Astonishing Quality, Insane DLC Dickbaggery - 2015 Nintendo Xmas Loot Report

Even though I grew up in a mostly Segan household with a bit of NEC PC-Engine on the side, we've owned every major Nintendo Handheld device from a crappy Game&Watch thingie to a GameBoy classic, Advance/SP, Color and the DS in various shapes and releases. Also, I'm going to pretend the VirtualBoy never happened.

With very few exceptions, I've always considered Nintendo's portable games to be something you do whilst waiting for the bus, taking a dump, some quick and easy entertainment when there's no PC or home console nearby. I've spent ridiculous amounts of time playing games like Gargoyle's Quest, Final Fantasy Tactics Advance and, weirdly enough, Monster Racers, when these games came out, but for the most part I didn't play these portable games for more than 30 to 60 minutes at a time. It was entirely possible to beat most shmups and brawlers within these amounts of time, lengthier titles came with a save feature and some 10-20 hours of total play time. Happy days.

Having spent a few days with the humble ten or so games we now have in our 3DS library, I've come to realize that handheld gaming has changed a whole fucking lot from one generation to the next. Some changes are really surpsising to me, such as portable games with production values, which make certain PC titles look like shit by comparison. On the not so happy side there are invasive DLC and microtransaction methods, which rival all the shit I'm used to from EA or Ubisoft. Yes, Nintendo were facing some hard times when the WiiU bombed, but holy shit, they're cold and greedy for somebody, who is all about family values.

I have spend the last three days playing Fire Emblem: Awakening, interrupting only for a few hours of sleep here and there. I'd get up, fire up the 3DS pretty much straight away and play till 5 or 6 in the morning, Claire doing pretty much the same, alternating between Tomodachi Life and Ocarina of Time. I have never finished a Fire Emblem game before, even though I tried some of them on the GBA. I liked the gameplay, because it was very similar to Shining Force, but the crappy visuals and the permadeath mechanic always put me off in the long run. Awakening lets me play without permadeath and it looks absolutely amazing, so it was the first game in the series I actually played all the way to the end. I got about 40 hours of play time out of it, not including most DLC or bonus missions. That's some great value for ~25 Quid.

In many ways, Fire Emblem: Awakening is like a better Shining Force. The tactical, turn-based battles are very similar to Sega's ruined franchise, there's a friendship system, which allows your units to provide bonuses to one another and since this is a Japanese game we're talking about, of course certain characters can also get married and have children, which will eventually join your army when they're fully grown up. Because reasons, time travel, the story is pretty awful, but what the hey.
The game also sounds pretty fucking great:

There's also enough paid DLC available to spend more on added content than on the original game. There's a lot of free DLC here, too, and the main storyline was created without bonus content in mind, so you can easily complete the whole thing without forking out for extra stuff. Still, it's annoying to play a brand new game and five minutes in you're presented with a cash shop, which offers tons of new stuff for lots of real currency, including Pay2Win-crap such as paid maps, which reward you with insane amounts of gold and experience, which can be played an infinite amount of times.

But the game which absolutely takes the piss when it comes to microtransactions is Bravely Default, which combines old school JRPG mechanics with the worst, most annoying features of browser/mobile gaming.

Holy shit. Bravely Default features so much quality voice acting, incredibly detailed hand-drawn landscapes and an absolutely amazing soundtrack, I haven't seen such production values in a portable game since Final Fantasy: Advent Children. Which makes sense, seeing as they were both made by Square Enix.

The game actually freaking looks like this!

Hidden underneath the fancy visuals and audio and tons upon tons of unnecessarily cheesy, cringeworthy dialogue is a fairly standard JRPG, which plays a lot like the old-school Final Fantasy games. You have your four warriors of light, you put a bunch of weapons, armor and spells on them and explore dungeons, solve quests and battle your way through tons of random encounters. The whole thing gets spiced up by the brave/default combat mechanic, which lets you perform multiple actions in advance at the cost of missing turns further into the battle. Or deliberately skip a turn, turtle up, then perform multiple actions afterwards. Or ignore the whole thing and just play it like any other JRPG before it. It's pretty fun, I guess.

What ruined it for me about ten minutes in was a popup, telling me that I can basically cheat by spending real money via microtransactions. There's a feature, which lets you freeze time and perform attacks, spells or any other action in order to gain an advantage in battle. Normally, you only get one of these actions for every eight hours you put your game into sleep mode. However, you can buy potions to refill your action meter by spending real currency. But the game doesn't just tell you about it once and then shuts up about it. It goes out of its way, breaking the 4th wall and all immersion the first time you try this feature.

"Is it true that there are other ways to use this ability besides putting the system to sleep?" Your fucking characters say these things out loud while you freeze time, constantly hinting at the fucking cash shop. This isn't a Free2Play game, it's not a budget title and having characters ruin immersion like that, only to remind me that I should spend more money on microtransactions is absolute bullshit. And while this is the only form of microtransactions I've encountered thus far, Bravely Default still goes out of its way to keep you from actually playing the fucking game.

You see, there's a little minigame, which has you rebuild a village in real time. Tell your villagers to build or upgrade the potion shop, have them open a weapon shop, that kind of thing. Think WoW garrisons. Some tasks only take five minutes, others take several hours and a little icon will flash at you and remind you to keep checking on the villagers whenever they complete something. There's also a flashing icon when new sidequests appear. "Change the order of your party!" "Slow down or speed up combat!" Yes, tutorials are great and everything, but I've played RPGs before and I'd really like to skip this. You will also get random visits from other players' characters, who can be summoned in battle for a bit of extra damage, which also causes random update notes to flash on your screen. So in between build orders on your village, pointless side missions and random online crap you get drowned in so many notifications that it becomes pretty difficult to focus on the actual game. Thank god you get a "party dialogue" notification flashing every two or so minutes, whenever you group wants to share their thoughts on the situation. And they want to share a whole fucking lot.

Music is good, though:

Out of all the games I've tried so far, Bravely Default is the only one that really disappointed me. I'll keep at it for a little while longer and give it a chance to convince me, but I'm not expecting much. I don't like it when a relatively basic RPG is cluttered up in so many minigames, social media features and other meaningless garbage. Just let me play the damn game!

On the other side of the spectrum is Luigi's Mansion 2. I didn't really want that game, but Claire put it on the Christmas list for the heck of it. I played the original for a few minutes, but I never had a Gamecube and I've never been a huge Nintendo fan outside of their handheld department, so I didn't expect much. And damn, was I wrong!

This game is amazing. I think it looks even better than Fire Emblem or Bravely Default, because it has some incredible lighting effects, it makes excellent use of the stereoscopic 3D and plays around with perspective a lot, when you move and tilt your DS. Music and character animations are awesome and it's really funny when Luigi suddenly hums along with the background music. See, this is how you break the 4th wall without fucking up the atmosphere, Square Enix! Vacuuming up ghosts is pretty easy and for the most part this game reminds me more of a point & click adventure than a platformer or whatever it's supposed to be. There's a lot of discover, it has a great sense of humour and I'm surprised at how much I'm enjoying this. Definitely worth it!

Another big surprise was Street Fighter IV. It's been out for a while, but I still can't believe how close it is to the PC and console versions:

Characters, moves and animations are just like in the "big" version and they even put all the taunts, colours and costumes in there! The one thing that bothers me is how all the characters and animals in the background have been turned into flat, dead cardboard cutouts. I know they're doing this for performance reasons, but those bystanders just don't look right when they're flat 2D pictures with zero animations or depth to them. This is especially true in the dynamic 3D mode, which slightly alters the camera angle for a better 3D effect. You get to see all the 2D bystanders from the side and they look incredibly fake and cheap. On the other hand, how much time to you spend looking at details in the scenery when you're playing Street Fighter? It's not a massive drawback and the game is still incredibly fun, but I think I'd prefer it if they had removed those guys altogether instead of turning them into still, ugly sprites.

People in the background never move and they're all in 2D.

I'm pretty sure there is nothing that hasn't already been said about Super Smash Bros., Mario Kart 7 or Ocarina of Time, so I'll just say they're all great, though Mario Kart feels unusually difficult for some reason. The entire 50cc cup is so laughably easy, that I was bored the entire time and really just wanted to get it done. But when you get to the 150cc races, things get so incredibly tough, that the whole experience can get a bit frustrating, especially when you just want to unlock additional characters and vehicles. It looks great, it runs well, it's a nice game and everything, but it didn't really blow me away. I'd say it's still worth it, especially when you have friends to play against. It's just a shame that the stat system for the karts seems a bit messed up and apparently everybody chooses maximum acceleration over stats like speed, weight, handling or off-road, as most of them are pretty useless. I prefer Smash and the Zelda remakes, but none of these games are really bad.

Goodbye, 2015!

I've been living in the UK for more than a half decade now! Can you believe it? Man, time is flying! And things could only be worse if I had cancer and lived under a bridge right now. Merry Christmas!

Five years of working our asses off, which usually includes saturdays and sundays. Heck, Claire is working right the fuck now and my next article is due in the first week of January. And guess what? We're not a single step closer to that marriage we may as well give up on planning, we haven't been on a single vacation and I haven't seen a single square mile of this fucking island, which isn't part of our daily trip to Farm Foods.

But that's our own fault, because we blew all our hard-earned cash on fancy Nintendo toys this year, right? Yeah well, I had work days in November, which started at 9am and ended sometime around 1am in order to afford that shit. And guess what? Claire and I gave each other NOTHING, nada, zilch for Christmas or our birthdays in 2014 or 2013, because we had to save all our pennies to pay a guy for shoving cotton up my dead father's ass, so the family could look at him one last time before they put him in a vase. Because enbalming isn't just fucking pointless, it's also ridiculously expensive.

So here's to the next 5 years with no hope for change, no future and no proverbial light at the end of the tunnel, because we live in a day and age where 70 Euro a page is considered fair pay for freelance writers. Because unreliable assholes with zero talent are okay with these wages and they'll also do it for less. Hurray! Hey, maybe I'll just fart out some stolen, badly-researched news articles at 3 Euros a pop and "if I offer you six, you should consider it a favour, not an insult, but we'll have to renegotiate afterwards" you stupid, fucking, greedy bastards!

Here's to another year of 7 days work a week, taking all the shit and the scraps nobody else wants, getting by on 800 Quid per month and whatever working tax credit the Tories say I deserve. It's not like I need fair pay or a vacation, seeing as tinned and frozen foods are getting better and better each year and I can see most of the countryside on tv, anyway. And it's not like our 7 year engagement looks like a total joke or something. Ho, ho, fucking ho. Happy Christmas, you cunts!

Getting Hitler & Death To Make a Baby

Bring Hitler to your island and suddenly there's a death problem. Weird.

Tomodachi Life lets you mess around with the virtual lives of your friends, families and favourite celebrities and fictional characters. Which is boring, so I did the only reasonable thing by putting Hitler in there. Yeah... we may have to skip this game when Claire shows the 3DS to her Nana this Christmas.

I may have been a little too accurate recreating the angry little shitsack inside the game, so we had to nerf him a bit by putting a pink bunny hat on him and stuffing him inside a giant hamster cage.

Who's a good little Hitler? Does Hitler want to play? 

To make things a little less creepy we've also put some actual friends in there, such as our good friend Haggy. He plays a sick Ukulele.

I don't know if he also plays any real instruments. But look! There he is now!

He's still playing the theme from Halloween outside assorted ladies' bedroom windows every night.

And five minutes later, this is what happened:

Abort! Delete! UNINSTALL!

Since Tomodachi Life is 90 percent soap opera, a huge part of it is really a dating simulator. Claire has put our Miis in there, who were set up with one another by Twilight Princess' Midna. And only 38,433 dates later, they totally hit it off, despite their low compatibility rating of 7 percent! Or as we're hoping to proclaim in our wedding vows one day, "Eh, close enough."

I didn't take off the penguin suit all night, ifyouknowwhatimsayin

Ironically enough, Midna ended up all heartbroken when she finally realized that her aching loins were screaming my name all along. No matter what we tried, she simply wouldn't stop feeling moist for me, so we deported her to some random 3rd world country. She still sends creepy pictures every once in a while.

We've removed the bottom half of the pic. She's completely naked down there. It's not pretty.

Meanwhile, Haggy and Hitler were getting dangerously close. Sure, they make a cute couple and everything, but the whole thing still seemed a bit wrong, so we added Death to the show. Did you know the Grim Reaper is really female? It's so hard to tell when somebody is a skeleton, but Death spends most of her day painting her nai... um... finger and toe bones, knitting disgusting sweaters and singing to herself in the bath tub. I think Death might be too nice for Hitler. Whoa.

Eventually we decided to distract Hitler with random toys like a metal detector, which lead to some bizarre moments. Here's a picture of our Miis enjoying a midnight walk on the beach, while Hitler is furiously digging in the sand after his metal detector found something:

Wo ist mein hidden Nazi Gold??

Besides, it looks like there is somebody much better suited to hook up with good old Death.

I don't think this is what Nintendo had in mind when they came up with this game. To be fair, the game is pretty bizarre even when you don't turn it into a boning simulator with Death and Hitler. I'm well over a year late to the party, but just in case you missed it...

I'm a Dinosaur!

Claire and I have finally transformed into one of those elderly couples, who sit up in bed and read, occasionally turning their heads to comment on interesting stuff happening in their books. Or however that works. Except our books are portable consoles and our reading material consists of demos, videos and a bizarre life simulator.

Nintendo is weird. Everyone, myself included, is happy to make fun of EA and Ubisoft for farting out the exact same games over and over again, as well as releasing tons of overpriced DLC for their games. Last night I spent five Quid to unlock Cloud Strife in the 4th Smash Bros. game. And if I wanted all the additional stages, costumes and characters, I could spend more money on DLC than what I had to pay for the game itself. And we're on which Mario Kart now? Eight? And don't get me started on their DLC...

Yet I didn't hesitate to fork out some real cash to put Ryu and his stage in my portable game, which I'll probably never even look at a couple weeks from now. Funny how that works.

Perhaps I'm so okay with throwing lots of money at Nintendo, because they also do a lot of things right. Fucking demos, for instance! Remember when you could fucking try a game before you shelled out a ton of money on something you might not even like? Without pirating it, that is? There used to be a time where playable demos were a pretty common thing - or so I've learned from ancient cave paintings. And apparently this is also a thing on the 3DS. Awesome!

I have spent hours trying all kinds of games on there. Surprisingly, the new Sonic Game (the one with the hideous, malformed characters) is actually really fun to play. There's also a crazy cat lady simulator, which couldn't possibly be any less realistic. The cats on there are friendly, happy, they eat their expensive brand name cat food without drama and you can freaking walk them using only a laser pointer. The demo cat looked exactly like one of our cats. I uninstalled the demo five minutes later and cuddled the real cat. She hated it. Life is good.

If I offer my real cat the same brand of food twice in a row, she'll turn her ass on it and do a burying motion. True story!

But we didn't just dick around on weird game demos. There's also a new anime channel in the 3DS home menu, which plays crap like Pokemon episodes and the cringeworthy Kirby show. I always thought games turned cartoon show served to sell a product, but I actually kind of hate Kirby after watching the first episode of that nonsense. But everything was better after we watched I'm a Dinosaur!

It explains all cool dinosaur facts in a funny, easy to understand fashion. Ancient monster lizards never looked cooler! And kids will like it too, I suppose.

We've also bet some (virtual) money on a bunch of live battles happening around the world on Super Smash Bros. Amazing stuff, really. There was always a match about to start, never any delays in between or during battles. I suspect we were really just watching replays of recent matches rather than having them live-streamed as they happened, but it was still a pretty cool feature. It's fun to see what other players can do on there. And things get infinitely more interesting when you bet on somebody and hope for them to win.

Wanna know what new content is coming up for Smash Bros.? Here's some lag-free high quality video showing all the new characters and costumes in all detail! We've also spied on our sleeping Miis in Tomodachi Life and shot each other's faces in some weird built-in minigame thing that lets you shoot faces. It also plays all our favourite Xtube videos.

Yeah, I know. This thing is basically a smartphone with better games and without the phonecalls. I can awkwardly update my Facebook status on there using the stylus or I can watch Youtube videos on a much smaller screen using a much lower resolution than my PC. And it doesn't exactly run Dragon Age or Warframe, either. But who gives a fuck? We have Mario Kart. Heh.

XL Fun!

Our New 3DS XL consoles arrived today and exceeded all expectations! As a cave-dwelling backwards fuck, who refuses to buy a smartphone, I have now finally reached a stage in evolution, where I get to poop and watch Youtube at the same time! Whee! Here's me killing five people in the Ghost in the Shell FPS game:

I can now chill out on the sofa and book face like a pro. Oh yeah and apparently the thing plays games, too. Ryu on Smash Bros. feels weird and out of place, but I'm having too much fun to care. We've also ordered another brand new game, today. And if anyone had told me it was gonna be Tomodachi Life, I would have laughed them off the internet.

There's a trial version of that game on the new 3DS. So I dicked around a bit with the lookalike Miis the console created for Claire and my grumpy self. Highly unflattering stuff, but what the hey. I had a little virtual Claire in my game and then she got a cold, so I gave her some medicine and then I put her on a swing and pushed her a little and then I gave her orange juice and she really liked that and damn, this is the biggest waste of time, EVER, but I can't stop caring, because she's Claire (sort of) and it was fun watching our Mii's interact with each other on there andand... ahem.
Well and then I pictured a scenario where Claire was dead and all I had left was her Mii in Tomodachi Life and I got really depressed, because the human brain is a dickbag.

Apparently, old NDS games look pretty good on the 3DS, as well. Claire's going through all her old Mario games right now, starting them over to experience them all over again. And I'm waiting to get my hands on Fire Emblem. Starfox looks pretty neat and is on offer for less than 20 Quid right now. Final Fantasy Explorers is coming next year. And another Fire Emblem. And there's like a dozen games rated 90+ on that console already. We'll be very busy these next couple of months. And hilariously poor. Time to eat cardboard! Whee!

Go Fuck Yourself, eBay!

Living in the UK whilst getting your monthly salary in Euro is a pain in the ass. You try and do your Christmas shopping on Amazon when all your money is in the wrong fucking currency. Of course this wouldn't be such a big problem if Amazon accepted PayPal, but of course they don't, because PayPal is affiliated with eBay. Of course I could order all my shit from online stores which accept PayPal such as game.co.uk, but those bastards charge 180 Quid for a product I could get for 140 on Amazon while I'm writing this.

Amazon

Game - the extra 40 Quid are for the English text on the cardboard box.

So yeah... turns out eBay still exists. Did you know? I mean, have you honestly used eBay within the last decade or so? That website people use to sell you all their broken shit, empty cardboard boxes or nothing at all even though you pay them? And it turns out the place hasn't changed one bit. Have a look at Smash Bros. over at Amazon:

It was 25 Quid a week ago. Thanks, Christmas!

Meanwhile on eBay:

Should I buy the overpriced one or the one that was clearly stolen?

Great. On eBay I can either pay AAA PC Game money on a fucking handheld game or I can save half a Quid, but get my game second hand, with no box, manual or fucking anything it originally came with. Who throws out the fucking protective cases these games come with?

And yes, I did see the seller offering a brand new Smash Bros. for 25 Quid, but they're located in Australia, selling the Austalian version of the game, which takes up to 3 weeks for delivery. The fine print mentions additional fees when the game goes through customs.

And you had better be fucking patient if you want to buy a *New* 3DS XL on eBay. As in, the 2015 version, not the one from 2013. Let's see what happens if we search for New 3DS XL, shall we?

The first page of results is much bigger than this - I have highlighted the only two matches.

Of course this is as much Nintendo's fault as it is eBay's - out of well over a dozen results on the first page, only two actually show the new 3DS XL, the rest is different stuff I didn't want to buy. You have to blame Nintendo for giving their product such a retarded name, but it doesn't change the fact that it makes shopping for one on eBay a massive pain in the dick. If you don't know exactly what you're looking for, possibly because you're shopping for a friend, relative, child or whatever, you may well end up buying the outdated 2013 model - possibly at the exact same price of the newer, better 2015 version. Gee, thanks so much, eBay!

So I set up an eBay account, linked my PayPal with it, got ripped off (the current exchange rate is 72 Pence per Euro, PayPal gives you 69), bought articles from 4 different sellers, all of which stated, "Item will be dispatched today if you order within the next XX minutes." They all took my money straight away, they all gave me a positive rating (mkay), none of them, not one, have sent out the item today.

Instead, I get a message from one of the sellers:

Okay, I had to give all that information to eBay and even more than that to PayPal and have it all verified, but whatever. I gave him my name and phone number and told him I cannot re-send him my email address, because eBay disallows that in private messages. Try it for yourself - you'll get an error message, telling you to remove the email address. Here's the guy's response:

Because apparently my landline isn't good enough and it's somehow my problem that he doesn't trust new eBay accounts without user ratings. Any real shop  that accepts PayPal would have sent me my stuff by now. Meanwhile, this guy wants my blood type, a stool sample and all my favourite sexual positions. So I replied like a dickbag:

So the guy finally called me on my landline and confirmed the purchase. After he accepted my fucking payment. The item is still not marked as 'sent', but he has given me a super positive review, because he's probably afraid I might send him a negative one for being annoying.

I hope this concludes today's entry and I'll just receive all my stuff sometime this week and that'll be the end of that. Next time I'm gonna get my money out of an ATM, pay it into my bank account and shop through Amazon, because eBay is outdated, frustrating, tedious horsefuck.

-Cat

UPDATE, 24 hours later

I have paid for each and every item yesterday (07 Dec). Today, only one out of four items has been dispatched. The remaining three items, all of which are supposed to arrive between tomorrow and Thursday, are still with the seller. Ironically, the one item which has actually been put in the mail is not due until Thursday or Friday.

UPDATE, 48 hours after payment

The games have now been dispatched. So tomorrow we should be sitting on two chargers, two copies of Smash and no 3DS. Nice.

UPDATE - Day Four

3DS was paid for and the order was confirmed on Monday. The mail man delivered this in the morning:

Couple hours later he showed up with this:

Well then! Time to charge my brand new 3DS and try out this sweet, sweet game!

UPDATE - Day Six:
Still no 3DS. The seller told me they should get here next Tuesday. Really? He said he put them in the mail on Wednesday morning and, like me, he's located in the UK. Okay then. Let's wait for Tuesday. I coulda just taken all my money out of an ATM, put it in the bank, ordered through Amazon, saved some money and a lot of time by now.

Why User Reviews Are Necessary

The other day I read an interesting column about how user reviews on sites such as Amazon or Metacritic are bullshit, because lots of people tend to vote only the maximum or minimum amount of points (or stars) and because Metacritic doesn't even require you to own the game you're rating and because certain publishers and game developers have been caught rating their own shit. And maybe average Joe simply isn't as "qualified" to review games as us professional games critics. To which I say - get off your high horse. User reviews are as important (and full of shit) as most "professional" ones.

Let's get one thing out of the way: Video game critics and wine experts have one thing in common. The better ones among us are great with words, but aside from that, we're faking it, because we're just as stupid as everybody else. You don't need any special skills to tell whether or not you like or dislike a game and tell people why you do or do not enjoy playing something. This isn't fucking rocket science. It's goddamn entertainment. Anyone capable of forming an opinion and explaining it with a few words can be a games critic. Maybe not a great one at that, but the lousy quality of today's gaming magazines and websites is an entirely different matter.

So user reviews are bad, apparently. Current popular example: The PC version of Fallout 4 scored an 85 with professional reviewers, while the user rating sits at an underwhelming 5.4 on Metacritic. And while the average user score is certainly off the mark with this one, you can't deny that many of them raise valid points of criticism, from the horrid console UI to the usual plethora of Bethesda bugs, tons upon tons of boring fetch quests or the fact that the story pretty much forces you to be a goodie-goodie, where games like New Vegas allowed you to become a slaver, if you so desired. And while I'm personally enjoying the streamlined new perk system and the absence of durability loss on anything but power armor, you can't deny that this is the easiest Fallout game of all times. A five year old could master this game on the default difficulty setting. That whole "wasteland survival" feeling gets a little ruined when you can get all sorts of perks that make you immune to radiation during the first five or so level ups.

I don't agree with a 5.4. I like Fallout 4. But you can't just claim that all of these user reviews are completely pointless and contain no valid criticism. Many of the things users bring up on Metacritic or Steam aren't mentioned in any professional reviews and, as a user, I find them interesting and relevant. And there are lots of games, where the user rating is simply more accurate than the professional average.

This still image is only slightly slower than the actual gameplay.

Take the abysmal Need for Speed: Rivals, for instance. A professional metascore of 76 for the worst game in the series by far. The PC version of this game is frame-capped at 30 FPS. A fucking racing game, which came out in late 2013 with a 30 FPS frame cap! If you unlocked the cap, it would break the game's physics, cars would start flying away and everything ran way too fast. The game also introduced great features such as unskippable tutorial videos on how to accelerate and use your brakes. Because clearly we've never played a racing title before. The tutorial is played twice for good measure. Look, if you wanna see for yourself how fucking awful and broken this game is, look at TotalBiscuit's Let's Not Play. I have bought this game after reading some of the positive professional reviews, none of which mentioned those annoying tutorials, the shitty frame cap or the problem with the physics engine, let alone the piss-poor performance of the Frostbite engine, which struggles to maintain Rivals' ridiculous 30 FPS in the first place. The low user-rating of 3.2 is spot on and I would have saved a lot of money if I had checked metacritic before I bought this thing.

Another great example for a series of games, most professional reviewers don't know anything about is Call of Duty. Year after year they fart out another spectacular 4 hour campaign with lots of flashy explosions. Granted, Black Ops 3 actually offers a few more hours of gameplay, but it's still on rails, you still can't leave your predetermined path and, most importantly, a huge part of the player base never touches the fucking campaign! I haven't finished the story in any CoD title since Modern Warfare 3, because - like a large part of the community - I focus solely on the multiplayer portion of the series. And guess what? Professional reviewers don't get to fucking see the multiplayer, because they get to play a press version, weeks ahead of the official release.

Yes, they get to play against other reviewers and random Youtubers, but how's the matchmaking? Are cheaters ruining every lobby? Are there dedicated servers? Are any of the new game modes "professionals" praise in their shitty reviews actually being played or do people ignore them anyway, because everyone only plays TDM and Domination? If you want to know about any of these things, you depend on user reviews, because professional reviewers are too busy talking about the campaign or the 3 new multiplayer modes nobody is going to play.

War never changes :P

But what really ticks me off is when a professional critic complains about user reviews being bought. Excuse me? I remember when I was asked to review the hilariously awful Silent Hunter Online. You probably haven't heard about that game, because who the hell gives a fuck about browser-based Free2Play submarine simulators? If you watch only a single video today, make sure it's the following trailer:

I was asked to change my negative review into a neutral preview, because Ubisoft paid for the article. Sponsored content. It's a fucking advertisiement, pretending to be a real article. Yes, you spend a lot of money on a magazine to read fucking sponsored content.

Oh and do you remember Final Fantasy XIV? The first version, before the re-release, which now rivals WoW's subscription numbers? The original Final Fantasy XIV was so bad, Square fired the entire team that worked on it and started from scratch.

The original release was a broken, unplayable mess, where your biggest problem was a pair of broken panties. I'm not making this up. Apart from the usual weapons and armor your average Eorzean adventurer would carry around, every character also had a pair of underpants, which would take damage in combat like every other piece of equipment. And this would eventually result in a little warning icon on your screen, informing you about item damage. Problem is, if you didn't level up the crafting profession required to repair your own knickers, you'd be stuck with the item damage icon for all eternity, because you could not take your broken underwear to a repair NPC or another player. You could do so with any other item, but removing your undies was not allowed, so they'd remain broken for good.

I was asked to review the game for a magazine and they bumped up my intended rating by about 10 points, because, "Square are too important, we can't afford to piss them off." Yes. This is a thing. So excuse me, if I can't help but laugh when a professional reviewer complains about certain user reviews being "bought". So what if there are one or two phony user ratings among hundreds of legit ones on Steam, Amazon or Metacritic?
They made me hand out a rating of 73 for the original Final Fantasy XIV, a game so unfinished, so unplayable, it was little more than a concept demo. If you wanted to know how awful this game was back then, user reviews were a lot more trustworthy than certain professional outlets.

Don't get me wrong. This doesn't happen all the time. I've only experienced this with four or five of my articles with a place I've long severed my ties with. But it absolutely happens. There's a reason many readers are having a hard time trusting professional reviewers these days. There's a reason certain magazines spend more time explaining and justifying their review scores than they do talking about fucking games. Of course you have to take user reviews into consideration before you buy something! Fuck the numbers, ignore the fact that many of them rate in nothing but absolutes and always go for a straight 0 or 10 and nothing in between. But read their reasons. Figure out why they love or hate a game.

I always wanted to be a games critic. I read all the gaming magazines I could get when I was ten years old. And when some of you flew cardboard boxes to the moon or dressed up like cowboys I'd sit and write my own reviews about my favourite C64 games, just for myself. To me, this is the coolest job in the world. Some of the folks I get to work with nowadays were true childhood heroes to me. But for fuck's sake. Stop being so goddamn arrogant. You write about fucking videogames. You're hardly brain surgeons.

-Cat

EQ2: Terrors of Thalumbra is the best, worst expansion, ever

When SOE Daybreak announyed that there'd be no more expansions for Everquest 2, lots of people feared it would go the way of Vanguard: Saga of Heroes and Free Realms. But as people were starting to look for new virtual homes one one of the many other MMORPGs out there, Daybreak suddenly made a surprise announcement - there would be another expansion after all: Terrors of Thalumbra.

Sounded too good to be true, which is exactly what it was. With price tags ranging from 35 Dollars (standard edition) all the way up to 140 Dollars (premium edition), you'd expect a pretty juicy content infusion. Instead, you get a new signature questine, which can be completed in about three hours, a ton of generic side quests (kill this, loot that), new "prestige" items, which can only be equipped while you have a running subscription and an ugly brown zone with a dull and generic storyline, full of dull and generic characters. Look, you've already sent me to the afterlife and dragon heaven, had me join the armies of good and evil in an attempt to save the world in a massive showdown, so throwing me into some generic steampunk cave full of gnomes... sorry, "gnemlins", isn't gonna get me super hyped.

There is nothing epic about Terrors of Thalumbra and compared to some of the most exciting things you could see and do in previous expansions, Thalumbra looks and feels like early mid-level content at best. And this is the new "end game". It offers more or less the same amount of stuff you'd get in a free content update from more popular, successful MMOs, but with maximum padding. Here's a city, but you cannot interact with any of the NPCs without grinding a ton of reputation. Here's an instanced dungeon, which uses the exact same map as the city, except all the NPCs were replaced by monsters. Here's another dungeon, which uses the fucking city map AGAIN!

What's worse, the game no longer explains shit. Previous expansions finally gave you map markers and a general idea where you should go. They removed that sort of thing from Thalumbra, because apparently it adds to the "immersion". I have spent an hour down in a seemingly cleared dungeon, only to find some tiny, random bowl of water sitting in the corner of a room. You can pick it up, but you cannot use it, the item description tells you nothing about it. Turns out you have to bring the bowl to a dog at the other end of the dungeon to stop him from kicking you out of an elevator. Meanwhile, the quest log states: "Observe the activity of [generic bad guy faction]."

Look, I don't need a game to hold my hand every step of the fucking way. But this shit is just lazy. Speaking of lazy - EQ2 lets you study the anatomy of certain enemies (e.g. orcs, gnolls and the like), so you could use a powerful master strike against them. Studying them also rewards you with a book and a decorative item for your house. The new expansion gets rid of that by introducing trinkets, which allow you to use the master strike against everything. Not only does that make 100 levels of anatomy research entirely worthless, but it also means they won't have to add any more of those quests in the future. Lazy bastards!

The expansion introduced one redeeming new feature, however, which makes all of the laziness and the ridiculous price tag a little more forgivable: The infusion system. Infusable items can be upgraded to absolutely ridiculous power levels, meaning raiders and casual players are now on an equal power level. And this is something many other MMOs should do. Reserving the coolest, strongest, most interesting items for the low percentage of players, who have the time and the willpower to treat an online game like a second job is stupid. This shit needs to stop. A raid is its own reward.

The way EQ2 works right now is brilliant. You can play solo or group dungeons, join a raid, temporarily lower your level to enjoy some old content you may have skipped before, do whatever you want to do and keep getting stronger while you're at it. You'll earn enough ingame currency and resources to keep upgrading your stuff for a while. The system doesn't come without its flaws, however. The fastest way to upgrade stuff via infusion is by spending ingame currency. And you can make a ton of currency simply by buying subscription tokens for real money and selling them on the broker (read: auction house). You can turn real money into stats for your character.

It would make a lot more sense to award infusion points for simply playing the game, completing dungeons and quests, taking part in events and activities, rather than allowing players to throw money at the screen to make their characters grow in strength. But at the end of the day, this is Everquest 2 we're talking about, they're desperate for money and they'll do whatever it takes to seperate you from your cash. To be fair, infusable gear is incredibly powerful even without sinking mountains of currency into them and the first bunch of infusions is affordable with whatever gold you'll take home from your daily dungeons. But the wealthiest players will always be the most powerful ones. I'm not sure if this is any better than dividing the community into raiders and filthy casuals.

-Cat

God Damn It, Nintendo!

The biggest drawback to my job isn't the relatively crappy pay or the sometimes ridiculous and inhumane deadlines for articles. To me, it's non-disclosure agreements. I've been playing Fallout 4 for roughly two weeks before its official release, which was fucking awesome. Despite a bunch of people meta-bombing the shit out of it in the user ratings right now, it's one of the best games I've played all year. And I couldn't tell anyone about it. In fact, when my friends got hyped about it on Facebook and started posting trailers, teasers and other such things to show their anticipation, I decided to post a picture of my original box of Fallout Tactics, which resulted in instant complaints - dude, don't talk about anything even remotely related to Fallout! I didn't post anything directly related to Fallout 4, I sure as fuck didn't reveal any story, artwork, ingame-footage or breach my NDA in any other way. But posting stuff that could be remotely connected in some way to an unreleased AAA-title gets you in trouble.

The spiders in my toilet are a close second.

Meanwhile, certain outlets have posted tons of "leaked" footage and some stores started selling the PS4 version several days before the official release, so that whole thing didn't really work out as planned, anyway.
Being able to play stuff before anyone else is awesome, of course. But NDAs are pure torture. Imagine you had a chance to start playing a game you've been looking forward to all year long, before anybody else you knew, and you couldn't tell anybody. It also means that, while most people are only starting to get to the best parts of the game right now, I've already seen all the endings, dicked around with all the factions and I've seen and done most of the stuff there is to see and do. And fuck all the whiners, I think this game is incredible! I've sawed a man into tiny pieces and then put his remains on a shelf!

German neatness, Ladies and Gentlemen.

Of course they're not just letting me play games early simply because I'm so awesome and I'm better at this stuff than all you ignorant cunts. It's work. I get shit done on there and then write about it. And then I get paid. Because it turns out my parents lied to me and you don't actually need to finish school and yes, you can just sit on your ass and play games all day and go through life just fine. Give it a try!

Long story short, I've got a lot of paid work to do, most of it is already done and Christmas is actually happening this year. As in, we don't just write our names on a bunch of cards and pretend that we contributed to everyone's presents whilst stuffing our faces with free food - Claire and I are actually spending a little something on some fun new toys.

Close, but no.

Here's the thing - we both spend a significant amount of time playing video games together when we're at home. But sometimes we have to leave the house and that's where we depend on mobile gaming devices. And ours are old. We've got everything from a classic Gameboy to a Sony PSP, but time has moved on, we've got a bit of spare money, so why not upgrade to something a little less dated?

My first impulse was to jump at the 2DS + Mario Kart 7 package for 75 Quid. Holy fuck. That's a fantastic game with a decent enough handheld console right there. At an insanely cheap price. But then we had a look at the 3DS XL, which has an extra analog nub, more power, it's bigger, faster, better at all the things an suddenly we're looking at nearly 150 Quid per console. And at that price you may as well go for the much more powerful Playstation Vita.

Because who needs games when you have Skype?

Higher resolution, a slightly bigger screen, a freaking quadcore cpu and so much more power in that baby than in a 3DS XL. Heck, some PS Vita games look so amazing, this thing almost feels like a portable Playstation 3.
And while lots of people argue that "graphics aren't important", I fucking love quality visuals in a game and yes, to me, they are very important and can make a good game even better. Besides, half of those fucks, who are whining about Fallout 4 over at Metacritic complain about the game's dated visuals, so graphics can't be that irrelevant after all.

Here's the thing, though. I've looked at the features, capabilities and the best games currently available for 3DS and PS Vita. And I've come to the following conclusion: If you enjoy fun, colourful games with lots of customization and great multiplayer, get a 3DS. If you want to watch movies, play music, browse the internet or talk to your friends on the go, get a fucking smartphone.

There are some cool-looking first person shooters available for the Vita (like, two of them). I won't lie - being able to play an FPS title with stunning visuals on the go is super tempting. But it's not "spend 250 Quid on a techno-doorstopper" kind of tempting. I'd play those shooters, finish them a few hours later, maybe even get some fun out of local multiplayer with Claire and that about wraps it up. On the 3DS I'd get Fire Emblem (with another, even cooler new Fire Emblem on the horizon), Smash Bros, Mario Kart, Star Fox... heck, for as much as I hate how stupidly overrated Ocarina of Time is (Twilight Princess was superior in just about every way), the 3DS version looks so great, I'd probably give that a go. I can look at the best current and upcoming 3DS titles and spot a dozen or more titles I'd play right the fuck now. Then I look at the list for the PS Vita, spot 4 or 5 games with absolutely amazing visuals, two of which I'd probably play, and the rest is boring, pixellated indie crap you can also get on Steam for a few pennies.

I grew up in a Segan household. I think Zelda is stupid, I don't give a crap about Mario unless there's kart racing or smashing involved and if you're male, straight, older than 14 and into Pokémon, then all Eagles of Death Metal concerts in Paris should be mandatory for you. There's nothing more annyoing than a bunch of dickbags bitching about EA, Activision and Ubisoft, whilst buying the exact same Nintendo games every year since the early 1980s. It's absolutely pathetic how WiiU games look worse than early Xbox 360 and PS3 titles. And you know what? None of that fucking matters. They still got my money. Sure, I'll spend most of my time playing shitty Atlus RPGs on my 3DS XL when it gets here, but this year, ugly, outdated, stupid Nintendo games beat Sony's handheld console by miles in this house. So there's that.

-Cat

WoW Legion - Make It Singleplayer

I've quit playing WoW back in Cataclysm and I've never looked back. Then Claire mentioned something weird today, saying something like, "I think they're trying to make WoW a little more like Diablo." Apparently, there will be random group dungeons with random powerful drops as an alternative to raids or something. A little bit like rifts in Diablo. I'm paraphrasing here and I haven't actually looked into this feature, because fuck WoW and fuck more group content. But tell you what - if WoW really were to become more like Diablo and I could actually solo randomized content for increasingly powerful gear like in a Diablo-style rift, I'd play the shit out of it. I'd not just resub - I'd pay twice the subscription fee if I had to.

Now, if you're about to ask me why I would even want solo content on an MMORPG - GO FUCK YOURSELF WITH A RAKE! When you're done with that, go do some research on the massive new story expansion for SWTOR. And the reviews for that shit. The whole thing is completely solo, people are coming back like crazy to play it and everybody fucking loves it. Yes, they're subscribing to an MMORPG to fucking solo, so quit telling me that solo content is unimportant to the genre, you fucks!

I, like a ton of other (former) WoW players, joined the whole thing on launch day, over a decade ago. I've seen my fair share of raids, heroic dungeons, guild drama, you name it. And, also like pretty much everybody who started back then, I'm done with that sort of thing, but I'm not done with games. What used to be school is now a job and a family. I can't get up in the middle of the night to replace the raid tank who couldn't make it. I don't want WoW or any other game to be my second job. And maybe reading a bunch of crap about Chuck Norris or people putting the word "anal" in front of random ability names in trade channel isn't as funny to me now as it was when that shit was still new. And yes, maybe I'm a bit tired of all the best content, the happy endings and the most amazing items being offered exclusively to those five per cent or so self-congratulatory fucks, who jerk each other off over mythical boss kills and world firsts and shit they've achieved, because they're willing to give up on a huge portion of their real lives to fine-tune their shit and study youtube bosskill videos and shit.

Why not have soloable dungeons with powerful, Diablo-style item drops? That shit can be challenging, I don't mind at all. But why is being a single player so completely fucking worthless? Why can you only get the good shit if you bring 24 friends for everything? Why doesn't individual skill matter at all? Oh yay, I can level up solo, dick around in a garrison or play fucking Pokémon, isn't that great? Let me play a dungeon solo or with just one or two friends and change difficulty and droprate dynamically, like on Diablo, but allow me to get my gear that way, without forcing me into guilds, LFR, group finder, shit with random people. Nobody wants to suffer bots and AFKers in battlegrounds and people only put up with that shit, because they want the gear. Why do you think the cunts at Honorbuddy sell their stupid bot like crazy in the first place? Because people hate to grind for their shit, they hate to play with random people against their will, so they're actually paying real money to have a program do it for them.

WoW subscriptions are at a new low of, I dunno, 5.5 million players or so? That's still a great number, but Blizzard recently announced they'd no longer inform the public about player count. Yeah, that's a big fucking sign of confidence right there. So why not go all the way with the whole Diablo thing? Blizzard are already going out of their way to appeal to the most casual gamers on the planet. I have friends playing WoW, who are so bad at video games, you could put a guy with no arms or legs in a wheelchair in front of a computer, have them try to control the game with their minds and they'd instantly be more successful than my friends. Yet they don't ever stop playing WoW, because it has fucking pandas and pet battles and fool-proof skill trees and gear that changes its stats for you, so you don't have to think. Why not take it one step further and finally stop forcing people to fucking group up?

Okay, sure, it's an MMO, so why would I even want to be able to solo shit? Because sometimes I just want to be successful on my own. Because I don't want to constantly depend on others with every tiny thing that matters on there. Because I'd still have the choice. I can run into friends and team up with them naturally, without a multiplayer staging lobby, if I wanted to. I could still see other players, look at their gear and achievements, I'd still have a living, breathing virtual world. Doesn't mean I wanna depend on all of those fuckers 24/7. I'm surrounded by people in real life, doesn't mean I wanna make friends with all of them and group up when I go to work or shop for groceries. I don't need somebody to hold my hand when I take shit. Allow me to take a shit on my own, Blizzard.

Give people their stupid world first achievments, titles and mounts for raids. Give em exclusive cosmetic gear. You know what game does that? Warframe. Warframe has raid versions of bosses, which rewards players with some cosmetic goodies you can't get any other way. But you can fight easier versions of these bosses alone or with up to three friends. You don't miss out on any super powerful stuff if you don't want to raid. Nobody gets excluded. You can become just as powerful as a solo player as you could be as part of a huge, successful raid guild. It's harder that way - and it should be - but it's entirely possible. You don't get the nice titles, cosmetic doodads and trophies that the big guilds get, but you get the same story, cutscenes, items, everything. You're not getting treated like a second class player.

I know SWTOR isn't entirely like that, but it doesn't have to be. I'm gonna resub to SWTOR, I'll play their story expansion and then I'll take a break until more solo story stuff gets released, because I don't wanna grind dungeon tokens on there. But they're gonna get my money, because they cater to me as a solo player. Perhaps it's time for Blizzard to give that a try? Even if it means pissing off the raid community? Fuck those guys. They never were the biggest part of your player base, so perhaps it's time to stop sucking their dicks.

-Cat

Heroes

It's 7:15 in the morning while I'm beginning this entry, I've been up all night to write my review on Sword Coast Legends. The game is basically Dragon Age in Forgotten Realms, which is super fucking awesome in my book. Lots of rage going on over at Steam, because the game uses skill trees and cooldowns instead of D&D rules and because the built-in editor only lets you create boring, shitty quests without any depth. I can understand where these people are coming from, but I absolutely love Dragon Age, I love the Forgotten Realms and I loved having to complete Sword Coast Legends in about four days.

As an added bonus, I contacted the PR guys mentioned in the press release thingie I got along with the job and got a reply from none other than the folks at Digital Extremes. They threw a whole ton of Steam keys for friends, colleagues and family at me. I wonder if they're aware of the super awesome Warframe review I wrote for GameStar. What's even more exciting, when I asked them for help with a technical issue I had with Sword Coast Legends, I got a response from Dan Freaking Tudge!

He's the president at SCL-developer n-Space and the main guy behind the game, which is amazing enough, considering I just needed some tech support. But he's also the guy who was in charge of Dragon Age: Origins at Bioware, which is my favourite game of the series. Apparently he also took care of Sonic Chronicles on the Nintendo DS, which was a bit weird, but unlike most newer Sonic game, it didn't suck, so there's that. I absolutely worship this guy and I love my job for letting me get in touch with folks like him. I hope he won't hate me too much when he sees the relatively mediocre rating I gave for Sword Coast Legends. I genuinely care for this game, but it's getting a lot of criticism right now and I'm afraid some of it is actually kind of justified. Sigh. I hope they're gonna support this game for a long while, warts and all. I seriously want to keep playing future content. And now I need a whole lot of sleep.

-Cat

Sprechen Sie Goose Fair?

I'm one of those stupid, mildly crazy people, who are always attracted by flashy lights and overpriced fair rides, despite the well-known fact that shit like that always ends in disappointment. And it was the Goose Fair last weekend, Claire had a bit of extra cash, so we went.

Loud music, flashy lights and public urination. Whee!

Claire doesn't go on most rides and two minutes on the ferris wheel cost six Quid per person, which drastically lowered the event's entertainment value. It was still great fun, what with all the curious merchandise everywhere.

"One Sahara, please!"

And of course absofuckinglutely everywhere that handed out shitty prizes for throwing balls at cans, shooting balloons, catching rubber duckies and god knows what else was covered in fucking Minions. Because hurray for slapping googly eyes on a Twinkie and marketing the everloving fuck out of it. They're lame, boring, cowardly inoffensive and designed to appeal only to children and the dumbest of fucks.

Hilarious, apparently.

Naturally, original, licensed merchandise for this crap would be far too expensive and most kids are probably too stupid to notice the difference, anyway, so most of the Minions toys you could win there were hilariously fake. Some of them had faces, which vaguely resembled those of Minions (they're yellow and have an eye or two, it's not that hard), but their lower half was the pointy end of a banana for some inexplicable reason. That stuff went really well with the kiddie rides and merry-go-rounds, most of which ripped off Cars. I would have expected more Frozen this year, but spray-painting all your shit with imagery, which vaguely resembles popular franchises takes time and effort.

The most annoying part was the music, though. Not necessarily the questionable selection of tunes or how every single ride cranked their shit up to unbearable levels. But witnessing the music at Goose Fair is like listening to some 13 year old laptop DJ skipping through his playlist. They literally played about three seconds of every song, then skipped right to the next one. Over and over. I'm guessing you don't have to pay for a tune if you only play a tiny fragment of it to the public or something? It was all highly confusing. The one thing that was at least partially genuine was this:

Home.

The guy selling sausage and pulled pork there looked too friendly to be an Englishman selling overpriced crap at Goose Fair. Don't get me wrong, you usually get great, friendly service when shopping in the UK. It's all darling this and love that and phony smiles and everyone's happy when they're being watched. But not at Goose Fair. No hello, no thank you, no service with a smile. They openly hate you, hate their lives, their jobs and the fact that they're gonna be stuck there for hours and hours, standing around near a hot, stinky frying pan whilst serving greasy shit to people. Their faces show what every employee at Tesco or Farm Foods looks like on the inside. But German panhouse guy actually looked me in the eyes and when I heard him say things like "Bahget" and "Zenk you", I knew he was genuine German. I think that was the first time I actually got to speak a few words of German in this country in half a decade.

When I came back there a couple hours later and tried to order in German with the lady who was now serving there, she had no idea wtf I was talking about, because of course she didn't speak a fucking word of German. It's all lies and shit hasn't been so awkward since I had a job at Daewoo and was asked to book a hotel room for our branch manager named Dong Suk. True story.

People in Europe and the US are paranoid right now. They're afraid of brainwashed zealots, dangerous fanatics, who want to force their beliefs upon everyone they know, indoctrinate everyone around them and tolerate nobody who doesn't adapt to their way of life. And you know what? I think they're right to be paranoid. It's time to fight back. I think we need to put and end to this and shut them the fuck up. It's okay to believe in whatever you want, live your life any way you want, for as long as you don't hurt or disrespect anyone. But don't force that shit upon me. Fuck off, vegans!

And don't wave that tofu sausage at me like that.

I've built something fun on Everquest 2:

It's a reptile tank. He's got a plant, a hollow log, a basking spot, rat and water bowl. It's open right now so the lizard can play with his shoe.

For the better or worse, EQ2 is the most feminine MMO I've ever played. There's no way in hell I'd ever consider installing it, had I not found the game for a fiver in the bargain bin mere weeks after its release some 11 years ago. I mean, look at this shit:

Everquest 2 has a lot of mature content, it's full of zombies and corpses and blood and gore and there's a new horror-themed expansion on the horizon, but it's also full to the brim with girly stuff like pixies and frog people and princesses and pink unicorns and flowers and rainbows and magical mushroom forests and shit. You can ignore most of that nonsense and just be a badass, if you so desire.

Claws, pirate hat, red, spiky plate mail with skulls on it, demon wings, a pet were-rat. Yes, that's my pony in the background...

EQ2 allowed you to play an undead shadow knight from day one, letting you wreck your enemies with fear, disease and curse, sapping away their very life force. It's full of dark fantasy elements, but unlike most other MMOs it's not a total "no girls club". Okay, let me clarify that one. I know other MMOs feature female characters and everything, but would you kindly look at these armored ladies in the game Tera?

Granted, not all online games are so extreme, but would you look at some female characters from the Blizzard universe?

I'm not offended by any of this and I'm okay with a sexy art direction for female characters, but imagine the Lich King in one of these outfits. I think it's relatively safe to assume that most of the character designers are male, the target audience is largely male, while I'm not entirely sure whether or not male gamers are still such a massive majority in today's online games.

Here is what heavy armor looks like on a female character in Everquest 2:

No thong, no tank top, no cleavage.

Here's another example I really like. Behold the Argonian race of Elder Scrolls Online, a fun bunch of lizard people, who, according to the ingame lore, hatch from eggs:

Lizard tits are the best!

And this is what the female Iksar, the lizardfolk of EQ2, look like:

No tetays.

Flat butt.

And while we're at it, let's compare trolls, shall we? Here's a female troll from World of Warcraft:

She's a sex-beast and I want to do things to her.

Aaaand Everquest 2:

Pass!

The point I'm trying to make is how somehow, over the years, game designers have tweaked their female character models and ultimately cranked up the fuckability-slider to maximum and just broke it off while it was there.
Of course it's still entirely possible to make a female character look sexy on EQ2 if you so desire. The difference is that it isn't forced on you there. If you put on a heavy suit of plate armor on a female character, then she'll be covered in fucking metal and said armor won't magically transform into a pair of shiny nipple pasties. If you choose to play a reptilian character, she won't come with a massive pair of tits, because of course not!

I'm not saying one is better or worse than the other. But EQ2 has a female executive producer and female devs among their (ever-shrinking) crew of developers working on the game and you can't deny the game has a certain feminine touch to it. From the pixies and rainbows and unicorns to functional armor on female characters and pot-bellied ogre ladies, female trolls with saggy tits or bearded female dwarves.

Look, I won't lie. I don't need unicorns in my games. But they don't hurt EQ2, either. And strong, "ugly" female characters aren't so bad, either. The only thing I remember about Jaina Proudmoore is how she somehow manages to show off her navel and cleavage, despite the fact that she's always wearing a robe. I remember that Sylvanas has a perfect body and she got fucked (metaphorically!) by the Lich King. Yeeeah, I know. Everquest's Firiona Vie looks a bit slutty, as well. But she's also one of the biggest and most important heroes in Everquest lore. Major cities like Qeynos, Neriak and Gorowyn are lead by female characters. The women of Norrath don't serve as slutty poster girls, who put some flesh on screenshots to appeal to a male audience. Granted, this may also be one of the reasons why hardly anyone cares about, let alone plays this game. But for all its flaws and shortcomings, EQ2 is pretty progressive when it comes to gender equality. Which really isn't a subject I spend a massive amount of time pondering about, but this was still a fun observation to make.

-Cat