Borderlands 2, or ‘the Accidental-on-Purpose, not-so-secret, feminist game’

There really is a lot that can be said about BL2, and although I’m not going to say it all, I’ve picked up on some points I think are more relevant for BadRep.  It isn’t, however, as hard as you might expect to find good, feminist-friendly things to say about BL2. In fact, it’s probably one of the best AAA titles in terms of its ability to give players something quite egalitarian as an overall experience.

Basic game-stuff first, though: keeping to form, Borderlands 2 is beautiful.  Hand-painted landscapes, smooth animation, great character design, brilliant monsters and, like, a gazillion-billion guns and other loot items.  It’s an FPS/RPG that combines the best of both game styles; you can recognise the colour-coded scale of awesomeness for your loot alongside the superb right-in-there combat mechanics.  You can grind, farm, explore – whatever.  It’s fun.  A lot of fun.

It’s available on the three big platforms (PS3, Xbox 360, PC) and is big on multiplayer, though frankly it’s just as great solo. However, the one thing that annoys me with these big multi-platform titles and multiplayer is that we can’t interact with each other.

While I can play through Steam with one friend, my Xbox friend can’t join in and is left to languish alone with inferior loot.  Not the fault of the game – more the big console companies trying to keep their corner of the market isolated – but it’s still a letdown.

Anyway, these things aside, why is this such a great egalitarian game?  Put simply, it takes the piss.  Out of everyone.  On the surface of things, anyone is fair game, but(!) if you listen and observe, what I’ve noticed is that there’s a bit of a slant on the piss-takings, and it’s a positive one.  I’ll give you some examples, but from here on out, beware the spoilers.

My two favourite NPCs are Ellie and Tina. They’re both great examples of powerful, self-confident, self-reliant women who aren’t your average pin-up character and who represent integral, practical and useful components of the story & mission.

They’re not decoration over in the corner of the room; they’re key to your success.  Ellie is a mechanic (and a bit of a whizz at that) and she’s a larger woman.  She loves it, and so does the game and its creators.

In the book that came with my special edition game-pack, Inside the Vault: The Art & Design of Borderlands 2, one character artist has said:

Ellie is one of my favorites… I like that we have embraced a variety of different character shapes.

Ellie’s dialogue is snappy, funny and generally awesome.  Some examples include: “…they like skinny chicks ’cause they’s pussies!” and “My mom Moxxi always told me if I slimmed down, men’d pay me more mind.  Shows what she knows – I got these boys bending over backwards…”.

And Tina.  Tina is an early-teens girl who has been orphaned and likes to spend time having tea parties and, uh, exploding stuff.  She’s the best explosives expert on the planet. Even the man leading the resistance defers to her.

Tina’s a confusing character to meet – her speech is a little discordant with her sweet appearance – but she nevertheless maintains BL2 hilarity while being totally badass.

Tina and Ellie are just two of the female NPCs (yup, there’s others!) but I gotta say, having played through, the women are very important in BL2. They’re powerful, proactive, and practical. They can fight, build, explode stuff and save the day – they are full and proper characters and they’re equal (if not more awesome) than their male counterparts.

Even a rather minor female NPC adds to the all-round feminine badassery by “accidentally” giving you coordinates to mortar a very misogynist fellow into tiny pieces.

What’s great is that while the game’s pleasing me by being fair with its female characters, it’s also very subtly passing on the message that misogyny and sexism isn’t cool and isn’t funny.  Plenty of anti-egalitarian types rear their heads in the story, but they all get punished in-game. I think that’ll go a long way to dissuading that sort of behaviour in the audience – and hopefully show other developers that women can be awesome too.

Deadlight, or ‘the obligatory, festivity-themed title that’s actually pretty awesome’

Finally, in the spirit of all things spooky, there’s Deadlight, which recently ported across to Steam from Xbox Live Arcade (released on Steam 25/10/2012). Developed by Tequila Works alongside Microsoft Studios, Deadlight is a tense indie zombie-survival offering set in post-apocalyptic 1980s Seattle.  You play Randall Wayne, who’s been separated from his wife and daughter, battling and evading the ‘shadows’ as he navigates a ruined, hazardous cityscape to reunite his family.

It’s a simple premise by all accounts, and we’ve certainly seen plenty of zombie themes in recent years across the entertainment spectrum – but don’t let that put you off.

Deadlight is a side-scroller with a dark, moody art style reminiscent of LIMBO . It doesn’t feel too distant from the survivalist title I Am Alive, which also requires you to focus on your stamina levels to avoid falling of buildings or running out of energy mid-fight.  Similarly, you have limited weaponry and ammo (only what you can salvage on your way) so a lot of the time you have to make do without, meaning you can’t go full force forward shooting everything that moves. Nor can you charge about with an axe and splatter everything, because that runs your stamina down pretty sharpish.

Running, climbing and hiding are some of the best options, but there’s also environmental elements you can use to your advantage.  Zombies aren’t smart: if you jump over a hole in the floor, they’ll just fall in it.

Without giving away too much, zombies aren’t your only problem in Deadlight, and not every moment is spent dashing about.  It’s good fun and manages to keep up the tension without being so nerve-racking you log off (I’m looking at you, Amnesia… you too, Slender!).

At under a tenner full price (£9.99) it’s not bad value either, but if you’re quick there’s 15% off on Steam until the end of today (£8.49), so it’s worth checking out for a little Hallowe’en amusement.  For those of you who prefer XBLA, it’s 1,200 Microsoft Points.

If you aren’t tickled by Deadlight, don’t forget, Thanksgiving is nigh approaching (22/11/12) so keep a look out in November for more sales all over the place from US-centric platforms and digital management systems!

First I’ll give you something of substance.

The posts I wrote last month (here and here) were somewhat laden with negativity – you could say legitimately – so I thought that for this offering I’d continue to talk about our gaming community and the relationship developers have with their audiences.  Most importantly, I’d like to highlight a couple of examples of those who are getting it right.  Or, at the very least – because no one can be perfect – who seem to be doing it better than others.

There are a lot of devs and publishers who have their plus points, and there are those that have their negatives.  Most have both, but some are more memorable for either one of these polar options.  For this post I’d like to look at the ones who are most famed for being a little bit awesome.

It being summer, those who know them will not be surprised that I’m going to bring up Valve.  During the Meet the Pyro update for Team Fortress 2, they announced the Source Filmmaker, and as the Summer Sale began, they announced Greenlight.

I jumped on Filmmaker and have quite enjoyed playing with it.  Here’s my one-and-only even-vaguely-close-to-finished short I made.  The tutorials started off simply enough but after a few of them, ‘Bay’ (our guide) seems to dispense with the explaining-it-to-a-layperson format and just starts blurting jargon at you left, right and centre.  Hence why I haven’t finished the tutorial video yet. (That and the fact I got distracted with my little Western-style showdown there.)

One other criticism at this point is that the Store Page (on Steam) for the Filmmaker has a list of minimum system requirements, but not all of these are accurate.  The page lists that you need a minimum resolution of 1366 x 768, which I had, but this creates problems with displaying all the necessary functions of the tool.  I had to bump up to the “suggested” 1920 x 1080 in order to get full functionality out of it.  But, hey, it’s free, it’s pretty fun and is a great way to get involved in the community.

Now, Greenlight is not something I expect to benefit from – as I’m not a developer – but I will definitely be checking it out from a voter’s perspective.  Here’s the basic premise: lots of games get submitted to Valve looking to be sold via Steam; they started to think maybe there was a better way of selecting games; having seen the success of the Workshop ratings system they thought of employing a similar thing for games; Greenlight allows developers to submit their games and be at the mercy of the community.  In theory, if the community likes your game(s), you get high ratings/votes, and your game gets to go to Steam and be sold through the client.

This is a brilliant opportunity for a lot of smalltime and bedroom developers to get recognition for their work, to build a fanbase and maybe make some money out of their work.  So, Steam users of BadRep, get behind this!  When it arrives, let’s make sure we show Valve this is a good tool to help out the smalltimers.

Competition Time!

In celebration of a variety of things (Valve being awesome, “summer”, I’ve been at BR Towers over a year now…) I thought a little gaming giveaway would be nice.  As BR is voluntary, this is me buying prizes for you guys, so given that I’m sure you’ll understand why this competition happens to follow the Steam Summer Sale.

Up for grabs:

• Torchlight – as mentioned June’s “…Playing” post.
• Bastion – also from June (see link above).
• LIMBO – recently part of Humble Bundle V (discussed here)

How to enter:

Leave a comment on this post (they do not automatically see the light of the internet so your details will only be seen by Team BadRep) and remember to include an email address linked to a Steam account or your Steam ID and which of the three games you’d prefer.

Early in August I’ll collect all the details, and using some funky random number generators to do some description of Name-out-of-the-Hat magic, I’ll then get in touch with winners to arrange the gifting of their new Steam game.

Simple as that, really.  Good luck!

But if you’re feeling generous, could you spare a couple of minutes to complete this little survey?

I’ve also had a bit of a TF2 revival this month, and that’s been fun, but what more can be said about TF2?  There are no female characters (yet), although there are plenty of female gamers.  I personally haven’t seen much SexistFail in chat but I know it does happen on some servers (you do, however, get a lot of childish insults and obscene ‘sprays’ on some servers).  It’s a fun, team-based game that’s F2P (Free2Play), and Valve just hired an economist to help with the ever expanding Mannconomy and the inter-game economies as they grow further still.  That’s interesting, right?  Plus PYROMANIA has landed.

Bastion’s protag, “the Kid”, looking a bit moody.

To Bastion!  This is a very curious indie title that offers a considerable amount of play-time compared to other indie offerings.  It’s described as “…an action role-playing experience that redefines storytelling in games, with a reactive narrator who marks your every move”.  I’ve heard similar claims before and ended up disappointed, but Bastion really delivers on this concept.  Admittedly, the narrator’s voice does get on my nerves but it really does react to what you do.  I’m sure there’s an inventory of quips and comments that are selected according to specific trigger events in the game but it’s still pretty cool.

The art is lovely and it isn’t just the simple damsel-in-distress format that I have encountered in a lot of other indie titles (LIMBO, Braid, for example), which is a nice change of pace.  Although the main active characters are all male and the one female (so far) has been pretty passive, there’s still a good bit of joy to be taken from this game.  It’s simple enough to grasp and you can make it harder in a variety of ways, so for gameplay and originality it gets a thumbs-up from me.  Unfortunately, if you didn’t get lucky and snap up the Humble Bundle, Bastion as a standalone is £11.49 on Steam but is currently going for under £9 on Green Man Gaming (sort of an alternative to Steam).

The one last thing that I will mention about Bastion is the soundtrack, which is beautiful, and I bring this up because I also want to make a special note of Torchlight’s soundtrack.  While playing Torchlight I am constantly finding myself with the urge to go and watch Sunshine again.  This is because the generic background twinkling of Torchlight often hits some of the same chords or sequences that the piece ‘Sunshine (Adagio in D Minor)’ features.  Now, that piece (composed by John Murphy) makes me all soft and wibbly on the inside every time I hear it.  As does watching Sunshine.  But, alas, ’tis presently packed in a box somewhere.

Torchlight only features 3 classes and only one gender and set appearance for each… HEY LOOK more boobs that don’t require proper armour; that really is magic.

Music aside, Torchlight (yes, it’s 3 years old, sorry!) is a great little RPG offering.  I have it because I pre-ordered Torchlight II via Steam and got Torchlight to play with in the meantime.  Torchlight II is making some people in RPG land a bit excited after the numerous issues people have had with Diablo III.  The first game is charming, easy to use and offers some features bigger RPGs haven’t, such as sending your pet to town to sell items from your backpack – meaning you’ll end up with a huge surplus of Town Portal Scrolls as you never need to use them!  It does, regrettably, fall foul of the tediously standard female-armour-fail… do all these women seriously have bullet/arrow/sword/magic proof tits and navels?  That’s the only negative so far, but this looks like it might be halfway rectified, at least, in Torchlight II: go and check out the character classes on their site (only one of the 4 female figures has cleavage showing!).

Now for something released in 2012; I know, incredible, right?  Max Payne 3 has amazing visuals, even on low-spec PCs, and great mechanisms for exciting gameplay.  It showcases the new Rockstar engine that will be used in next year’s Grand Theft Auto V; not a franchise I’m fond of, but with this engine, it’ll look stunning and run spectacularly.  Max Payne 3 has kept fairly faithful to the originals and the basic ‘essence’ of Max, which is a relief for the old fans, but offers plenty for those new to the series.

Max Payne 3 has refined and capitalised on the Shootdodge mechanic of previous games

As an observer (not the sinister Fringe kind) to Max Payne it’s a little different to discuss than if I’d been the player.  I was hoping to get my partner to contribute something here, but the house-moving saga has put paid to that plan.  Max Payne does play with some damsel-in-distress themes and always has, but it also manages to twist them around.  Originally, Max becomes an avenging angel, fallen-from-grace figure after his wife and infant daughter are murdered.  He tears up NYC seeking revenge, but finds conspiracies abound, and then his moral compass takes over and he kills all the baddies.

In MP3, he’s given up being a cop and is playing the private security game.  Although the game starts out with the feel that Max is off saving, and I quote, “fallen women” all over again, it swiftly changes tack in the brutal underworld of Brazil and Max, in the middle of an identity crisis, isn’t sure whether he’s a good guy, a bad guy, or a magical pixie putting the world to rights.  I’m not sure if he ever really ‘finds himself’, but he shoots all the baddies and conquers another conspiracy in typical grim, noir style.  The combat mechanics set this game apart and offer a truly varied way of kickin’ ass.  As, I say, the graphics are gorgeous, the engine is shiny and the music is atmospheric (not to mention nostalgic) the whole way through.

Still pretty spry for an old guy: Ezio takes in the view of Constantinople.

Here I am, talking so much about music and mechanics, you thought I’d forgotten AC:Rev, didn’t you?  Well, let me squeeze it in now.  I have yet to complete the game because I’ve been purposefully dawdling in order to enjoy sandboxing in such a magnificent environment.  Constantinople looks great, and you get to train up your Assassins right from the get-go, as well as the usual bits and pieces around the city with added stalkers who occasionally try to stab you right when you’re supposed to be tailing someone.  The main storyline, so far, hasn’t been too riveting, which is a shame.  I’m sure – after I’ve finished unpacking – that I’ll charge through the story and update you all next month.

What else can you expect in July’s end-of-month post?  I’ve got a couple of new games to play with (actually new, i.e. newly released!) and I’m always keeping an eye out for things to play, but summer tends to be time for the blockbuster films until autumn brings gaming back into focus again…

Obviously the simplicity has benefits as well as negative points: it’s simpler to use, so therefore more of the community can try their hand at map-making for an extremely popular title.  This is demonstrated by the fact that since the Puzzle Maker has been available, the number of Steam Workshop files for Portal 2 has shot up to nearly 100,000 (by comparison, Team Fortress 2 has close to 5k and Skyrim just over 7k)¹ despite being the newest edition to the Workshop repertoire.

My first test chamber for Portal 2

The negatives, I feel, come with the restrictions you face with what is available to you in the Puzzle Maker: e.g. you can’t add extra doors for staged testing.  Plus, try as I might to create things exactly as I imagine them in my head, it never seems to be quite right as not all the tools are available to you.  The solution here would be to learn how to use Hammer properly… but for a lot of fans that’s a bit too confusing to contemplate.

So, you may be wondering why my production of test chamber blueprints stopped mind-May… the answer is Diablo 3.  This hit internationally on May 15th and domestically (in the UK) May 18th.  After some very irritating cock-ups from various pre-order suppliers, I eventually got my hands on it for the UK release date.

I must say I’m sort of glad I didn’t get a copy until May 18th as Blizzard had some serious issues on the international release. Let me explore these. D3 is both single and multiplayer but you have to be online all the time, on Battle.net’s servers even to play on your own.  No, it doesn’t make sense to me either.  Couple that with the fact that their servers clearly weren’t ready – nor capable – of handling the volume of people trying to connect.  Again, just to play single player.

Error 37 screengrabs were plastered all over the internet as eager fans were raging at Blizzard.  That’s not to say I didn’t escape: I’ve had three instances since I got the game where I’ve been unable to play because the damned servers were having a tea break (or eating themselves, I dunno) with Error 35 taking out the game on May 20th for over 9 hours and Error 37 rearing its ugly head again nearer the end of the month (Error 35 = servers down for maintenance; Error 37 = servers are busy).

That’s the one major drawback of the game.  The interwebs have been awash with rumours of an “offline mode”, but whether Blizz decide to actually do it or not only time will tell.

Enough of that.  The game itself is great fun with brilliantly detailed graphics and fun attacks for all classes.  This is the first RPG of this type (the hack’n’slash) that I’ve actually finished – albeit only on normal difficulty – and am now going through it again to try and find better loot (so far unsuccessfully).  The fact that I haven’t got bored yet is praise in itself as I do have a tendency to just wander off despite all my intentions to play through as every class and on every difficulty.  Again, time will tell if I do end up admitting defeat.

Blizz have done OK with the female characters; yes, they start off fairly under-dressed but so do the male counterparts.  My one criticism is the fem-Demon Hunter’s boots… why would you wear heels (at all!) to fight the prime evil?  Seriously.  Oh, and the occasional armour vs. cleavage fail is a given.

In between my battling of evil I made a brief foray into the world of the mod.  The mod in question is Centralia: Part 1, which is the opening sequence of a game developed as a mod for Half Life 2: Episode 2.  I’ve written a more general review over here but I felt it worth a mention as a) it doesn’t involve shooting guns or killing things and b) yeah, OK, my brother is one of the devs.

The idea behind it is (I paraphrase) “to make creepy places fun”, so they’ve taken an extraordinary story from real life (Centralia, PA) and added some more spooky to the mix.  Even though it’s pretty short for now, it still managed to make me jump a couple of times.

A still from the beginning of Centralia

It is a genuinely interesting concept for a game and I’d quite like to see where it goes, but to do that I first have to persuade my bro to set up a KickStarter fund, then he has to get funded through it.  Blah, blah austerity etc.

Tropes Vs Women in Games: a cool thing for you to throw money at

As I’ve mentioned KickStarter, we here at BR had this drawn to our attention.  Tropes vs. Women in Video Games is the brainchild of Anita of Feminist Frequency who is hoping to make a series of films based on, well, tropes of women in video games.

“The series will highlight the larger reoccurring patterns and conventions used within the gaming industry rather than just focusing on the worst offenders.”

This looks promising, and who here wouldn’t want to get paid to play games and make films about it?  Exactly.

Next Month:

There will be Max Payne 3 – as the PC edition got delayed so it didn’t have to do battle with Diablo 3 – and probably (finally) some AC: Revelations as I now have a copy waiting for me.  I suspect there will be more but I haven’t thought that far ahead yet!

But! Before I go, an Assassin’s Creed note…

Just quickly, this has just popped up on the internet: promise of a female protagonist in an Assassin’s Creed title!  It will be a “companion game” to AC3, subtitled Liberation, but will only be on the PS Vita.  Borderhouse (follow the link) say:

What’s interesting and exciting is that the protagonist of the game will be a woman of color named Aveline.

Admittedly, yes, that is pretty interesting – and awesome – but being me I have to push the cynic buttons and raise two points. First, we’ve talked about this before, and I will keep banging on about it until it surfaces for definite: is this the “her” Juno mentioned at the end of Brotherhood?  This mysterious lady-assassin that Desmond has to find before he can defeat the Templars?  My guess is: no.  If it’s running concurrent to AC3 he can’t have found her yet as, surely, her story comes after his ends (after another three games).

Secondly, PS Vita?  Really?  An over-expensive handheld with few titles and not nearly as many users as Xbox 360/Ps3/PC?  That’s where you decide to premiere your first femprotag of the franchise?  You don’t think that’s a little bit sidelining?  I suspect the peeps over at Ubisoft are expecting only the die hards to buy it, which means they aren’t too bothered about offering up a viable femprotag for the mainstream just yet.

Or, maybe they’re testing the waters for the Elusive Female Assassin that will save the world.  Or, maybe Aveline is “her”. Prove me wrong, Ubisoft, please!

1. as of 9am, 31.05.12

Mostly.

Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy were the issues.  I don’t want to sound like a broken record but boobs on display in a high risk profession such as being a Gotham City criminal is not exactly clever – is it?  Harley was very nice to see as a significant part of the story that is out to scupper your plans, but her being called some less-than-charming things by the Joker’s own thugs was tedious to say the least, and when you actually fight Harley herself she is defeated ridiculously easily – in a cutscene no less.  Disappointing.

“Please don’t punch me in the chest, Batman. It’d be terribly inconvenient and I might have to reconsider my outfit!”

Ivy, when you first meet her, is lounging about in her cell – apparently the only female inmate – not wearing prison issues but her own clothes displaying her sizeable bust.  Later, in her boss fight, for some reason she decides to float about attacking you in what – as our ed described to me in an email – “appears to be a giant laughing vulva-plant which flaps open periodically to reveal she still isn’t wearing a great deal…”.  Super.

I’m pretty sure she gets referred to as some less-than-charming things too by henchmen.

Fast forward to Arkham City, which I got in another sale (but it still cost me £20), and now you can play as Catwoman too!  However, she appears to have fallen foul of Rule 1 of Sensible Female Armour: her suit is only ever zipped up to just below her breasts, allowing for ample cleavage.  When you fight thugs as Catwoman, you get called a ‘bitch’ but for some reason, if you’re Batman, you don’t get called a prick, a wanker, a bastard or even a knobend.  Really, people?

The assassins of Rā’s al Ghūl’s order are all for some reason scantily clad sex icons – as is his daughter – and the concept art is mainly essentially the sort of softcore you might find in lads’ mags.  In fact the vast majority of the concept art involving any female character is pretty oversexualised and repugnant.  We get to meet Ivy again, too, but it seems she still hasn’t bothered to find any clothes since the laughing vulva-plant incident.  And Harley is wearing even more revealing kit than last time.

Great graphics, but do we really need to see that much breast?

Now, even if we leave aside all of this sexist nonsense, Arkham City is somewhat disappointing anyway.  I finished the storyline in less than a day; the ending snuck up on me and was rubbish.  I won’t say what happens, but… just… what?!  That’s even before I get to the complaint I have with the huge continuity hole left at the end.  I was so disheartened by it that I did a Ragequit of Disappoints and haven’t gone back on it since.  Even though I still have lots of side quests and puzzles to solve, I just haven’t found the heart to go back to it.

Arkham Asylum was worth the £5 but City was definitely not worth the £20 – let alone the standard retail price in the range of up to £39.99!  The first game offered something new and interesting with a gorgeous noir feel much akin to Nolan’s reimagining of Gotham on film, if not grittier.  The second game whizzed past all too quickly, with no real indication that one should slow down, do side quests, do the puzzles and so on, lest you face the atrocious storyline ending.

Benefits of the second game, however, do exist; the world is larger, you get more gadgets and there are no area transitions between outdoor locations.  Plus you do get to play as Catwoman, even if she is just eye candy to be abused by burly henchmen. (Are there really no female crims in Gotham?)

Both games do fall down woefully at the Treating Female Characters with Respect hurdle.  Would it truly be so hard to think logically about the design of these people?  Does Batman walk around without his Kevlar body armour, flexing his pectorals, with a big “SHOOT HERE” target on his chest?  No.  No, he does not.  So why should Catwoman, or Ivy, or Harley?  Basic boob-sense would say maybe a comfy sports bra would be better than leather basques and flimsy shirts with only one button done up.  At least then the breast tissue wouldn’t detach during all this acrobatic criminality.

Also, Catwoman has anti-gravity boobs.