So after some confusion with Amazon (and possibly the most amazing customer service experience I’ve ever encountered in my life) I finally got 2008’s critically acclaimed Valkyria Chronicles.

While this game has been reviewed to death, I’d still like to talk about it, especially for those of you on the fence about playing it.

Very rarely do I get to go so blindly into a major release like this one. I knew that it was an alternate universe World War 2, I knew it was a tactical RPG and I knew that a lot of really different people all want to sex up the disc for a plethora of reasons. That was about it. I had no idea what I was in for.

Starting the game up, you’re treated to the standard demo video, and this is the first time that I truly got to see the game in action... and holy shit. For a game four years old, it looks better than most releases now. The aesthetic, using Sega’s CANVAS engine, makes the entire experience look like a living watercolor painting. Paired with the excellently realized anime designs, the developers have made a game that I genuinely can’t imagine ever looking dated.



Hardened soldiers? Check. Plucky reporter? Check. Badass tank? Check.


Gameplay is broken into two sections, strategic and combat. In strategic, you’ll visit your headquarters, buy upgrades, train troops, select scenes and read through the world’s history. The entire interface is designed to look like a history text, and it’s an attractive and functional way to navigate the game’s options.

In combat, the gameplay is turn based tactical combat with slight real-time aspects. You have a limited number of orders per turn, and you can hand them out as you like. If you want to give them all to one soldier, having them shoot the hell out of whatever’s nearby, go nuts, though a character’s movement is denoted by a yellow bar that reduces as you move around. Subsequent orders to the same soldier garner less and less movement allowance. Orders that you don’t give carry over to the next phase.

Attacking with a soldier pops you into either third person view or, if you’re commanding a sniper, first person view to target wherever you like on an enemy target. Play goes back and forth until either your team is wiped out, your main battle tank is destroyed or you complete your objectives.

The story is deep and vivid and full of fantastic social, historical and political details and it’s easy to get lost just reading up on the world. At it’s heart, all this aside, is the story of two soldiers, Welkin and Alicia, caught up in defending their small nation and just wanting to go home.

Emotionally, the game’s all over the place, one minute having the characters watching a delirious enemy soldier die before them, begging for his mom, and the next, playing volleyball with their squad and a winged pig. It’s heartwarming, poignant, funny and exciting.



Jesus Christ I’m tripping balls.


All this though fails to convey the flat-out absurd level of detail this game has. I can say how you can read about the histories of the various nations, but until you open the glossary and find pages on native plant life, you won’t realize just how batshit crazy this game gets with it’s own world. Perhaps the most impressive feature is the fact that every single character you can enlist has their own voice actors, histories, mannerisms and personality traits that change how they function on the battlefield. Some of these are positive (‘Sadist’ is a favorite of mine, the character gets bonuses when shooting people to death.) and some of these are negative (such as being racist or being allergic to, of all things, biomes).



Argh, you make me so racist I can’t shoot straight!


It’s a testament to the game that about ten hours in I’ve already started thinking of my soldiers in terms of who and what they like, rather than their stats. And you have to, because they’re all practically the same besides those traits. A good commander will use this knowledge.

Another thing is the permadeath. I’m not sure how I feel about it in this game. In X-COM, I only play in Ironman, so when someone dies, they’re gone and there’s fuckall I can do about it. I feel it adds a serious sense of urgency to the game. In VC, you can save all the goddamned time (and you really, really should) so most of the time, losing a trooper is pretty hard to do. The only time I ever considered letting a downed soldier stay dead, it was a 15 year old girl who was drafted into the war. As she lay on the ground, an enemy soldier came up and put his gun to her head. She looks at the camera and says “I hope I can find my way to Heaven... I’ve never been good with directions...”

BANG. ‘SO-AND-SO has been killed in action.’

Fuck that. I reloaded.

Besides this, the game isn’t without it’s issues. The hit percentages feel wildly stacked against you at times (I swear my anti-tank soldiers graduated from the Helen Keller School of Combat), your troops will waste movement points and get killed because of badly designed geometry or invisible walls and the controls are absurdly touchy for the precision needed at times. Also, sometimes you’ll start a mission and due to random mortar targeting will lose either a good chunk of your team or all of your available cover in the first phase.



Tis only a flesh wound!


These are all buried under the sheer brilliance of this title though. If you have even the slightest chance to play this (hell, I don’t even own a PS3... I’m just stealing my roommate’s) get it. You can likely pick it up for under $20 now and trust me when I say that it’s possibly the most stunningly designed and fully realized work on the system. Besides the detail, the lovable characters and the solid gameplay, it also boasts not only a fantastic soundtrack, but the ability to switch between English and Japanese voiceovers.

One word of note though, the translation is probably one of the most interesting, if distracting, parts of the game. The localization teams took a lot of liberties with the text and if you’re using the Japanese voices, what they say isn’t always what you’re reading. Not that this is a bad thing, mind you, as most people try to translate Japanese directly into English and it usually ends up sounding like the audible equivalent of a gaping stomach wound, but if you speak Japanese, you’ll definitely get a different picture of some of the characters than presented by the text.

Has anyone here played it? What are your thoughts on it?

I am nearly finished with Max Payne 3, and have finally come to admit to myself a difficult truth.

I don’t like this game.

This was a shocker to me, as MP 1 & 2 are games that I consider to be some of the best that the third person shooter genre has to offer. When MP3 was announced, I was initially turned off by the redesign and changes, but I refused to let that stop me from trying it. Rockstar had not hurt me with this series yet and I trusted them.

It was about halfway through the game that the nagging voice in my head (the one that convinces me that three cookies would be better than one, and that those jeans looked like ass on me anyway) started up. I took a break and complained to a friend, but he advised me: push on.

So I did, and what I found was severely lacking.




Screw working as a temp. I'm going back to bodyguarding.



First off, the game play. I don’t know how this ended up so clunky, especially since Rockstar lives and breathes third person shooters. The fourth or fifth time I died because the targeting reticle vanished behind Max’s head I let out a grunt of frustration. How did no one else see this? It happens all the time to me, and I can’t be the only one. Did they simply think that his shaven head was just too damn pretty to move out of the player’s view? (It IS pretty though)

The animations were another point. Standing up, crouching and entering/leaving cover are performed too slowly. The number of times I got shot because Max took too long to move away from a wall was obnoxious.

Not having any visual feedback when you’re being shot was also baffling. How the hell did that happen? I know Max is a bad ass, but I would finish a gunfight and think I had just completely danced through the fight unharmed only to realize my lungs were scattered across the wall behind me.




If only Brazilian Air had pulled Die Hard from their in-flight movie list.



These are small fries though compared to my biggest gripe... how rushed everything felt. I feel that the game design process went something like this:

Visionary - ‘We’re going to make this game so detailed, so beautiful, so jam-packed with hidden items, clues and interactive environments that you’ll need like 30 GB of hard drive space.’

Former EA Employee - ‘That sounds amazing, but you’re forgetting one crucial detail - 80% of the game should have you paired up with a useless NPC who constantly shouts at you to hurry up. Also, it should be utterly inconsistent as to what scenes you need to rush through and which ones will fail you after an unclear amount of time.’

Visionary - ‘You’re an asshole.’

Former EA Employee - ‘Oh, but the other 20% of the time, there should be near constant inner monologue where Max is yelling at the player to keep going.’




Pictured: Max's newest ally. All of them.



Seriously. It’s infuriating. Why would they make a game so detailed and interactive and then constantly force the player to keep moving? Besides the NPCs, just approaching the next scene will trigger a cut scene without warning, throwing you ahead into another fight and stopping you from exploring the previous area. It feels more like Lethal Enforcers than Max Payne.

Also, what is up with the story? Max gets bored, decides to work a shitty bodyguard detail in a violent hell hole, working for clearly evil people. There are no likable or memorable characters either. Everyone is a walking stereotype of one form or another and they all do their very best to annoy the shit out of the player.

This isn't what I picture when I hear Max Payne. When I hear Max Payne, I picture distinctive visual style. I picture Neo-Noir and John Woo’s lovechild. I picture a man torn by the deaths of his family and seeking revenge. I see the deep, intelligent juxtaposition of a New York mob war and Norse mythology. I see a unique graphic novel storytelling style. I see grim humor and self-awareness. I see disturbing, surreal horror. I picture some goddamned color. Not a game that looks like a generic modern warfare shooter with an HD upgrade.




THE FLESH OF FALLEN ANGELS!



I mean, who looked at the graphic novel portions from MP1 & 2 and said ‘You know what we need instead? Generic cut scenes.’

Maybe I’m jaded and cynical, but this can’t be the best Rockstar can do. This can’t be the same game that garnered such strong critical praise. It feels too much like a run-of-the-mill, generic shoot-em-up. It has only the barest connections to anything prior and the whole game I wondered why they even used Max as their main character. The previous two games weren't afraid to be a little out of the box. It’s sad to see this one use that same box as a comfort blanket.

I find myself in a position I’m becoming rather familiar with (no, not reverse cowgirl)... owning all of the games in an upcoming pack. So now that I’m finally doing this crazy blog thing, I figured I’d spread some of that knowledge for those of you on the fence about buying this absurdly awesome pack.

Without further ado...

1. Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet

ITSP is a game in the Metroidvania style, where you pilot a UFO and explore an alien world while collecting items, weapons and upgrades that allow you to backtrack and progress further. The best part of this game, hands down, is the art. It’s almost worth picking this up for that alone. The game is gorgeous, and runs like a dream. It’s stylized, acid-trip-like visuals make you feel like you’re in a lost episode of some crazy cartoon.

There are drawbacks. The game itself is fairly short, and at times crushingly difficult. Figuring out some of the puzzles can be very hit or miss and you can find yourself lost or way over your head fairly easily. The multiplayer, too, is another shortcoming. Don’t be fooled by the 4 player co-op. Co-op involves running from a massive creature down an obstacle filled hall while carrying a light in the manipulator claw of your ship. Each player gets one, and if the enemy hits them, it destroys the light. It’s frustrating, confusing and you will find yourself often screwed by the physics of the game. There’s also only one map with very little variety in the challenges you face.



Gir, this is the last time I’m letting you pick our vacation spot.


2. Deadlight

In Deadlight, you play a survivor in a zombie-infested, apocalyptic Seattle who’s trying to find his wife and daughter who he assumes are in one of the area’s refugee camp. The gameplay itself is reminiscent of older adventure games Out of this World, Flashback and Blackthorne, and the controls are for the most part, solid and responsive.

Out of all the games in this pack, to me this is the weakest. I managed to play through this game in less than 6 hours, and while it is visually and atmospherically stunning, many of the puzzles can be unfairly cryptic and you’ll find yourself getting killed many times in a way that feels a bit cheap at times (I’m looking at you, Rat).

The developers have packed an unbelievable amount of backstory, history, detail and emotion into this game, and while I feel it could have benefitted from a bit longer run time, I’m glad it doesn’t overstay its welcome.



His homeless-fu is strong.


3. Toy Soldiers

The only game in the pack that I haven’t had a lot of time with. A sort of hybrid tower-defense, RTS... thing... Toy Soldiers sees you fighting off massive swarms of enemy soldiers with gun emplacements, artillery, tanks (which you can control directly), planes (which you can fly directly) and snipers (which you can take over and shoot with directly). It’s a lot of fun, but tends to drift towards the repetitive side after a few missions. Some missions also tend to be a bit longer than they should, and the lack of checkpoints to restart with means losing can be painful at times.

I’ve made it through about a quarter of the main campaign and have no major beef with the game. Some weapons could stand to feel a bit stronger, there might be more reward to personally controlling vehicles but those are mostly nitpicks.

If you enjoy tower defense and wished it could be a bit more hands on, this isn’t a bad place to start. Though compared to the next entry, it starts to look a bit pale.



If you’re captured... it’s into the microwave for you!


4. Iron Brigade/Trenched

In this World War 1 aesthetic sci-fi masterpiece, you pilot a ‘Trench’, a big, rickety mech bristling with guns, missiles and mines. Your enemy is the Tube, a cybernetic life form created by an evil science bent on... you know what? I don’t know. Probably killing stuff.

Honestly, it doesn’t matter. While the writing in this game is good, the gameplay is like having cocaine shot directly into your eyes. This is an arcade-style mech piloting tower defense game with some surprisingly robust customization options.

My advice? Get three friends to shell out for this, get plenty of the drink of your choice and crank through this baby. It was the most fun I’ve had with a video game in years. No surprise there, being a Double Fine production.

Seriously. This features a general who lives in an iron lung (which has an automated cigar cutter/lighter/manipulator built in for him) and lets you play as a posh British soldier in a tuxedo and tiki mask aboard a walking mech painted solid gold. It’s mad fun. Tied for the best title in the bunch with...



Yes, I AM compensating for something.


5. Mark of the Ninja

Talk about dynamic entry. Inked in the oh-so-iconic Penny Arcade style, this sidescrolling stealth title was one of the biggest ‘holy shit’ moments of last year.

You play a ninja (YES!) who has received a magical tattoo that allows him to stop time whenever he feels like it. The story concerns the old ‘revenge for my destroyed clan’ thing that damn near every ninja has going on, but that’s not the reason to play this.

The absolutely eyegasming visuals, the fantastic sound direction, the solid gameplay and the absolutely knife-edge-perfect stealth mechanics are the reasons to play this.

This game stands in the perfect balance of not holding your hand, but never putting you in a situation that you won’t naturally be able to conquer on your own. It’s empowering, it’s fast and it’s thrilling as hell. Taking out a roomful of guards hasn’t felt this amazing since Arkham Asylum, and you’ll find yourself grinning ear to ear as you pull off amazing strategies and destroy your foes.

Fans of stealth games will love the system, and people who aren’t major stealth fans might still like it for it’s solid controls, beautiful presentation and organic mechanics.

It’s also very flexible on how it allows you to approach a mission. Want to avoid kills? By all means. It’s a hell of a challenge. Want to kill everybody? Go ahead, the game’ll support you all the way through. The only thing you can’t do is get caught. Your ninja knows what his job is, and that’s cutting people like fruit while being invisible, and it cements this by not allowing you to kill people when they’re aware of your presence.

Easily a contender for my top list of 2012, you can’t go wrong with Mark.



More like a non-ja.

Awhile ago, I’d read an article outlining how games are beginning to target older audiences, in an effort to appeal to the finally-aging fan base of our favorite medium. It was an interesting read, and one that wasn’t unexpected, but still struck a chord with me.

Recently though, I was surprised to realize that many of the games I’d been becoming enraptured with embodied this idea. Now, I have no children, nor am I personally sure I’m ever going to, but I was surprised to see just how strongly these appeal to me.

I’ve never been one to shy away from having an emotional reaction to a good story, so when I say that dad movies always manage to affect me, understand that they usually hit hard. Big Fish, Field of Dreams, etc... these movies always hit home. Strangely enough though, it’s the role reversal found in the games I’ve been playing that’s having the same effect.

It started with Red Dead Redemption. Minor spoilers here, nothing too major, but if you’d rather, just skip down after the image. The game took awhile to grip me, but after it did, I was hooked. I really got into John’s story, his hunt for these men, his desire to protect his family, it became personal. At the end, after all is said and done, the time you get to spend with your son really got to me. It was a fantastic reward, getting to spend time doing mundane things with your child after all the violence and madness.



My dad can bullet-time kill your dad.


Fast forward to a month or two ago, when I finally stumbled into The Walking Dead. Going in, I knew nothing about this game. The first episode was good, mind you, but the real beauty didn’t occur to me until sometime a bit later. I’m talking, of course, about Clementine. For what it’s worth, I’ve never encountered a child character more compelling or better realized in a game.

I think it was sometime around chapter 3 that it suddenly hit me that I wasn’t making decisions that benefitted my character most or that were the usual choices I’d make in a game... I was making the choices that I felt were best for Clem. Both Lee and Clem’s relationship and watching Kenny fight to keep his family safe really impacted me on a personal level. The moment Clem admitted to putting a bug on Duck’s pillow with that mischievous grin, I knew I would do anything to make sure she made it through that game.



Out of context, this picture is sketchy as hell.


Dishonored, which I’m currently playing through, is another game which has a strong father theme. It makes the player question his actions, whether he wants to seek out and realize his revenge for the terrible things done to him or whether he can forgive and let go of these grievances in hopes of not destroying the city that his young ward is meant to inherit. While I don’t think Dishonored is particularly well written, the idea is there and it is something I can’t help but keep in mind as the ‘choke a fool’ and the ‘stab a fool’ options pop up on my screen.



Hit-Girl seems to be collecting screwed up father figures.


I like this trend. I never expected I would, but I like games that put me into this protector sort of position. It feels more real and feels far more emotionally gripping than saving the world or a kingdom or just getting revenge. It forces me to think outside the box. In Far Cry 3, my choices are ‘shoot someone with a rifle from far away’, ‘sic a bear on people’ or ‘stab people in the throat’. While an absurdly fun game (emphasis on absurdly fun), these are personal, selfish choices. They don’t matter in the long run. Being forced to decide what’s best for another, to weigh my actions according to someone else’s standards... that provides a strong, memorable obstacle for me. I will always remember sweating in front of my monitor, hands frozen on the keyboard, as Clementine looked up at me, patiently awaiting my answer to an absolutely gut-wrenching question.



Well thank goodness there aren’t any children around to see this.


How about the rest of you? Do you feel the same way? What moments in games do you remember affecting you due to it’s effect not on you or your avatar, but another character?

Recently, I got to play through Resident Evil 6 with a friend of mine, who surprised me with the game as a Christmas gift. Now, this game has received a lot of flak and while admittedly it’s earned most of it, I still think it does a lot of things right. Mind you, I’ve been a fan of the series since its debut on PS1.

However, one thing it did was help me get to the core of my biggest pet peeve in video games. Games have one trait and one trait only that puts them apart from other media. Control. Video games are the only entertainment platform where you are able to make decisions for the protagonist (or army, or whatever) and have those decisions produce unique consequences.



Fe Fi Fo Fum, I smell the blood of a minimalistic protagonist.


So... we know this. You know this, I know this, why am I telling this to a person with a controller sitting a few feet away? (And likely without charge. Hook that thing up so you won’t be sad later!)

Well, I believe there are two concepts at war here. Control and power. Control is your ability to move your character, to perform actions within the gamespace that have some effect on your character or the world (even if this is just moving around a bit). Power is how in control of the situation you find your character in. I feel these are important distinctions.

Taking away power from a player can be a, well, powerful thing to do in a game. Think of the time you fight Pyramid Head in Silent Hill 2, trapped in a flooded stairwell with him. This is a great example of taking away power, but not control. You could try to attack him with your pipe, shoot at him, run away or bleed on him heroically, but this was Pyramid Head. He was huge and terrifying. He never showed a reaction to your attacks. The game specifically refused to give you feedback in the form of health bars, flinches, flashing red enemies or the like. You felt helpless. It wasn’t frustrating, it was terrifying. You were in control and the only one you could blame for your predicament was yourself.



James regrets not taking his pills that morning.


Shadow of the Colossus, without going into too many spoilers, used the gift of control and the denial of power to great effect in its ending to richen and strengthen the experience.

Resident Evil 6, however, flips this on its head, and like a similarly-handled toddler, the result isn’t very pretty or functional. There were countless times in the game where the player is forced to look at some item of interest. Occasionally this is an important enemy or clue to a puzzle, but more often the camera is hijacked to show a door or, worse, something the other player is doing. What really makes these events special is that not only can you not skip or avoid them, and not only does this pull your targeting reticle with it (yep, potentially making you miss a shot with your valuable, valuable ammo... or blowing yourself up) but it doesn’t pause the game.

At least half a dozen times throughout the experience I would return from a cutscene revealing a door or switch to find myself surrounded by enemies. This is particularly egregious during a forced stealth segment, where you are mostly unarmed and being guided by your ally in a security room. When my ally opened a door, the camera jumped away to show him doing that... opening a door. When I returned to my character, a few seconds later, the alarm had been tripped by a wandering guard that saw me and I was already surrounded by foes.



“Why can’t I quit you?” “The camera’s been hijacked.” “Oh.”


This isn’t an occasional thing... this happens all the time. I can’t imagine this made it through testing without at least a few broken controllers. Even worse, there are mandatory chase sequences where the camera will switch angles, and will switch your directional input with it. You’ll suddenly find yourself running towards the giant monster.

This is bad game design, and there is no excuse for it. Gears of War implemented this elegantly by allowing you to press Y to optionally look at the important thing the game wanted to show you. If you were too busy chainsawing people, you could ignore it. More recently Journey used the background and level design to naturally bring your attention to points of interest and scenery of note. Resident Evil 6 has no excuse.

It’s like when you see your powerful, experienced hero captured by one guy with a pistol. Your avatar has survived hundreds of bullets and can likely out shoot his captors, but the story demands you submit and a cutscene makes it happen. It’s annoying and breaks the illusion that we’re in control of the character.

Take Spec Ops: The Line. If you have not played this game, you should. It’s an incredible, unique experience that I’ve never seen replicated. In that game, you’re often presented with questionable situations and surprisingly (besides one major exception) the game allows you full freedom to react to those situations however you like with the abilities you have. The best part is? It doesn’t tell you that you can do these things. It’s organic and natural... you never feel cheated or like you’re not in control of your character. You just react and the game responds exactly as you’d expect.



David Carradine was a bad example on Dubai’s youth.


Capcom could learn a thing or two.

How about the rest of you? What are some moments in your experience that have removed your power or control, and how effective were they as game elements?

Well, I suppose for a debut post, this isn’t a bad place to start.

So, sex in video games. This is a topic that has always been on my mind, one I’ve felt gets an awful lot of attention but doesn’t actually benefit from this attention in any meaningful way. I’ll avoid the whole ‘it’s fucked that you can blow off 36 individual parts of a person in Soldier of Fortune 2 but nipples are SATAN’ discussion for now though.

Can video games be sexy? Of course they can. Here’s the secret folks - no one drew Minerva Mink or designed Blood Rayne so that their character design reflects their deep, well-written character. Someone, somewhere, (probably a few someones, that shit gets expensive to produce) found the traits that they decided to gift these characters with sexy. Some artist discovered that he got tingly in the nethers when he looked at girls in leather and figured that maybe, just maybe, someone else would appreciate this.



Is it exploitative? Sure. Is it degrading? That’s debatable. Is it arousing? Sure, it could be. Why not? There’s an absurd idea floating about that people should be ashamed of what they’re aroused by. I grew up on cartoons and video games, and some of my earlier crushes were Terra Branford, Gadget and Zelda. Why not? They were a part of the things I enjoyed, they were important to me in the context of the hobbies I had and they were designed to appeal in some way to their audiences.

Human beings do not control whom or what they’re attracted to. Heterosexuals, homosexuals, asexuals, furries, pedophiles, foot fetishists... no one sits down and checks off what they want to find arousing (it would save me a LOT of money and effort if I was sexually fulfilled by Pepperidge Farm Goldfish). No one wakes up one day and says ‘I can’t wait to be a social pariah for my personal urges’. We just make do the best we can. ‘Whatever floats your boat’ indeed.

So when we talk about arousing moments in video games, the focus should be less on ‘can video games be arousing’ and more ‘what makes a scene arousing’. It’s the same with Hollywood, (and to be fair, in the context of realism, uploading some knuckle children into Cortana and hooking up with Emma Stone are both pretty damn unlikely for pretty much everyone) some sex scenes work really well and some... don’t. Two words: Showgirls, pool. To some degree, it’ll always be a personal preference thing, but design figures into it too.

So... what makes a good video game sex scene? To be honest, they haven’t really nailed that down yet. Personally, I remember Shepard and Tali’s love scene from Mass Effect 2 affecting me, but emotionally, not necessarily sexually. It wasn’t explicit, but neither was it awkward or poorly animated, likely thanks to the overeager cut-to-black.



On the other hand Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy’s sex scenes were more explicit and didn’t feel too shoehorned in, but didn’t really rev my motor. Maybe it was the uncanny valley, maybe it was the bad animation, who knows.

More recently, Far Cry 3 received some attention for having one of the first mainstream first person sex sequences, and while it wasn’t all that long or graphic, I found it to be more effective in conveying realistic sex than many games have in the past. The characters are climbing the far end of the uncanny valley, and while the scene itself was pretty out there, the sex wasn’t over the top.



It’s hard to talk about sex in games without discussing eroge, which for those who don’t know means Erotic Game, and originates in Japan. Often in the form of visual novels, these games are only marked as eroge if they feature graphic sexual content... regardless of how much there actually is. Now, these really don’t do sex any better than other media, and in fact probably do a far worse job in many cases, but one title I’ll mention briefly is the US produced, free-to-play Katawa Shoujo.

Now, regardless of your thoughts on the subject matter and quality, one thing that really stood out about the experience is how it flat-out nails the first-time sexual experience. Anyone who has had sex will immediately grimace, grin or squirm at (most of) the scenes, and to me, that makes them fantastic. All the poor communication, the lack of satisfaction, the uncertainty... they really captured it well, and I think it goes a long way towards its charm. Its relatable and grounded, not idealized and clean, which sex rarely is.



You often hear the argument that these scenes in games don’t need to be as explicit as they are, but I’d like to put forth the argument that as technology improves, we should be pushing to be more explicit. Why not? In Mass Effect, you watch friends and children die, make decisions that condemn lovers, comrades or entire races to horrific fates, and in the middle of all this madness, we should cut away from the one moment of love? Why?

Human sexuality has always been something of great interest and great importance to me. It’s always shocked me how something so important to life, something that is of such an interest to nearly all of us, has become such a knee-jerk taboo throughout much of the world. Film, literature and music have made strides, for better and for worse, in exploring these important matters for years now... it’s about time for gaming to be a bit less shy about doing the same.

What do you all think? Tell me about a scene in a game, sexual in nature, that made you feel something. What was the scene? What did you feel? Arousal? Warmth? Embarrassment?