Girls and Gaming:What's so Taboo?

If you haven't figured it out yet, yes I am female. It comes as a surprise to many people that I play video games. It's something that has bugged me ever since I rescued Princess Toadstool for the first time as a kid.

Why is the video game industry a seemingly male dominated field? Supposedly, a girl shouldn't play the latest Call Of Duty game because we don't understand how to hold a 360 controller. And we shouldn't play Pokemon because there is no way a girl could understand it. We should just stick to the horrible 3rd party games on the Wii, because all you need to play it is to wave the remote in front of yourself. So easy, a girl could do it! One comment I read on Bennett the Sage's video about this same subject said that a girl gamer is a novelty, and this individual said he would be surprised if a girl made it though World 1-1 of SMB.

That last paragraph was all real things boy gamers have said to me over the years. Insulting? Yeah. Expected? Yeah. It's just common sense in the minds of many consumers, girls don't play video games. Now that's not true, exactly. One popular series that's marketed towards girls is the DS's Imagine series. Grant it, I don't have any of those games, because they look kinda dumb. I mean Imagine:Babysitter, really? That's what girls love to do, right?

Here's a run down of all the systems I own:
Atari 2600(It was sitting in the basement for 30 years and is broken but I'm trying to fix it)
Nintendo Entertainment System
Super Nintendo Entertainment System
Playstation
Gameboy Color
Playstation 2
Gameboy Advance
Nintendo DS
Wii
Pretty impressive eh? Now some of those(NES, SNES, PS1) where given to me from my uncles when either they got the newest system, or they were moving out of town.

I was born in 1992, and the earliest gaming memory I have is playing SMW on a Yoshi level. There were no arcades in my area that I know of, so I never had that experience. Only a few months ago did I finally play Donkey Kong on a machine, mostly because the mall I was at was stuck in an 80's time bubble, and it was great. Nothing like Billy Mitchell or Steve Wiebe, but still, it was fun.

It's not like the developers and distributors intentionally make and market games towards boys exclusively. Think back to when home consoles were a brand new thing. It was the cutting edge of technology at the time that you could play in your house at anytime. What, back then, made the Atari, Magnavox, Intellevision or Colecovision a thing boys would get and girls wouldn't? Anybody, young or old, boy or girl would be amazed with what they saw on the TV.
Fast forward to today, and you have the PS3, Xbox 360, and Wii. According to the wise words of fanboys, the PS3 and 360 are only for hardcore gamers, the ones who live their lives through the online multiplayer feature, and HD makes everything better. The Wii is for either A) Pussies or B) Girls who know nothing about real games. I only bought the Wii because it seemed like the real next gen system, whereas the PS3 and 360 just seemed like an expected upgrade. Plus the Wii was a lot cheaper. Of course now there's the Move and Kinect, but it's obvious that Sony and Microsoft saw how well the Wii was selling, so they needed to make their own motion control peripheral. Are they technically superior to the Wii? Of course, because technology marches on.

Look at it from a marketing standpoint. There's a PS3 commercial, where a guy is saying that his girlfriend thinks the game he's playing is really a movie. Yeah, of course we would think that!!!  The only time I've ever seen a woman in Sony's commercial where the CEO or whatever is talking to a person is when the Move came out. I'm not trying to sound like a gung ho feminist here, but I'd thought I'd point that out.

So as a girl, what kind of games do I like? Pokemon was the thing when I was in 2nd grade, so I have very fond memories of that, and still today I'm playing Black right now. I don't have much of a broken base mentality over which generation is the best, I just enjoy playing the latest installment. Although I think it's safe to say the original opening for the anime was the best. One game I absolutley had to get when I got my PS2 was Kingdom Hearts. I saw it as being fun with Disney characters, but the storyline was interesting....in someway in the mind of a 10 year old. I played it for the first time in like 4 years a few months ago, and yeah, it's pretty standard. But still, good gameplay is what matters. Legend of Zelda of course is always a great series to sit down and be sucked into. NES or DS, you can't go wrong. One of my favorite childhood games was Croc:Legend of the Gobbo's for the PS1, a underrated adventure game with a crocodile saving the creatures who raised him, the gobbo's from the evil hands of Baron Dante(who could really pass for Bowser's unseen brother). It has a very underrated soundtrack, and I remember even at 6 years old thinking it was the most beautiful thing since The Lion King's score. Okay, maybe not that far, but still, it's very good.

But if there's one game I got so pissed off at when I finally bought it and played it, would have to be Metroid: Other M. I was waiting very patiently for this game. I dug out the original NES and Super Metroid games, bought Metroid Prime at used book store to see how it's first-person gameplay was like, and really counted down the days until it came out. So the day comes, I buy it, get home, slide it in and right away it looked promising with a recap of Super Metroid's ending. The graphics are good, and from the tutorial, the controls seems alright. Then we got the monologue cutscenes. "Adam was my commanding officer," "I can't use super bombs without Adam's permission," "The period in my life without Adam was horrible," "ADAM ADAM ADAM!!!!". I mean GAAAHH!!! This was a chance to develop the backstory of one of Nintendo's best action characters, and they make it something that can fit into a Harlequin romance novel!! And after you get to use the first person mode, it gets really clunky. Like the part where you're using the Ninja Gaiden-esque wall jumping and you have to shoot the wormy things(sorry, I don't have the instruction book here) to stop them chewing the elevator supports, yeah....why couldn't they make it a standard Wii adventure game with using the Nunchuck? At least Epic Mickey and Kirby's Epic Yarn made up for it.

So there you have it, legit complaints and from a girl. Sorry if this seems kind of rambling, but it's something that I love talking about to some guys when we run out of things to talk about. Thanks for reading!

An Introduction

Well, as I'm writing this first blog on my new site, no one knows who I am and that this exists. There are billions of Internet users, some have meaningful things to say, others just like to push everyone's. Conspiricey nuts, video game fanboys, random trolls, anything that you can think of, the internet has it. Rule 34, I know, just a non porn version? I don't know.

Hopefully someone would like to read my ramblings, please??