It’s that time again, time to catch up with John and Rose as they talk about the week in gaming. John Samurai’d his way to Otakon with Maverick last week then got himself a CRT so he could experience classic PS2 games the way they were meant to be enjoyed as he continues to try to make his way through Rain Code. Rose has been reading a ton of Fate when she’s not playing Ghost Trick, Pikmin 4, or Tactics Ogre Reborn.

In the news, Mario Kart and Splatoon are back online, Red Dead Redemption is getting ported to Switch and PS4 and Feminist Frequency is shutting down. Kai Cenat caused a riot in NYC, Anthony Fantano and Activision are beefing, and Evo was a massive night for announcements.

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Edited by Lorelai

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In the news, Shinzo Abe got assassinated and a bunch of racist channers tricked people into blaming Hideo Kojima for it. In tragic news, Yu-gi-oh‘s manga creator Kazuki Takahashi died in a tragic accident. Gamestop laid off a ton more people from Game informer, Rockstar is stopping development on Red Dead Redemption and Grand Theft Auto 4 remasters because the GTA Trilogy remasters sucked and shifting everyone to Grand Theft Auto 6‘s Development. E3 is coming back in conjunction with ReedPop and Yuji Naka is having a complete breakdown on twitter while Intellivision might be making a comeback. SGDQ happened, and some guy just straight up cheated a run of Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance and Elden Ring hero Let Me Solo Her was gifted a sword and a ton of cool extras after killing Malenia 1000 times. Monster Rancher Ultraman Kaiju is officially being released in the US as well as Witch on the Holy Night. A fan bought enough Nintendo stock to join an investor meeting and ask about F-Zero while some Final Fantasy XIV players bought multiple billboards to advertise an in game event for their ERP venue.

As always, you can support us on our Patreon, and follow us on Twitter @VGChooChoo, @john_michonski, @JudgementScythe and @mavsplaniamania.

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Our theme song is “Crush” by Melt Channel, from the album Magic is Real.

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Employees at WIRED are asking readers to not click on or support any pages from the publication on July 12 and 13, Amazon Prime Day, to support a walkout. After more than a year of bargaining, Conde Nast management still hasn’t negotiated a fair contract with the shop.

Rockstar Games is shelving the idea of remastering some of its past titles such as GTA IV and Red Dead Redemption. Speculation suggests this decision is made due to the poor response to the GTA Trilogy.

According to trademark documentation, the status of the Intellivision Amico is now up in the air. Initial findings have discovered that the trademark for the system seemingly abandoned, but it has been refilled as of a couple of days ago.

As an acknowledgement of their “Let Me Solo Her” Elden Ring exploits, Bandai Namco has sent the player, who goes by @TsuboiKlein on Twitter, a massive gift box set, including an engraved sword.

A Nintendo fan spent over $40,000 in stock just to ask a top executive a question. He simply wanted to ask if there will ever be more F-Zero games.

An FC in Final Fantasy XIV tried to advertise a special, internal summer event featuring a link to their Discord server through a series of billboards. A couple of these boards have been spotted in Texas, and there are rumors that they are also supposed to go up in California. The billboards faced scrutiny due to its copyright infringing, misleading association with Square Enix and the depiction of datamined content which violates the game’s terms.

After a major patch to the game that introduced the Data Centre Travel feature, which allows players to visit other worlds, a few players of Balmung tried to wall off newcomers from coming in to their world. These fears are likely precipitated by the recent billboard incident.

On top of several rearrangements going on internally, Gamestop is undergoing several rounds of layoffs.

After a few years of hiatus, E3 is set to return in 2023 through the assistance of a partnership with Reedpop. Although the specifics of what this relationship entails is still not clear, the upcoming show is expected to include both digital showcases and in-person specific events.

And finally…

Yuji Naka is still off his shits.

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As I played The Last of Us Part II, one of the things that really stuck out to me, amongst my many issues with the game, was my incapability to find the notion of its female main character, let alone one that was openly gay, even remotely compelling. I’ve played plenty of bad games in my time, and even at their worst, I’m usually able to at least appreciate when something’s making bold strides in either representation or diversification. However, here, Ellie didn’t really register to me as gay, despite me loving her lesbian antics in the Left Behind DLC for the first game. At the time there was far too much else going on with Part II for me to really nail down this lack of resonance, but after some time away I know exactly what’s going on.

The main lesbian relationship between Ellie and her girlfriend Dina, isn’t contextualized by the nature of their personalities, or their love for each other, but rather by their obligations as a daughter and a mother respectively. Ellie’s motivations throughout Part II are driven by her feelings towards the death of her surrogate father Joel, and Dina is swept up along with her out of support for her partner. However, for some reason, the writers of the game decided that it wasn’t dramatic enough to have a messy relationship on the basis of filial revenge, so they decided to throw in the wrench that Dina is pregnant with her ex-boyfriend’s child.

At first, I’d be inclined to give Naughty Dog points for the all-too-rare case of a character being bisexual, as well as the notion that somebody in a lesbian relationship could be pregnant without that invalidating it. However, it quickly becomes clear that those are not the reasons for this development. Rather than expanding the relationship between Ellie and Dina, the game becomes secondarily about the father of her child, who crosses hundreds of miles and manages to find them almost instantly. From then on, things aren’t about Ellie and her girlfriend, but rather about Ellie and her revenge quest, and about her pregnant girlfriend’s involvement with the father of the child. If that wasn’t bad enough, even when the game later suggests that Ellie and Dina do get married to raise this child, the relationship may as well have put traditionalized labels on each of them for “Dad” and “Mom”.

This type of situation, where representation doesn’t end up feeling like actual representation, is increasingly prevalent throughout the medium of games, and almost entirely because of who exactly is given the job of writing them. While The Last of Us Part II is co-written by a woman, it takes all of 5 seconds to find director and lead writer Neil Druckmann talking about his feelings on becoming a father and how that affected his writing of Ellie and even the characters of other Naughty Dog games. He’s not the only one, either; the aforementioned God of War was lauded specifically for its molding of Kratos into more of a father figure, while the game itself positioned each of its women into the role of a mother. That one was also written by a guy, in case you were wondering. In games, fatherhood has become almost entirely conflated with maturity, despite the failings of these games to even begin to reconcile with their treatments of the roles of women.

To consider another heavily praised female lead, also written by a man, there’s Aloy from Horizon Zero Dawn. Aloy’s initial motivations in Horizon come from the murder of her father. While in the grand scheme of things it’s largely inconsequential to the plot, it is nonetheless the entire reason she sets out on her journey in the first place, immediately placing the primary role of Aloy as, yes, the protagonist, but also as a daughter. While Aloy does gradually get fleshed out more and more as her journey goes on, it’s hard to forget that the driving force behind her adventure was limited by the idea that she wouldn’t have done it if it weren’t because of her father.

There are countless other examples of this, even more obviously in games focused on a male lead. For Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar used strong imagery of Bonnie MacFarlane, one of the only women in the game, brandishing a gun throughout promotional material, in contrast to their more sexualized advertising for Grand Theft Auto. In the actual game, however, while she’s ostensibly a rough and tumble character, her entire personality is shaped around the notion that she’s a surrogate wife for John Marston, as well as tied to the ideas that her father represented. When making Red Dead Redemption 2, Rockstar decided that this dictation of the woman’s role was too subtle, so they made nearly every woman in the plot a stationary NPC at a camp who does nothing but act as a therapist for Arthur, calling him a good man and comforting him on command.

Video games aren’t made by one person obviously, and in all of these cases there are more than certainly several women involved in the creation of each of the games I’ve complained about. However, as is so with every industry, systemic sexism and power structures put a wrench in what change is readily attainable. As we’ve seen throughout the years with Blizzard, Riot Games, and most recently Ubisoft, the world of games is trapped in the inherent mindset that men must be in power, and powerful men tend to believe they’re always in the right.

There are plenty of games across multiple decades that showcase the sheer difference of women being in more direct control of a game, and just how different it can be. Kim Swift directed Portal, arguably one of the most iconic works of the medium, and it and its sequel are driven by the conflict of two women. Every Yoko Taro game has been primarily written by women, with Drakengard 3 being a particular standout for showcasing a more blatant sexuality for its female lead, without absolute fetishization.

When I think about some more of my favorite works, it should be no surprise through reading this article that many of them focus heavily on women; games like Bayonetta, Fate/Grand Order, and Final Fantasy XIII. However, when it comes to most games, especially those in the AAA sphere, it’s particularly hard for me to resonate with nearly any of the characters because of that limited lens through which women are seen. To me, these works I adore resonate because of the dynamism afforded to the women they’re about.

The thing that gets me about these games is that they’re not games written by women, or even particularly for women as their main goal: Bayonetta was penned by Hideki Kamiya; Fate is penned at times by women, but generally by Kinoko Nasu; and Final Fantasy XIII is even written by a dude who self-admittedly fell in love with Lightning. Yet somehow, each of these works take into consideration the notion that a woman can be driven by multiple things and become who they want to be, rather than having to be defined by their relationships with a male character.

Bayonetta is a story that, yes, places its lead character in both the role of a mother and daughter, but at the same time uses those roles to contextualize the trauma she’s experienced in her life while letting her flaunt both sexuality and personality in spades. Fate/Grand Order is sourced from a visual novel that gradually attempted to show that women are capable of doing countless things beyond what men generally expect, and takes that further by transforming the notion of certain historical figures into not just hot anime women, but hot anime women with both independent agency and purpose. The Final Fantasy XIII trilogy is in part about Snow trying to find his fiancee, Lightning’s sister, but the game quickly makes it clear that he has little to do with these women’s characters, and as things develop he is driven more by their actions than they are by his.

The problem with AAA gaming isn’t just that it’s men leading the conversation, but rather that it’s one specific type of man consistently being rewarded by other men who see themselves in each other. If big games want to make a difference with their diversity, then the identities they’re championing need to be more than just assumptions. Games shouldn’t be held back by such a myopic lens, and the sooner we broaden the perspectives and groups behind them, the better we’ll all be for it.

The post For Women in Games, You Can Be a Mother or a Daughter appeared first on Gamesline.

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According to Techradar, they have confirmed with a source within Rockstar that this is indeed real and recent. The source revealed that the map was from their art department and that this sequel will take place before the events of the first Red Dead Redemption.

If you look at the map some familiar details might reveal themselves. For one, the ‘Great Plains’ at the bottom left of the map were on RDR’s map, but in the top right. Meaning this game takes places east, and north, of the original. There is also a distinct lack of train tracks and developed cities implying a less settled western United States. Some eagle-eyed fans also noticed the name ‘New Bordeaux’ in the bottom right, a city from Mafia 3, that is akin to New Orleans.

I guess what surprises me most of all is the existence of Red Dead Redemption 2. Somehow Rockstar had kept this game a secret until now and now I’m wondering just when we’ll see it revealed. The original developer was Rockstar San Diego and they haven’t made a game since GTA V, so it would make sense if this was what they’ve been working on since. Last September marked two years since GTA V’s release so maybe San Diego is beginning to close in on a final release for RDR 2.

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For some they couldn’t download these games. Others would download one game only to have another backwards compatible title play in its place. And worst of all no one knew why this was all happening. Turns out it was a pretty simple explanation, you weren’t meant to see or download any of these games in the first place.

In a post on Reddit, and in subsequent tweets, Xbox’s Major Nelson explained exactly what happened. In the process of testing how games run on the Xbox One’s Xbox 360 emulator they need to test them in the back end, and during those tests certain titles became available to the public. Everything has been removed and Major Nelson says Xbox “will have more information on upcoming releases soon”.

According to their previous statements the backwards compatibility program is opt-in. Meaning developers, publishers, or whoever else has a game on the Xbox 360 merely needs to contact Xbox and let them know they want to be on modern consoles. The question remains if Rockstar wants Red Dead to be backwards compatible or if Xbox is merely doing the legwork ahead of time. My guess is the former. No reason to do work if the publisher might still say no, so dust off your old discs, and get ready to saddle up.

Also makes you wonder if a sequel might be in the works.

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