I honestly don't expect any new Poe IP to drop...

;)

Yes. Let's create a snappy title to describe a resurgence of a particular syle of a specific genre, but use the wrong generational name. Granted, Gen X shooter doesn't exactly roll off of the tongue, but it's not that hard to find something that rhymes and basically fits the theme, such as Gen X Reflex. And the term "Gen X" itself sounds like marketing commitee speak. I would prefer something both accurate and descriptive such as "Baby Boomer Babies". Which could then be shortened for ease of use to "Three Bs".

They do put it in brackets, eg, Donkey Kong (1994) which is what the publishers should have done all along. It makes life a lot easier for everyone when searching for mods / tweaks / patches / support for an older version of two games over a decade apart with identical name.

I dunno if it is so much rarer to have female protags nowadays, esp. in modern games, as one would be led to believe. I see games released with female mc (or option to play as one) regularly at least, esp. within the indie scene. The ratio is different for older/classics games though for sure, no argument there. I just find the tag funny, it doesn't really have any value to me personally and feels like it is there just to try and sell itself for a fact of having the female mc, as a form of cheap marketing of sorts. I wonder if there are people who actively seek or avoid playing games with a particular gender mc. Seems silly to me, but whatever. Different strokes for different folks I guess.

Don't have any detailed statistics or reports, but on Steam alone there is 7500 games with "Female protagonist" tag, so doesn't seem as such a niche. I reckon that the other games have either male protagonist only, both m/f or it's redundant as you don't play as mankind or it's irrelevant for some genres. Anyway, I wonder if the ratio comes close to 1:1 if we would ever see an end of such gender tags, or even see the male protag tag at some point. I know i would have a good laugh if we ever come the full circle.

Btw one of the earliest games I clearly remember playing as a kid with female protag was Athena. Loved it back then, though I didn't even pay attention to that mc is a girlie (arguably, it was just a matter of a couple pixels back then). However I remember seeing a cool poster of her, though I doubt it was the driving force for me to play the game. Today pretty much any new game contains a waifu of some sort though.

Is that the Athena that's in the SNK collection here?

Also, I'd prefer female protagonists who stand on their own rather than waifus.

Yeah Athena originally by SNK for arcades, although I did play the port back then.

Overpopulation of waifus might be just another cheap marketing... seems it counts as female protag tag, interestingly enough. There are also waifus who are highly capable, e.g. Juliet Starling from lollipop chainsaw. One of my faves for sure!

Just remembered another one:

savescumming: The problem is that this term seems to reinforce the idea that saving is somehow bad, which can encourage the bad habit of some players that refuse to save, and then complain about losing hours of gameplay. (This bad habit could carry over into other applications, resulting in people losing hours of work because they forgot to save and something bad happened.)

Speaking of female protagonists, I'd like to see more cases of default female protagonists. That is, games where there's a choice, but the default choice is female. For games with premade characters, Ys Origin (Yunica is default, I believe), SaGa Frontier (Emelia I believe is default), and I believe Unlimited SaGa (Laura default, but I haven't played it), though I note that all of these games are of the sort that the plot changes completely based on who you are playing as.

I'm not aware of any game that has full character creation, but has female being the default choice for the player character's gender. (I also can't think of any game with female-only character creation, even though games with male-only character creation exist.)

Edit: Actually, it occurred to me that, in Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, the default portrait is female.

"Mob" is short for mobile.

https://mud.fandom.com/wiki/Mobile

Agreed that savescumming in the perjotative sense is harmful, I like to think it helps to own it though and refer to yourself as savescumming even when you're just being cautious.