How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love a Lady Who Is Actually The Bomb

I appreciate how King’s interpretation of our ‘glory days’ has my wife out of the house, and us on the couch. Could this be the beginnings of a budding bromance? Or at least a bromantic comedy?


I’m only surprised that Mountain Dew isn’t involved, somehow, as if our palates had regressed to some stunted teenage state. Once upon a time, ten thousand cups of coffee ago, it was DRINK of CHOICE, if never exactly the CHOICEST DRINK. Parents of the world! You don’t need to bat an eye when your boys start showing interest in girls. But when they start to show an interest in single malt Glenfiddich, then it might be time for The Talk.

First on the block has been Braid, a task that was in turns exhilarating, tedious, rewarding and oppressively inert. I find it curious that a game advertised as one that “treats your time and attention as precious” would have a secret item that you have to literally sit still and do nothing for an hour and a half to acquire. Waiting for the glacially slow cloud to whisk us from one side of the map to another, King and I employed our newly reclaimed precious time to the fullest, him scrambling madly to develop a vaccine for the Swine Flu, and I conference calling Benjamin Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas to see if we couldn’t “get this silly little squabble out of our systems.”

Guys. Come on. Knock it off.

With global pandemic halted and peace in the middle-east secured, we returned to our game to see how our precious time had been invested. We were surprised to discover that our precious Xbox had frozen.

So we got to do it again.

Due to my nature, I am often labeled as a “completionist” when it comes to videogames, a term with which I’m not sure I’m satisfied. I tend to read books all the way through to the back cover, if for the simple reason that that’s where the end is. But it never lends itself to conversations like this:

“Hey, how’d you like that Nabakov you borrowed from me?”
“Man, it was awesome. I hundred percented it.”
“Oh, yeah? Does that unlock anything?”
“Well, it lets you re-read it, but with foreknowledge of the crushing banality of modern life that will ultimately lead to the protagonist's destruction, undone by their own unfettered wants and desires."

Also you get to dress this guy up as a clown.

I am not greedy, and do not ask for a lot out of the endings of games. Years ago I would toil for hours, if only to be presented with some warbling 8-bit ditty or pixelized animation. Perhaps this may be understood as the faintest echo of Pavlov's operant conditioning: Ring a bell, then give me a high-five. Whatever the case, it made finally collecting the eight stars in Braid worthy as a task in itself, even if the process let me feeling a little cold.

Perhaps it's that the reward of the true ending, is, essentially, a bald assertion of the very thing that all the story had been hinting towards from the get-go. How could there have been any doubt about things at this point? It all seemed to be struggling to settle for all time that classic zen koan: "When is a princess not a princess?"*

I will swallow my constant urge to spoil things, and instead couch things in ridiculously transparent entrendre instead. I mean, I know that Tim and the princess had an explosive relationship, but he just hasn’t been the same since she split. All he wanted was a nuclear family, but things began to mushroom out of control. He wanders around Manhattan projecting his failed hopes on the city, a Fat Man rejected for a Little Boy. Even after their fallout, she could always make him glow.




Oh princess. You were The Bomb.


- Rook

* When she's a METAPHOR!**

** Metaphor? I hardly touched 'hor!

More than Pac-Man With a Bow: Part 4

"It's like the Adventures of Link. He has to find Zelda, you have to find a house... "

"Boy, is that sexist."
"It's not sexist! It's... romantic."

- The Wizard, 1987

I've been invited by the Escapist to discuss the role of The Legend of Zelda's Sheik in an upcoming issue on gender. I'll link there from here when it goes live.

May I say, with the risk of spoiling the surprise, that dude looks like a lay-day.


- Rook

More than Pac-Man with a Bow: Part 2

"Yeah, well, just keep your Power Gloves off her, pal."
- The Wizard, 1987

The character of Princess Peach originated as one of pure captivity: A literal damsel-in-distress, held captive by Donkey Kong, who must be saved by the heroic Jumpman. At the time, her name was simply "The Lady", and her long hair, pink dress, and frequent shouts of "HELP!" communicated all that you needed to know about her: That this was one long haired, pink-dressed lady in serious need of some HELP.

Re-christened as a princess in Super Mario Bros., a crown was added to the number of signs that communicated her character. But it wasn't until the North American port of Yume Kojo: Doki Doki Panic that she was given legs, so to speak.

While originally Yume Kojo contained characters from a Fuji TV television event, it was Marioified for a North American release as Super Mario Bros. 2. It was in this translation that the character of Lina, a young girl who could fly, was replaced by Princess Peach (or 'Toadstool' in the English version). Grouped alongside Mario, Luigi and Toad, each of these characters range in abilities such as their jump height and ability to lift objects.

The Princess' performance is on par with one might expect from a formerly-distressed-damsel: Peach has the most difficulty lifting objects and had the second-worst jump height, drawbacks that were mitigated through her ability to glide on her dress for short distances.

Though the end result is a playable character that still carries the signified femininity of a captured damsel, the messages that is conveyed treats women as both an exception and a burden: "Women can play games, too... it's just that they're weaker and slower." Even the benefit of being able to glide fits within this negative context. Jumping in the Mario Bros. games was difficult - so difficult that the original version of Super Mario Bros. 2 wasn't ported for fear that certain tricky jumps would frustrate novice North American gamers.

With such footwork an early badge of video game acumen, the idea of a female character - designed in part to appeal to female gamers - who could 'float past' the trickiest sections of the game serves only to re-iterate notions of handicap and inability.

It can be tough hiking up your skirt to make those jumps.

With Peach as a character serving the role of the perennial victim, and her victimhood dependant on notions of female paralysis, notions of gender and ability are inevitably linked. That is, her signified femininity defines not only the ways in which she is rendered incapable, but also sets the context through which she is playable. In Squaresoft's Mario RPG, Peach (as Toadstool) is armed with a wide variety of weapons including a parasol, a hand-fan, a frying pan, and, of course, good ol' fashioned slaps.

In the TOSE-developed Super Princess Peach, Peach is promoted to the role of protagonist, and navigates the game through the power of her emotions. In turns angry, happy, sad and calm, (calm?) each emotion changes music tempo and alters her ability set. Rather than discard the rudimentary signs of a hysterical female, these games extrapolate them to the point of caricature.

Peach, then, proceeds as a hyper-woman: Through femininity, weaponized.


- Rook