You may not understand how truly angry this makes me.
That, my friend, is a screen capture from City of Heroes. I was dashing through King’s Row this afternoon to see a contact, and suddenly found myself looking at two NPC women in a back alley. Just as I was confirming that they were the recently added (to CoH; they were already on CoV) “Skull Girlfriends” and thus not targettable, one of them said THAT. I had a little seizure slamming the Print Screen key.
It was bad enough that gang member girlfriends were added to areas that previously had no female mobs at all, as if to HIGHLIGHT that fact–you can’t target them, and when you attack the male gang members, they scream and run away. Previously, I have only seen them standing around talking trash about the girlfriends of the opposing gang. But apparently the CoX game designers decided to give them another aspect of personality! They don’t just snipe at other women! They are also insecure about their physical appearances!
Excuse me while I vomit.
June 26th, 2006 at 6:35 am
You can’t look fat while wearing black! It is a rule of the universe! (Isn’t it?)
“So, like, yeah…” is pretty depressing too.
So these aren’t avatars, but computer-generated? Stupid game designers. However, I love the way in which Andromeda’s posture seems to express her disdain…
June 27th, 2006 at 9:33 am
These characters portray girls who think street thugs are a perfect catch. Wouldn’t it be worse if they were articulate, interesting, strong willed and *still* some gang-banger’s “ho”?
I don’t know the game, but I can sympathise with frustration at not being able to slap them in their faces.
July 2nd, 2006 at 4:22 pm
Ace: The central issue is that there are so FEW representations of women among the mobs of CoX that the impact of representations like THAT is magnified. I really find it particularly irritating that there are almost no female mobs to attack, despite the prevalence of female player characters. Equal opportunity, dammit.
K: Yes, those are part of the game environment. There are almost no female mobs that can actually be targeted–the one all-female mob group I’ve encountered so far, the Cabal, is made up of witches and is singled out by the game as female; when you get a mission involving them, the contact says, “I wonder what they did with their men!” As if anyone wonders why the Vahzilok (mad scientist types) have no female animated corpses. >_
July 3rd, 2006 at 3:57 am
I suppose the game designers are probably trying to wriggle out of any accusations that they condone violence against women, but that must be pretty annoying. And “their men”? What men? Why presuppose men?
(Sorry, I’m getting rhetorical. I should perhaps try playing this game before I criticise it!)