by KA

Call me a gamer she-geek for this (I dare you: goahead@illfuckyourassup.com), but I've had my fill of RPGs that appear to have been conceived solely for the pleasure of male gamers. The first thing I want to tear into is Baldur's Gate 2; it's a kickass game and anyone who likes Dungeons and Dragons should go out and get it, but speaking from a chick's point of view, the romances in it suck. In fact, they suck hairy goat ass. See, I honestly don't see why they would have even bothered putting romances in the game (aside from some scant experience point gains from selected romances) if they expected only guys to play the game. I'd like to meet a guy who actually gives two shits about romances in games. But Bioware did expect girls to play; see, us girls have the possibility of romance with an NPC too -- but just one. Yeah. And the guys have three. Okay, so right there that doesn't make any sense -- shouldn't chicks get more romance material seeing as they're the ones who'll actually give a fuck about 'em? 'I guess not' says Bioware. So aside from that initial piss-off, here are some more:

a) there are no alignment restrictions on any of the guys' three romances, but in the one romance available for chicks, the player has to be of Good alignment (sorry chicky, you can't be that awesome halfling Neutral Evil assassin you've been craving to be...well, not if you want to have a romance AND play the game). You'd think 'Hey, if you're an evil bastard/bitch, than why would you need a romance anyway?', because that would make some sense, but once again even this clever philosophy isn't enough to make sense of BG2's romantic nightmare. You see, male Evil or Neutral players can get any of their three available romances. I may have hit a bug when I played through BG2, but the alignment thing fucked me up; some people say they haven't run into the same issue.

b) one of the guys' romances is all about sex, which is fair, but no equivalent is given to chick gamers. Apparently, it is inconceivable for a girl to want just sex.

c) one of the guys' romances is a fairly decent one, with an almost-normal woman, and it ends in friendly separation. The one romance available for chicks ends in one way: marriage. It's nice to know that the fuckers who 'thought this through' unanimously believe that all women want to get tied down. I'm surprised it wasn't decided that female player characters should also get pregnant during their romance and suffer stat penalties for it ('Duh, why didn't we think of that?' says jerkass number 2 at Bioware).

d) there is an untapped teasure trove of romance setups for chick players. Valygar for one, with his vow of chastity, dying family and murdered girlfriend. I even found some jucy dialogue bits (not used in the game, mind) that hinted to the possibility that the BG2 programmers didn't have enough time to complete a full romance with him before the release of the game (but, I'll sourly note, they sure as all bloody hell found the time to make not one, or two, but three romances for guys). There is also one of the more charismatic characters in the game, Yoshimo, that would have made a delicious romance -- if, of course, he hadn't turned out to be a traitor to your party that dies halfway through the game (after which you meet yet another good romance prospect, a drow who's fighting with his ex-lover and who, when asked, refuses to join your party...go figure. Thanks a lot, Bioware. That's charming. Give the guys Viconia t he drow sex machine but don't even let the girls get a taste of drow-boy, spinal cord or no). Then there's Keldorn, a dashing Paladin (who's like fifty years old, but is still a decent prospect considering the shitty selection of males around) who goes home to find his wife has cheated on him whilst he was serving the city or gone to war or whatever...pffft, as if we didn't get the chance to catch him on the rebound.

e) the guys get a romance of each possible alignment (one Good chick, one Neutral chick and one Evil chick). Girls get Lawful Good. What if that's just not attractive to me? What if I want a sly thief, a pious druid or one hell of a nasty necromancer? For fuck sakes, we don't all want knights in shining armor!

f) the guys romances are all very different, and somewhat reflect the types of girls they'd come across in real life (some more of a stretch than others, but all-in-all still moderately accurate): you've got the normal angsty chick who's getting over the loss of her shitty jellyfish-of-a-husband, the abusive indecisive chick who's all about sex but actually wants to be a house wife deep down (yeah, I know...), and the young/naive chick who can be manipulated into just about anything and ends up carrying the male players character's baby (seriously...it's ridiculous). Now the girl gamers, they get a guy who's so unbelievably uncharismatic and unbearable (there's something wrong with you if you like him) that it floors me to think about who came up with this guy's dialogue (if I find you, by the way, we're going to have a nice 'talk'). This guy wants you to dote on him half the time, then turns into your slave two seconds later; he's nothing short of schizophrenic in that regard. Granted some guys are like that, but why did Bioware have to hand us a guy like that as our only choice? Not to mention the fact that it's painfully obvious that someone in the programming team (or someone's wife) has been reading way too many drugstore romance novels and has decided that it would be cool to copy over one of those jerks into the game -- complete with cheesy pre-sex lines. Fuck off, you god damned loser.

Right, so the other thing I wanted to to talk to you about is NeverWinter Nights. Again, I gotta say I love the game with a passion (hats off to the people who designed the Aurora engine, btw, except for the fact that characters can't wear robes -- that's bullshit), but chick gamers are once again told to bend over and take it up the ass. There are no romances for me to bitch at in the game, but there is one subplot that I can't help but scream at the screen at as it unfolds: the Aribeth/Fenthick wonder. Okay, if you've played the game before you know that Aribeth loses her lover Fenthick, and becomes excellent friends with the player-character afterwards (I'm unsure wether this is open only to male characters or not, as I played a female through the game on my first try and didn't get the chance to be Aribeth's 'special friend' -- however, my new male character did...). Well here's the thing: it may be that the people who made the plot were guys, because Aribeth's lover Fenthick was an incredibly effeminate elf (a priest to boot) who looks and talks in a manner that leads me to believe that he's a homosexual. See, it makes no sense for a strong, independant woman like Aribeth (a paladin) to go for someone as naive and spineless as Fenthick; in fact, it's almost as though the programmers sought to make Fenthick as un-manly as they could in order to boost guys' egos so that they could muster the courage to go for Aribeth as soon as her lover bit the dust. Some more Fenthick-related oddities that make me wonder about him:

a) He rarely mentions Aribeth and gives a vaguely poetic answer when asked if she and he are lovers. Aribeth, on the flip side, won't shut up about him.
b) He won't shut up about Desther, the villain (another priest, surprise surprise), whom he has more faith in than he does his own God.
c) I just can't take him seriously when he says anything even remotely affectionate about Aribeth. It comes out like plastic.
d) He follows Desther after he (Desther) has proven himself a trator and stays with him in his evil hideout for a tremendous period of time without being killed.
e) He delivers a blubbering speech just before the final fight and begs for Desther to be taken alive, lamenting why the other man betrayed him. He barely mentions Aribeth, despite the fact that he knows he's going to die for siding with the enemy.
f) He wears a tiara for Christ's sake.

Yeah, so aside from that whole fucked-up deal, there's the matter of Aribeth's breasts. Being a programmer myself, I decided to peek into the nifty little toolset that comes with the game in order to try my hand at creating some custom maps and characters. Through the toolset, it's possible to load the modules that form the NeverWinter game itself and see how the programmers made everything (very nice, lads, very nice indeed). So I did that and loaded up a few of the NPCs from the game; Aribeth was one of them. I was amazed to see that he clothing/armor generated by the game as well as the hair, moved when the character did; you can actually click on the sprite and rotate it, which is a fantastic way to see every angle in 3-D. Being a curious idiot, I clicked on the Aribeth sprite and turned her around, checking everything out and watching her gear and hair bob and swish about with the movement. Then, I turned her back around and and made the sprite move back and forth quickly across the screen (kinda like shaking it); I thought the gear and hair might look cooler if it moved faster. Lo and behold, my eyes fell upon something that both amazed and irked me. Aribeth's breasts (I'd say the tops of them, but it's actually more) moved. They jiggled, almost alarmingly as well as they should in real life. It floored me. I loaded up more chick NPCs immediately and checked to see if their breasts moved too. They of course did not. Dismayed, I realized that this was likely another of the reasons why Aribeth gets a partial-romance by the end of the game. Wow...now why would Fenthick go for Desther when he's got the only chick in the game with moving breasts? I'd like to point out that none of the male NPCs' crotches move.

Lastly, I'd like to bring up the subject of armor for female characters. What the fuck is wrong with you? Three words, my friends: that's not armor. Either half the chest/abdominal portion is missing, or there is simply no below-the-waist or back portion at all (sometimes in combinations). Fuck arm guards or leg guards; and it's cool to have your hair down and in your face when you're wailing on orcs and fucking zombies and shit. High heels are not for combat. I understand chicks have to look good, but there's a limit. Like Rose's hafling monk character would be running around in a fucking bathingsuit ('Gee Tomi, why don't you let me disable that trap. ' *bends over*) -- give me a break.