Roundup of Unusual Size: The ABCDs of the Day – Anime, Bayonetta, Cupcakes and Death
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Nightmare Mode is republishing Dire Critic’s ‘Roundup of Unusual Size’, a collection of links put together by site friend, Kris Ligman. It’s like Critical Distance, except we post on the six days of the week that Ben Abraham doesn’t, and there are usually more non-game-related articles… So I guess we’re actually more like Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s Sunday Papers, except less British. You can send Kris recommendations for the roundups via Twitter or email!
(source needed!) My blooood! The doctors took all my blooood! Videogames At last, a perspective on Bayonetta I wholeheartedly agree with, from Go Make Me a Sandwich: Bayonetta is hands-down my least favorite character in any type of gaming ever. It only gets better from there. Over on the Newsgames blog, Simon Ferrari reports on You Shall Know the Truth, a hidden object game in which the player assumes the role of a U.S. spy sent to retrieve leaked documents from a WikiLeaks employee. Provocative in and of itself, one should think, but Ferrari provides additional commentary as well. And over on Joystick Division Gus Mastrapa touches death in L.A. Noire. Warning: graphic images. Machinima Here’s a fun one: a commercial music video animated almost entirely in LittleBigPlanet 2. Fandom Ahh, a fan-made Doctor Who anime? Yes please. Curios They’re SQL injectin’ through your windows, stealing your data up, tryin’ to hack ‘em so ya need to hide yo kids, hide yo wife–an’ hide yo husband they hackin’ errybody out here. A counter-terrorism strategy that Valve would approve of: MI6 hackers replace Al-Qaeda bomb formulas with cupcake recipes. Finally, science cannot de-cuteify this cat video. |
The way the author simply dismisses the argument that Bayonetta is empowering female figure by simply saying “she is a fictional character, so it’s doesn’t matter” is all kinds of ridiculous. If we were to expand this “rebuttal” to all analysis about any given fictional character, we would singlehandedly destroy all forms of narrative arts critiques.
There is much I dislike about the character of Bayonetta, but I still give that she is empowering female figure the same way Kratos is empowering male figure.
She a weirdly tall woman that loses pieces of clothes in other to defeat monsters, while teasing their sexual frustrations.
He is a half-naked muscle man with a weirdly shaped chin that rips monsters apart with extendable erection blades, while having sex with any woman he sees.
(Question, after fighting Zeus, will Kratos survive fighting syphilis?)
The only differences between them are hair and fashion sense.
In concern to Bayonetta-
I have always struggled with my view on her. As a girl and a future hopeful developer, I would never want to make a character for a game as shameless as she comes off. While yes, it’s clever that her clothes dissapear as she attacks, it just seems like it is an excuse for guys to get this game, my first thought is not “Oh! How Clever!” more like “Oh!That’s cheap!”
But I am not one to get up on the female high horse, I am cool with a bit of sexuality in my female characters, hell I play Taki in Soul Calibur and I don’t think her body obeys any of Newton’s laws, but when it comes to a character who is the lead in her own game I would expect her to have a little respect for herself. Instead of everything she does being a cliche to the over sexual woman, it would be awesome if she was just a kickass hero type who maybe had a secret easter egg move, costume, and so on that were more like her normal stripping moves. To me, that would give a bit of incentive to the truely perverted to actually play the game, and maybe give the actual gamer some breathing room from the obscene.