I'll be in my bunk!

Well maybe she's just button-mashing! You don't know my life!

That's a huge generalization that's not backed up by any statistics that I'm aware of. That may be your anecdotal experience, but my anecdotal experience, with friends and family, is that women play shooters, and RPGs, and RTS, etc., "real games," as prolifically as men do.

You didn't know? Technology industries are well-known as being especially hostile to women. http://www.usatoday.com/sto… This isn't the best article or overview, just the most recent. It's endemic. Sorry to break this bad news to you.

Can you suggest a better source of critique of sexism in gaming? Especially one as accessible and well-known?

My daughter told me today that she wanted to be a video game designer when she grew up. Today! Of all days! When we have so many hardcore gamers taking to the Internet because they're terrified of being able to virtually sexually brutalize women slightly less often. Because they're choosing to side with the people who …

I just spent a good five minutes of my life trying to figure out whether you were trollin' (Poein'?). If so, good job! …you are being sarcastic, right?

Sphere was formative for me too! I read that and about 5 other Crichton books in a week when I was… well, young enough to learn other things too from books like Disclosure.

This is a really interesting idea. Maybe it's time for another playthrough…

You're right. The characters in FF6 feel totally distinct to me, years later, even though statistically they're all nearly identical (for all practical purposes, at least). With espers and relics everyone plays basically the same way — yet it always feels different to swap out, say, Edgar for Locke.

Apparently also Shadow will not rejoin you if you're at the menu screen when the timer runs out. I found this out the hard way on a replay — I had a few minutes left, so I amused myself by turning everyone to imps while waiting for time to run out. The timer ran out and everyone died. My little sister will never let…

Yeah, I was 13, prime music-buying age, and I've only heard a couple of these.
To be fair, I was raised by fundamentalist christians and any "secular" music had to be smuggled into the house by dubbing it to a cassette and writing "Amy Grant" or "Michael W. Smith" on the label. So, not really the same I guess.

I know exactly what you're talking about in AssCreed 2. I spent hours, literal drunken hours trying to grab that stupid bar.

I didn't have a PC during my prime RPG playing years, so while I played all the SNES and PS1 JRPG classics over and over, I missed all the games you mentioned. I decided to play the Baldur's Gate series to get familiar with the genre so I can fully appreciate Planescape: Torment once I play it.

The first! I used GOG's mod guide (http://www.gog.com/news/enh… and I plan to play through both games and expansions. Never played it before.

I think it's almost exclusively the spoilerphobe's responsibility. I watched all of Buffy and Angel for the first time last year and managed to stay completely unspoiled. My secret? I didn't read goddamned articles about Buffy and Angel on the internet while I was watching!

Oh! I forgot one! I picked up Spec Ops: The Line in its sale last week. I'm not really a fan of military shooters but I heard that this was non-jingoistic and legitimately interesting. So far so good. It flies its Heart of Darkness flag proudly and obviously from the very beginning (you're going into a…

If only real life was more like games…

More Dark Souls New Game +. Still stuck at Ornstein & Smough! It's starting to feel impossible that I beat them the first time.
Other than that, still slowly making my way through Baldur's Gate.

Well said. And good use of footnotes!