It’s nice to sit back and relax on a Sunday night after a good holiday. All the better tonight because I’ve stumbled across Velvet Assassin, a WWII (yawn) stealth-shooter (intriguing…) with a humanly-proportioned, fully-dressed female protagonist (O.M.G!).

Her name is Violette Summer and she is supposedly inspired by a Special Operations Executive agent named Violette Szabo. The real Violette fought and died for the liberation of France in 1944. I’m guessing that the game inspiration was so loosely-based that they felt the need to change her name. Head on over to Wikipedia and read about Violette Szabo.

Going by the promo stuff on the official Velvet Assassin website, it looks like you’ll be able to choose how to approach missions, so I’m enamoured already. I know that I blither on about choice in games. I was a huuuge fan of the old Eidos Commandos games where you would kill guards, or hide their bodies or just sneak around them. I loved working out a guard’s vice, throwing cigarette packets or wine bottles to get him and then bopping him over the head and stealing his uniform. Every mission, I left behind a little room with a pile of tied-up guards in their underwear. The thought of doing it all over again in a high-res third-person game is enough to make me go *squeeeee!*

Then again, I could be sorely disappointed. I wait eagerly for more information.

In the meantime, here are some rather brown screenshots and a teaser trailer, just for you.

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Stumbled across this Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops screenshot on Joystiq.

I see EVA’s boobs are still proudly on display. Go to the Joystiq article if you want more MGS:OP pics.

Okay, maaaaaaybe if she was in the middle of a heated battle and her zipper burst and she had more important things on her mind like surviving to be concerned about, a la Sigourney Weaver in GalaxyQuest, then it makes sense to put her in overalls unzipped to the waist and showing off her bra.

But she’s in a freaking camp. You’d think she’d learn to zip up her damn overalls by now. I’m so bored of female character models designed as wank-fodder.

(Is she meant as satire?)

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So, I caved and bought* a £4 copy of Edge this month almost, but not entirely, on the basis that the front cover was comprised of cutesy drawings of the LucasArts adventure staples of my childhood.

But in addition to the LucasArtsy goodness there’s an article on female characters in games. No special revelations in it really (few women in games, blah, Lara Croft, blah, publishers like Hawt Secks, etc.) but one thing caught my eye. A quote from Ragnar Tornquist. (Hey, if he can leave out the non-English character online then so can I.)

“Gender should never be simply an aesthetic choice, although for the most part, regrettably, it is,” argues Tornquist. “Men and women are different, and there’s nothing wrong or sexist about making that an integral part of gameplay and the storyline. But most developers are afraid to offend, or maybe some people are too easily offended, and so men and women have become mostly interchangable in games, a consideration like hair or costume. That needs to change.”

First up, which games is he playing that actually allow you to interchangeably pick man or woman without affecting gameplay? Not MMORPGs since they’re avatars, not characters. Everything else is pretty fixed. Perhaps he’s referring to the male and few female FPS non-characters, though I don’t think some reactions in a few cut-scenes really constitute an integral part of gameplay either.

Secondly, what I really meant to ask was this. To those guys out there who actually played Dreamfall (or part thereof): Was there ever a time where you would have done something drastically different to Zoe, if that situation had happened to you?

Seriously, you fall asleep, you wake up in some other world, you wander around and ask questions, right? I don’t see how Zoe is particularly a “woman” rather than a “man” but hey, I’m a “woman” and I spend my life wandering around asking questions, so maybe I’m just blinded to it all.
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*(sweet-talked TheFluffyFist into buying)

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