I mean, I picked up Oblivion for the PC a few weeks ago, and it has the most ridiculously customizable face editor I’ve ever seen.

I hated the Oblivion character generator.

1) Not enough hair styles. The hair doesn’t even look real; just texture-mapped skullcaps.
2) Too hard for me to make human-looking faces! I had more luck just clicking “random face” over and over again than trying to deal with a hundred sliders.

Maybe my brain just doesn’t “do” faces that way. My wife didn’t have a problem with it at all. I was hopelessly lost trying to make a face that looked like a heroic badass instead of a malformed monkey.

You could be talking about any number of building simulation style games: Pharoh, Caesar, or any of their spiritual successors. They’re all kind of like Antiquity age SimCity with a little military defence thrown in.

I would recommend Civilization IV for anyone who likes a nice abstract strategy game though. I blow countless hours playing low-difficulty builder games of Civ.

Do the over-exaggerated female attributes bother me? Somewhat. I wish there was more variation in the body types. A lot of my complaints in that regard are balanced by the fact that the femaleness of my avatars are strictly aesthetic. I’m no princess languishing in a tower. I kick as much ass as any other character, male or female (sometimes more ;P).

I haven’t really been harassed in any way, with the exception of someone with a male avatar using the “lick” emote on me once. I employed my “slap” emote, and that put an end to that. Otherwise – no problems of any kind from either players in chat or avatars.

I never see racist terms in chat, and I’ve only seen “f*g” get used once (the user got yelled at quite sufficiently before I noticed and hit my talk button). I hardly ever see homophobic comments (“that’s so gay” or similar), and it usually isn’t countenanced by the other users. Maybe I’m just lucky in that regard – I imagine it’s a lot worse on other servers – but I can only report what I know.

I also remember seeing one once where you have to build a community by using limited resouces wisely. Less war, more coorperation, but I don’t remembe the name of it, Civilization maybe? I’ll have to check it out.

Also, I hadn’t really considered it, but I could probably also get a PC racecar game, though that migh require some additional hardware to be fun. I’m not abou to pay for an Xbox or any TV driven game at this point.

Anyway, thanks again, you’ve given me some things to think about.

Gmae shops are kinda creepy to enter when you’re a girl and people keep asking if you’re buying “for your boyfriend” (I had one sales assistant spend 5 minutes talking to me about a game I’d just picked up and “but if you think your boyfriend would like Serious Sam how about getting him THIS as well?”

Tell me about it. This happened a while back, my boyfriend and I were in EB, and I decided to pick up a copy of KOTOR (clearly this was before the release of WoW, I haven’t bought any other PC games since beta) and there I was, standing at the counter with my copy of KOTOR in hand, and the clerks kept trying to talk to my boyfriend! He was flabbergasted and tried to ignore them.. it took rather a few AHEM!s from me to get their attention.

The next time I was in that EB, I was with a female friend picking up an extra dance mat for DDR because one of ours had finally worn out from extended use. The clerk asked us if we had the game, and we said yes we just needed an extra mat. That’s fine, because people are stupid sometimes, but he pressed.. .are you SURE you have everything else? You don’t need the game? or another mat? Because it won’t work without the game you know.. .etc.

Needless to say I avoided that EB afterwards until months later when I saw they finally hired a female clerk.

The upcoming Conan MMORPG. because while I love REH’s Hyborian Age fiction, (yes, you CAN enjoy Conan the Barbarian and be feminist. it’s just difficult, depending on whose take on the character you like ht most.) and the gameplay mechanics seem great (much customizable, the gameplay is stand alone driven for quite a while, so no interacting with jackasses until you’re high enough level to not need to put up with jackasses.), female PCs start as sex slaves.

that isn’t optional. Male characters are galley slaves on a ship, female characters are sex slaves in the captain’s quarters.

and that little bit of information basically tells me all I need to know about which version of Conan we’re getting. No Practical and Deadly Low Fantasy for us.

Really wish there were more like Beyond Good and Evil and Dreamfall, and I’m definately looking forward to the gender-nonspecificity of BioShock. but otherwise, I’ve kind of stop caring about humans in console and computer games. Kirby has better gameplay, anyway.

I suppose I’ve always been easier on Squaresoft (makers of the Final Fantasy series), because especially in more modern times they’ve really been slipping some very interesting attacks against homophobia, sexism, and racism into their storylines for a while now and has been constantly bucking the “conventional” wisdom that that will not sell. They’ve attacked gender definition in Chrono Trigger (cross-dressing villain), Final Fantasy VII (main character cross dresses), and Final Fantasy VIII (genderless playable character). Homophobia in SaGa Fronteir (lesbian main character who actually has to deal with internalized homophobia), Wild Arms 2 (main character is a gay male who isn’t stereotypically feminized because of it), and Wild Arms 1 (lesbian NPC).

I don’t mean to be rude, but… are we playing the same games, here? I mean, you’re right about Saga Frontier, but I’m not quite sure Flea is necessarily an attack on gender conventions (I got the sense that his/her gender ambiguity was supposed to be considered funny, not respected). And Cloud’s cross-dressing most certainly isn’t.
In the effort to get the female clothes for the main male character of FF7 to cross-dress (so that he can sneak into a brothel – there’s nothing particular gender-bending about the motivation here. If anything, it’s meant to be funny that Cloud is cross-dressing, because lolz man in dress!), you have to go to the gym and play some minigames. There’s also a fair amount of stereotyping in the character who gives you the clothing. It’s not the standard US stereotypes, to be sure, but they’re there, and slightly homophobic/transphobic. And that game has other proglems with gender issues – Tifa’s character design, for example. *wince*

Additionally, Squaresoft is not the producer of the Wild ARMs series. That’s Media Vision, at least for the first few games.
The main character of WA2, Ashley, is a straight or bi male, ad evidenced by his having a girlfriend. (Unless you’re going to argue that his romantic relationship with Marina is due to him being in denial about his sexual orientation, but that’s going beyond the scope of what’s presented in the game.) If you meant Brad… I really didn’t see any evidence of Brad’s sexual orientation being anything in particular. He’s got war buddies, but there’s not really any indication of those relationships being romantic, at least in the US translation. So while Brad may certainly be gay, or straight, or bi, the (US translation of the) game doesn’t really seem to address that.

And I can’t even guess who the lesbian NPC in WA1 would be, to be perfectly honest. There’s just not much evidence about anyone’s sexual orientation in that game, except Jack’s.

If you get in a good guild, the people in them will help you learn the ropes. You also have to just get out in the game and get whacked alot. You learn the right ways to use your class skills by doing that. When you team with a group of people you should be proficient with your class abilities and you will learn the right tactics in battle. This is where you are most likely to catch shit from fat heads though, it gets tedious if you have a inexperienced player and that is leading to breaking up the flow of the battle.

What I find pretty amazing about MMORPG is that you take a group of strangers who are reasonably competent at the game and they will often fall into synchronized team that can kick ass. I found this particularly true in City of Heroes. Of course you change one character out and it just does not work. No chemistry as it were.

As with life in general there are always overly competitive assholes in the games. If you fall in with one of those, you wait to a break in the game and leave.