I wrote last weekend, somewhat jokingly, about the new mechanics in 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Pokemon Scarlet & Violet. Namely tha🅷t the𒊎 game would let me shower with my mangosteen queen, Tsareena. For all the open world adventure, ‘experience the story however you please’ angle has been front and centre of the marketing up to this point, the latest trailer showed off all of the stuff you could do in your downtime. While getting soapy and steamy with Tsareena is perhaps overselling it a mite, the game is going to great lengths to allow you to see your Pokemon not just as tools to help you in battle, but as friends and companions who are alongside your🌊 adventure as partners. The more I see of it, the more it reminds me of a forgotten genre of my childhood - the horse girl game.
The horse girl game is a genre that sadly no longer exists, at least not to the extent that it once did. I played Horse Tales at Games🍒com and felt i💞t was a major advance on the horse girl games I used to play, but that was 20 years ago or so and Horse Tales does not feel like 20 years worth of improvements have gone into it. Sexism has moved in odd ways in gaming. In the '90s and '00s, general gaming publications were extremely sexist, making crude jokes and objectifying women. Even as 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Lara Croft ruled the world, she was heav𝓰ily fetishised by the p🎐ress and many in the audience, while magazines frequently came w🐽ith stickers, posters, and other miscellaneous merch that signalled🐠 gaming as an edgy activity for teenage boys and men who never grew out of their teenage phase. Even the Game Boy was marketed as an alternative to masturbation.
Girls weren't entirely sidelined though, instead they were given the worst games ever created. Seems fair. While the '90s and '00s saw a boom of iconic video game titles, girls were given Barbie dress-up games and horse grooming simulators. Made on a miniscule budget even for the era, the games were dull affairs with stilted mechanics, terrible animation, and generally seemed like a psyop designed to push girls out of gaming for good.
Since then, the medium has attempted to become more welcoming, even if the general audience hasn't always caught up. We no longer see a division of 'boy games' and 'girl games', or at least not as harshly. Women who play competitive shooters are well within their rights to point o🔥ut we still have some way to go, but progress has been made. However, even this progress has a veneer of sexism to it. The games that were once for boys have toned down the misogyny ever so slightly while still relying on authoritarian principles, hyperviolence, and might is right, and now they claim like they were for everyone. Meanwhile, the games that were for girls have been all but wiped out. Worse, those that have survived the cull (168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Animal Crossing, for example) have enjoyed blockbuster popularity, showing they probably deserved a better shot. The games for boys are now for everyone and the games for girls꧒ are now dead. Equality!
Perhaps it's unhelpful of me to call them 'horse girl games' while claiming they should be for everyone, but the fact is these games universally starred female characters and I suspect that is part of the reason they died out. Besides, Horse Girl is as genderless as Big Dick Energy. It's an aura. Lana del Rey is a Horse Girl with Big Dick Energy. We are not limited by our bodies.
Horse girl games were pretty rubbish when rushed out with disregard and outright animosity for their players, but they have remained in our favourite games today. Red Dead Redemption teaches a love of horses and has you taming, naming, training, and cleaning your horses. You can even plait their tails if you wish. Then there's all that gun scrubbing we do in The Last of Us - a mechanic that dates back to the focus on cleaning these games for girls had, likely because they were made with virtual preparation for homemaking in mind. Girls clean for their husbands, boys clean for murder.
And now Pokemon. Feeding your Pokemon, grooming them, giving them cute outfits, styling their hair... all of these are ideas Pokemon has implemented recently, and all of them are staples (stables?) of horse girl games. We're probably never going to see a triple-A version of what a horse girl game could be, but until then Pokemon is flying the flag.