Both Dance Dance Revolution Solo Bass Mix and Solo 2000 are the only Arcade releases to feature a female announcer. The same announcer is also used in the console game Dance Dance Revolution Extra Mix.
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In 2014, Official Nintendo Magazine UK, who had previously criticized the Senran Kagura series in their reviews, published a notably harsh and superficial preview description of Senran Kagura 2: Deep Crimson in one of their issues. The reviewer seemed reluctant and upset to be covering the game, referring to it as "filth", and focused on mocking its exaggerated breast jiggle physics while dismissing the combat and story aspects, describing it as "smuggling fleshy watermelons in your top and the only way to win the "game" is by making sure everyone's seen your bum". This review also mistakenly referred to the game as "Senran Kagura Burst 2", presumably as a result of the reviewer's disregard while writing.
The same issue also featured a dismissive but less negative preview description of the game Lords of Magna: Maiden Heaven, published by Senran Kagura's worldwide publisher Xseed Games, which also reduced the game to being about "scantily clad […] pink-haired, big-eyed gals" and "something that might be crystal meth". The reviewer admitted he did not get much information out of the game's "cryptic" trailer and was certain it was a fantasy RPG where it "sounds like you get to run an inn" and fight monsters, but generally described it as "an anime Breaking Bad game."
These previews prompted a similarly harsh and upset response from Leona Renee, or Hattsu, then-production coordinator at Xseed Games, who criticized the previews on Twitter for the surface-level focus on fan service, demeaning the female cast, and unprofessionally ignoring each game's combat, story, and features, but also resorted to direct insults by calling the Senran Kagura reviewer an "idiot" and a "twat". Hattsu clarified that her response was not an official response representing the views of the company, but were her personal views on the matter.
Alice from Balloon Kid, while not Nintendo's first female main video game protagonist, (being predated by Bubbles from Clu Clu Land and Samus from Metroid) was the first to be unambiguously female in all regions in which her game was released, as opposed to having her gender be a surprise reveal or having an androgynous design and being assigned as female in a Western localization.
Both Mach Rider's identity and gender are ambiguous. They are portrayed with a muscular build, and the NES and Famicom versions' manuals never use any gendered pronouns to refer to them. The arcade port Vs. Mach Rider's stage clear screens slowly introduce piece-by-piece an image of a skimpily-dressed woman (bearing similarities to Jane Fonda's appearance in the 1968 film Barbarella) holding a dagger, but it is never specified if this character is Mach Rider, or one of the other wasteland survivors. However, Mach Rider's trophy description in Super Smash Bros. Melee years later lists them as a male character with he/him pronouns. Even later on, Captain Rainbow, a game centered around obscure and neglected Nintendo heroes, has an unused model for Mach Rider that, while not having visible breasts due to wearing armor, portrays them with a feminine skinny waist.
In June 2020, the game's writer Chris Avellone was publicly accused of sexual assault and harassment by two women in the video game industry on Twitter claiming to have been victims of his behavior. Avellone denied the allegations, stating that he has never sexually assaulted or harassed anyone. Techland, the developer of Dying Light 2: Stay Human, later announced that the two had agreed to let him go from his work on the game, with Avellone also losing work on other games. However, in March 2023, after Avellone brought on a libel lawsuit, the women retracted their statements claiming that they were misinterpreted, and paid Avellone a seven figure payment as part of the settlement. In a joint statement, the women said that Avellone "never sexually abused either of us. We have no knowledge that he has ever sexually abused any women", and they "believe that he deserves a full return to the industry and support him in those endeavors."
The English version of the game mistakenly refers to the character Connie Springer as female in some cases, and similarly mistakenly refers to the character Nanaba as male in the journal entries.
Originally Bangai-O was set to have a "woman planet" at some point in development, or the idea was at least thought of by developers. The map designer on the game, Koichi Kimura, specifically stated:
"It doesn’t appear in the game, but there is a 女星 (josei, “woman-planet”) too! But my image for it was like, everything’s colored in pink for some reason, and there’s some annoying melody going “pa-ra-ra, pa-ra-ra-ra~” always playing in the background… and well, I thought we might be getting into sexual harassment territory here if we included this, so I dropped it."
In 2023, Activision Blizzard was ordered to pay $35 million by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) over its failures to maintain proper workplace disclosure controls and violations of whistleblower protections. The fine was imposed due to the company’s failure to ensure proper employee protections against workplace harassment and gender discrimination, which led to many women leaving the company. The SEC used a 2021 lawsuit by the state of California’s Civil Rights Department against Activision Blizzard to launch its own investigation meant to determine whether the firm’s handling of the situation constituted a breach of its fiduciary duty to investors. The proceedings were started after the company’s home state charged it with violations of the California Fair Employment and Housing Act in summer 2021.
The PC version of the game includes four female playable characters while the PlayStation version doesn't have any. According to Visual Sciences programmer Russell Kay, the lower number of playable characters in that version was due to VRAM issues and the fact that most of the PC characters were completed in the final months of the game's development, by which point the PlayStation version had already been finished.
Tingle's effeminate mannerisms have caused many fans to assume the character is supposed to be gay, and so much so that in 2006, GayGamer named Tingle as gaming's #1 "gayest character". The Legend of Zelda series producer Eiji Aonuma would say to Kotaku in 2015: "He's not gay. He's just an odd person." The Tingle spin-off games very overtly portray Tingle as a heterosexual man, with Ripened Tingle's Balloon Trip of Love being a combination of a dating simulator and point-and-click adventure where every date is female, while in Freshly-Picked Tingle's Rosy Rupeeland, part of Tingle's motivation is that he wants to be with beautiful women.
In Kinoko Nasu's first draft of Fate/stay night that he wrote while in high school, he had planned for Saber to be a man and the player character to be a woman in glasses. While the two genders were eventually flipped for the final game, this idea was revisited in "Fate/Prototype", an original video animation released as part of the Carnival Phantasm OVA collection. Fate/Prototype portrays Saber and the primary Master as described in the early drafts, but as of now, the full story of "Fate/Prototype" has yet to be told, with the animation and short story details being the only known aspects of this particular adaptation.
The 2009 Java Phone game Postal Babes is the first game in the series to feature a female playable character, with the second game to do this being Poostall Royale in 2023.
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Following the PlayStation 2's success with non-gamers in the UK, the Official PlayStation 2 Magazine UK attempted a radical rebrand to appeal to more mainstream audiences, specifically members of the rowdy, irresponsible British "chav" subculture who bought the console primarily for its DVD functionality or a small sampling of titles. As a result, the magazine's content shifted into more lewd, violent, snarky, and misogynistic coverage, sometimes bordering on pornographic. The most infamous section in this magazine's history would come in a section titled "Rate Your Mate", where women (with an explicit rule against male entrants) would be asked to submit risqué photographs of themselves with the promise that their boyfriends would receive some kind of prize, and then rate their body based on "graphics, gameplay, and lifespan" as if it were a video game. The magazine would eventually revert to a more appropriate gaming publication by the release of the PlayStation 3 and its final rebranding to PlayStation Official Magazine - UK.
In the page of the manual for Bad News Baseball that introduces the girls' team mode, it explains that the girls' mode still shows boys in the cutscenes and follows up with "sorry for letting you down".
The Casio Loopy was not originally developed with the intention of being a specifically female-aimed game console, but ended up being marketed as such due to the popularity of stickers with women in Japan and previous Casio products aimed at a unisex child demographic gaining popularity with teenage girls.
Bubbles' original name in Japan was Gloopy, and a defined gender was not given for her. It is very likely that Bubbles was made a female character by Nintendo of America, as her design lacks the common cartoon gender signifiers (such as a pink coloration or eyelashes) that Nintendo's character designers typically used at the time for female characters whose genders weren't intended to be a surprise reveal.
In the Japanese release of Phantasy Star II, the piano teacher, Ustvestia, is openly homosexual. When a male party member volunteers to be taught the Musik technique by Ustvestia, Ustvestia replies, "He looks cute." Ustvestia then proceeds to charge the male party member less for the lesson than he would charge a female party member.
However, in the English release of Phantasy Star II, Ustvestia simply says, "He looks smart." The gender-based disparity in the fee for learning Musik is left unexplained.
Dee Vasquez was originally designed to be male, but this was changed after the developers realized Spoiler:that all of the killers were ending up as men during development.
In the PlayStation Portable version, while playing as the female protagonist, during the ultimate boss fight with Theodore (the male equivalent of Elizabeth), Fuuka will describe him as female.
If you put in the cheat code "girlnextdoor" you can play the game as Mary Jane Watson. At the end of the game, where Spider-Man and Mary Jane usually kiss, Mary Jane will kiss herself. This code was removed from later versions of the game, presumably because of the lesbian kiss in an E-rated game.
Both Mach Rider's identity and gender are ambiguous. They are portrayed with a muscular build, and the NES and Famicom versions' manuals never use any gendered pronouns to refer to them. The arcade port Vs. Mach Rider's stage clear screens slowly introduce piece-by-piece an image of a skimpily-dressed woman (bearing similarities to Jane Fonda's appearance in the 1968 film Barbarella) holding a dagger, but it is never specified if this character is Mach Rider, or one of the other wasteland survivors. However, Mach Rider's trophy description in Super Smash Bros. Melee years later lists them as a male character with he/him pronouns. Even later on, Captain Rainbow, a game centered around obscure and neglected Nintendo heroes, has an unused model for Mach Rider that, while not having visible breasts due to wearing armor, portrays them with a feminine skinny waist.
If you put in the cheat code "girlnextdoor" you can play the game as Mary Jane Watson. At the end of the game, where Spider-Man and Mary Jane usually kiss, Mary Jane will kiss herself. This code was removed from later versions of the game, presumably because of the lesbian kiss in an E-rated game.