From:
Tekken 7 is already out in Japan, and with this game’s release includes swimsuit costumes for all of the fighters, men, women, and beast alike. As expected from a Tekken game, the costumes are over-the-top all around, regardless of gender or…animal. The game will release in the West in 2017, and a Tekken fan reached out to the series’ producer, Katsuhiro Harada, via Twitter and point blank asked if the US release would indeed have these swimsuits. Harada responded with, “Ask your country’s SJWs. HAHAHAHAHA.”
Now, that’s marketing genius. The swimsuits are a DLC pack for the game: you have to pay extra for the jiggly pixels. Blame the SJWs. Make it a brave, heroic, thing to stand up to all the mean SJWs by buying the jigglepixel expansion for $20.
I’m minded of the time when there was a movie that was on its way to being a great big flop (because: it sucked) so the producer hit on the idea of paying Halle Berry $500,000 to do a topless scene. The movie budget was $80,000,000 and worldwide it made $60,000,000.
From Tekken 2 Swimsuit DLC
– Warner Brothers was not happy, nor should they have been. It was 8 years until Hollywood was willing to give director Dominic Sena another chance and he produced: Whiteout – the 8th worst movie of 2009 with a 7% approval score. It’s hard to know how much Berry’s breasts brought in the boxoffice but she still has a career and Sena doesn’t. Is there a moral to that story? My suspicion is that its: “don’t make really shitty movies.”
Maybe another moral to the story is: “don’t make really shitty video games” – admittedly the screenshot above is from Tekken 2, but – ugh – look at the ankle closest to the camera, and the leg pose of the kick. Wretched. Unless there are people who eroticize bad 3D skinning and geometry, then save your $20. If you want to watch pretty people fight naked, Rule #34 pretty much guarantees it’s on porntube.
Don’t blame the SJWs for making Tekken bad.
Don’t blame the SJWs for making Tomb Raider 1 (1996) a piece of crap, too. It’s as if the studios have realized that by pandering to a certain sort of sexuality they can squeeze a few dollars out of a bunch of suckers. As a gamer, that bothers me a lot. Given a choice between controls that worked, and moves that didn’t look utterly awkward, and a higher poly-count on Lara Croft’s boob-shelf, guess which I’d choose? That’s right: I chose Xcom (1994) – I deleted Tomb Raider after the first level and did something else.
When I say “pandering to a certain sort of sexuality” I’m not trying to put anyone down – I suppose it is possible that there are people who played Tomb Raider and thought “damn that boob shelf looks like the kind of thing I’d like to cut my face open on!” But 1996 was the early
Lara Croft in Tomb Raider 1
golden age of internet porn – there was other stuff on the internet that was a lot more interesting even in 2 dimensions. (Note: There is a marxist critique of pornography that doesn’t apply to in-game people, I am not trying to dismiss the many criticisms that can be levied against the porn industry by saying “watch porn instead of playing Tomb Raider”) Is there even a fetish for being turned on by 2D representations of 3D renderings? I suspect that what’s going on here is mostly curiousity. Once we get 3d modelling to the point where it’s good enough that you can’t tell if you’re looking at humans or renderings, then what happens to porn? That will happen in 10 years. It will be interesting.
I keep coming back to this: there’s a charge that SJWs are ruining gaming, but what I see over and over is that some games are really really mediocre and badly plotted and their defenders are saying … what, that’s our fault?
I’m not aware of any SJW attempts to ban any particular games, anyway. I suspect a lot of us would enjoy a game with a certain amount of eroticism in it, actually. The problem is: pointless violence that doesn’t advance the plot and is directed at female characters for being female – that doesn’t make the game better. In fact, it makes it worse.* Scenes with Halle Berry topless that don’t improve the movie? They don’t improve the movie. Yeah, you can also get a bit indignant about them because, basically, the director stood up and screamed at his audience, “I don’t respect your taste you stupid rubes!!!” What’s ruining gaming is not SJWs, it’s stupid plots,** pointless quests,*** awkward controls, and code that’s shipping before it’s ready and “let’s ship the actual working version as DLC in a year!”****
My mining-rigged Python “Tankitty” headed in to collect some palladium at 20 Ophiuchi 7 (Elite:Dangerous)
Gaming isn’t actually being ruined, of course. There are all kinds of amazing games coming out, and the top titles are immersive, beautiful, interesting, well-plotted, and have good game-play.
(* By defintion, in my use of “pointless”)
(** Hideo Kojima, I am looking at YOU)
(*** “I know you are in the middle of saving the planet from a horrible fate but can you get my cat down from this tree?” “OK now that you’ve done that, I need 3 dripping necrospleens from the wyverns at Big Bog Pond”)
(**** Chris Roberts, I have stopped bothering to even follow what you’re doing)
PS – speaking of interesting and beautiful games, I’m part way through “Life Is Strange” and it’s pretty cool so far. It throws a few stereotypes but within the bounds of dramatic license. I’m digging it. That’s not an official recommendation, though (no money-back guarantee) I’m also playing Elite:Dangerous and Dark Souls 3. Surprisingly, good games though Elite deliberately lacks a storyline. Don’t blame us SJWs – we didn’t steal Elite’s storyline.
I just read some of the comments on that link. My favourite are those who complain that “SJWs” don’t focus on serious matters.
Irony is dead.
Tabby Lavalamp@#1:
Yeah, the comments are… uh.
Wow, it’s looking pretty good for a 1995 game!
I was going to take issue with the characterisation of Tomb Raider 1 as “crap”. It was basically almost all of the mechanics of “Prince of Persia”, but in 3D, no swords and with a female lead, with good level design, great music and atmosphere and one of the all-time great moments in gaming in it (the initial T-rex encounter, which, since it’s on level 3, you presumably never saw). The controls on the Playstation version worked very well. Comparing it to X-Com is like dissing the reboot of Ghostbusters and saying you preferred The Seventh Seal – it’s an entirely different genre, and a comparison makes no sense. If TR1 had had a male lead it would have been like every other video game of the time. I was going to say that more positive representation of women in video games had to start somewhere, and the definitely-not-a-stereotype-damsel-in-distress Lara Croft was a start.
But then I remembered you think that screenshot is of Tekken 2, so I’d probably be wasting my time.
I can’t believe people are still buying video games for titillation in an age where actual, honest-to-goodness porn, is available on the internet for free. I remember when The Guy Game (a really stupid party game that had Girls Gone Wild-esque cutscenes of women taking off their tops) was released, and one of the EGM critics who reviewed it pointed out that you could get the same experience with a Google image search for “breasts” without playing any of the dumb games. I really thought gratuitous T&A in video games would peter out for that reason.
“…I deleted Tomb Raider after the first level and did something else.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomb_Raider
You lost me at that line, but I read the rest of the piece before commenting.
Look, there’s a difference between not liking something because it’s terrible and not liking something because you’re too easily offended to want to see if it’s good after you had a bad reaction and uninstalled it. If you act like a vegetable hating child tantrum-ing away at that bit of spinach, you’ll grow up hating them until the day you realize “Oops… these aren’t that bad after all!” Tomb Raider games are still being made today, the audience includes a lot more females than you probably think, and (surprise!) Lara’s a lot more of a well-rounded character (no pun intended).
As for Tekken, Katsuhiro Harada is extremely active on social media. Why not do yourself a favor and interview him yourself for this site? I’m sure he’d LOVE to address your issues with his game(s) if you put together some solid questions. Yes, I’m serious.
Finally: “Is there even a fetish for being turned on by 2D representations of 3D renderings?”
You do use the internet, correct? Put that line into a search engine (not Yahoo, as it’s wonky these days) and you should get an answer. Or hell, just poke around deviantArt for ten minutes.
P.S.: Oh, and Swordfish was lousy, so you earn a point for that, but lose that point for making me look it up.
The screenshot is apparently from Tekken Tag Tournament 2 from 2011, the second latest installment, and with the first swimsuit DLC
My Achilles tendon hurts just looking at the Tekken screencap.
sonofrojblake@#4:
I was going to take issue with the characterisation of Tomb Raider 1 as “crap”. It was basically almost all of the mechanics of “Prince of Persia”, but in 3D, no swords and with a female lead, with good level design, great music and atmosphere and one of the all-time great moments in gaming in it (the initial T-rex encounter, which, since it’s on level 3, you presumably never saw).
I agree that Prince of Persia was a really good game. But I’ll continue to slag Tomb Raider 1 off as crap for exactly the reasons you mention: Prince of Persia didn’t go 3D and consequently it didn’t have the laggy controls and the fail-camera hover that Tomb Raider had. You can say “Tomb Raider was pushing the envelope” and I’d agree – with the caveat that the results of that pushing were not good.
Prince of Persia avoided camera hover stupidity and bad control by not attempting to give you a 3d maneuver-space. Nowadays, with GPUs of comparatively limitless power, you can do that kind of thing as in Metal Gear Solid or Dark Souls and it looks good. Porting Tomb Raider to the Playstation fixed Dos’ bletcherous polling-based joystick interface and gave them a chance to unsuck the game a little. But it would take a huge amount of turd polish to make Tomb Raider a good game, let alone a great one.
Comparing it to X-Com is like dissing the reboot of Ghostbusters and saying you preferred The Seventh Seal – it’s an entirely different genre, and a comparison makes no sense.
I don’t agree. For one things, the genre is “movies” and if we’re talking about which movies are great versus which movies are fluffy entertainment, it’s perfectly legitimate to ask “why are you watching Batman Vs Superman when you haven’t seen Seven Samurai yet?” The comparison does make sense because the viewer’s got a limited amount of movie-watching time to spend in their life. Now, if you say “I don’t care about good movies!” then I agree, it’s irrelevant. There are lots of Michael Bay fans, still, apparently.
I was going to say that more positive representation of women in video games had to start somewhere, and the definitely-not-a-stereotype-damsel-in-distress Lara Croft was a start
Yeah, I remember interviews with the designers in which they said that. No, wait, they said they had sweated over making her ass swing from side to side.
But then I remembered you think that screenshot is of Tekken 2, so I’d probably be wasting my time.
I’m not a fighter gamer and I grabbed that when I was reading about the versions of Tekken that offered the swimsuit DLC. I haven’t tracked which versions have the jigglepixels, and I took that off a couple pages returned by Google image search, because the figure posing was deliciously bad.
Which version of Tekken is that from? So that I may avoid it. Wait. Never mind, I’ve avoided all the Tekken games pretty successfully anyway. (Though I did play Soul Calibur through.. ugh. Buttonmash hell.)
soogeeoh@#7:
The screenshot is apparently from Tekken Tag Tournament 2 from 2011, the second latest installment, and with the first swimsuit DLC
Thanks for clearing that up.
I admit, it should have caught my attention that the poly count is way too high for 90’s.
I’ll leave the error in my post, so that anyone who wants to point and laugh, can.
tbtabby@#5:
I really thought gratuitous T&A in video games would peter out for that reason.
Me too. I also thought that things like “the fappening” would die out when people realized that the photoshopped and postworked images of stars generally look better than the selfies.
I think curiousity has something to do with it: it’s interesting to see how good a job they can do with portraying sexuality in a computer game. The gaming industry has to figure out that portraying sexuality isn’t just “look at the size of those boobs!” It’s happening. I did the “love track” with Talli in Mass Effect and I really enjoyed the whole byplay where Talli mentions how life-threatening it is for her to have sex with a human – and does it anyway. So far that was one of the deepest representations of intimacy I’ve seen in a game. I have a lot of hope for the Mass Effect series…
… which, I will say, descends from the game-play DNA of Tomb Raider.
GW@#6:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomb_Raider
You lost me at that line, but I read the rest of the piece before commenting.
Wait! Are you saying I was wrong because gaming companies and wikipedia later retconned “Tomb Raider” to “original Tomb Raider”? I’m talking about the Tomb Raider that I played when it first came out – the first Tomb Raider. Not the subsequent ones that had the suck removed.
Look, there’s a difference between not liking something because it’s terrible and not liking something because you’re too easily offended to want to see if it’s good after you had a bad reaction and uninstalled it.
Where did I say anything about being “offended”?? I didn’t like it because it was terrible and I said what I thought was terrible about it: crappy camera, goofy low-poly animation, terrible controls (and stupid levels as far as I could tell, but I didn’t go into that)
I had a “bad reaction” to its general unplayability. I had a “bad reaction” to people doing backflips in the middle of a running gunfight. I had a “bad reaction” (this is a general complaint about platformers) to the whole platformer notion that you need to run and jump and flip to get from place to place, instead of climbing slowly and carefully like a human actually would.
I wasn’t “offended” by the shelf-boob. I was unimpressed by it, and I felt that it was a crappy addition to make a crappy game sell. And: it worked! I’m a bit disgusted that it worked, but there’s just some people who will insist on eating sub-par quality food as long as the wrappers are pretty. Or something.
If you act like a vegetable hating child tantrum-ing away at that bit of spinach, you’ll grow up hating them until the day you realize “Oops… these aren’t that bad after all!”
Where are you coming up with these weird assumptions about me? For one thing, I’ve played through the entire Metal Gear series, from Solid on, stopping before the last. Those games have Tomb Raider DNA in them. I’ve played through Shadow of Mordor (again: Tomb Raider DNA) and I’m working on Dark Souls 3 (again: Tomb Raider DNA) The difference between them and Tomb Raider – I mean the original Tomb Raider is that they don’t suck. Maybe it’s because we’ve had enough time to learn how to make cameras that don’t suck (Dark Souls’ camera needs work…) and controls that don’t suck (a lot of the blame there goes to Microsoft) But it can hardly be said that I took a look at Tomb Raider and walked away from the genre like a child. I walked away from Tomb Raider (the original) because it sucked. I haven’t gone back because I’m not interested in throwing money at people who sold me such a crappy game. There are too many other games that are better.
As for Tekken, Katsuhiro Harada is extremely active on social media. Why not do yourself a favor and interview him yourself for this site? I’m sure he’d LOVE to address your issues with his game(s) if you put together some solid questions. Yes, I’m serious.
That would be interesting! But .. I don’t actually have an issue with his game at all. It’s more like I am bemused as his game’s audience. It’d be interesting to know what he thinks but that’d be a great big “so what”? He appears to have already expressed his opinion on the topic.
P.S.: Oh, and Swordfish was lousy, so you earn a point for that, but lose that point for making me look it up.
I’m not trying to grind rep with you. But thanks for the progress-bar update.
We can agree on that at least.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_of_Persia:_The_Sands_of_Time
We’ve established so far that the version of Tomb Raider you played was a poor implementation.
You base this opinion on your experience of one level of a poor implementation. I question the value of this opinion, especially in the light of the remarkable success of the game in question and its ongoing franchise. I played a number of similar games at the time, games that were trying to be Tomb Raider. Nothing really came close. I’m surprised to hear the PC version was so bad.
>>Comparing it to X-Com is like dissing the reboot of Ghostbusters and saying you preferred The Seventh Seal – it’s an entirely different genre, and a comparison makes no sense.
>I don’t agree. For one things, the genre is “movies”
No, the medium is movies. The genres are comedy and drama. It’s possible to have a good example of either.
The medium is video games. The genres are puzzle-platformer and turn-based strategy. It’s possible to have a good example of either.
And yet, in the Playstation version, her ass did not swing from side to side. All that sweating wasted, assuming they ever actually said that.
>>But then I remembered you think that screenshot is of Tekken 2, so I’d probably be wasting my time.
>I’m not a fighter gamer
You don’t say?
Tekken 2 screenshot, for comparison of polygon count: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/KfT8iv4RZSM/maxresdefault.jpg
Since the last version of Tekken I had was Tekken 3, I wouldn’t presume to guess. Guessing would put me at risk of being out by over a decade and two or three generations of hardware, and then I’d probably look quite silly.