I feel kinda trapped when it comes to Overwatch’s Roadhog. As I have said about six million times, I find his design really upsetting in the sense that it’s lazy and reflects all the bad tropes of fat character design. But this week I found an entirely new way to be upset about Roadhog, since I was… Continue reading Trapped
Category: Games Criticism
Say Anything
Remember a while back, a long while back, I wrote about a League of Legends champ named Taric and how I felt Riot should just make him gay already? A long time has passed since then (three years+, in fact). As I've written elsewhere, my feelings on Riot, on the situation itself, and on what I said back in… Continue reading Say Anything
Fest Be Not Proud
So, Pridefest happened at last. I heard this today from my friend Bryce, who was engaging the "oh goodness, do I play this?" internal argument. I then had the same internal argument before deciding: yeah, I should see what is going on with this. And so I picked it up, since the game is free-to-play microtransaction mobile… Continue reading Fest Be Not Proud
Please Leave
Hey, remember Mortal Kombat X? The series reboot by NetherRealm? Came out early last year. I remember it, because in April I wrote the game's subtle deployment of the first canon gay character in the MK series, Kung Jin, for Paste Magazine's games section. In said article I was pleased with the way they handled the character's… Continue reading Please Leave
Whole Hog
This is a short post. But I am cranky. Like many people in the gaming culture/press/business/what-have-you, I have spent many a moment over the past couple days looking at my Battle.net client longingly, hoping I too will suddenly receive a beta invite for Blizzard’s upcoming TF2-alike, Overwatch. To kill some time, I decided to look… Continue reading Whole Hog
Paradoryxical
Where to begin. Although the information has been floating around gaming's social media spheres and message boards for a few weeks now, yesterday Polygon ran an op-ed by Laura K. Dale about Oryx, the titular king of Destiny's recent The Taken King expansion, being transgender. As a cis-though-not-as-cis-as-they-thought-they-were-for-30-years person, I struggled a lot with whether it was even… Continue reading Paradoryxical
Touch Me
Where do I start. On Thursday, Robert Yang put out a game called Rinse and Repeat. It is a game that is part of Robert's growing body of work on making... well, gay sex games. However, these are not games about gay sex in the "want to watch some folks with cocks do it" way; rather, they're about… Continue reading Touch Me
Teachable Moment
Right. By now I'm sure many of you have heard about Michael Thomsen's WaPo review of Super Mario Maker. Suffice it to say that I found it really freaking obnoxious. Others did, too. I didn't see many people defending it, and I can imagine some reasonable ones; Tom Auxier at least had a couple reasonable explanations for… Continue reading Teachable Moment
Apropos of Nothing
It's, uh... it's been a heck of a couple weeks, hasn't it. A lot of stuff has happened. For a few glorious hours last Monday, many of us in the Twittersphere indulged in a bit of saucy appreciation of Street Fighter V's bearded alt-costume "Hot Ryu" and how in many ways our desire to either have… Continue reading Apropos of Nothing
Dismissed
Hi, Twitter. So I made this tweet earlier tonight, around dinner time-ish: https://twitter.com/laevantine/status/618580256325283840 I've got thoughts about both of these topics, obviously, but I've been skirting writing about them for various reasons. Some of them more professional, some silly (FF14 has eaten up a lot of my life lately), and some personal (I am scared… Continue reading Dismissed