With the announcement of Pokémon Gold & Silver being released on the Virtual Console this September, I've gotten myself into a nostalgic mood lately, so I thought I'd make this thread where we can discuss our earliest and most cherished memories with our first Pokémon games—mine being Silver, a game that's perhaps closer to my heart than any other game in existence.

I have a whole ton, but I'll try to be succinct for each one.

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Though my Pokémon journey truly began with Silver, I've technically been a fan ever since the first generation. I watched the original anime religiously, and collected toys and trading cards from that era well before the second generation even existed in America. Pokémon: The First Movie was one of my favorite movies to watch, and I thought Mewtwo was the coolest fucking character ever.

That said, when I finally received both Gold & Silver for Christmas in the year 2000, I never really went back to anything else.

Starting with Silver, I played that shit before I could even read or write. Not fully cognizant of what I was doing, I'd walk around aimlessly until I found a Poké Ball sitting on the ground. When I pick it up, the game tells me that I found a "POTION," not a Poké Ball. What the hell does that mean? Maybe it's the Japanese word for Poké Ball, I told my five-year-old self.

And as for that mean red-haired dude, I consistently named him ???, because that's literally how he introduces himself to you.


So when the officer asks if you caught his name, the only answer to give is ???. I mean, saying anything else would just be lying, right. I always wondered why it was so difficult for the developers to come up with a less awkward way of conveying to us that, yes, you can give your rival any name you want. But at the same time, it's still kinda funny to me.

To this day, the red-haired rival—who is the best rival in any Pokémon game, I think we can all agree—doesn't actually have an official name. People like to believe it's "Silver," but contrary to popular belief, that's not actually confirmed. So, as far as I'm concerned, his name will always be ???.

Sadly, I don't remember what my first Pokémon was. It was either Cyndaquil or Totodile—though I'm willing to bet it was the latter, because Totodile was indeed my favorite Pokémon before I discovered Porygon.

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Whichever my first Pokémon was, it was eventually Cyndaquil to win the day. Because I was still learning how to read, and this was the first game I've ever played that featured such text-heavy gameplay, I frequently restarted my adventure, because I wanted to understand what the characters were saying so badly. As I kept restarting and kept trying, I understood more and more until I was ready to play the game uninterrupted. You could say that this game, more than anything else, encouraged me to become literate.

Learning to read was one thing, but I still had a lot of trouble spelling at the time. One day, I was fishing in some random town, and I caught a Shellder—a Pokémon I had never seen before, so I assumed it must be rare. I named the thing LOCKE, because that's how I thought you spelled "luck" as a five-year-old. Go figure.

The Cyndaquil that would eventually carry me to the end of the game was named QUIL!. [sic], and since I didn't have any concept of strategy, I didn't generally use any other Pokémon except as HM slaves. This way, QUIL!. ended up gaining all the experience points, which made him incredibly overleveled to a point where he would simply one-shot everything in his path.

His nightmarish moveset consisted of the following moves:
- Cut
- Strength
- Flamethrower
- Return

Marvelous. Don't worry—I realized that teaching him such shitty HM moves was a bad idea, and I tried to replace them several times, but to no avail. Unfortunately, the game doesn't really explain how HMs work in a way that small children could understand, so I was stuck with this fearsome moveset for my entire playthrough. Not that I cared too much, because QUIL!.'s Cut still managed to one-shot pretty much everything anyway (except for Red's Snorlax).

To explain the game's appeal, it simply had this warm, crisp atmosphere of childlike curiosity and sheer, unadulterated wonder that I hadn't experienced before in any other game. The music was cheerful and splendid, the Pokémon were colorful and amazing, and it was just as fun to see the monsters I recognized from the anime as it was to find new discoveries I had never seen before. It also gives you this odd sense of companionship. I found myself growing emotionally attached to my Cyndaquil, and watching him grow into a Quilava and eventually a Typhlosion as I got stronger and cleared through the gyms was an exhilarating, inimitable experience.

And gosh, don't get me started on when I finally discovered that the Kanto region was in this game.

Before my save file was eventually wiped out by the treacheries of battery depreciation, I managed to bring QUIL!. up to level 100. To this day, he's the only Pokémon I've ever managed to bring all the way up to that level.

---

Not all of my memories of this game are positive, however. I was about seven years old at the time of this story.

I made a lot of friends in elementary school—two of which are my closest, and thankfully, we're still in touch to this day. Only one friend in particular played Pokémon, though, and for as young as he was at the time, he was a genius at it. He had every game—Red, Blue, Yellow, Gold, Silver, and Crystal, which was a fancy-pants game I didn't even know existed. That was the one he played the most.

He also collected trading cards and had loads of rare ones in his collection. He even had a ton of game guides, which probably accounted for his immense knowledge of how the games worked—if you had a question about what to do in the game, or where to find a certain Pokémon, he would know off the top of his head.

He was also way further than me in terms of game progress. This isn't that big of a deal nowadays, but for me, this was kind of a big deal, because it meant that someone was better at the game than me. He had ten badges, and I only had four. He has a Lugia, and all I have is my stinkin' Typhlosion. Most importantly, though, he happened to own a snazzy four-player Game Boy link cable, with which we had many battles and trades with.

He would never make good trades with me—he knew what was valuable, and I didn't. I probably made a number of bad trades, but at least I got some Pokédex entries out of him. I would just see a Pokémon I've never seen before, like Misdreavus, and I'd say, "Where the heck did you found that?" and he wouldn't tell me. It was a bona fide Pokémon rival relationship—he was the Gary Oak to my Ash Ketchum. He was okay with giving me tips on how to progress through the game, but he would never give me any tips that may help me beat him in a Pokémon link battle.

Our battles were always pretty intense, because I only had my Typhlosion (who was only around level ~70 at the time) against his team of beefed-up killers, like Lugia, Entei, and Tyranitar. As a result, he would beat me almost every time—I managed to beat him once because of a fluke involving a Focus Band. Even though his Tyranitar resisted every move in QUIL!.'s arsenal, my Typhlosion was at such a higher level that I could two-shot it every time.

And then he'd bring out his Mewtwo—his most prized Pokémon—and that would be the end of it for me. All I could do was watch in awe. It's the same Mewtwo I saw in the movie, and it's just as powerful, just as cool.

I asked him where he got his Mewtwo from, and he told me that you can only get it by transferring it over from Pokémon Red, Blue, or Yellow using the game's Time Capsule facility, found in the far back of every Pokémon Center. Sheepishly, I asked him if he was willing to trade it for something—needless to say, I was denied.

Eventually, I convinced him to trade it to me under the condition that I'd immediately trade it back—I told him that all I really cared about was the Pokédex data, and he was okay with that. Over at his house, I let him handle the trading with both of our devices, because my mother had called in order to check up on me. Normally, she used to require me to check in every few hours, and I hadn't done so at all that day—so she took it upon herself to call me instead, to tell me that she was making dinner at home. She sounded quite frustrated, too, so I knew I had to leave straightaway.

I told my friend, who was still in the middle of the trade, that I had to leave and that I was in a hurry. Before giving him a chance to respond, I snatched my Game Boy and unplugged the device from the link cable... as the trade was still going on.

Panicked, my friend angrily shouted at me not to leave, because I had just made a grave mistake—and I realized what I had done right away. It was too late, though—in my haste, I had already shut my Game Boy off. There's a very good chance that something bad might have happened to his Mewtwo during that botched trade.

Still panicked, my friend demanded that I check my party to see if a Mewtwo is there, where my Typhlosion was.

I checked, and to my dismay, I only saw five Pokémon in my party. The Mewtwo was gone—his data signal vanished within the cable, never to be retrieved again.

My Typhlosion, however, was safe and sound in my friend's Crystal file.

This almost killed our friendship. Once I told him that his Mewtwo was missing, he started crying, and told me that he's never giving my Typhlosion back now—and to be honest, as bad as I felt, and as bad as I fucked up, I completely understood. QUIL!. was his now. There's virtually nothing I can do to make up for this monumental fuck-up. Since I was unfamiliar, though, I asked him if there was any way to get another Mewtwo—"NO, there isn't," he snapped at me. "You can only get it once, and he's gone now."

Feeling all sorts of awkwardness and guilt, I left his house, feeling like the scummy asshole I was. I genuinely felt horrible.

We didn't speak for a whole week, until I was forced to sit with him on the bus one day. I told him that I was sorry about Mewtwo, and that I was sorry that I didn't apologize sooner. He said that it was okay, and that he had mostly gotten over it, but he was still unhappy with me. I understood, but I had to ask about my Typhlosion—that thing was my virtual pride and joy, and I was worried if he had released him out of spite or something.

He told me that he was fine, and that he just stuffed him in the Daycare, where he had gained quite a few levels (he was in the 80s or 90s). He then told me that I could have him back if I wanted—I think he could tell that I really wanted him back, though I never dared say it. I thanked him and told him yes, I'd be glad to have him back. I didn't know how to make it up to him. He told me not to worry about it, because he was starting to lose interest in Pokémon anyway, which made me feel really sad. I asked him if I had anything to do with that, and he said no—but I don't know. To this day, I'm not so sure about that.

Either way, when I received QUIL!. back, I proceeded to train him up to level 100—and that's the story of how I fully trained my first cognizant Pokémon. I had a little bit of... "help," but it was still pretty awesome. Naturally, I had to ask my friend for one last battle, if he was truly done with Pokémon. We must have been eight or nine years old at this point. He accepted, and he used his old team of monsters.

QUIL!. was at a point where he one-shotted everything this time—even Tyranitar and Lugia. Normally, this is when his Mewtwo would be sent out to kick my ass. When it didn't show up, I felt a pit in my stomach.

In its place, however, was something even stronger. It turned out that he had a level 100 Pokémon of his own: A Sandslash, which I never knew about. He told me that he had kept a Sandslash in the daycare since the near-beginning of his playthrough, and never took him out until he had beaten the Elite Four several times over. When he finally took it out, the thing had reached its maximum level—and now he's using it against me.

Of all the things he could've slapped in the Daycare, it had to be a Ground-type—naturally, Ground beats my Typhlosion's Fire, so you could imagine how that matchup ended.

I never got my triumphant victory against his team, and even if I had beat him, the fact that I was never able to beat his Mewtwo would've been a big asterisk on our last fight. As it turned out, the only way I was able to beat his Mewtwo was to inadvertently destroy it myself.

Thankfully, neither of us take Pokémon so seriously anymore—but now I'm the one who knows more than him, and he doesn't really play video games much at all anymore. I never really made up for the Mewtwo incident, which I regret—but he's studying economics and computer science at Yale now, so I'm sure he has much better things to worry about. We're still in touch, though, and every now and then, we still take a trip down memory lane from when we were both fighting to become Pokémon Masters.

---

Do you remember the first Pokémon you ever caught in a Master Ball?

I remember first receiving the Master Ball. That same friend from earlier told me about this legendary Poké Ball that could get a guaranteed capture on anything, and without weakening it. It's basically the game's Master Sword, or Excalibur—even the mere concept sounded thrilling. I had to find it, and he told me exactly where.

He didn't tell me what to use it on, though—he just told me, "You only get one, so don't waste it on something stupid."

Heeding his advice, I tried to think of Pokémon that I would actually use it on, and I immediately thought of the legendary beasts (which I called the "legendary dogs" at the time). The trouble is, they tend to appear wherever they want, and they're extremely hard to follow—especially because they run away as soon as you encounter them. The Master Ball solves that problem, but how am I supposed to predict where Entei and Suicune are (this was before I learned that you can use the Pokédex to track down the beasts that you've seen at least once).

I kept the beasts in mind, but I never actively searched them out, because I thought it was impossible.

Then one day, I saw this thing:


I thought to myself, "...Skarmory? Is that some kind of legendary bird, like Moltres?"

It looked pretty formidable, so I thought very hard about whether to throw the Master Ball at it. I've never seen one until now, and I may not ever see one again, so I wasn't sure what to do.

Eventually, I decided against it—but I came SO close to wasting my first Master Ball on a Skarmory, just because I had mistaken it for a legendary bird.

Eventually, I ended up using it on a Suicune that I spotted shortly thereafter. Much better. That Suicune ended up becoming a valued member, too—if for whatever reason QUIL!. was decommissioned, Suicune was my back-up.

---

Now we're getting into some bullshit. In Gold & Silver, Unown is a pseudo-mysterious, pseudo-"legendary" Pokémon that are meant to represent ancient hieroglyphics. They have no in-game significance whatsoever, making them one of the biggest red herrings in gaming history.

Unown are not powerful. They have incredbily low stats and they can only ever know one attack: Hidden Power, making them utterly useless for gameplay. What makes them intriguing to a child, however, is that they're all shaped in the letters of the Latin alphabet, which means that they can be used to spell words when ordered properly in your team.

Certain letters of Unown are only available in progressively deeper portions of an area called the Ruins of Alph. So, in order to collect every letter of Unown, you have to progress quite far in the game, which creates a lot of interesting build-up.

Let me tell you—I went and caught every single letter of the Unown alphabet as a kid, and I was so pissed to discover that it gave you absolutely nothing. I was even more pissed to discover that the common rumor where, if you collect the letters C, E, L, E, B, I, arrange them in that order, and head to the shrine in the Ilex Forest, that a wild Celebi would appear—this was also just a farce.

Everything about Unown is dogshit, and at age seven, I had already declared them my least favorite Pokémon. Please, Game Freak, do something interesting with these pieces of shit. What the fuck is the point of keeping them around if you're not even going to give them any plot significance? They're so worthless. It's just sad.

---

Around the time my friend stopped playing Pokémon, he decided to lend me his link cable so that I could do trades on my own. It was during this time that I took an interest in glitches and exploits.

At this point, I had already played my fair share of Red, Blue, and Yellow. My friend was telling me about this new  Pokémon he had discovered on the Internet called Missingno., and how dangerous it is for you to actually encounter it in the game. The way he described it, it was like a creepy horror story—unsettling, but likely untrue. C'mon, a glitch Pokémon that gives you infinite items, but destroys your game if you try to capture it? Sounded like BS to me at the time.

And for the most part, yeah, it kind of was bullshit. There was a lot of paranoia going around at the time Missingno. was first discovered—people used to claim that it would delete your save file if you so much as encountered it, but I would discover firsthand that none of it was actually true. It was still an enigma, but from there, I found websites like TRsRockin.com that contained an entire database of all KINDS of weird glitch Pokémon and other weird stuff that can happen under certain conditions.

This was like adding a whole nother dimension to these games that I loved, and I instantly became hooked on finding and exploiting as many glitches as possible. I then tried to find glitches for Gold and Silver, and while there were considerably less of them, I did manage to stumble upon a few of my own.

I was transporting starters using the link cable one day when I accidentally bumped the cable as a trade was going on. The trade still went through, but something very odd happened—the Totodile that I traded over had its name changed to a single dash, hyphen, or minus sign. That was certainly odd, but things didn't start getting REALLY weird until I checked my PC afterwards, which was filled to the brim with a random assortment of Pokémon, all with jumbled names, odd levels (including some level 0s), and some that didn't even have any attacks. One of them was a Raikou, a legendary beast that I hadn't even encountered in my life before. My mailbox was filled with a bunch of spammy nonsense—probably a bunch of love letters from Missingno. and company.

The oddest thing of all was a Snorlax holding an item called a "TERU-SAMA." I had no idea what this item was at the time, and it didn't appear to have any immediate use. For some reason, it didn't even occur to me to simply Google whatever the hell it was—so I just sold it, because it sold for a decent amount of money.

It turns out that the Teru-Sama is an item dummied out of the American version of Pokémon Gold & Silver—there are 29 varieties of them in the game's code, and can be obtained through a variety of exploits. One of the varieties of Teru-Sama occupies the same space as the GS Ball—a Japan-exclusive item that's used to capture Celebi in the Ilex Forest. This means that I may have been able to use that thing to try to catch a Celebi with in the American version of the game, and I fucking sold it. It was the only one in my PC, too, and I had no idea how to replicate the glitch.

Fortunately, as I later discovered, there does exist a glitch that allows you to catch a Celebi anyway—but as far as I know, Game Freak never actually gave America a single opportunity to catch a legitimate Celebi in the entire lifespan of generation II.

---

One last story—this is pretty much the last notable thing that happened in my Pokémon Silver game, and it was the first time I found a shiny Pokémon. I was maybe twelve, thirteen years old.

This is well after my file was wiped. Still mourning the loss of my precious file, and my Typhlosion, I began a new game. This time, I was playing the game on a Super Nintendo, using the Super Gameboy cartridge. It basically allows you to play Game Boy games on your television, which is pretty nice.

I started a new adventure, and about ten minutes in, I find an oddly-colored Rattata that gave off this really cool sparkling animation before the fight began. I had no idea what a shiny Pokémon was at the time, but I obviously noticed that there was something very weird about this Rattata, so I immediately caught it and told all my friends about it. They told me that I had just found something very rare, and that I should be very excited.

This was back when shinies had a flat 1/8192 rate of being encountered. There were no cheesy, dumbass methods of obtaining a shiny—it's all sheer, dumb luck. But in my years of playing and being faithful to this game in particular, I was honestly due for at least one, even if it's just a measly Rattata.

Several years later, this eventually came full circle in Generation VII, when I found a Shiny Alolan Raticate randomly in the wild as well. I've found many shinies in my day—at least ten or twelve—but there was something special about my first and last ones both being ugly rats. I don't know, it's oddly poetic.

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I obviously have many more stories to tell from this game, and even more from the other generations, but given that this one is my absolute favorite, I decided to talk exclusively about it here. This doesn't have to be about Generation II for you—it can be about anything, as long as it gives you some kind of nostalgia.

aka your sleep patterns (on average)



as you can see, mine is literally split in half, would not recommend

why does CMD hate this so much again?

it's pretty dope, actually

is anyone even gonna bother with this silly-ass shit

totally not a kotaku article

I mean...

and everyone (except for you) is now a cannibal

They're not ravenous, zombie-like cannibals; you're not in any danger. Nobody outside of the factory farm is. They just consider "human" to be a part of a balanced and socially-acceptable diet now, like pork, chicken, or beef.

Humans considered to be the absolute dregs of society are captured and forced into farms as livestock. After being fattened to the point where they can't walk, they are stuffed in a tightly-packed room to wait for their impending (perfectly humane) slaughter by guillotine. Their hands and feet are cleanly severed off so they don't try to fight back, and cauterized with hot iron so they don't bleed out. Once the human livestock are slaughtered, a butcher takes care of the deboning process and severs the most valuable and nutritious parts of the body (thighs, buttocks) and prepares them for distribution. Obviously, children of livestock are mass-produced in vitro, but women are still frequently raped and impregnated in order to efficiently produce breastmilk.

All of the negative health effects of cannibalism have been accounted for; it's now perfectly healthy to consume humans, and it's widely encouraged by nutritionists and health experts.

Oh, and they taste delicious. Not only will everyone tell you that they do, they'll look at you funny if you deny it. If you try to tell them what they're doing is wrong, they'll give you an even funnier look. They might even get defensive and ask you to stop judging them. Some of them will start treating you like you're an asshole trying to spread an agenda.

Only a small bevy of angry teenagers you meet on the Internet happen to think these people are crazy and evil. They are largely mocked and derided by the whole of society, while some people say things like, "I respect their opinion, but I'm never going to stop eating humans, because they taste so good!"

What do you make of this world you now live in?
How would you feel about it?
What questions do you have for these people?
Could you live in this society for 20+ years?
Would you join them, or would you try to fight back?
Do you think you could you compose yourself in conversation with anybody from this society?
What would you do?

Sad news: Apparently, this is the LAST Tropes vs. Women video she's ever doing.

The series has had a lot of ups and downs--she's made good points and bad points--but at least she's sending it off with a good subject. So, for the last time:

TRIGGER WARNING: The following video contains feminism; if you're a stupid bigot, please move along.

“OK, it looks like I can open it from here, but I can’t go with you. Here goes!”

In 2013, 2K Games released BioShock Infinite, the eagerly anticipated follow-up to the earlier, hugely successful BioShock games. Infinite’s story centers on a man named Booker DeWitt, a private investigator with a bloody past who takes on a mysterious assignment: Bring us the girl and wipe away the debt.

What follows is Booker’s adventure to the flying city of Columbia, where “the girl,” Elizabeth, has been imprisoned in a tower for her entire life. Busting her out of captivity, while she busts out of her corset, Booker shoots his way across Columbia, getting caught up in all sorts of drama in the process as the game tells players a garbage story which suggests that oppressed people are just as bad as their oppressors and the truth is always somewhere in the middle. But that’s much too big a can of worms for us to open in this video. Let’s just focus on Elizabeth.

Elizabeth possesses the incredible ability to open portals to other timelines, an ability that plays a significant role in the plot as Booker and Elizabeth hop forward and backward and from side to side in time, leaping from one version of Columbia to another and sometimes thrusting Booker into the past or the future. So as a plot device which drives elements of the game’s narrative, she’s very significant. In gameplay terms, however, Elizabeth serves a different kind of role: that of a glorified door opener.

CLIP: Bioshock Infinite
Here you go.

As with most shooters, Bioshock Infinite often puts you into situations where you can’t progress until you’ve cleared an area of enemies. The way it frequently does this is by blocking doors to the next area that can’t be opened by Booker. Only Elizabeth can do this, which she does only when all the enemies have been killed. For all of her tremendous powers, Elizabeth is reduced by the game’s mechanics to doing the most basic and menial of tasks, and waiting around for her to open a door becomes a significant aspect of how players experience her character.

CLIP: Bioshock Infinite
Let me scout around ahead and see if there’s some way to move forward.

Of course, she performs other actions as well, sometimes tossing Booker ammo, first aid or other useful items, or opening tears through which he can have her summon things like weapons or killer robots to help him in combat. Now, there’s nothing inherently wrong with the idea of characters who play a supporting role in combat situations. But Elizabeth is an example of a female sidekick who is reduced to a tool. There aren’t gameplay mechanics that allow you to have meaningful interactions with her. She just opens doors and dispenses useful things, and her tear-opening powers are not her own, but yours to call on and control with the press of a button.

CLIP: Bioshock Infinite
Elizabeth…a little help?

-Looks simple enough.

At other times, she’s less like a person and more like a sexualized slot machine, tossing you the occasional coin.

CLIP: Bioshock Infinite
Here you go!

-You’re a lion!

As a glorified gate-keeper, Elizabeth joins a long tradition of female sidekicks, including Alyx from Half-Life 2 and its follow-up episodes, and Yorda from the much-beloved ICO, whose magic is needed to activate doors, staircases and other mechanisms that allow players to advance. Yorda also has the distinction of being the quintessential example of what I call the Damsel Escort Mission. You know, after making three whole videos about damsels, I’d kinda hoped to never have to talk about them again, but gaming’s love of using helpless women as both narrative and gameplay devices was too much for even those videos to contain.

Damsel escort missions occur when a female character joins the male player character, but is largely helpless, and rather than being a clear benefit to the player, she feels more like a burden. In ICO, players free Yorda from a cage early on. She then joins Ico on his journey, and much of the game consists of solving puzzles so that Yorda, who can’t make leaps or climb walls on her own, can traverse the environment. Meanwhile, players also need to protect her from the shadow monsters who sometimes try to whisk her away. Spoiler alert: yes, in the ending cutscene, Yorda carries Ico out of the crumbling castle, but what the narrative tells us or shows us in the end doesn’t undo the impact of how we experience a character through gameplay. Another classic damsel escort mission occurs in Resident Evil 4, where Ashley Graham, the president’s daughter, has caused players tremendous frustration over the years by burdening them with the need to protect and manage her.

Whether they’re presented as capable or helpless, female companions often encounter situations in which they just can’t proceed on their own. Ellie in The Last of Us, for instance, is hardly a Yorda-like damsel, but when she encounters a body of water, she may as well be, and Joel has to go out of his way to get her across. Now, look, there’s a lot to admire about The Last of Us, but I guarantee you, nobody’s favorite part of that game was helping Ellie get across the water.

A good rule of thumb is that if you spend any portion of a game carrying a female character around, it’s a pretty safe bet that it at least has some elements of the Damsel Escort Mission.

CLIP: Prince of Persia
Ow! You’re heavier than you look!

To be clear: There’s nothing whatsoever inherently wrong with depictions of people helping each other in times of difficulty. If anything, we could do with a lot more narratives that focus on companionship, cooperation, and support. But the models games give us rarely offer experiences in which this kind of support is truly mutual; instead, we see a pattern of men frequently carrying and helping women in situations where they’re otherwise helpless. This pattern is rooted in sexist ideas about men as protectors and women as the ones who need this kind of protection. Perhaps no game makes this more obvious than Dead Rising 2, in which players sometimes need to carry female survivors to safety, but are never able to carry male ones. It’s coded into the gameplay that men are the ones who kill and protect, and that women are the ones who experience moments of helplessness and need to be carried. When these female characters are of aid to the player, it’s often in rudimentary ways, as a glorified door opener, or an even more basic tool. in the Ocarina of Time dungeon “Inside Jabu-Jabu’s Belly,” players must carry the snobby Zora princess Ruto around, at one point using her as a weight to press down a switch. And in Metal Gear Solid 5, you’ve got four sidekick options to take with you on missions: a dog. A horse. A robot. And a woman..

Finally, female companions often function as cheerleaders, doling out little ego boosts to players for gunning down bad guys or pulling off other feats.

CLIP: Resident Evil 4
And I have to get you out of here. Now come with me!

Along with the glorified door-opening and the damsel-like aspects, female sidekicks are there to make players feel better about themselves, to make them feel important and skilled.

CLIP: Enslaved: Odyssey to the West
You did it! You did it!

CLIP: Outrun 2006: Coast to Coast
Wow! You’re so cool!

CLIP: Blast Corps
You’re just trying to impress me.

CLIP: Uncharted 2: Among Thieves
Did I impress you? Got all those guys by myself.

But these interactions are rarely depicted as mutually supportive. It’s not nearly as common in these scenarios for the male player character to offer emotional support to their female sidekick, to tell her that she’s doing a great job. These particular sidekicks aren’t designed as characters that players can actively engage in developing a relationship with, characters who are fully fleshed-out people with their own goals and desires that sometimes require players to compromise their own wants or desires. This pattern of female sidekicks who serve more as gameplay devices, door openers, and ego boosts than as people is a design approach rooted in the idea of games as power fantasy; players get to feel powerful and important, sometimes issuing orders that are obeyed without hesitation or doubt, sometimes being told that they’re doing a great job. Companion dynamics in games almost never model what equal footing, cooperation and collaboration in a relationship might look like, but instead serve to make the player feel like the center of the world, the one in control, which is not at all a model for healthy relationships.

Of course, a huge number of games focus on men fighting alongside other men, and in these games, the male companions often have some of the same characteristics we sometimes see in female companions.

CLIP: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2
And that’s at least 10 more confirmed, Hunter 2-1. Good shooting.

It’s very common for male characters to compliment the player on their good shooting, or to breach a door that the player character can’t open himself. However, typically these characters are presented as equal participants in the conflict. In shooters ranging from Call of Duty to Gears of War, the player’s male companions are armed and active, and are portrayed as playing their part to fend off or eliminate the enemy threat.

Occasionally in these games, male characters do have to protect other men. But unlike scenarios in which men protect women, these less-common instances in which men must protect or rescue other men don’t represent a significant pattern and don’t reinforce pre-existing cultural attitudes about men, women and gender. Similarly, the occasional situation in which a female character protects a male one, which happens in the 2013 Tomb Raider reboot, among other games, also isn’t a problem because it doesn’t work to reinforce limiting, harmful ideas about women or men that already exist in our culture. In other words, we don’t live in a culture that says that, generally speaking, men should be the protectors and women should be the protected. When women function as competent companions whose skills are more-or-less equal to those of the player character, it can challenge these ideas. The Last of Us goes against the grain by giving us the character of Tess, a somewhat rare and refreshing example of a woman who fights alongside the male protagonist, and the later Gears of War games do a decent job of including female squad members who are on equal footing with their male counterparts. And thankfully, we are seeing more games that complicate and subvert the old patterns, providing players with relationships with supporting characters who don’t function as mere extensions of the player but who feel like separate, individual people.

The 2016 indie title One Night Stand throws players into a situation with a female character who clearly has her own feelings and her own desires, and communicating with her is a matter of trying to find some common ground for mutual understanding, not one in which the player is in total control of the situation. In Left Behind, the wonderful add-on for The Last of Us, Ellie’s companion Riley is not someone players can issue orders to or someone they have to protect. Riley is constantly active, often taking control of the situation, sometimes competing and being playful with Ellie, and as a result, she doesn’t feel anything like the companion characters in most games, or even anything like Ellie herself felt in the original game. Instead, she feels much more like a real person accompanying Ellie on the journey.

And while Trico in 2016’s The Last Guardian may not be a human character, he does possess some of the characteristics we’d like to see more of in human companions in games. Asking Trico to do things isn’t a simple matter of pushing a button and watching him immediately obey. He’s not a simple tool, not just an extension of the player. Sometimes he’s hesitant, reluctant, even frustrating. But this makes it feel more like he’s a living, breathing creature, with thoughts and feelings of his own, and by taking time to pet him, you can sometimes express your connection to him in ways that fall outside the requirements of the gameplay and the story. And crucially, Trico is often the one protecting the player, rather than the other way around. He does not exist to fuel a power fantasy, but to allow for gameplay mechanics that focus on cooperation, care, and helping each other.

When supporting female characters in games don’t have this kind of depth, when they exist primarily to be protected or to be ordered around, they not only reinforce harmful ideas about gender; they also fail as characters. Regardless of their gender, race, class or sexuality, a person is more than a tool and more than a burden, and games can and should give us mechanics and stories that reflect that.

Not a bad video, but having played Half-Life 2, I think she's underselling Alyx's role in that game a little bit.

Now that the series is over, here's every video she's ever made in this series:

Damsel in Distress: Part 1
Damsel in Distress: Part 2
Damsel in Distress: Part 3
Ms. Male Character
Women as Reward
Women as Reward: Special DLC Mini-Episode
Women as Background Decoration: Part 1
Women as Background Decoration: Part 2
Strategic Butt Coverings
Body Language and the Male Gaze
Lingerie is Not Armor
Are Women Too Hard to Animate?
All the Slender Ladies: Body Diversity in Video Games
Sinister Seductress
Not Your Exotic Fantasy
The Lady Sidekick

Looking back, I'm a little disappointed that she never really made a video that was dedicated solely to over-sexualization and sexual objectification. Of course, she gives no shortage of attention to that issue in all of her videos—it's a very broad topic, after all—but the closest she comes to fully tackling the subject is her infamous Women as Background Decoration video, where she unfairly criticizes Hitman: Absolution for allegedly encouraging you to kill and degrade the bodies of some scantily-clad women that appear in one scene—when in reality, the game actually penalizes you for doing so. She caught more flak for that than the entirety of her series, and even I was disappointed with that video.

She also only made TWO videos in her short-lived Positive Female Characters mini-series, which is unfortunate.

Nonetheless, she's made more good points than bad and rustled a lot of people's feathers along the way—and even though all of her criticisms are generally constructive and well-substantiated, and conducted in a very polite, courteous, respectful manner, people still managed to get pissed over her opinions. I think that's pretty funny. Whenever people tell me that I'd be a lot more agreeable if I didn't have such a caustic personality, I think of Anita Sarkeesian to remind myself of how untrue that is.

Kreygasm

Why do you like bad graphics?

So you like rubbery steak and cheap wine while they charge you $100? You think that's acceptable?

you're not being charged $100 for a game, and i almost never pay full price for games anyway

it's not that i like "bad graphics"--it's that i don't buy into the concept of "bad graphics" to begin with

there are just graphics

whether the graphics are pretty or ugly to you is a matter of personal opinion, and that's all it is

just because the majority of people tend to agree on what's "good" and "bad" when it comes to graphics doesn't somehow magically turn that opinion into a fact

try to go the whole day without doing that at all

just post it

most unfortunately, we've lost a lot of non-weebs since the last list was made, so i figured it was about time we updated

the higher up on the list you are, the better you're off in terms of social standing

everyone who was on the "wanna-weeb" section before has been defected to half-weeb

Anti-weeb Bourgeoisie

Verbatim (defected to nonweeb; likes grave of the fireflies)
Nuka
Napalm
Orion
Jim
Jono
Fedorekd
Lord Ruler
Maverick
BaconShelf (defected to nonweeb)
Stroud
Flee (defected to nonweeb, in a shocking turn of events; likes dragon ball z)
Simse
Assassin 11D7

Nonweeb

Joce
Nasty
Nexus (defected to weeb in utter contempt)
Charlie
Zizzy
Husky (violently tossed to half-weeb for liking Berserk)
Icy
BC
Door
Meta
Berzerk
Tyger
Pip
Snake
TBlocks (likes RWBY; defected to half-weeb)
Ryle
Inglorious (carelessly dumped into weeb)
Vien (defected to half-weeb)
Baconshelf
Flee
Verbatim
Velox
Irish

Former weeb

Dietrich (relapsed to weeb)
Thunder (defected to half-weeb)
Aria (hunter x hunter; rocketshipped back down to weeb)
Pepsi
Zen
Gasai
Atticus

Half-weeb

Casper
Elegiac
Deci
Luis
Rocketman287
Slash
Jive
challengerX
SecondClass
Ember
Thunder
Korra (likes jojo; defected to weeb)
Big Boss
Azure
TBlocks
Das
Zonda
RC
Vien
Solonoid
FatherlyNick
Catzilla
Chronic
Husky

Weeb Proletariat

XSEAN
Ender
Gatsby
Luciana
Septy
Tru
LC (defected to ultraweeb)
Fruit
Baha
Death
Cindy
Nexus
Aria
Inglorious
Korra
ChaosMetalDragon
Dietrich
Psy
Ian
LC
Azumarill

Ultra-weeb

Psy (promoted to weeb)
Ian (promoted to weeb)
Yutaka
Byrne
Ossku
LC (promoted to weeb)
Epsira

also a lot of names we haven't seen in a while

HAHAHAHA VEGANS #BTFO

U TRIGGERED VEGANS? :)

kinda wanna fuck the shit out of her tbh but i saw her with another guy todsy

what do lads