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Vlad, Liberty Paper guy (who was a CIA agent or whatever the GTA equivalent of them is) and Dimitri. All from my head, honest.

So the failed hope of immigrants living a good life and escaping their past in hope of liberty, the oppressive state that is corrupted to turn against normal citizens, the key plot element that every big shot criminal sort after, the diamonds, which represented the pursuit of fortune in hope of a better life and the eventual ruin the pursuit of money actually brings, none of that is related to the American Dream?

They tried to make the American dream happen, by getting rich. They did that for a time when they moved to Manhattan and opened up a bigger taxi business and Nico got an apartment on one of those posh apartment towers. He and his cousin achieved all of that through sweat and the blood of their enemies. It could almost be a Western set in New York. They did that with Red Dead though.

GTA V's missions were better mainly because you could potentially switch between three characters, allowing you to always have something to do. One character means a more linear element to the game, but a more focused one at least. GTA V felt a bit haywire in terms of plot thanks to the ease of switching between characters.

Aye, Bechdel isn't perfect but it's the only real foundation we have for this stuff. Stuff needs to come along to trump its old style, since it isn't perfect.

Saying that, yes, good characters are good. We need more and need to rely on less setereotypes.

And i'll post this again, because I feel a lot of what you guys have brought up is discussed by Heir, and rather well addressed too:
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1020420/Misogyny-Racism-and-Homophobia-Where

Jade's good enough. She's a cool character.
Final Fantasy has some terrible representative characters. Tifa is a big sex appeal character made for hentai.

Mass Effect does it well, as does most all Bioware games. Morrigan, Aveline, Traynor, Tali, Ash, Chakwas, Juhani, Bastilla. All good characters, all independent, all could be men because their characters are effectively gender neutral. That also make a good one, someone who is easily relatable no matter the sex.

In terms of movies the only female I can think of right now is Ripley from Alien. She was bloody good.

My creative writing lecture talked about this. He was at a book fair and was on a panel with other male writers and asked questions. One asked all of them 'How do write female characters?' and many of the others said they try to imagine being a woman. My lecturer said that he imagined a good character, and the rest would follow. I have to agree. Many reasons women are so poorly characterised and portrayed is because writers think of them as women and build from their. It leads to the unfortuante pitfall of using lazy stereotypes and creating characters who are tokens for something else. If you read novels, you'll see good female characters are ones who act just like a well rounded person would.

Actually i've just realsied, most of the time, my best writing has just come from sexless characters. I wrote about an astronaut window cleaner who loved their children, but I never once stated their sex or gender. I thought of him as a man, but It easily could've been a woman without any shift in my writing. It's just better without being sexed apparently.

Make well rounded characters that aren't based purely upon their sex. The Bechdel Test is used to judge whether a piece of media, specifically fiction, represents women in a non stereotypical way, effectively.
The test is that there must be at least two female characters and they have to talk about something that isn't related to a man. Surprisingly, very few films pass the test considering the simple, if specific, criteria.

I'll give Rihanna Pratchet her due, the Tomb raider reboot showed a well rounded Lara who was a survivor, not a victim. Though the story rarely conveyed this, her characterisation was ok at it: not fantastic, but better than almost every other game.

Just read up on it, plenty of opinions.

GTA IV was amazing. Quintessentially the great American Novel Video Game. And the only way such an America story could be told was by two British brothers. Yep, sounds about right.

GTA V looked amazing for the hardware capability. Loading times were guff but it never loaded after which was pukka.

So i forgot I posted this...

Oh and I ordered one: with some loyalty reward points I got the Mario kart bundle for £198 and got Wind Waker too. Pikmin will probably be my download, but i want to see what's the most expensive on the list first and just pick that.

Else while coming up eventually, ZombiU, Wonderful 101, Bayonetta 2, Hyrule Warriors, Splatoon, new Zelda, Super Mario World. Basically a lot more than most of the other consoels are offering at the moment.

If loving developing your game was all it took to make a good game, we'd be surrounded by masterpieces. I'm saying they sound desperate to be appealing at this point, tweeting productions great and their immensely happy as often as you say, makes it seem even more so. After Fuse, they're obviously hoping to encourage fun and colour as an appeal of their game, but I've seen nothing I haven't done before that makes me feel like I should care.

So what if the mission structures are like that? All we've seen so far are demos of the open world, scripted events that take place, this could easily be as structured as Saints Row, I wouldn't care. The Crackdown comparisons is more the massive jumps and enemy gangs and the mutants, the guns. The Saints Row comparison is also the guns, the tone, the bombastic nature of gameplay and such. The only thing they've revealed so far that's 'next gen' is the 'Next Gen Respawning!' which is hardly a selling point for me, otherwise i've played this game before by the looks of it. Not saying the comparisons are bad, i'm saying they're not as original and Insomniac seem to be bigging them up to be., and which you seem to be defending.
Ok this is where i'm lost. What games are theses that haven't got a lot of press that people love that make up Sunset Overdrive? And what aspects are in the fore?

People obviously think I don't like fun, but I still enjoy Dynasty Warriors after playing six instalments because it's fun to whack people, or the recent DmC which was great fun to play and had a nice art style imo, but had terrible characters, story and such. If it didn't look so desperate in my eyes, i'd think this is an alright game, not enough for an Xbox One purchase but a PC port version which i'm feeling will release later like Dead Rising 3. Just have issues with what's shown and said about it so far, no clue what the final game i haven't played will be

I've just re-watched the E3 trailer of it , and I have to say, this game is looking stupid. I mean, stupid can be good with a bit of smarts behind its intent, like how Bulletstorm had these stupid gruff Gears of War characters saying stuff like "YOU KNOW WHAT I LOVE? RESPECTING WOMEN!" and the classical music of the advanced age was Disco. It could be great if it takes that silly direction and mocks itself.
But all i've seen so far is an arsehole protagonist boasting it's a great game, just 'cause, and mocking cover system shooters when it's effectively a Crackdown or a Saints Row, complete with mutants and enemy gangs. Also, it has AK-47s and Revolvers. Why? I thought the aim of this game was to trump the classic modern military shooters, but only some of its guns are bombastic whilst the rest are conventional? Currently, it feels like the worst kind of narcissistic arseholes on the internet. It feels desperately trying to appeal.

And that's why it's turned into a broken and fairly boring historical fiction. It depicts assassinations that never actually occurred in the manners played out in, and yet that's fine, but give the ability to play as a key character in the assassinations who was a woman, a racial minority or whatever, and that's 'not accurate of the time'. Like Manveer Heir states more or less 'history is written by the victor and the victor has always been male, so women's roles in history have been suppressed'. How do we know what happened at the time? We don't and that's why historical fiction is a great way to fill in that need to know, to make it more exciting and palatable for an audience. Bones of the Hills is the third book in the Conqueror series by Conn Iggulden, which depicts the life of Genghis Khan and his Mongol armies until the time of his grandson, Kublai. Genghis is famous for allegedly dying by falling off his horse in Mongolia and buried in an unmarked grave. In Bones of the Hills, Genghis is instead killed by one of the wives he takes from a Chinese kingdom he almost conquered, but were spared in exchange for, among other things, another wife. She stabs him as they lay together in their yurt, before slitting her own throat. She had always planned to kill him when she was offered up, and her story tells of her internal conflict on whether to kill him on her fathers orders or whether to let this amazing man who treats her well, to live in. He dies due to a woman killing him. It's not accurate, not even to the legends, but the build up and impact is so far reaching that it added to the plot more than simply Genghis dying from a horse riding accident. That's good historical fiction, that entwines the changes in a way that lends to the whole experience because it rewrites history in a way that benefits the reader.
Assassin's Creed and a lot of historical fiction get free passes for their lack of creativity in the fiction department. Like The Order 1889 or whatever it's called. steampunk, monster hunter in the 1800 alternate history of London, and all the characters are white. Why? Because it's London in the 1800s, that's who would've been there. Disregarding the black and Asian communities in London at the time, as well as the whole werewolves thing. Seems a bit stupid to be creative till you hit a problemand it's oce.

I'm not naming background characters, I'm naming the roles of prominent characters.
In AC2,Brotherhood and ACIV: Freedom's Cry, we have about 5 named prostitute characters, and plenty unnamed. They also include Brothel Madams, all sexualised as seducers for men. They're not powerful simply because they own a brothel and can seduce men, and even if it was, they're still stereotyped characters, Brothel Madams are cliched. In all AC games you see housewives, few named. The homestead had Miriam as the only non-stereotypical character, a hunter, but then you had a seamstress, her daughter, the wife of the innkeeper, the housewives of the lumber guys. In ACIV, Anne Bonny is a barmaid who turns into your figure head navigator post-game. She's initially seen as a sex object by the pirates, then when she's accused of piracy, she's beaten to the point of having an induced abortion.

One Aveline doesn't mean we can ignore the rest of the female cast. It's worse things are going backwards in the series having come so far in III and Liberations.

But ancient god beings who genetically engineered humanity into homo sapiens and Pieces of Eden that influenced the flow of history and famous historical battles, with an ancient secret war between Assassins and Templars, that's not rewriting things? That's a hollow excuse given to all historical fiction. These aren't documentaries, they're adventures in time periods which can be made into something different. It's genre definition is historical fiction, yet the defence is always focused on the history and not the fiction, which is biggest opportunity to do whatever you want with your game, but nope tropes and clichés still dominate.

Seriously, please watch this, it explains better than I can:
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1020420/Misogyny-Racism-and-Homophobia-Where

Honestly, the biggest thing that stood out for me was the music sounded Kingdom Hearts-y.

The one example of a good female is Aveline in terms of representation, most others have had little to no character development. Liberations was generally just better at characters and representation because of the subject matter. Even her surrogate mother came close but she was too secondary and hidden to get any real bearing until the end, and she turned into a cliché, though not a female specific one.
I can't see any other female character justified as being particularly well developed and at the same time, not in a stereotypical role. For a game about freedom fighters and their struggle for individuals choice and autonomy in society, you have a lot of barmaids, courtesans, brothel madams, wives of important characters and not much else.
Aye, wives of men. Added the men because their roles as the husband generally introduce the wife character, who is obedient and stereotypical. Bartolommeo's wife is introduced as purely a comedic piece, because he loves his sword more than her, but still she follows him. Seems badly representative.

I don't' see it as sexist, I see it as unneeded restrictions on the player. Why put in place a system that can't do what the past has done? Ubisoft and its teams clearly have the capability to do it, yet it's brushed off as an impossibility because men and women walk differently, so nothing can be done without oodles of effort or time? Bollocks. Why are they really doing it? The thing is, Aveline and Adewale were both characters separate from the main series, one in a spin off, another as a DLC mission guy. In terms of included in main games, Connor is the furthest we've got from the stereotypical rough white looking guy. It's almost like they're trying to avoid using actually diverse characters.

Just having a black character does not make it representative of black people. It's not about simple inclusion. Having a black gangster doesn't mean it's not racist, The amount of stereotypes in games is atrocious. Assassin's Creed itself has women as prostitutes, slaves, wives of men and just generally victims. Few stand out as strong, and the ones who do, like Caterina Sforza, are strong because history paints them as such. You get to the actual few original characters more often than not they represented as tools to men's desires. Zio is one of the few I can remember. They all just need better representation when included.

Seriously guys, Manveer Heir's GDC talk. Watch it. Pretty much shows how badly games are at representation and why all games need to buck up ideas.

Did think of you at the announcement, Lexi. Might even get it myself. Need Vita games.

You do interact with the world through a female perspective. The very fact Ellie was playable was to show that different perspective from the predominantly male one you play as. They effectively played the same, but their interactions, characters and so on were unique, and for Ellie, very female oreintated. It allows us as the observers to see her in a new light. She is one of the best female teen characters in general media in a long while, well rounded, well developed and generally just good.

I'm even sure what your point is. You say that you have no side on the Ubi stuff, but you're saying it's their artistic right to do this and defending their choice?
I just didn't see why complaining about a step back isn't a reasonable thing. I complained that Mass Effect 2 was wrong for reducing the ability for players to explore planets' surfaces. Still enjoyed the game, but it's a bad thing for a game like that to go back on seeing as the story has always been about the whole galaxy yet you could only go to some of it. Assassin's Creed has always been about these historical freedom fighters who have always sought the oppression of control, looking for equal rights between all people and their ability to choose. Yet you can't choose to look like a woman if you can customise your appearance? Can you choose skin or hair colour? Just seems mental to give you a partial choice for little to no reason, even an artistic reason that's not even here.

Play the game.

This is the equivalent of a writer doing their novel during their travelling time.

Good man. Edited well enough and shots are surprisingly good.

Look at 2:27. You see the same chairs as than and the flat escalator thing he's on? He must have left the phone on the moving belts and let it film for 0:47.

First world problems thread, eh?

Alright, it''s 2014, and the blue screen still exists, Microsoft.