Mouse Smash

JC Lau's blog about geekery, gender and other rants

Monthly Archives: February 2015


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Destiny Troll tells Victims to “Suck it up”

cuckoo Last week, a video went viral about a young Destiny player who used the Share Play feature on his PS4, and had two high-leveled characters and an exotic weapon deleted by a stranger when he stepped away for a few minutes. The victim was 11-year-old Henry, who went by the handle CuckooKnight.

Much vitriol was leveled at KirmitTHEfrog, the account that deleted the characters, including someone threatening to find and burn down his house, or another person telling him that they “wished he got cancer and died”.

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WTF of the day: Soulcalibur: Lost Swords hires Hentai Artist for Female Character Costumes (NSFW)

By now, it’s not news that the game industry is rife with accusations of sexism, misogyny and objectification of women.

Given the publicity that the industry’s received in the past year about its horrendous sexism problem, it’s baffling that Bandai Namco Games has collaborated with hentai artist Yamatogawa to design new costumes for characters in their free-to-play PS3 game Soulcalibur: Lost Swords.

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Firefly Online Announces Lead Voice Actors

I’ve blogged about Firefly Online before, but here’s an update of meijianguo proportions.

Taylor wheaton

On Wednesday February 23, Firefly Online announced that Wil Wheaton will be the male voice lead for the upcoming game, a multiplayer strategic RPG set in Joss Whedon’s TV show universe.

Today, they announced (in an exclusive with the Mary Sue) that the female lead will be Courtenay Taylor. Taylor is no stranger to voice acting in video games, with credits in games such as Evolve, Mass Effect, Starcraft II, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and Dragon Age: Origins.

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Review: Emoji Stars

IMG_1802I should start with a caveat: I’m not really a fan of real-time social games. Being designed for quick turns between players, they are usually straightforward, with little content to them.

That’s why I find it puzzling that I’m still playing Emoji Stars after two weeks. The goal of the game is to describe a song to a teammate using only emoticons. Your teammate guesses your song’s title, and then sends you a new song to guess. All the controls are by touch, although sometimes you might have to drag letters into the right order to spell out the song title.

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Destiny gives us a Lesson on Stranger Danger

You know how there’s that saying about if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is? And you know how your parents probably warned you about strangers offering you things?

A young Destiny user learned this lesson the hard way when he gave control of his game to a stranger, who promptly deleted his two highest-leveled characters, as well as dismantling an exotic weapon.

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Marvel reveals an all-female A-Force, and why it’s important

Aforce

Cover Art for A-Force

This morning, Marvel announced a new monthly series of comics to be released in May. Written by G. Willow Wilson and Marguerite K. Bennett, and with artwork from Jorge Molina, the “A-Force” will star the likes of She-Hulk, Dazzler (those skates!!) and Nico Minoru from Runaways.

The kicker? It’s an ALL-FEMALE TEAM.

“We’ve purposefully assembled a team composed of very different characters — from disparate parts of the Marvel U, with very different power sets, identities and ideologies,” Wilson said in a statement. “They’ll all have to come together to answer some big questions: what would you sacrifice to succeed? What is being a hero worth?”

And while those are all very interesting philosophical questions for superheroines to ask, there’s more on that front. The A-Force will also introduce Singularity, a cosmically charged brand new super hero to the universe. However, Singularity isn’t going to be your run-of-the-mill Amazonian heroine. Continue reading →