Man Gamers

A not-so-serious look at gender representation in games.

[mangamers]

Playing Live-A-Live for the first time - I've just been going through Prehistory.

How many times is Beru going to get swiped? How many times will the main character have to rescue her?

[mangamers]

Page not found? Rektor's "Princess", browser game where you have to rescue a princess in an interactive musical, consider yourself lucky this time.

[mangamers]

So we can choose a boy or girl ranger in the 1984 game Park Patrol but the tile-swapping game Reaxion doesn't elaborate on the gender of the cursor you control? A single pre-game menu option surely would have boosted the game's inclusivity.

[mangamers]

More like they had one chance to make a game without another regular dude as a protagonist am I right?

[mangamers]

It's been like one minute of gameplay, Iga!

[mangamers]

Nobody with a bow then? We just forgot about Ms. Puck then? Where's the justice?

[mangamers]

Tides of Annihilation: big armoured dudes vs lithe women, coming soon.

[mangamers]

So I was trying to find one of my old posts and I found that another post had been flagged for obscenity. I traced back what it was and I think it was a print ad for Criticom showing Gorm and Delara back to back, and presumably Delara was showing too much skin. Which I totally get - my post was probably pointing out how much more armour and covering Gorm had going on.

So in the interests of restoring Criticom content, please enjoy this blurry low-quality picture of Gorm instead.

[mangamers]

When you're revealing a new console and the few seconds of gameplay you can display show this random dude front and centre, whilst any diversity is pushed into the background.

[mangamers]

Just two dudes spraying white foam at jellyfish.

Xybots, Spectrum, Tengen/Domark, 1989

[mangamers]

Konami's Jackal offering a smorgasbord of diversity with Bob, Deckar, Grey and Quint adorning the promo material here.

[mangamers]

It took longer than I thought, but DoA has finally dropped any kind of thinly-veiled gameplay pretence to spend time with digital ladies, and the forthcoming "Venus Vacation Prism" will be a first-person romance game releasing exclusively in Asia.

Presumably players won't have an opportunity to hang out with the likes of Bayman and Akira; more's the pity.

[mangamers]

I played through Super Mario Bros. Deluxe recently via the excellent Delta emulator. It's nice that you actually get to resume the game from the last stage you finished, and these little in-game achievements are an interesting idea - but why the "Bowser Award" for completing the eight worlds and then the second run? Maybe it's saying that Mario is so good at chasing after the princess (the intervening years since the original didn't inspire a more original plot device for Deluxe) that his determination is just what the arch nemesis of the kingdom is looking for...

[mangamers]

Guardians of the Hood and its four, uh, guardians of the hood.

I think this was supposed to be a follow-up to Pit-Fighter but I skipped it entirely. It's still relying on the stilted digitised animation but it feels worse here somehow. Anyway, before you begin you get four characters to choose from. If you want to play as a dude you can pick Connor, Chief or Javier. Otherwise, well, you're playing as Tanya.

[mangamers]

Boxxle's marketing team here with some questionable commentary on who's qualified to push crates.

[mangamers]

Are the boxes for the two Dive Alert games really blue for Matt's version and pink for Becky's version?

[mangamers]

Not cool, FFV Wendigos. Also Bartz is in my party?