As a kid, I was definitely a tomboy. I was sick of playing house, wanted to kick a soccer ball around with the guys, highly competitive, etc. When I started playing video games, I wanted to be as hardcore as all my friends, though even in my endless attempts to overcome any remaining girliness within me, I couldn't bring myself to love the FPS. Counterstrike did nothing for me, and I knew I was a hopeless case with Unreal Tournament. Eventually I learned those heartwarming lessons of being true to yourself, my friends would still respect me despite my inability to play FPS, I enjoy being a girl, etc.

2007 actually produced a few titles that have actually piqued my interest in the genre again. A friend brought over Metroid Prime 3 one weekend, and the sheer smoothness of the motion controls amazed me. Of course, my skills were not as slick. I flailed around cursing while trying to pinpoint where people were shooting me from; don't get me started on my aim. I soon put down the game, not out of boredom or lack of enjoyment, but because I got pretty motion sick. It made sense to me why, considering all the spinning and years of motion sickness in the car, but it surprised me somewhat to experience it from a video game.

While not a shooter in the traditional sense, Portal definitely seemed like a better starter for the FPS genre, especially with my undying love for puzzles. Besides, beyond the turrets, nothing really shot at me, so there would be less spinning involved. My boyfriend let me play his copy on the PC, and I within a few levels, the game quickly won me over ... until disaster struck once again. It wasn't just the looping portals that got me, necessarily. Just walking and controlling my view unsettled my stomach, and despite multiple breaks, I couldn't manage to finish the game on my own. Doubled over in nausea and a little shame, I watched my boyfriend play out the ending for me.

I can watch others play first-person perspective fine. It's when I take control of a character that start having problems, though this brought me to admire shooters in certain ways. I think it's definitely a credit to well-executed shooters that they're so immersive. World-building and story are definitely immersive in their own senses, but the first-person controls of Metroid Prime 3 impressed me in how much of a physical presence I felt within the game. I find it a characteristic truly unique to video games; while you can create a first-person perspective with a camera in film, video games combine that viewpoint with control. It's that interactive quality that separates video games as an artform. No other medium, by nature, requires viewer/audience participation like video games.

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The same friend that let me play MP3 came back to school recently, so I've been watching him play on the 360 a bunch. When I was falling asleep mid-food coma, he asked me if there was anything I wanted to try playing. I looked on his shelf: Call of Duty 4, Ace Combat 6, Rainbow Six, Gears of War, Assassin's Creed, and Bioshock. Well, damn. I didn't feel like getting sick, but at the same time, there was Bioshock, just sitting there and emanating the aura of deco-porn. Maybe it'll be better this time. Maybe if I try the game with more traditional console controls, I'll be okay. My friend popped it in, and I started on easy mode.

It actually went really well. My aim is still atrocious, but I shot some splicers and wrenched just as many. Unsurprisingly, I can hax them vending machines and bots like no one's business. It felt good playing Jack and marveling at the remains of Rapture, which others have described in far prettier prose than anything I could conjure at the moment so I'll refrain from further description. I honestly can't pinpoint what changed my experience this time around. Maybe I took more time to settle into the controls, or it could be that I felt at home with controller more familiar to me than the keyboard or wiimotes and nunchuks. It didn't hurt that my friend walked me through and kept reminding me to not move my camera so fast, either. All I can say is that I'm looking forward to practicing with Bioshock and the possibility of a whole other world of games opening up to me.

How to Stop Your Girlfriend From Gaming

You know, maybe I haven't looked around the internet enough, but I found this fun piece pretty refreshing! I've seen pretty much the same concept executed for the exasperated girlfriends of gamers, but so rarely the other way around. Girlfriends who game have been around for awhile, and I guess the internet's sense of humor is slow to catch on to that concept. That probably explains why there are still wii-ner jokes in the comment threads.

Me: That's going to be you and some lucky boy someday.
Friend: That's you and some lucky boy already.
Me: Aww, thanks!

Regarding the article itself, I think I'm safe for now. My guy and I almost always play games together, and recently, it's been his copy of Portal and our own copies of Lumines II. Healthy dumbass gamer love! However, I wouldn't want that cake for my wedding, but it looks like a badass birthday cake. Less than three weeks hint hint!

Man. I kept saying to myself that I would avoid posts centered around gender, and it's only my third post. Ooooh weeeell.

When my friend first got her PSP, she gushed at me over Lumines II—nono, back it up, she
shouted "Pump it LOUDAH! Pump it LOUDAH!" all around her apartment and attributed her
newfound enthusiasm for the song to Lumines II. I'd heard of the series around the internet
as a must-have for puzzle game junkies like myself. For the uninformed, Lumines is
another falling block descendant of Tetris in which you try to clear 2x2 squares ... to a beat.
Q Entertainment integrates music into much of its gameplay, most notably Gunpey and the
Every Extend Extra. In Lumines, the speed at which the blocks fall and clear depend on
tempo of the accompanying music. Moving a block around the playing field creates a beat
intended to flow into the song, and in some of the better stages, it's almost as if you're
improvising music through gaming.

As with many music intensive games, Lumines II licensed a bunch of American pop songs,
ranging from the aforementioned Black Eyed Peas track to the lesser known "Bottle Rocket"
by The Go Team!. I admittedly stopped looking to radio's top 40 charts as a source of new
music for the same reasons as everyone else and their mother, ("Too much bad rap," "stuff
gets overplayed," etc.), and yeah, I got a little snooty and groaned a little when my friend
was trying to sell me the idea of enjoying "Pump It." You know where this is going. I'm
playing the game, and I can't stop hearing Fergie wail "on the stererererereooooooo."

You start the easiest mode with three songs of generic Japanese electronic tracks that rank
slightly above oldskool DDR tracks. Suddenly, things go quiet. You hear the slam of a car
door, and oh God, this sounds familiar. The falling blocks change to a vibrant aqua green
and white that complement BEP's music video, and it's refreshing to enter familiar territory.
The song's hooks combined with the aesthetics and a great tempo to play to completely re-
contextualized the song for me. It's so easy to write off anything you hear on the radio that
it's easy to overlook the merits of a song. I'm not saying that "Pump It" is Rachmaninoff,
but it's got decent, enjoyable hooks and samples "Misirlou" in a fun way.

That's not to say that Lumines II revolutionized the way I hear all of its licenses. I still hate
"Hollaback Girl" with a fiery passion, but I gave it a chance since it's an early stage in the
second difficulty. Lumines II isn't the first game I've experienced this process with either. I
admit to liking an Ashley Simpson song because of Elite Beat Agents, and I'm sure if I
thought hard enough, I could drudge up some guilty pleasures from my DDR days. The
thing is, games dress up songs in a far more accessible way than the radio does, in a way
that tears me away from most pretensions. It makes me wonder what songs I could really
enjoy in the right context: Linkin Park with an awesome step pattern, clearing blocks with
Rihanna, or rescuing fuzzy animal from the claws of fur-loving fashionistas EBA-style to The
Fray's "How to Save a Life." (Someone needs to save that song, because all I can think of
hearing it are faux-witty doctors and their painfully irrational sex lives. Best drama, my
ass.) We all have our pop gems that we discovered through music gems. Don't lie; I know
there are other "La La" fans out there dammit!

For me, the pop I hear on the radio is so rarely about the vocal or songwriting talents of the
individual artists. It's about the production team behind the scenes, and the "artist" is a
means of presentation. Music that's spoonfed through mainstream radio isn't even
considered music by many, but rather calculated consumerist drivel or the entrails of "sell-
outs," but there's still a fascinating art amidst it all, again, the art of presentation. There's
more than just the song: there's the music video, live shows, and in my fantasy world,
gaming would be another form of that art, a different way of consuming a product such that
under all the plasticity and glamor, you might actually find something worth enjoying.

Hello! Welcome to La La Bleep Bleep, the result of Dtoid's relentlessly guilting randomly
generated messages goading me into creating a clog. (...) I am not an important person,
IRL or on the internets; I just like talking about vidya gamz. While I game frequently on
multiple platforms, I consider myself a casual gamer. I do play lots from the puzzle genre,
but I really got started with fighters and JRPGs (though I'm not especially masterful at any
of the above). I play any given game for as long as my tiny attention span can take, and
stop whenever I'm not having fun. Simple as that.

My memories of gaming go back to mashing E. Honda and Chun-Li in Street Fighter 2 at my
cousins' house to getting my Vectrex console to feeling truly hardcore by blasting through
Lunar: TSS, my first RPG. Nowadays, I'm working on Disgaea and Lumines II for the PSP
and Phoenix Wright 3 : Ace Attorney: Trials and Tribulations: 3 Semicolons Too Many for
the DS.

Okay, enough of the intro! Today's internet find is old for many, new for Kim. As an even
tinier kinder than what I am today, I read Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials like I
read so many others, imagining my own realizations of each character in my mind. The
exception, however, was Mrs. Coulter, the protagonist's cunning and gorgeous mother, an
ice queen I could only see as Nicole Kidman. Of course I made little fangirl puddles after
seeing her in this holiday season's Token Fantasy Movie, and she was fantastic despite the
weak material she was given (the screenplay, please do not be mistaking for the books
themselves oh God). However, my favorite Kidman role of 2007 may actually be her stint
as a DS Player.



By far, Europe wins the celebrity endorsement game. Utada Hikaru is all cute and nice, and
Jessica Alba buying her crew DSes was pretty sweet. Kidman's a package of class,
elegance, and cute, and she definitely implies the same for the DS.

Though really, I never got on the Brain Age bandwagon. It was fun to play against others in
competitive mode, but I could never motivate myself to buy a copy. It feels like less of a
game, and more like flat out edutainment. The challenges I played were, indeed,
challenges, but the accomplishments still feel too simplistic. I'm young and still in school,
stretching my mind in different ways that probably compensate for lack of Brain Age.
Maybe I'll try Brain Age 5000 when I'm 30 or something. How many teenagers and
twentysomethings play these games, really? Not to write it off—I'm genuinely curious.

EDIT
Oh look, Colette just posted about Brain Age! I am "relevant" and "with the times" after all! I'm always skeptical towards such golden promises of keeping your brain healthy through the mystical power of video games, but not totally. All video games require an interactivity that stimulates the brain to some extent, and I totally appreciate whatever gets the gears turning a bit. (Except science. I leave that to those who do what they must because they can.) The emphasis on improved thinking is a gimmick, one easily recognizable to those who regularly game, but not so much to the crowds who have yet to justify the existence of video games to themselves. "Hey, maybe it's educational!" Or not, as the case may be, but if it breaks down accessibility barriers for non-gamers, whatever, right?