Duncan

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Posts posted by Duncan

  1. Posted

    Apparently they do let you, if you get it FedEx-ed.

    Orders valued at $50 or more or which include large Retail Boxes (and you actually want the packaging - see above) must be shipped by Federal Express International Courier for delivery within 2 days.

    I have no idea why they have to do that, though.

  4. Posted

    But I think the truth is that the industry has ended up being more exclusive towards men at the expense of women. The very architecture of the industry itself seems unwelcoming to women, down to how gaming and its world and culture are dealt with psychologically.

    Definitely. I think video games have ended up as one of the few media industries which has this outside perception - regardless of how true it is - of being clique-y and unfriendly toward women. (I'd put comic books down as one of those industries, too.)

    Many women don't tend to be techno savvy, and games are all about technology. There hasn't been much work, for example, in marketing user friendly hardware and software in terms of games, which has an alienating affect on a potentially large female market

    I agree with you regarding the lack of user-friendly marketing, but I don't think that's the primary reason more women aren't getting involved in computers or games; that they get discouraged by the technicalites. To fall back on the Sims 2 again, clearly women are playing that, and that has just as many hardware/software requirements as the next game, though they may not be the most demanding. There's even a separate DVD version out, and the in-game menus have options for textures and resolutions and all that jazz. I think the alienation you were talking about is more prominent with computers, rather than games. A lot of people I know just buy new computers when they need a new computer with no regard to specifications because they don't know about that stuff and as long as the computer works, they don't really want to. That comes back to one of the favourite pro-console arguments; that you can just get a game, you don't even need to install it and it will work absolutely fine. While I should state that I have absolutely no knowledge of any particular statistics regarding this, it seems like that would be a lot more appealing to the female techno-phobe stereotype.

    From my observation this looks to be how a lot of men prefer it - to keep the girls from muscling in on their territory by making it as difficult as possible for them.

    I don't know about that. Admittedly, I'm never conducted an exhaustive investigation in this area, but I've never encountered anyone who's so blatantly misogynistic as to express that, however subtly. I mean, I can imagine some men wanting to keep gaming a 'guy's club', but, well, come on, they're just nuts. But if the perception created by those guys is keeping women away, then that really sucks.

  5. Posted

    I've been trying to think of other semi-mainstream 'girl games' and I'm coming up kind of short. Apart from the Sims, the only other things I can think of are whatever first-person-point-and-click stuff the Adventure Company puts out. Which, as I understand, the 'older women' demographic just go nuts over.

    Both those types of games are - well, not derided exactly, but... okay, kind of derided by the gamers who aren't playing them. And those gamers are usually predominantly guys. Guys who think that Halo 2 and Half-Life 2 aren't just cooler than the Sims, they're also the better games. (I'm not trying to slam anyone here, I'm probably one of those guys.)

    And since the industry and gaming press in particular is male-dominated, I think there's this perception that unless women are playing the 'cooler' games they're either 'casual gamers' or resistant to innovation or newer technology.

  6. Posted

    That reminds me of Carolyn Seymour (Estelle in GK3), who I don't think has ever changed her voice in anything. This is especially noticeable in KoTOR, where she plays like a million different incidental characters, including Bastila's mother, and you can always tell it's her.

  7. Posted

    Warning: the following is basically thinking out loud and possibly redundant.

    I was at a friend's house today, (a male friend - PLOT POINT) and noticed he had a copy of The Sims 2 lying around. I asked whose it was, and, no surprise really, it was his sister's. I remembered this post Yufster made a while ago about - I think I'm remembering this right - about basically only girls are interested in The Sims. And yeah, in my experience that's almost completely true. I actually had a copy of the Sims at one point, which I had for about a week before I lent it to a friend. (Who, as it happens, was a guy. And actually that is the only guy I know who has any variant of the Sims.) He never actually gave it back, but I didn't really care because, well, it was the freaking Sims.

    So I started thinking - not instantly, it's not like I start thinking about this crap on cue - how did it work out that the Sims is something girls like and guys, well, not so much? Does it come down to that 'casual gamer' marketing phrase (I typed Marekting there for a second. Discuss.), and that the Sims, as an arguably 'casual' game, will appeal to those who aren't necessarily gamers and are just looking for something fun to play? And that that group of people are predominantly women? Are women supposed to go for a game which is more open-ended, with simple gameplay and that is easily replayable, rather than something which is more focused and intense, like Half-Life 2? (I bring that up because I have arbitrarily decided it is the hot game to reference.)

    I know this is generalising badly, by the way.

    Of course, from certain people at the Adventure Gamers forums (and I guess this is moving into adventure games a bit and holy shit am I using a lot of parentheses in this) you would get that the female audience is mostly made up of older women for whom keyboard controls are anathema. So of course they wouldn't go for Half-Life or whatever. I really doubt that's it, though.

    It feels like - and this is a feeling I get pretty much exclusively from gaming websites - that there's this apparent need to legitimize the industry by getting women interested in games. I mean, men and women can and will (obviously with exceptions) like different things, and just because vast hordes of women may not be interested in Halo 2 or whatever other mainstream games there are doesn't mean they don't have an interest in the industry.

    But the Sims is mainstream so these women may have an idea of what's out there. I think the mainstream is divided into games men might like and games women might like, and there isn't much crossover between those two groups. Maybe it isn't a case of casual girl gamers playing the Sims and those gamers basically are the female mainstream audience. But even given that I don't think anyone would argue that the games industry and the mainstream in particular isn't dominated by testosterone.

    Maybe there's a minority in the mainstream audience of female gamers who are casual gamers, I don't know. None of this is based on factual evidence, and how's that for a weak closing statement.

    Man, I looked over this. You should all respond as if I wrote something totally coherent and capable of provoking great debate. :shifty:

  9. Posted

    I think the guy's name was Morgan Hunter, which I have remembered for now-forgotten and probably bizarre anyway reasons.

    Also, Kay Kuter was in Gabriel Knight 2, I'm fairly sure. I remember being pretty bummed out when he died.

  14. Posted

    Man, I gotta tell you, life is great here in the year 2005. I mean positively fucking spectacular!

    Man! Wow!

    I wish you guys could see what life is like here in the year 2005.

    Too bad I guess.

    P.S.: Even in the year 2005 these smilies will still not have been changed back. :naughty::innocent:

  15. Posted

    I got HL2, Myst IV, and finally Beyond Good and Evil. :woohoo:

    Man, that's exactly what I got! Except not Beyond Good and Evil, because I already have that. And actually not Half-Life 2, the first one, which I've never played. So really just Myst IV and Half-Life.

    Still though: coincidence or what?

  21. Posted

    Looks like you enjoyed the game a lot more than I did, which is good, I guess. My problem with the story was that it wasn't just trying to be dark and edgy, it was trying to be smart and clever, and I think it ended up failing at all those things. Out of curiosity, which plot twists didn't you see coming?

    Please tell me it wasn't the one about Kaileena.

    I found the entire plot pretty telegraphed, to be honest. The only thing which had me slightly confused was when

    The Dahaka kills your 'stalker' in the past and not you

    and I figured out what that was about myself in the time it took me to run around the entire fucking castle three hundred times before the next cutscene.

    Also, I was pretty pissed when you spend the first half of the game stopping the creation of the Sands of Time, then you do it and it turns out IT DOESN'T MATTER ANYWAY.

    My problem with the 'you bitch!' line wasn't in its content; it was that it was there just to be cool. I mean, you're in this boss battle, halfway through it cuts to a cutscene which consists only of a Prince reaction shot and him yelling "You bitch!". Then you're back to fighting. There was absolutely no point to it other than showing off.

    On a positive note, though, I thought the pre-rendered cutscenes were very well done. (And this confused me: did you think the Prince's voice sounded different in-game? In the cutscenes he was a lot less snarly.) And I was definitely glad Godsmack weren't that involved.