT. I need to make an amendment to aformentiond glitch proclamation. This isn't a glitch, it's just a little error in design. What you need to do to pass this section is kill all the guards and then turn the wheel (which is on the wooden platform to the right of the gate) until the big grate closes the gate, then you may proceed. The weird insta-killing I experienced was actually me being decimated by a trebuchet but without a warning to that effect. So I apologise, this wasn't completely the fault of the game, I was also being a bit thick. Standard.)

It seems even The First Templar itself wants me to stop playing it. Thank god for that.

Follow me on twitter @minnieliddell to hear more of my musings or merely to berate me for being so mean to this game...

Made for Men, by Men

I’ve played games for such a long time now that when I’m given the option to choose the sex of my character, 9 times out of 10 I go for the man. I just know from experience that if I choose the man, I’ll be able to make him look awesome, whereas if I chose the woman, I know she’ll end up looking like Schwarzenegger in a dress (Yes Fable 2, I’m looking at you.) But it’s more than that; I seem to expect the protagonists to be men. Years of gaming has hardwired me.

I recently started Mass Effect 1 and I wasn’t very far through it when my brother came in, looked at the screen and said: “Why is your Shepard a man?” to which I replied, “Isn’t everyone’s Shepard a man?” He looked at me like I was thick and sneeringly said, “Were you even awake when you put the disk in the machine? You could choose their gender and customise them too. You’re an idiot.”

I was surprised to say the least. I’d assumed that everyone got a male Commander Shepard and I hadn’t even registered that there was an element of choice. I pointed to the box cover art like a dying woman pointing out water, “But look Harry! My Commander Shepard is on the box! He must be the right one!” He shook his head pityingly and left to the shout of, “Read the back!” 

CURSES

It’s not that Commander Shepard: The Generic Man, isn’t spiffy, because I like him a lot but it did make me stop and think: why had I assumed I’d have to be a man? It isn’t completely the fault of video games; there’s nothing wrong with having a man as a protagonist. After all, you’ve only got 2 options to pick from. But the role of females in games seems to be something I assume is set in stone, which is a bit tragic really. Judging by the female netizen’s reaction to Mass Effect and it’s impressive customisability (that I have no idea about), the gender choice should be implemented wherever it is feasible to do so, because it’s amazing how it can draw in female gamers (and of course some guys, who merely enjoying looking at digital ass for twenty hours).

On the customisation side of things; in my opinion, developers haven’t quite got there in terms of making normal looking women. Fable 2 is the game I would cite for being one of the worst offenders. Their levelling up system failed women completely and made us look like steroid pumping she-males. But strength was important to me as a melee user so I kept using the heavy ass swords and watching her thighs grow until she could have given Chun Li a run for her money. When I held my new baby, it looked like a bridge troll accepting an infant sacrifice. When I coerced my strangely unenthusiastic husband to join me in the marital bed, I realised his apprehension was due to the fact that I was imminently about to crush him under my gigantic muscled bulk. It wasn’t my best look. I was going for ‘Tomb Raider’ but all I got was ‘Fridge Raider’.

And it was the same when I remember watching the Assassin’s Creed 2 trailer (http://bit.ly/166cC0). After I’d managed to collect the exploded parts of my cerebral cortex off the walls and retrieve my jaw from somewhere near the earth’s outer mantle, I found it amusing how the only part of it that didn’t look completely perfect was the courtesans, particularly their faces. My brother and I joked that it was because none of the developers had ever seen a women, which of course is *terribly* mean but it does seem to fit in line with my theory that the largely male game developer community haven’t quite nailed ‘the female’ (I did not intend for that to sound as sexual as it did. My subconscious needs to get out of the gutter.)

In games, women are all too often super sexy, with ridiculously impractical clothing. There’s nothing wrong with sexiness but women can be sexy for a multitude of reasons, not just because they have a skirt that shows off the curve of both arse cheeks. Developers have yet to grasp the many facets of female desirability. Proportions are always a bit out, boobs are always a bit too big and heels seem to be worn in ridiculous situations (Bear in mind that in real life, heels are always ridiculous.)

I’d like to play more characters that are realistic looking women and maybe, if there were more options in more games, I wouldn’t be assuming you had to be a man. Basically, I think developers need to employ me as their onsite Female Advisor, where I can sit back and bark orders on how most women don’t have lips like Jolie and how we’d never wear armour that makes our most vital organs easily accessible to any passing pointy object. I’d go freelance; tour the world; save millions of female gamers from annoying girl characters with whiny voices and perfectly coiffed hair after every battle.

But in the mean time, I’m going to go and play Mass Effect, and start wooing some chicks with Male Shepard. Using his manly brawn and my feminine insight, they’ll be putty in my hands in no time.