Video Game Women You Wouldn’t Fuck With

There’s a funny phenomenon I’ve mentioned before on this blog: finding some elusive online thing by simply blogging about how you can’t locate it yourself and then letting the answer come to you. This was the case with a previous post here, in which I said it seemed strange that no comprehensive, chronologically organized list of video games that have female heroes seemed to exist. The very first comment turned up that very list, along with suggestions for games that like The Krion Conquest featured female characters on the box art, looking tough and imposing in a way that we didn’t see back in the day and still don’t often enough see today.

Here’s what we got. Oh holy lord, how the represent a time that came and went. Like Athena here.

The title character looks full-on godly, which is appropriate, given the game. What you see here is a very American take on the same SNK character that eventually became the King of Fighters regular Athena Asamiya, who is more based on the Psycho Solider version of the character than the goddess-y one seen here. But the Psycho Soldier version gets a shout-out as well for looking rather badass.

She looks very Deanna Troi, but with Chun-Li’s thighs, which is a far cry better than how she looked in the Bob Wakelin art for the original title.

Yeah, the character skews a lot more cheesecake-y over in Japan, though to me the official art for her there reads as more cute than sexy. I’m not sure which is worse. Of note, aside from Athena’s bared skin? The minotaur’s phallic midriff, which Wakelin himself admits is a little weird.

The original Phantasy Star doesn’t disappoint.

The heroine, Alisa, is clearly looking to cause some serious trouble. Please note how her breastplate doesn’t just serve as a boob-enhancing armor Wonderbra, especially in comparison to the Dolph Lundgren-looking lummox on her left. His breasts? Nuts. Maybe they swapped armor. Bonus points for the She-Ra-worthy kitty car familiar. I’m less psyched on the back-of-the-box art...

But I suppose even non-stereotyped female video game characters need sleep. In fancy bedrooms. Overlooking surreal landscapes.

Alisa looks even tougher in the American box art. Certainly more action-ready.

And her hunky friend with the armor boobs looks even more like something from the Folsom Street Fair. So there’s that.

Sega in 1985 released Ninja Princess, whose heroine was changed to a male for the Master System re-release. The original Japanese box art, however, is all about her.

Sure, ninja-hime is a poorly aimed high-kick away from exposing her birth canal, but importantly she’s not doing that quite yet, at least from the angle provided. And while she looks tough, I like that Sega didn’t shy away from the fact that the main character was female, at least in this version. For context’s sake, 1985 was also the year in which Super Mario Bros. was released, and I’d imagine that most people who remember video games back then wouldn’t think of many home console games that starred female characters but weren’t overtly girly in their presentation of them. Here, the main character’s gender seems incidental to everything else about the game.

Similarly, there is Namco’s valkyrie heroine — from a Japan-only NES title, Adventure of the Valkyrie — also sports a hint of leg and a whole lot of plausible armor. I support.

The sequel shows more of the valkyrie but preserves the dignity. I wonder if she’s the Scandanavian Kid Icarus?

Spacehunter never made it to the states, but I wish it had — in spite of heroine Al Tiana’s pink leotard and because of her weirdly expressionless face. At least she’s not grinning for no reason. After all, there’s much spacehunting to be done.

Not to be confused with Athena from Psycho Soldier, there’s also the Sega title Psychic World, which stars the psychic-enabled Lucia, who looks like all manner of space badass in the art for the Master System release.

The Game Gear release for the title puts Lucia in a more anime style, and that apparently necessitates the birth canal possibility, but she still looks like the superhero the game wants her to be.

Check out Anna Schwinn on the box art for the Mega Drive title Arrow Flash, looking every bit the Samus Aran-type that Sega would have wanted her to be. What’s especially interesting is how the North American box art compares with the Japanese counterpart...

The big difference here being that the American box art was telling you, “Hey, check out this video game about some space chick and her GIANT FUCKING ROBOT,” while the Japanese box art is just saying, “Ooh, look! A space girl!” In the latter, there’s really not anything more you can take away aside from the fact that the lead character is female, and while the colors and pose are identical for the two depictions of Anna, she looks a hell of a lot tougher in the American version.

And finally, Ghost Lion...

I know I titled this post “Video Game Women You Wouldn’t Fuck With,” and I stand behind that even though in this instance I’d guess you wouldn’t want to fuck with this character because she looks annoying as hell. Just looking at our heroine here, I’d guess this hit shelves around 1985. Nope. Ghost Lion didn’t arrive in the U.S. until 1992, and that makes everything about this all the more baffling. It’s the video game equivalent of a Robin Sparkles video. Yeah, maybe the heroine, Maria, looks like a mallrat version of Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, if she were to be played by Tina Yothers instead of Tanya Roberts and also had been Photoshopped into the promotional materials because she refused to be photographed for weird personal reasons. (It does look like her face was pasted in, right?) But all that awfulness aside, you have to hand it to Kemco for not dressing Maria in pink, not showing off her body, and not giving her a tiara. And even if they had, I still feel like anyone’s take-away looking at the box art now would be “Wow, that is not a current look. Is the game about getting her to a theme party?”

The biggest difference between the American and Japanese versions, I suppose, would be that the Japanese version of Maria looks a lot pinker, though not offensively so. Also, the lion looks a lot cooler here.

This? Appealingly dated. The Lisa Frank nightmare above it? A great example of how being very of-the-moment, aesthetically speaking, can make you horrendously, laughably dated shortly thereafter.

It wasn’t all sensible shoes and armor that actually works, however. In looking through these old titles, I saw a lot of butts, boobs and bows. I think maybe next time I’ll round them up. Also, I’m sure I missed some great examples of women in early video game box art. Did I? Tell me. I can include them in future posts.

Gender and video games, previously:

• The feminist leanings of Metroid and Kid Icarus
• Another less-celebrated female video game lead: Alice from Balloon Kid
• The travesty that is Dishaster
• Ladybug, the first-ever video game to feature a female protagonist
• Mega Man and the one female Robot Master

Ax Is Not Equal to Battler: What’s the Deal With the Equals Signs in Golden Axe?

A personal challenge for my geekish tendencies: In this post, I will relate an obscure punctuational phenomenon to video games and a luxury hotel. Go!

So back when I was a kid, a staple of pizza party birthdays was Golden Axe, a swords-and-sorcery beat-em-up released by Sega in 1989. (You know which one I’m talking about, people my age. This is the game where you would beat up little gremlins to get magic potions and where you could ride those weird animals with chicken beaks and whiplike tails. Ah, memories.) As with all arcade games, Golden Axe had an “attract mode” that gave the machine something to do when no one was playing. In addition to the typical “Winners Don’t Use Drugs” card, this particular game’s attract mode flashed pictures of the three playable characters and the big bad.

Visual aids, courtesy of Hardcore Gaming 101:





See those weird equals signs between the characters’ first and last names? (Or, rather, what a Japanese person thought should pass for appropriate, Western-sounding first and last names? Though I must admit that I wish my name were Gilius Thunderhead.) What’s the deal? Well, this message thread — a collection of little-known video game facts that I previously linked to sometime back — points out that the symbols are actually double hyphens, a fairly rare punctuation mark used in the following instances:

• When a nonstylized hyphen simply looks too boring, because you’re fancy like that.
• On a related note, it’s officially a double hyphen that separates the two parts of the name Waldorf=Astoria.
• In Merriam-Webster dictionaries, a word that normally would be hyphenated but that is split between two lines gets a double hyphen in order to demonstrate that the word’s internal punctuation should remain at all times, not just when it spans the end of a line.
• And, finally, in certain contexts, a double hyphen separates first and last names. When writing in katakana characters, an em dash or a regular hyphen normally does this job. However, if this symbol could be mistaken for a prolonged sound mark (ー), the double hyphen does the job. It also sometimes gets to separate multiple foreign names. The example Wikipedia gives for this is the Russel-Einstein Manifesto, which in katakana would look like a bunch of symbols most of you can’t read with what looks like an equals sign in the middle.

So there you go. Though the Japanese usages don’t quite seem to fit the instance seen in Golden Axe, it seems likely that the double hyphens there resulted simply from a designer’s effort to separate first names from last names, Giliuses from Thunderheads. Next time you’re staying at the Waldorf, playing Golden Axe with a bunch of 1990s-era children, or simply struck with the realization that your hyphens look to ordinary, you have options.

A video game-specific follow-up: Those chicken things? With the saddles and the whiptails?


They have a species name, I’ve learned: bizzarians. Or bizarrians, depending on who is typing.

And remember:

… But they do spend all day plunking quarters into a arcade machine slicked over with pizza grease. Thank you, William Sessions.

Sega’s Less-Than-Groovy Heart

Another from that “cloudbush” thread — and one that gets to reference “Groove Is in the Heart,” so it’s inherently extra special. You remember the song, of course.

Apparently sometime after this song by Deee-Lite hit it big, the singer, Lady Miss Kier got word of the existence of Space Channel 5, a music-based video game released by Sega in 1999. Kier concluded the game’s mascot, Ulala, bore more than a passing resemblance to her own stage persona — specifically by being a dancing girl sporting knee-high boots, a short skirt, a pink ponytail — and sued Sega. There is a similarity, I have to admit.


And according to Kier, Sega offered $16,000 to use her likeness in the game. When she declined, Sega used it anyway. Sega maintains that Ulala was different enough that they could legally use the character. Ultimately, a judge ruled in Sega’s favor and Kier was forced to pay the video game company $608,000 in legal fees, which surely took a big chunk out of any money Kier would have made with the success of “Grove Is in the Heart,” the band’s only real hit. (I mean, they had a cover of “You Sexy Thing” on the Dumb & Dumber soundtrack, but how many other songs by Deee-Lite have you ever heard?) And so ends the strange and acrimonious intersection of these two pop culture elements that I wouldn’t have imagined had a shared history.

That is, except for an even more curious epilogue: “Groove Is in the Heart” is featured in the 2008 Wii game Samba de Amigo — another Sega-produced music-based game — and notably the song appears in a stage that also features a cameo by Ulala. And that’s either an ironic little coincidence or a very purposeful fuck-you from the video game giant and to Kier.

Less-than-groovy indeed.

It’s a Secret to Everybody, Part Three: Name Origins for Sonic the Hedgehog

(This is a reposting of just one section of my rather lengthy “It’s a Secret to Everybody” post on video game etymologies. Click the link to see the whole shebang. Links to other sections are at the bottom of this post.)

There’s not all that much to say about Sonic the Hedgehog himself, but his arch-nemesis is a bit more complicated. Much in the manner that Peach was once Toadstool in the U.S. but was always Peach in Japan, the Sonic villain most of us grew up with no longer goes by the name Doctor Robotnik all the time. He is now sometimes Eggman, though he always had that name in Japan.

robotnik then, eggman now, and the roosevelt who inspired it all

Robotnik happens to mean worker in Polish. Robotnik was even the name of the newspaper of the Polish Socialist Party. Is Sonic, then, crusading against socialism? Probably not. Robotnik comes from the same origins as the word robot, and the Sonic villain should be known for robot creation if nothing else. Today, Robotnik goes by the far less cool name Doctor Eggman, in apparent reference to his rotund physique. By the way, on the subject of the character’s appearance, his looks — including his trademark mustache — were inspired by those of Teddy Roosevelt.

A commenter calling himself Generic pointed out that even later games seem to retain Robotnik as the character’s family name, even in Japan. For example, Sonic Adventure 2 and Shadow the Hedgehog both feature a kindlier member of the family, Maria Robotnik.

An anonymous commenter had a particularly intricate theory about why Sega changed the character’s name in the U.S. Here’s how he put it, though I should note that I shortened some of his sentences and changed some formatting.

The reason why his name was changed to Dr. Ivo Robotnik when introduced to the English-speaking world was because Sega feared a lawsuit, more than likely due to the estate of John Lennon concerning the Eggman title. Actually, one of the new names chosen for the portly scientist was the nonsensical Dr. Badvibes....

Going with Ivo Robotnik in itself could be a joke on John Lennon. Robotnik translated from its Czech roots [could also be rendered] as “slave worker.” Ivo, the first name, in itself is shortened from Ivor, which is a variation on the name Ivan that has roots in the Russian/Scandinavian language. Ivan to boot is the Russian/Scandinavian version of John. But, if you remember, John [Lennon] was The Eggman [in the Yellow Submarine song “I Am the Eggman.” Translated from the Slavic meaning, Ivo Robotnik could mean “John the Slave Worker” — or as the [John Lennon solo song] “John the Working Class Hero.”

The comment concludes with the note that in the Sonic the Hedgehog Saturday morning cartoon, Robotnik was given the first name Julian, which happens to be the name of John Lennon’s first son. In all, it’s very interesting. It’s also a stretch, though perhaps only as much as other theories that I thought up myself. I’m not sure if the Eggman moniker would have been enough to elicit a lawsuit from the Lennon estate.

Sonic’s sidekick Tails has two names, as well — the one everyone knows and his “real” name, Miles Prower. It might seem like a useless footnote, but it brings the added benefit of being a pun on the phrase miles per hour. (Ha.) It should probably be noted that joke would make a lot more sense if Tails was known for running quickly instead of flitting about with his helicopter tail.

Similar issues exist for the Sonic series damsel, Amy Rose. She debuted in Sonic CD, whose English language version named her Rosy the Rascal. The name similar to that of Rosie the Riveter, which would make sense if the game’s translators wanted to give the character a sense of empowerment.

rascal, princess modern-day hammer-swinger

To complicate matters further, the English instruction manuals for certain releases of Sonic CD also referred to the character as Princess Sally, a different love interest for Sonic popularized in the non-cannon comics and cartoons. (For the record, Sally and other characters from the comics did appear in one actually game, Sonic Spinball.) Regardless, the character soon after became known in English-speaking markets as she had always been known in Japan and is known today: Amy Rose.

Commenter castaspella noted one bit of interesting information regarding this character. It’s not especially name-related but seemed worth noting anyhow: Amy or a character a lot like her was at one point planned to be Sonic’s sister. Sega had initially planned on reworking the RPG-tinged platforming title Popful Mail into a game called Sister Sonic, replacing the original characters with this prototype distaff hedgehog. Sister Sonic never came to pass, however, and eventually Popful Mail made it to the U.S. without being so drastically altered.

The majority of Sonic characters aren’t of much use for this article, as their names are straightforward. (Knuckles the Echidna, for example, is an echidna who has pointy knuckles. Not much to work with there.) There are, however, two characters that time has essentially forgotten, Ray the Flying Squirrel and Mighty the Armadillo, that I think deserve a mention. Both debuted in an arcade game, SegaSonic the Hedgehog, that allowed players to control Sonic, Ray and Mighty with a trackball and a single jump button. The three moved identically.

left to right: flight, speed, and power

Despite what their names might imply, Ray could not fly and Mighty was not especially powerful. Lame, I know. And I think Sega thought so too, as Ray never appeared again and Mighty appeared only once more. However, latter-day Sonic games such as Sonic Heroes frequently feature characters grouped into threes — one that can move fast, one that can fly, and one especially that is strong. If you think about it, these three attributes are reflected in the names of the leads in SegaSonic the Hedgehog. In the sense of light, a ray is an airborne thing, while the associations with the word mighty are obvious. In this sense, SegaSonic the Hedgehog’s take on the three-man team could be seen as a precursor to what appeared in later games.

Two other quick ones: A few Sonic games feature a ninja chameleon named Espio, and I only recently realized that the reference to the word espionage makes the name the most appropriate one ever for a ninja chameleon.

Sega jumped on the fighting game craze in 1996 with Sonic the Fighters, which had the various Sonic characters kicking the crap out of each other for no apparent reason. The cast included a character whose name bucks the pattern of “name + the + animal species” — a bomb-tossing duck saddled with the baffler Bean the Dynamite.

explosive waterfowl

The odd name references the lesser known Sega title Dynamite Dux, which starred ducks named Bin and Pin who also specialized in explosive devices.

The whole “It’s a Secret to Everybody” series:

• Part One: Legend of Zelda
• Part Two: Mario, Donkey Kong and Wario
• Part Four: Street Fighter and other Capcom titles
  
• Part Five: Final Fantasy
• Part Six: Final Fantasy IV and Dante’s Inferno
  
• Part Seven: Metroid and Kid Icarus
  
• Part Eight: Castlevania
• Part Nine: Earthbound/Mother
• Part Ten: Chrono Trigger
• Part Eleven: Secret of Mana/Seiken Densetsu
• Part Twelve: Mega Man
• Part Thirteen: Miscellaneous Nintendo titles (Kirby, Pikmin, Pokemon, Animal Crossing, Duck Hunt, Clu Clu Land)
• Part Fourteen: Odds and Ends (Guilty Gear, Ogre Battle, Samurai Shodown, Pac-Man, Mappy, Adventure Island)
• Part Fifteen: The Worst Names in Video Games
• And the entire original post

Who's Laughing Now, Alex Kidd?

I recently stumbled upon a note that early versions of the Sega Master System title Alex Kidd in Shinobi World featured a first-level boss named Mari-Oh. Intended to be a parody of Nintendo's Mario, much as Shinobi World is a parody of the popular Sega series Shinoboi, this boss was renamed "Kabuto" for the final release. However, the character retained some of Mario's qualities, namely fighting with fireballs and shrinking after taking damage.

Here are the only images of Mari-Oh I could find.





More than a passing resemblance, I think — especially to Mario's sprite in Super Mario Bros. 3.