Very Nice Ride, sage! I really like that color on the Mustangs too!
Yea I see a lot of 3rd person play, it makes it easier to see everything around you at all times. but for me, in order to feel like my drow is really "Me" I must use first person.

Hose? Like This? Now we're talking!
Well, she already brought up Hose, and EVERYONE loves Fishnets!

On second thought, may I should be careful about wheeling out the fishnets. We've been able to avoid attracting the more vocal of the hooting dickholes from the last GA, and I shudder to think what their reaction would be to men doing such galling things as wearing fishnets for their own enjoyment without coercion; I can see it now: "BUT YOUR MASCULINITY!!!"

Hm, now that I think about it, that really sounds like a good case *for* the fishnets :)

Thank you ddickinson I'll join this time but will also leave you a +1!

Q1. Shooters, Strategy and RPGs, and if you can combine the three into one game that's even better, I'm also a fan of simulators as I think ArmA games doesn't count as shooters, I'm sure the 287+ hours I've put in ArmA II confirm I like the genre. :)

Q2. MMOs, they're fun and I've had quite my time with them but they take away that very thing from you, time you can spend on other things or games.

Tower Defense, is not like I don't like them, but there are other games I prefer to play before going for one of this.

Card Games, the digital ones, I had lots of fun during my childhood and early teenage days with Magic The Gathering but I just don't see the fun of this in a digital version of it.

Q3. Rarely play as a woman in games, basically when forced to, Tomb Raider is a good example of that, not like I have a thing agaisnt it, I just feel something doesn't fit when doing it (Yeah I tried it) unless like I said I'm forced to play a female character, that won't stop me from enjoying a good title. :)

Thanks once again for the giveaway! I'm in for the $9.99 prize!

I have a question for anyone who played Invisible War - Did you prefer male or female Alex?

I can't stand male Alex. He is a whiny little pretty boy with a d-bag haircut, and looks like he probably did grow up in a cozy enclave. He feels totally unnatural and wrong for the part to me.

I only play as female Alex. Her voice is perfect, and she looks great. Unlike the dumbass-looking male version, she looks like she really did grow up in Old Chicago. Her voice and appearance give me the vibe that she means business. And I think her persona feels much closer to JC from the first game.

For me, male vs. female Alex is honestly the difference between a bad game and good game.

I hate that they put male Alex on the cover.

Nice giveaway, +1! I'm male, please count me in for the $9.99 game.

Updated to add "why" to the section on my favourite game genres which I inadvertently left out originally. Wow that's actually a very difficult question to answer because I love quite a number of game genres fairly equally including in no particular order RTS, RPG, FPS, Simulation, 4X, Adventure/Mystery, Puzzle, and others. If I had to choose 3 out of them all, RTS, FPS would have to be 2 of them for sure, and then it'd be a difficult toss up between RPGs (ARPG, CRPG) and Simulation (flight sims, racing/driving sims, goat simulator, sub simulators, just about anything really). I probably end up playing more wall clock time in the past with RPGs than Sims perhaps so I guess I'll go with RTS, FPS, RPG. I'd feel naked without simulators though. ;)

RTS: Because I love a good strategy game, in particular games where you have an overlying goal to accomplish and missions to achieve that goal and mark your success along the way. I like turn based strategy as well however I play more real time than turn based. I find RTS games have incredibly high amount of replay value for my gaming time, and my favourite RTS of all time are:

1) The Lord of the Rings: The Battle For Middle Earth II, with and without the Rise of the Witch King expansion pack. My all time favourite RTS, which I enjoy the single player campaigns, multiplayer and also War of the Ring mode.

2) Starcraft - My friends and I have probably played more hours of Starcraft than any other game, and we've played it on and off since it came out in 1997, and it wasn't until about 2 or 3 years ago that we switched to various other games, however it is still hot at LAN parties.

3) Warcraft II - One of the best RTS ever as well, I could never get bored of WC2, however it's hard to find others to play this with nowadays, and it has problems running on modern OSs.

FPS: Ever since I played my first FPS game - Wolfenstein 3D back when it came out, I closely followed and played practically every FPS game that came out after that up until 2000 or so, and then a good number of the more popular ones after that. I love FPS games as they're very immersive. My #1 subgenre is the tactical combat simulation (TCS) type of FPS - all of the Tom Clancy Ghost Recon games up to GRAW2, and Rainbow Six titles, all of the ArmA games. All of the Valve games, id Software games, AvP, and countless others far too numerous to name. It would be difficult to choose one of these games to pick as a favourite as they all have a lot to offer.

RPG: I love RPGs as I was a pen and paper D&D player back in the 80s and a bit in the 90s and was drawn to the whole idea of participating in medieval battle and adventures searching for treasures and whatnot while your character develops new skills and abilities over time and grows more powerful to eventually face off with some big evil force etc. I love both turn based RPGs and action RPGs equally however for one reason or another or no reason at all I've put a lot more hours into ARPGs than turn based CRPGs. Perhaps because I've got more friends who favour ARPGs so that's what stuck for multiplayer. Also a number of the popular CRPGs are single-player only. The D&D series of games are legendary enough to speak for themselves, however aside from those, my favourite game titles include in no particular order:

- The Witcher, The Witcher II
- Torchlight and Torchlight II
- Diablo, Diablo II Sports: I'm not a sports fan and while I don't hate sports, the games just don't really appeal to me compared to the various other genres that I really do enjoy so Sports games would have to be low on my list.

Pay-to-play: Games that have either recurring monthly fees or similar, or which use micro-transactions or other similar tactics to get you to become a frequently recurring income stream. Doesn't matter if the game costs money from the outset or is Free-to-Play - if it forces me to pay additional money to enjoy the game properly then I wont play it because there are literally thousands of other games to choose from that interest me much greater that are a one time buy and it is yours type experience that more than meets my gaming needs without having to repeatedly pay for things to continue enjoying the entertainment. In this case, the particular game genre doesn't matter much although they mostly seem to be MMOs of some form or another.

Casual: All forms of casual "simple" games such as those that dominate on social networking platforms and mobile devices which often tend to be puzzle games or simple platformers etc. Once in a while such a game can occupy one's mind long enough to kill some time but they just do not give me the truly immersive type gaming experience I prefer from the more complex genres. As to why, while some of these type of games could actually be enjoyable there just seems to be way way too many of them out there. The market is severely oversaturated with thousands of puzzle games that are fairly basic and whether they can be fun or not they mostly seem like a big waste of time to me and I roll my eyes every time I see yet another new one pop up. Also, the social networks are flooded with them and they love to spam your newsfeed with updates from friends, invites and other annoyances that just push me even further away from them. I don't put too much thought into the gender of my in game characters for the most part but instead focus on their abilities/attributes/skills/spells/capabilities that I'd prefer. If a game lets you independently choose the gender of the character I'll cycle through them and sometimes I might choose the female character if she's very attractive from game artwork perspective. If I am going to be playing a game for many dozens of hours building up a character or similar sometimes it is nice to have female eye candy on the screen. Then there are games like Tomb Raider for example where you're Lara and that's the only choice. She's always been made out to have a certain level of sexiness presumably to appeal to a male audience though too. When I'm playing games though I don't really identify with my character, and rather just see them as a bunch of pixels. Even in RPGs which are technically supposed to be "role-playing", I've never really thought too much about trying to play a character as a particular gender - instead I just play them as me with my own way of thinking etc. and the character's just pixels on the screen coming along for the ride. Some RPGs expect you to play your character in a manner that is how you chose their race/class/etc. and I will try to play a lawful character thinking in lawful terms etc. to play the character right but again I never really think "what would this character do as a female". In the end I'd have to answer the question as either doing it sometimes randomly just to mix up a party of characters more balanced, or to admire the artist's female eye candy as it were. ;)

I hope I remember this if and when I get to play the game. Thanks for the post.

(It also chimes with what I posted about men being more often portrayed as idiots and douchebags.)

Could you please link to the post in the other thread. I looked for it in the past but didn't find it. It's a large thread.

As for roleplaying, my experience is the opposite, and I alluded to that in my answer about playing women. If I want to play a character that has well defined character traits which are different than mine, then it's easier for me to play a guy, because otherwise I have to roleplay both the different traits and being a woman, which is harder to do.

I know what you mean, there's not even as much porn as I thought there would be, let alone skimpy pjs and pillow fights. At least your crate of goodies has brightened up the place, but still not much going on at the boys sleepover. Although there was mention of a transvestite stripper, and [url=http://www.gog.com/forum/general/the_guys_of_gog_giveaway_no_girls_allowed/post46]laser tag, so perhaps their sleepovers are just slow at starting :-).

Yep, the part I bolded on the first sentence seems to be about right ;-). I also agree with the second paragraph above. I think as games are still made mainly by men, then both the female and male models are targeted for men. Which is understandable, as I said in the girls giveaway, men create what they know, they make games they would like and what they think other men would like. They sometimes try to get it from a woman's point of view, but often this just turns out cliche, sexist or ridiculous. Women don't necessarily want a wimpy, over-sensitive guy, but many don't want the ape-man either.

Hmmm, a male lesbian chimp. Sure, why not :-). It would be interesting to see what kind of games a male lesbian primate likes. Perhaps there is a new poo flinging simulator I have not heard of ;-).

Thank you for taking part. I already had a good idea of your favourites, but its nice to see some of your least favourite genres as well. I must say that I am surprised to see so many guys dislike sports games, I was always under the impression that they were very popular among male gamers. I'm not surprised to see so many people on here hate F2P games.

I'm assuming that your least favourite faction of Dawn of War is the Eldar? I can't see a Dwarf fan liking those pesky future Elves. Dune 2000 (I love strategy games with real life cut-scenes, when done well) & Warcraft 2 were some of my favourites strategy games growing up. I had quite a few nice strategy games growing up, one of my all time favourite was the original Starcraft and its add-on. I have not played the newer sequels, for some reason they don't appeal to me, the story seems poor and nothing compared to the first games (for example: Kerrigan changes from a kick arse strong woman, to a weak little girl who needs big strong Raynor to come rescue her.)

Which is your favourite Total War game? I think I mentioned to you previously that I stopped at Medieval 2. Partly because of the DRM the newer games had and also because the company seems to just release buggy and broken games. It seems that anytime a games developers is taken over by a big publisher, the games suffer. Look at Westwood and EA, Blizzard and Activision, and Creative Assembly and Saga.

I have read some articles that claims that despite many guys pretending to be female players, there are differences in the language and "body language" of the character between male and female gamers. I recall someone earlier saying how female gamers would tend to stand closer together and males further apart. I suppose little things like this would be what the articles were referring to. While it's not a completely true assumption, it is quite feasible, as the attitudes between men and women are generally different.

Question for the ladies: Have you ever pretended to be a male player, especially on online multiplayers? I am curious to see if it is mainly a guy thing, or if female players also enjoy playing under the guise of a different gender.

It's a sleepover? I thought it was a lan party.

It's just an issue of statistics. Sports games may very well be popular, but so are Call of Duty games, and I'm pretty sure most GOG gamers don't like those either. (In general, FPS games sell better than sports games.) The population here (and in particular the active forum population) isn't necessarily representative of gamers in general.

Interestingly, women are now about a third of FPS players (link), which I think defies the stereotype (even though men still outnumber them 2:1).

Since in the other thread there was a discussion about anime, I thought to share this masterpiece about REAL manhood!
I found it by chance yesterday and I immediatly thought about this thread!
Let me *BUMP* it with some among the silliest 20 minutes in the history of animation...


By the way: I am not in (and when ddickisnon will read this, I will be probably doomed)!

Thanks to you as well! Edited my post because I made my nomination choice.

I've always assumed that sports games were meant to be crossover titles - games for people who aren't especially interested in computer games. So I'm not surprised that they aren't particularly popular among people who like games qua games.

I'll tag along and I'm in for the $10 game. (Yes I'm a male)

I like the questions so I'll do my best to answer them:

Q1. What are you top 3 favourite game genres and why?

#1: RPG
#2: Platformers
#3: (Point & Click) Adventures

So I've grown up with rpgs and I really loved being able to get lost into the story and the world. I play them for the story and the excellent gameplay features of rpgs make it a lot of fun, to do side activities besides following the story.
Through RPGs and my ex, I got into contact with Point & Click adventures. I thought they would be boring at first, but it's nice to puzzle and figure things out and I found a refreshment. I got tired of rpgs with weak storylines. The P&C gave that deeper story element I was missing.
Platformers have also been something I played since my childhood and it's hard to tell what I like about it. It's about a sequence of actions you need to do to advance to the next level. Trial and error and figuring out how to proceed. It's challenging and that is why I like it.

Q2. What are you top 3 worst game genres and why? (I'm interested to hear the ladies answer to this as well.)

Worst game genres?

#1 Real Time Strategy
#2 First Person Shooters
#3 Sport games

Real time strategy means: Do a lot of things at once, multitasking and be fast about it. Do the right things faster than your opponent. There is however no time to do things at your leisure. It becomes stressful. Being autistic it can get overwhelming when there are so many things I need to do at once. Being bad at multitasking and seeing everything going WAY too fast for me. The opponent will already crush me before I can defend myself/figured things out. Though I did play Command & Conquer 1 + red alert when I was very young and enjoyed it. Trying that out recently, I sucked out so hard.

First Person shooters: Some stuff from RTS applies here as well. I'm left handed and use the mouse with the right arm. I know when I try to use MS Paint, I can't draw for shit and I am inaccurate. Also I don't like unexpected things. I also feel that FPS lacks severely in a satisfying story. It's always the same formula. Pick up gun, shoot baddies, win the game. Now there is one FPS I liked. Serious Sam 1 and 2. I didn't care about anything at all and when playing coop, I just rushed in and blew myself up with a rocket launcher... I died, but the enemy was dead too. Respawn and continue. It's amusing. I think there are WAY too many first person shooters coming out. A quick cash grab. Copy paste the game, change some stuff around and slap a sequel number on it and it sells...

Sport games: Just cause i don't have any affinity with this at all. I do like to watch football on tv some times, but could care less about about any other sports. So why would I want to play a game about sports that I don't like? I owned one football game. "This is Football". It was hilarious and I must say the gameplay elements are pretty cool. However, it doesn't interest me that much.

Q3. If you enjoy playing as a woman in games, what is it about playing as a woman that appeals to you?

I truly enjoy playing as a woman in games. That is a very good question. For some reason I always pick a woman as my character in games if I have a choice. I think it has several reasons:

1. It's nice looking at a beautiful woman. (I think you women like to see a pretty man as well in a game)
2. I like to roleplay and even though I'm born as a male and I feel myself like a male. I don't see myself as a stereotypical man. I actually have quite a lot of feminine sides to me. So it's also a way to 'feel as a woman'. Which is ridiculous of course, but I can roleplay as a woman and be in that game world. So basically I am a woman in games, and if I am a woman in the game, well, what does it matter what gender I have outside the game? It's a fictional world and if you can play as a woman, I like to be a woman in there.

And no, I don't pick a woman in mmo's just to get things from guys. Though it is VERY apparant that you do get a LOT more attention. But that's part of the fun. I like to be social on online games and talk to all kinds of people. Sometimes I even talk for hours without actually playing the game. Just chatting to another player.

3. I like to see a woman be a badass. I find it really cool to see women kick ass in a game. Cause in society there's always that unfair layer of women getting treated more unfair/seen as a weaker gender, I like to see a strong woman.

I don't think I can find more reasons why I like to play as a woman than the reasons I gave above. Maybe there's this reason for some as well: Perhaps being so straight and like women so much you pick a female character? Instead of choosing the gender you identify yourself with, you pick your sexual preference?

One nice turning of the tables. Well played, sir ;-) And not less invalid than my musings.

That's why I mentioned "kitchen psychology" and "jumping to conclusions" in my original post.