Girls in Games - 2:24AM, 2001/11/30
Hmm. Ok. After reading this over at Angry Babble, I think I’m not going to edit what I wrote yesterday. But while I agree with what Ka-chan said (and after rereading my own incoherence, it almost seems like what I was trying to get at), I realized that wasn’t what I was trying to talk about at all. I got sidetracked by another topic entirely.
What I was actually trying to discuss was my overhwhelming preference for the female characters in games. I can’t imagine I’m alone in this, though I sometimes feel that way when the only other person I get to see play is Okina. He doesn’t exactly ignore the female characters, but he usually picks the best characters [from a gameplay point of view -- plot and design are secondary to actually winning], of which group the girls aren’t always members. But me — I got back into playing video games because I thought Aeris from FF7 looked cool. I unthinkingly picked my standard party when heading to the area of no magic in FF9 and thus ended up there with Zidane and 3 magic users (yeah, yeah, an exception was made there, but Vivi is too adorable to leave out of the party for long, and Freya has horrible defense.) I left Ashton standing in the cold in Star Ocean 2 because I’d seen Okina get him and I thought he was annoying. I’ve yet to play Vagrant Story because it honestly didn’t look all that interesting. And… damn. I play games too slowly! I hardly remember the plots of most of these games other than in the broadest sense. And we have so many here that I haven’t gotten to yet. *K goes to stare at the pile of games again and cries* The PS3 will be out before I get done with these!
Well, that turned out to be a waste of space. I should be more succinct. I like to play the chicks because I think they’re cuter and males are entirely overrepresented in our media today. The end.
I’ve been kind of missing my NES recently. By the time I left for college it was totally not working anymore, unfortunately — we had to keep the game genie in it all the time or it wouldn’t even register that a game was inside. It was dirty or something. But it was a good little system. I remember when I bought it — and yes, *I* bought it, with the money I’d earned babysitting that summer. It was sort of a random purchase; I suddenly realized I had quite the wad of cash, and suddenly I knew I wanted a Nintendo. I know I was either 12 or 13 when we got it. Of course, we had the computer prior to that, and before that the Commodore 64, and before that the Atari 2600 and before that, Pong. Yes, we had Pong. Once upon a time, my parents were on the cutting edge of technology. 8-track tapes and Pong. I remember playing that on the black and white tv in the den. It was the super-deluxe Pong (from Radioshack!) with many different variations on the theme — there was two player, and barriers, and 2 balls, and some others. I remember getting the Atari too. That was the only game system (before our more recent computer, where she’s become highly addicted to Solitaire and all its variants) I ever saw my mother obsess over. She was the Pacman and Circus…(uh, damn, what was the name of the Circus Balloon game? You had to balance on a little beam and bounce 2 guys up and down at 3 rows of balloons which were purple/blue, yellow and red) Queen.
More game nostalgia later, perhaps. Today was a pretty long day — after procrastinating royally last night, I went to bed pretty late and still had to get up around 6:30 to work on all of the homework I hadn’t finished last night. I got most of the way through the sakubun before work, and then I took off during lunch and hid at the Pizza Hut to finish the rest. So with the sakubun out of the way (I wrote about Anne of Green Gables… lots of katakana and I didn’t actually have to look any information up.) all I had left was the kanji sheet, the take home quiz, and the vocab and kanji for the in class quiz today. So when I got to the parking garage at the station, I pulled everything out and didn’t actually get on the train until I was done. I was under 10 minutes late for class after all that, which I consider pretty miraculous. But it turned out I’d studied next week’s kanji, so that kind of sucked.
Things to do this weekend: dig out rest of the HP grid, put together a website for previous, poke at various other web probjects, beat the Phantom Evil King, fold the laundry, get some new shoes, do a bit more Christmas shopping, work on the grad school app, make sure I’m not leaving any Shoujo Arts Society foo undone. I have this niggling feeling that I’ve forgotten something. And if all else fails, work on the script for Akage no An.