Almost all gamers have heard of the lamentable Custer's Revenge, a title that, had the videogame industry been more high-profile at the time, and had Jack Thompson been on his little crusade, could quite possibly have singlehandedly led to the fall of the industry at the hands of society's self-proclaimed moral guardians.

I've never played it myself, but I'm familiar with the premise, as I'm sure most are: dodge arrows fired at you by those damn Red Injuns, make your way across the screen, and rape the shit out of an Indian (*ahem*, I mean "Native American") woman named, appropriately enough, 'Revenge'.

The game features the finest pixellated naked people to come out of the videogame industry in 1982, complete with grotesquely caricatured naughty parts for both the eponymous Custer and his rapee, Revenge.

Putting aside the (obviously) objectionable and tasteless issue of a game where rape is the objective, two things spring to mind about this title. Firstly, it represents a trend in gaming that continues to this day, that of objectifying women across the board and making them little more than shapely sperm receptacles, sometimes for the gamer's character (Conan and God of War spring to mind) and sometimes for the gamer himself (yes, I'm making an assumption here, but they don't put Lara Croft and Bloodrayne in games to satisfy the female demographic).

Secondly, Custer's Revenge sold 80,000 copies, twice as many as any other game released by developer Mystique. This tells us something that we already knew about the gaming industry, like many other industries; sex sells. And I'm not disputing or lamenting this, it's a fact of life.

What I am lamenting is that it's an across-the-board phenomenon for essentially the entire industry, with almost no exceptions. The movie industry as a whole has the pornography sub-industry, as well as a slew of pseudo-pornographic titles featuring the fine 'acting' talents of such women as Holly Valance and Jennifer Love Hewitt, and the music industry has Britney Spears and T.A.T.U.

But those industries also gave us Citizen Kane and The Godfather, the Beatles and Elvis Presley. There's a world of difference between Debbie Does Dallas and any of Scorsese's back-catalogue.

This is a point we haven't yet reached in the (admittedly, still fairly nascent) gaming world. Onechanabra was recently released to Western gamers, and a million teenagers are probably excitedly murdering hordes of nondescript enemies with their scantily clad 'ninja babes' right now. Tecmo's DOA franchise has gone from using its female characters' assets as a selling point to their fighting game, to simply dropping the fighting bit altogether and concentrating on the girls with the Extreme spin-off series.

I struggle to think of a woman in a videogame portrayed as anything other than a buxom/leggy vixen who's good with her fists or a sword/gun. Sometimes they're given a little character: Lara Croft occasionally imparts some wry, innuendo-laced witticism, as if her upper-crust English accent somehow lends intellectual weight to the fact that she's essentially limber eye-candy. Meryl's character development in Metal Gear Solid was excellent, what with her blushing if you stared at her breasts and needing a big strong man to rescue her during the title's endgame.

There's the odd deviation, of course. KOTOR II's Kreia was a poor man's Yoda, albeit (spoiler warning!) a bit more evil. And- gasp!- not even a little sexy. GTA IV is the bravest any developer has got, as far as I can remember, with its porky Queen-Latifah-wannabe gangster queen, Elizabeta.

Don't get me wrong- I'm not saying that we should outlaw gorgeous women from games, and I'm not saying that developers should adopt an 'ugly women' affirmative-action policy where they have to put a certain number of fat/ugly chicks in their games. Hell, I'm sure like most men that if I'm playing Tomb Raider, I'd rather be playing as Lara Croft and not Roseanne Barr.

I'm not trying to come across (and I realise that I might have done) as some sort of prudish, holier-than-thou 'deep' gamer. I enjoy the pixellated eye-candy as much as the next guy. I'm just saying that an industry that's come so far so fast should perhaps consider maturing a little insofar as its perception and portrayal of women is concerned. There should be more to the market than ninja babes and impossibly hot archaeologists.