Things have been doing pretty good with the new gig. It sometimes doesn't feel like work because it is that much fun. Our game will be at the NVIDIA booth so if you're attending be sure to drop by to check out the tech destruction demo, currently not in the open beta. Oh, I guess the secret is out if you follow my Twitter (HWKJody. The game is HAWKEN.

Lastly, I can't believe my last blog reached over 200 comments. Thanks again for everyone's kind words. I only saw one rage quit from  the site, and even he wished me well. Also, if you don't already have me on Steam (xpcaligirl) or Raptr (CaliGirl), feel free to add me! 

And.. have a Happy E3 week full of exciting news and hype! I'll have to make sure I take a peek in System Wars this week to see what you all think about the hardware and games. <3

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Subsequently, a lot of people have been in touch asking what I'm up to now. The last couple of weeks have been really exciting -- I've put out the first episode of my new weekly podcast, which not only reunited me with Jane Douglas, Lucy James and Dan Maher, but also went to number one on the iTunes chart. I've also been busy writing for Wired, appearing on BBC and Sky News, and updating my YouTube channel with new videos. In the next few weeks I'll be sitting on a BAFTA games journalsim debate, interviewing Rhianna Pratchett at the Hay Festival, talking about the next Xbox on CNN and BBC, and of course heading out to E3. If you're going to be attending any of those events, please say hi, and if not, I look forward to hearing from you over on my website or on Twitter. There's loads more coming down the line, but for now, please let me know what you think! See you all again soon.

Jane, Lucy, Dan and I recording the first episode of my new podcast.

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I've been spending a lot of time pairing up characters so that they get married and then I get to meet their time-traveling  progeny. It's fun to see what characteristics the parents pass on to their kids and get an extra perspective on this doom-and-gloom future everyone is ranting on about. It's also rewarding to fill out my party with new blood; the excitement of new life offers a soothing counter to the anguish of life lost.

Today I mourn Vaike.

Look at this cocky bastard. Weird chains dangling off his neck collar like so much Ylissian bling. Can't be bothered to keep track of his axes. Refers to himself not just in the third-person, but makes himself into a proper noun: "The Vaike." No shirt, no helmet, no problem. 

But what a soldier! When he torqued those practice-hardened muscles back and uncorked a ferocious axe strike, the Risen rose no more. He was a fierce fighter and a trustworthy ally, lending unbending support and an easy smile to all his compatriots. We'll all remember "Teach" sharing his strategies and tips freely, solicited or no. His confidence, his self-assurance, and his gusto made us all better soldiers, better allies, and better friends. 

Vaike, for your rockin' hair, your rockin' bod, your rockin' attitude, and your rockin' axe, we salute you. Rock in peace.

[ Watch Video ]

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First of all, I want to thank Krystal for the respectful response to my piece, and for not tolerating comments in the blog from those who are more interested in directing personal attacks my way than in having a civil, open-minded conversation about this.

As for the nitty-gritty of my response, I want to start with something Krystal says at the end of her blog. "In no way would I ever defend it if I shared Carolyn's sentiments and thought that the game was even remotely disrespectful and offensive." That sounds like a reasonable position, but it's not really one I feel like I can afford to take if I want to be able to enjoy most video games, or even lots of movies and television. If I demanded moral perfection of the games I play, well, that would have prevented me from playing a great many of the games I love. Generally speaking, I think games could be so, so much better with regard to their treatment of women, cultural minorities, and LGBT people. But because I love games as much as I do, I'd much rather engage with games in these areas, thinking about and writing about the ways they could be better, than just throw my arms up in frustration and walk away. This is certainly the case with Persona 4. If you look through the comments on my feature, I think you'll see that a lot of people were clearly upset simply because I was criticizing Persona 4, a game that they hold dear. But here's the thing: I love it, too. I mean, I really love this game. I think it's one of the best games I've ever played. Even so, I'm not going to give it a free pass. I don't know if you've watched the first part of Feminist Frequency's Tropes vs. Women in Video Games series, but as the great Alyssa Rosenberg writes here:

"At the beginning of the video, Sarkeesian, explaining that This series will include critical analysis of many beloved games and characters, says something that everyone who loves a piece of culture ought to be required to recite five times every morning while looking in the mirror: Remember that its both possible and even necessary to simultaneously enjoy media while being critical of its more problematic or pernicious aspects. If that ability to hold two ideas in your head at the same time, to enjoy something while recognizing that it might have problems, is what the people who tried to harass Sarkeesian into silence are so afraid of, it only reinforces how intellectually cowardly and inept they are. The need for something to be immune from criticism isnt a sign that its perfect and everyone else is wrong: its a sign you cant defend the things you love. Thats a position any self-aware person ought to be embarrassed to defend."

I agree with this, that we need to be able to look at the things we admire and enjoy and accept that not all of them are  entirely above reproach. I can simultaneously adore Persona 4 (and I do) and feel that in certain ways, it could have been better. Krystal also states near the end of her response, "I don't think it was Atlus' intention to mock or shame homosexuals and transgender people." Well, maybe they did and maybe they didn't. This is beside the point. A work--be it a game, novel, film or what have you--can have meanings and messages that its creators did not intend it to have. Many feel that Kathryn Bigelow's film Zero Dark Thirty endorses torture. (This is not a view I share, but it works here as an example.) People who see this message in the film see it there regardless of Bigelow's assertions that the film does not endorse torture. Once a work of art is completed and is sent out into the world for the public to view and to contemplate, the artist(s) relinquish control over it. They cannot control how it will be interpreted by others, what meanings or values those who experience it might find within it.

Nothing makes you a better person quite like taking on the Aiya Rainy Day Mega Beef Bowl Challenge!

Similarly, I don't think it's especially relevant that, as Krystal says, "Japan's views of gender identity and sexuality are probably much different than they are in the US." That's certainly true, but I don't give what I see as problematic aspects of a game a pass simply because they come from another culture. If I feel a game or movie or TV show is sexist, for instance, I think that sexism is worth criticizing, regardless of where it comes from. "That's just how it is over there" is not, in my view, an excuse. Krystal goes on to say, "Couple that with the fact that video game stories still have a lot of growing to do as a whole." I certainly agree with that. It's because I feel so strongly that they can be better and because I want them to be better that I write things like this in the first place.

So, okay, let's talk about Kanji. With regard to my criticisms of Kanji's storyline, Krystal brings up the dungeons of other characters, saying, "the characters' personalities and actions do not PERFECTLY match with the personalities of their shadow selves." She gives a few examples to support this. 

"It's actually said in the game that the shadows are only one facet of the characters personality. Also, the shadows and the dungeons are very extreme manifestations of the characters' deepest troubles and fears. 

For example, Rise's strip club dungeon was the result of people not seeing the real her. Rise constantly had to be everyone's charming, cute, and most of all, perfect idol for the camera. Fed up with this fake personality she was forced to show, she left show business and went to live a normal life. But of course everyone still approached her, wanting to meet Rise the media darling, not the real her. Therefore, the whole "I'm going to strip and bare it all" was a very extreme way of saying she wanted to shed her generic idol shell and show the world the real her.

Yukiko's dungeon was a castle; her shadow wore princess' clothing, and constantly spoke of "scoring a hot stud." Her shadow, once provoked, manifested as a bird in a cage who summoned a prince to fight for her. This represented Yukiko's feelings of being trapped in a life she didn't want to pursue."

Krystal provides additional examples. too, before saying, "these are extreme and exaggerated manifestations." My feeling is that, yes, most characters' shadow worlds and shadow selves represent exaggerations of one aspect of the character's inner life, but that in Kanji's case, what we get is not an exaggeration, but a contradiction. I did not want or expect the real Kanji to be an uncontrollably lustful gay man like his repressed shadow self. Instead, I hoped that the dungeon would resolve itself with him facing his sexuality and folding it into his larger personality in a way that was healthy and socially acceptable, as others did with the aspects of their personalities embodied by their shadow selves.

We sure made a lot of happy memories together.

And now, Naoto. Krystal says that, In the west, we refer to (people like Naoto) as tomboys. But this isn't true. Naoto isn't a tomboy. Naoto has lived most of his life as a boy. Not only does he not correct others when they refer to him with male pronouns; he clearly has gone to a great deal of effort to encourage and support this perception. If Naoto were a real person at a real high school, this would mean doing things like using the boys' restroom, for instance. For someone like Naoto to be accepted as male for years and years of life would take tremendous effort and carry with it a certain amount of danger; this is not something that tomboys engage in.

Krystal says, "Also, Naoto's reason for wanting to craft herself as the hard-boiled detective did not only stem from her attachment to fictional characters. She is descended from a line of famous detectives and she intends to continue the tradition." As I said in my original feature, the idea of someone living in a gender other than the one they are assigned at birth because they hope to pursue a particular profession does not ring psychologically true. I have never heard of a young girl living as a boy for many years of her life, for instance, not because she truly identified as a boy but because she wanted to be a police officer when she grew up and thought that the male gender was more fitting for being a cop. Nor have I ever heard of a boy who lived as a girl not because he didn't identify as a boy but simply because he wanted to be a nurse when he grew up and all of his nursing role models were women. 

Some may say, "So what if it's unrealistic? You're talking about a game in which a bunch of high school students pass through television sets and save the world by fighting monsters on the other side." Well, I'd say that the one area in which Persona 4 does need to be believable is in the psychology of its characters. What really makes the game special, ultimately, isn't its battle system or its dungeons or any of those traditional RPG trappings. It's the richness and complexity of its characters and the ways in which they connect and relate to each other. If those characters start behaving in ways that we find inconsistent or false, it takes us out of our investment in their relationships with each other.

So, yes, I UNDERSTAND that, within the game, we're meant to buy that Naoto is a tomboy, that, as Krystal said, his "true intentions were to become a splendid and ideal detective, not a man." I'm simply saying that, given Naoto's behavior in life up to the point where he becomes involved in the story, living as a boy, being known as the detective prince, and so on, and given what we see in his shadow world, I don't personally buy the idea of Naoto as a tomboy. To me, it would have been much more believable and consistent with these things if Naoto were transgender.

The quaint and lovely town of Inaba. If you haven't visited it yet, you really should.

Finally, a word on why this matters so much to me. A thought experiment, if you will, and one that I hope you will take seriously and participate in with an open mind. 

Imagine that you live in a world where a group that you identify with is frequently marginalized and discriminated against. Let's call this group straight people. Now, straight people have made some progress in recent years. In some states, they have the right to get married, and there are an increasing number of straight role models in the media; famous writers, TV hosts, and so on. But in your beloved video games, straight people are all but nonexistent. Never the heroes. Only very rarely do straight people like you even show up as supporting characters. It's practically unheard of. 

Then, along comes this amazing role-playing game called Persona 4, with a rich cast of psychologically complex characters. You venture into a land that reflects one character's mind, and what you find there is a facet of that character expressing heterosexual desire. Wow! Understandably he has repressed it, you think, because straight people are often not treated very well in society, but there it is, a true part of him, yearning to get out. 

When you finally complete his dungeon, though, the game tells a different tale; he doesn't actually like girls, you see. It's just that he was so afraid of boys, because they'd been mean to him in the past. You thought you were finally about to see a well-developed straight character in a game, but alas, no. The game veers away from that possibility, and goes down a different road. 

Ultimately, the game does this not just once, but twice! 

In a world with so few straight characters in games, it's hard not to see Persona 4 twice come near the brink of giving us a straight character, and both times backing away, as really, really disappointing, especially since so many things about the game are so wonderful. To have a game come close to giving us straight characters and then in both cases run away from that, especially in a world where there are almost no straight characters in other games, sends a message about straight identities, whether the developers intended it to or not.

Maybe you can put yourself in that position via your imagination and maybe you can't. I've received a number of kind messages from LGBT readers telling me that they felt similarly about the message the game was sending and thanking me for the piece, though, and that is good enough for me.

Anyway, I'm gonna give the last word here to Yosuke. This is an idea that's at the heart of the game, and I think it's something that all of us, women and men, gay and straight, trans and cis, should strive to do.

Sounds good to me, Yosuke. Thanks for all the good times.

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So...show kick off stuff:

We'll be bringing you live stream of all of the press conferences tomorrow and Tuesday, and then the big show itself features more live programming than we've ever done before. As with previous years we have our main stage that will be running throughout the event, which will be hosted by Chris Watters and Danny O'Dwyer. Then we also have a pro gaming stage in partnership with Major League Gaming that will be running games all day each day. Finally, we'll have our Bonus Stage which I'll be hosting, which will have more of a chat-show/podcast kinda vibe, and will feature guests from every walk of the games biz; developers, CEOs, folks from other outlets, and celebrities.

This whole thing is a huge production for us, and our approach is very different than it has been in previous years. Hopefully you enjoy what we are able to bring you from the show floor, and that you'll participate with us in the comments, and on Twitter.

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Some of you may have seen me lurking around on the forums, or in some of our chat rooms, or even in the occasional group photo, so obviously I'm still working at GameSpot. I've simply transitioned behind the curtain, so to speak.

Though many people probably thought I was an editor, I've never actually been part of that team. I was a site producer--basically the guy who made sure that you all were able to easily find the content the actual edit team produced by setting up promotion for it. I love to play games and I love to write, and thanks to both I was able to contribute to one of my favorite websites, which was literally a dream come true. Since last year, however, I've taken my talents and worked to contribute in a completely different way.

Since last April, I've been a product manager at GameSpot, and my area of focus is content. What that means is that it's my job to help create and improve the user experiences that everyone here from users to editors interact with and enjoy. I manage the production of recurring events such as our annual E3 page, new site feature requests, and more. I also worked on the homepage and site navigation redesign, and am working on tons of more exciting things for the coming year that I can't quite discuss just yet.

To be sure, I miss writing for GameSpot, and I'll always have Alex Navarro to thank for that because he's the one who gave me my first chance. Never did I think that I'd get to review games like Bayonetta and Dead Space or the remakes of two of my favorite games, Final Fantasy IV and Chrono Trigger.

I am still deciding how best to use this blog, but stay tuned. In the meantime, here's a great thing:

[ Watch Video ]

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Virtua Fighter 2 | Arcade 1994, Saturn 1995 | Pai and Wolf

It was the summer of 1994 and I was walking through a casino--not gambling--and found myself inexplicably drawn towards the side of the building that had an absolutely enormous arcade. In the front of the arcade, there was a screen featuring one of the most amazing displays of technology I had ever seen--Akira fighting Shun Di on a raft as it was floating along a river and underneath a massive bridge. I played quite a bit of the original Virtua Fighter, but what I was seeing was such an enormous leap in visual detail that I almost didn't believe it was real. But Virtua Fighter 2 was very real and while it's amazing rendering of polygons sparked the initial attraction, it was the depth of gameplay mechanics that kept me coming back.

I had two mains for VF2 (I know that kind of defeats the purpose of a main), but there was good reason. I liked using Pai because anytime I busted her out on someone, at that time, they almost always just expected her same punch, punch, punch, kick combo from Virtua Fighter, not realizing that she had a great assortment of counters, reversals, and other combos at her disposal. I found myself switching to Wolf later on because all of his grapple moves just looked really cool and often caught opponents off guard, but I won't hesitate to say that I abused his clothesline.

Samurai Shodown 2 | Neo Geo 1994 | Hanzo Hattori

To this day, Samurai Shodown 2 is one of the greatest fighting games ever created. When the original game came out, I found myself leaning a bit more towards Haohmaru for reasons that should be obvious--his moves were easy to pull off for any Street Fighter fan and his standard moves had a stupid amount of reach. Going into 2, I felt like I needed to change things up, so I went right for Hanzo--a character I used off and on before in the original Samurai Shodown because he is a ninja and not, in fact, a samurai.

Hanzo in Samurai Shodown 2 was the first character that really taught me the importance of properly executing cross-ups despite criticism from opponents that using such moves constituted cheating. But what I liked most about playing as Hanzo was how deception factored into his repertoire of moves, especially when it came to intertwining his projectile attack (the bouncing fireball) and his teleport move.

Saturday Night Slam Masters | Arcade 1993 | Mike Haggar

Saturday Night Slam Masters was a fantastic wrestling game, but it was also just a really great fighting game. Sure, it wasn't necessarily as complex as something like Street Fighter, but it had more than enough depth to keep it interesting. Plus, it had one thing most fighting games didn't have--Mike Haggar. Yes, that Mike Haggar. The only mayor in America who knows how to really get things done and his tools are two massive fists and devastating pile driver. There's some debate as to whether or not this is pre-Final Fight or post-Final Fight Mike Haggar, but it doesn't matter. I used him in this game and I will use him in Marvel vs. Capcom 3.

--Dishonorable Mention--

Golden Axe: The Duel | Saturn 1996 | None of them. They're all terrible.

My experience with Golden Axe: The Duel comes from the Saturn version of the game, so apologies if the arcade version is any better, but the Saturn version was absolute garbage. Maybe I just didn't give it a chance, but everything about it felt like a knockoff of Samurai Shodown, only someone forgot to include the parts that actually made Samurai Shodown good. Another sign of its horribleness: It's one of the few fighting games I've ever returned to the store and this is coming from someone who actually owned Way of the Warrior for 3DO. In fact, I think the only reason why I didn't return it that same day was due to being a huge fan of the original Golden Axe and perhaps hoping Sega would release Revenge of Death Adder for the Saturn if The Duel did well. It did not. But hey, Sega? Revenge of Death Adder would make for a nice XBLA/PSN release.

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Share a couple of items on your Christmas wishlist this year.
Inception on Blu-ray
New parts my Jeep
New headphones for my iPhone
A new laptop

Which games will you play during the holidays?
Oh man, where to start? BioShock 2, Call of Duty: Black Ops, Battlefield: Bad Company 2: Vietnam, Goldeneye 007, Fallout: New Vegas, Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit, R.U.S.E.,

What are the kinds of food or drinks you must have during the holidays?
Beers, seafood, Mexican food, lots of steaks, probably some pizzas, and chocolate brownie!

ORNAMENT HUNT ANSWER - CLUE 22

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