General gaming |
- Six Progressive Women of Retro Gaming
- Interview: Christine Love on Creating Inclusive Games
- Saints Row Expansion's Cancellation Allows Saints Row 4 to be That Much Bigger
| Six Progressive Women of Retro Gaming Posted: 20 Jun 2012 03:18 PM PDT
Feature 1UP COVER STORY  1UP COVER STORY | WEEK OF JUNE 18 | GENDER, SEXUALITY, AND VIDEO GAMES Six Progressive Women of Retro GamingCover Story: This group set the standard before the industry knew better.T he 8-bit era of gaming established one hard-and-fast rule, largely borrowed from adventure-based fiction: women are for saving. Donkey Kong in particular set a narrative standard that would be plagiarized for years to come: your adventure starts at point A, and girl exists at point B -- get there. But, early on, designers began to subvert this trope in ways that went beyond slapping a bow and a beauty mark on Pac-Man and semi-fraudulently selling it as a new game. The following females showed us at an early age that women in video games didn't necessarily have to take the role of the helpless captive -- in fact, they could easily outperform their male contemporaries, and with style.  |
| Interview: Christine Love on Creating Inclusive Games Posted: 20 Jun 2012 12:31 PM PDT
Feature 1UP COVER STORY  1UP COVER STORY | WEEK OF JUNE 18 | GENDER, SEXUALITY, AND VIDEO GAMES Interview: Christine Love on Creating Inclusive GamesCover Story: How this independent developer's text adventures reflect her own desires -- and those of others, too." Honestly, the whole 'game-making' thing is still new to me," pink-haired Christine Love muses. "I always thought I was going to be, like, a novelist -- and have to support myself doing some shitty programming 9-to-5 job while I worked towards getting published." Canadian-based developer Love is probably best known for Digital: A Love Story, a visual novel set "five minutes into the future of 1998." "I did a bunch of non-branching visual novels from late high school into university," she says, "and Digital was just another one of those; I never thought of myself as being a game-maker until suddenly the indie gaming press was calling me one. It was just a short one-month project, as was Don't Take It Personally, Babe, It Just Ain't Your Story." |
| Saints Row Expansion's Cancellation Allows Saints Row 4 to be That Much Bigger Posted: 20 Jun 2012 12:16 PM PDT These days it is not uncommon to see titles from the same franchise released in successive years with a trail of downloadable content leading from one game to the next. That was to be the plan for Saints Row, as following the release of The Third last year and its subsequent DLC, Volition was to release a standalone expansion, Enter the Dominatrix, later this year. Instead, the influence of new THQ president Jason Rubin is already being felt as the call has been made to cancel the release of the expansion and incorporate its content into a proper sequel that will be released next year. It's an unexpected move as THQ is short on cash and has a limited number of releases in the near future with which to change that situation, and some of those titles have been delayed recently. Sacrificing the revenue Enter the Dominatrix could have generated is a bold step, and one that illustrates the distinction between THQ and, say, Electronic Arts. THQ seems to be modeling itself after Take-Two, which avoids annualizing its non-sports franchises and gives developers (particularly Rockstar) the time and resources needed to make quality games. That appears to be Rubin's intention with THQ's products: to consolidate the release slate and invest in those which remain to make them as good as they can possibly be. |
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