Half life 2…this is the most amazing game ever…
it has the perfect balence of great graphics, physics, and ragdoll animations…..
The guns are well ballenced making the game hard but not impossible…the story is gripping and interesting.

there is a wide range of enemies…antlions, zombies and combine….
and each ‘species’ needs to be delt with in a different way.
It is not the most scary game…but it doesnt need to be…

Most importantly…its a hell of a lot of fun!!!

The voice acting is very good, specifically they’ve done well to pick a voice that nearly always feels natural coming from your character, regardless of the look or ethnicity of him. Except when I created a Ming the Merciless clone, then it didn’t work at all.

And you certainly aren’t restricted to them all looking like ‘vacant’, shaven headed Calvin Klein models’. I’d put up a picture to illustrate my point, but unfortunately I played it on the Xbox.

Interestingly, Chet at Valve was saying that the opposite phenomenon is more generally true: you can write bitchy, griping, arrogant dialogue for male characters and players take it in their stride and sometimes even find it charming. But if you have a female character say the same lines, they loathe her and complain bitterly about the constant nagging. So there’s a grouchy old man in Left 4 Dead, but the girl is all sweetness and light.

Broadly, men suck.

It’s strange that you didn’t mention Kreia, a character i found so interesting i unintentionally ended up doing exactly what she said in every situation.

I am lose.

“Thomas Lawrence: […]Subversion of gender roles, see?

It does, however, suck that in general, the options for female character romances aren’t as interesting as the male ones (I’m thinking mostly of BG2 here, and haven’t yet played Mass Effect).”

The trouble is, whilst ideally it would be as interesting as Deus Ex’s option to play as black-JC (and as amusing, with the religious debate connotations and all that), I think that there’s very little progressive role-play options in terms of gender (far less than race), and it mostly amounts to fan-service at worst, and at best, a brief exploration of ‘women in a man’s world’.

I’m trying to remember how games like N.O.L.F. handled it – I think I’m right in saying it was an ironic response to Lara Croft, and played up the whole gender thing for laughs. Games like KOTOR and Mass Effect (the latter of which I don’t have much time for) make gender-swapping more a case of male players getting kicks out of playing through straight (hetero) storylines from a female perspective (ie, a straight-male-lesbian approach), which aren’t entirely helpful.

There’s something to be said about online play and male players ‘losing themself’ in female characters – but that’s a bit of a complicated issue.

RE: gender bending in games, I don’t know whether the games development community has really progressed beyond ‘nice ass to look at’ Croftian Syndrome.

It does, however, suck that in general, the options for female character romances aren’t as interesting as the male ones (I’m thinking mostly of BG2 here, and haven’t yet played Mass Effect).

But mostly I suppose I avoid the gender bend because my natural instinct in games, given the choice, is to shag everything that moves and I’d rather my conquests be female.

However once again, all my characters are black and I’m white, and that has zero impact on the gameplay (although wouldn’t it be interesting if it did?) so who am I to judge?

Thomas: I probably mentioned it in that feature, and it was also Best of the Forum once. I did an interview that’ll be in the next-but-one issue where I was asked by my interviewee why I played women, and made most of your points. The key one being, in these environments, a woman’s story is automatically more interesting. I probably cut this bit from the interview, and if I didn’t I’m sure Tony will have.

Fat: Thanks.

Sentry: I’m reasonably confident they won’t charge for the new incarnation of Battle.net. It’s a huge turn-off to players, and I think Flagship only did it with Hellgate because they were a startup and would desperately need the cash to stay afloat. I think it’s worth Blizzard’s while in sales and expansion packs to run a good free multiplayer service, just as it’s worth ArenaNet’s to run Guild Wars and Valve’s to run Steam.

Dave: Yeah, but that’s not the lovely high-res version, which I insist everyone see. I also didn’t link Blizzard’s own page because a) I forgot and b) their embedded player is fucking horrible and c) their downloader is, as I say, fucking horrible.

Hey, wait, long-time James commenter Dave McLeod is probably the same person as the work experience Dave McLeod who was with us in the office all of last week. Who knew! Hopefully you did.

No more typing. French keyboard ftl.

But in my case, and in brief:
1) Female characters are usually more interesting in the kinds of roles you get in videogames (i.e. professional killers). A man who kills stuff is dull. A woman who kills stuff is at least interestingly subverting gender expectations.
2) As a straight man, I find women inherently fascinating. Hence, in a roleplaying game, I’m more interested tin getting to know the female characters than I am the ale ones. This probably gives rise to my subjective impression that female characters in roleplaying games are usually better written and more likeable than the men.
3) There’s something to be said for the “if I’m staring at my character’s ass for 99% of the gamepaly, it should be a nice ass” argument.

Also, congratulations to Tom for being right.

Mind you, I’m notorious for ‘racebending’ so I can’t talk.

http://www.gamevideos.com/video/id/19701