Triumphant Return

I realize that my month long hiatus was both unannounced and unaccountably horrifying for anyone who set forth to follow this demon thing on any sort of regular basis. But fear not, gentle readers, for I have returned! After a break from writing brought about by soul crushing despair and quiet alcoholism, I have returned to dance for the masses once again. And what a dance I shall do! I shall dance the rumba of selflessness, following closely with the waltz of dignity. That's just how good I am. So, what to talk about upon my triumphant return? Well, first I guess I should get back to the promise to try out 3D Mailbox. Well, I have done so, and I can tell you that the results were sub-par. They were sub-sub-sub-par. Hell, I may as well just come out and say it: That piece of software is unadulterated shit.

Why was it shit? Well, let me count the ways: You have a 3D engine where you can only rotate the camera, your viewpoint is fixed in certain preordained locations. I started the program up with a couple hundred e-mails. This made the program angry. On my (reasonably) state of the art computer, the thing would just turn into a slide show while it did its best to make heads or tails of that many e-mails. There's nothing particularly special about the whole "avatar is your e-mail" thing, either... I mean, you can look at your bikini clad missives, but once you select one, you just get a pretty generic looking window with the contents of the e-mail in it. There are much more interesting ways they could've tackled this, but instead they basically gave me a shitty 3D interface for something that didn't even need a good 3D interface. So there, that's done.

On a less funny note, Metroid Prime 3 came out recently, which rekindled my love affair with Samus Aran. One of the things video games get slagged for is catering to a strongly male demographic. Characters like Lara Croft or Rachel from Ninja Gaiden Sigma are pointed at as proof that the industry refuses to grow up, and refuses to create female characters who seem realistic. Recent characters such as Jade from Beyond Good and Evil and April from The Longest Journey have bucked the trend and delivered interesting characters who don't have to be cookie cutter bombshells. So things are looking up, right? The problem I have is that I'm not sure things were ever looking down. Metroid came out for the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1987. While I confess that I was first introduced to the series 5 years later with Metroid II on the Gameboy, the basic idea remains: You begin the game as Samus Aran, a galactic Bounty Hunter in a set of the coolest battle armor ever placed in a game. So you play through that first Metroid, and then at the end, lo and behold, Samus takes off her helmut and you find out that the most ass-kickingest bounty hunter in the universe is a woman! Samus seldom says much, but her gender is pretty much a non-issue for the game. Sure, beating the game faster means you have a better chance of seeing her take her armor off in a victory celebration, resulting in her in her "zero suit" (it's pretty much a bathing suit), but the game really doesn't knock you over the head with the fact that she's a woman (even a hot one). The fact of the matter is, Samus Aran is the perfect example of the kind of female character that people have been clamoring for for years. She's beautiful, but independent, strong, says very little, and conveys a sense of power and dignity. Anyone who really wants to see great female characters in games doesn't need a reform of the game industry, they need to focus on the characters that get it right, and hope that people take notice of that.

I realize that the previous (huge) paragraph was a bit more dull than my normal rants... I blame Communism. I considered writing about how bad Lair sucks, but there were two problems with that: First, I'd be taking other people's word for it that it's abysmal and then making jokes about that, which seems... derivative. Secondly, making fun of a game like Lair is like beating up a comatose kid for his lunch money. If his Mom kept giving him lunch money. Which would really just raise the question as to what kind of mother would keep putting lunch money in the pocket of their constantly bruised, comatose child? It's not like he's going to be spending it any time soon. I'm going to have to ask Mrs. Stevens about that one day...

--Ak out