Lizardsquid, maker of noises @lizardsquid@computerfairi.es

@mavica hgjkdfhjahkds

@Arteneko @BatElite yeah, it definitely gets better later on, but the beginning of the game makes a super bad impression by introducing 6 different dudes and no women at all

Over the course of the first 3 missions you meet the following characters:

• Icarus
• Noah
• Nomad
• Birdman
• Dogen*

(who are all men)

and 3 nameless side characters with a single line of dialogue each, 2 of them are women.

*Dogen is not actually met, but he's introduced through dialogue.... by the 2 nameless women characters who each have a line like "Dogen expects you to pay your debt, and he's getting impatient"

@BatElite not at all - the women in the safe houses are doing combat training or practicing their parkour skills.

But none of them matter in terms of the plot, and that's the problem.

You get introduced to 1 important woman about halfway through the game, and 1 other important woman about ¾ of the way through. And then that's it.

There's this weird discrepancy between the world/level designers filling spaces with an even distribution of men and women, and then the writers basically saying "the only important people in this story are men".

I recently played through the original Mirror's Edge and now I'm playing through Catalyst.

Two things have struck me: firstly, Catalyst feels so much better moment to moment.

But secondly: this game has a really weird relationship to gender.

With the side characters that you find in the runner safe houses and such, there are plenty of women.

But the characters who play an important role in the story? They're basically all men.

@xenon 💖 💜 💖

@xenon outstanding and beautiful!

(One of the expansions to the original game, Blue Shift, also included some great xen sections which showed off this kind of stuff, and it's something that the original game was very sorely missing.)

Black Mesa (the game) adds scanning equipment, and tents, and various pieces of quick-set-up infrastructure and machinery, to make it clear just how much they were messing around in the border world.

I've been playing Black Mesa, and I've gotten up to Xen, and I have to say that they've done an outstanding job.

They've managed to make it feel alien, while also expanding on the mechanics of the core game.

It's beautiful, and (most importantly to me) it actually makes the story behind xen more clear.

The scientists at black mesa were already sending survey teams to explore xen, and while that's said in some side dialogue in half life 1, you never really saw it.

(cont)

gears, cogs,
sprockets and sprogs,
That's all you need,
to make some frogs