Lizardsquid, maker of noises @lizardsquid@computerfairi.es

I don't want to sound too negative about it, because I'm really enjoying the game, but at the same time they messed this up really badly.

This game has so many problems with its story and characters that would so easily be fixed, and this is one of the most obvious ones!

Thinking about it even more: all they'd need to do is make either Birdman or Nomad a woman.

Birdperson is elderly and wise, and (after retiring from their running days) takes care of a collection of pidgeons.

Nomad is young and anti-authoritarian, and comes up with ideas on how to fuck up the police.

If even just one of these characters was a woman, the start of the game would feel so much less dominated by dudes.

After some more time playing, this is frustrating me even more.

3 of the 5 guys you're introduced to at the beginning of the game only have the *barest* of characterisation. They basically only exist to give you quests.

You could so easily exchange them for women (or enbies), and it makes it feel... bad. Like, they could have chosen anything for these characters, but they decided to just go with men. Why did they make that choice? And who made the choice?

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"

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.

(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