There has been a lot of hubbub here and there on the net when it comes to nerds who also happen to be attractive females, and even models. As I’ve been told that I count as one of these, I felt like I needed to say my piece. True, I have written on similar topics in the past, but I think there’s a message that bears repeating: you don’t have to be what other people think you should be.

Many people are so quick to lump others into easy to manage categories. That person is a jock, that one’s a diva, over there is a goth. While it may make it easy to sort things in your mind, I believe everyone is more than a singular, stereotyped label. This is not to say that labels are a bad thing. I do consider myself a nerd, but that’s not all that I am, either. Labels sometimes help us to find and communicate with those that are like minded. As has been noted in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, once the base requirements for survival have been met, they are immediately followed by an instinct to seek out a group and gain a level of acceptance amongst your peers. This is how society survives and these are the connective tissues that keep us together and help us build meaningful relationships.

While this system of categorizing can be helpful, it also brings with it a set of problems. With labels comes stereotyping and often a narrow sense of what these titles translate to. I know a lot of people who fit into categories thought to be paradoxical, including the marriage of the categories “nerd” and “attractive female”. Nerds, by many, are still perceived as socially awkward, and often unattractive men that frequently take up residence in their mother’s basement. For a while, this may have been a pretty apt description, but as with all things, it has evolved. Nerds are no longer regulated to the outskirts of society. In fact, it seems that nowadays it’s hip to be square.

However, there is still a lack of parity between nerds when they happen to be men, versus when they happen to be women. There is this perception that women either can’t be nerds or, if they are, they are never going to be on the same level as men. Now, if you’re an attractive female and a nerd, well, that seems highly improbable to people. If they do decide you might be as nerdy as you claim, there is often a testing phase that comes next. I experienced this first hand at an event a week or so ago. I was with a group of nerdy women who also model, and we were treated to a barrage of questions intended to make us prove our “geek cred”. While a part of me found it amusing, another part found it insulting that we couldn’t be taken at our word. (Yes, I am aware some of this also occurs on the male side of things, but in my personal experience, it is far less severe.)

Sadly, this sort of trouble comes not only from the outside, but within. There is a strange tendency for people that identify with any sort of group to claim that many outsiders are “posers”. There’s a sense of exclusivity when you are part of what appears to be a minority. The issue is that until they start being more inclusive, nothing is going to change. The in-fighting only serves to schism things further. I’ve seen a lot of girl versus girl hating, and it needs to stop.

There is also the argument that you shouldn’t need to prove anything, or a self-proclamation of geekhood is a call for your legitimacy to be questioned. While, no, you don’t NEED to prove anything, there are benefits to doing so. For example, until the media realizes there are more women wanting shows like “Game of Thrones” or films like “Lord of the RIngs”, they’re going to continue to cater to male audiences first and foremost. Same goes for video games, comics, merchandising, etc. If we don’t have a voice, then these things will never change.

There is also the discussion of why can’t we all just be nerds/geeks without the male or female designation. That goes back to my last point. I’d love for everyone to live under one heading, but geeks and nerds are not a one size fits all group. I can think of many occasions where I would have gladly bought shirts for a film only to find that there was nothing being produced in a more breast conscious fashion. There have been games where I would have preferred some more gender-balanced options. There is a legitimate reason for all of the outcry from geek girls on the web.

Stereotypes are based on sweeping generalizations of one group or another, and there is usually some basis in truth. They are often deeply ingrained in the social consciousness, and they are not easy to change. However, I believe that if we work to change the perceptions and keep the conversations going, that we can be there to witness the shift.

To all of my fellow nerd/geek girls: keep talking and discussing and breaking out of the box to which you have been assigned. Only together will we see any real change.

*Please note that I use the words nerd and geek as synonyms. I know that not everyone agrees that they are the same, but to my mind they are so close as to be relatively interchangeable.

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…aka Why You Shouldn’t Spend Sixty Bucks On Fable III

Let me go ahead and say that this will NOT be a spoiler-free review. If you don’t want spoilers, turn back now. You’ve been warned.

After playing Fable II and enjoying it thoroughly, I was more than willing to lay down sixty bucks for Fable III. I’d heard some shaky things about it, but I doubted it could really be that bad. How wrong I was.

I happily took my purchased game home and when the time finally came to start it, I cheerfully put the disc in the XBox and booted it up. It took maybe all of twenty minutes for the luster of it to wear off. I don’t know how they did it, but they managed to take the things that worked in Fable II and break them.

The simply explanation of the plot of the game is that you are a prince or princess and your brother is in charge of the kingdom and is messing it up royally. (Pun intended.) You end up having to flee the castle and go to work on building a revolution to take your kingdom back. You do and then find out there’s actually an even bigger threat and defeating it is the real goal of the game. The more in depth explanation of the game is about the same. There’s really not a lot to it.

Overall, the game is pretty dull. Even the characters are pretty bland. You waste a lot of time on what generally seem like pointless tasks that lack much creativity. I also found a few glitches that kept me from finishing (and even starting) a couple of the quests. The main point of the game is to run around your kingdom, trying to gain support and making promises to various groups in return for their promise to fight in the revolution. Each task that you complete earns you Guild Seals which unlock certain items on the Road to Rule. I’ll elaborate…

The Road to Rule is what was put in place in Fable III to help explain your progress and allow you to unlock more powerful spells, weapon abilities and so forth. The creepy blind woman from Fable II is back and appears on the Road to Rule as some kind of strange spirit guide. There are a few problems with the Road to Rule. The first is that you have to play a lot of side quests to earn enough seals to unlock the treasure chests containing various skills, so you have to pick and choose carefully or do just about every quest in the game. However, a lot of those chests are for things that I feel your character should be able to do from the beginning. Did we really need to unlock the ability to buy houses, to buy businesses, to have other characters fall in love with you, to earn additional character expressions, to go up levels in the mini games and dye your clothes? Are you saying my character is too stupid to be able to fall in love without wasting seals for them to learn how? Or how hard is it to go and buy a house? Did I actually unlock some kind of medieval home buyers guide?

The combat in the game is pretty easy. You have three focuses you can work with: melee, ranged and magic. Depending on which you focus on more, your character’s physical appearance will change. Melee combat makes you more muscled, ranged makes you taller and magic makes you all glowy. Attacking is really basic and there aren’t really any special moves. The best part about training your character up in any of the three options is that with a focus in melee or ranged weapons, your weapons actually evolve to look more bad ass. With magic, you are able to do a thing called spell-weaving which actually lets you combine two different magic spells together. For example: fire and electricity or ice and magic daggers.

Individual enemies in the game are pretty simple to beat, but it’s easy to get swarmed by bad guys and have your ass handed to you. This wouldn’t be so bad except that the only times I ever got knocked out were because of random swarms of baddies and not the final boss fight. How does that work? I also got tired of the non-randomized enemy encounters that seemed to happen every five feet. It wasn’t exciting, it was annoying.

Instead of tweaking the menu system from Fable II that so many complained about, they removed it entirely. This removed easy access to your inventory, stats, saving, etc. Instead they decided to give you a sanctuary that you could return to any time by pressing the “start” button. Even once you arrived there, you had to go into a separate room for you weapons, clothing/hair/makeup and money. When you access a side panel for your character’s stats, you receive a watered down status. There are no fun stats like how many chickens you’ve kicked, bad guys you’ve killed, STDs you’ve received (I’m not making this up), etc. Instead, you will see those randomly appear on your loading screens. The main room also includes a map which allows you to check in on the status of property and quests and then to teleport to different locations.

One of the other rooms in your sanctuary is basically the XBox Live room. You can locate other players and buy in-game items with your Microsoft points. That’s all very well and good, but you are constantly reminded of it when you teleport back and your butler recommends checking out the shop. I get it, you want to sell me stuff. Shut the hell up already! It was like listening to a bloody commercial on repeat. Wait, that’s exactly what it was. Infinite infomercial loop.

While it may seem nice to be able to save your game at any point by traveling to the sanctuary, it’s really not that necessary. The game auto-saves a lot, but that’s also part of the problem. If you screw up, there is no going back. Maybe the point was that the game makers wanted you to have to live with your decisions, but I found it ultimately frustrating. It also means that to see an alternate outcome to something, you’d have to start a whole new game.

Also located in your sanctuary is an area for gifts you’ve received from people in the kingdom. No more finding out what they gave you when you receive them. No, you have to go back to the sanctuary to open them.

On the subject of gifts from towns people, you can no longer win over crowds with your charm. You have to approach NPCs ONE BY ONE, waste a lot of time doing things like heroic poses or whistling to win them over and then they send you on an errand to win them over completely. (Winning them over completely is a crucial step to starting a relationship should you want to have an in-game romance.) The errands get dull and repetitive for not much return.

Starting a family in Fable III is fairly consistent with how it is in Fable II. (Even though my fair skinned child changed racial backgrounds for no apparent reason at one point.) However, there is one kink. Your children will ask you for presents, but unlike Fable II where you could go to most any shop and get a lot of similar items, stalls and stores only carry two to five items or so. So you either have to find the right stall carrying the right item or find it out in the world. One of my children got all upset because I couldn’t find the porcelain doll they asked for anywhere. It was like trying to find the hot Christmas item for kids on Christmas Eve.

So, let’s link this in to the problem with shops. It is incredibly hard to find what you want half of the time. There are items that are exclusive to each town and, as noted before, each shop has a stupidly limited amount of goods. Are you really telling me the guy at the gift vending stall only carries two things? Really?

In Fable III, they bring the money-earning mini games back. The available jobs are blacksmithing, lute playing and pie making. To play, you have to hit a sequence of buttons on your controller in time with the screen (sort of like Guitar Hero or Rock Band). As you play each section of any given mini game, your gold multiplier goes up (the amount you earn per successful sequence). The problem is that I kept running into lag on my system and it would screw me up around the sixth or seventh level multiplier. It also didn’t help that the NPCs were stupid and would walk right through my character while playing the games which ended up being distracting.

So, I’ve covered a lot of what I didn’t like about the game. What about the things I did like? Well, they were few and far between. There were a couple of quests that were fun (one is particularly entertaining if you’re a D&D player). There was a lot of quirky humour throughout, including some really awesome posters that are displayed in the cities. The game does seem to pick up a little bit in the second half, but it’s too little too late. What parts I did enjoy were pretty much washed away by the major problem with the game: it sets you up to fail.

As with the last two games in the Fable series, you are allowed to be a moral and upright character, a conniving villain or something in between. This game makes it exceptionally hard to start out playing an evil character. The whole point is that you’re supposed to gain support from various factions to aid your cause. How can you do that if you just piss them off all the time? I don’t know, maybe it doesn’t change things much to be evil, but with the auto-save system, it’s hard to give it a try and back up if necessary.

Here’s where things get screwed up. If you decide to play a moral character, the ending will screw you over. What seems like the goal of the game (winning back your kingdom and being crowned ruler) is only a part of the final story. It turns out there is an evil darkness heading your way and you need to amass enough wealth to properly afford protection for your citizens and you only have one year to do it in. As ruler, you have to make decisions that will eat into your money pile or will help build it. Keeping the promises you made along the way always eats into the funds, but choosing the more corrupt options will help you build it. So, if you’re playing a moral character you have to choose between most of the population of Albion dying or deciding to become a dick. Making unpopular decisions does more than upset your people, it also ruins your kingdom. Things like using one area as a place to dump sewage and draining a lake to mine for precious materials. Out of all of the decisions you have to make, only two or three (of maybe twelve to fifteen or so) are moral and earn you money.

The year you are allotted to try to build up your treasury counts down unevenly. You start with 365 days and once you complete the tasks for one day, you’re knocked down to 320-some days and so on. There is no knowing when you’re finally going to run out of time. This caught me off guard and prevented me from transferring personal wealth to the kingdom’s treasury. Because of this, the majority of my citizens died. After a ridiculously easy boss fight where I simply spammed the magic button, I came back to find my castle strewn with dead bodies. By doing the right thing I doomed most of Albion’s citizens to death. What kind of ending is that? If you play an asshole, then you save more people? Is it like Dark Helmet says in “Spaceballs” that “evil will always triumph because good is dumb”? I can’t recall ever being so dissatisfied with the ending of a game before.

Fable III feels unfinished, forced and unoriginal. It’s a short game, and it pales in comparison to Fable II. Sequel games should get better, not worse.

Save your money. Go by Cataclysm or, if you’re looking for another fantasy game on a PS3 or 360, get Dragon Age. I guarantee either of those options will be better than the fail that was Fable III.

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You can read my new Dragon Age: Origins review via my guest post at ThinkLeet.com:

Behold! Dragon Age: Origins

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My time lately hasn’t allowed for much in the way of video games, but I finally got around to starting a campaign in Mass Effect.

I’d tried the game once before and got discouraged when I realized how much it played like a first person shooter. Fortunately, a friend told me not to worry too much and that the combat gets easier as you go along.

So far, and for the most part, I’m enjoying the game. I really like the style of RPGs that Bioware has made over the years (both Knights of the Old Republic games and Jade Empire). The idea that your character changes based on how you treat the others around you is very fascinating to me. Of course, if there’s an option to be mean I’ll pick in 99.9% of the time.

I’m still not very far into the game yet. (I’ve made it through all of the quests in the Citadel and through the planet Feros.) Everything in the game was fairly smooth until I hit Feros. Actually, Feros would have been okay had it not been for the use of the MAKO.

The MAKO is essentially an armoured tank used to cover wider swaths of terrain and supposedly to mow down enemies. They got the covering of terrain right, but for the life of me I couldn’t get it to effectively kill all the Geth attacking me. I tried the cannon, I tried the machine gun, nada. I finally got so tired of dying that I just rolled over the enemies and gave them the finger as I drove past.

I was also finding some of the tasks particularly tedious. The planet map is so expansive that you can muck about for a while without anything interesting happening. Even when there is action it can be extremely repetitive. (Those who have taken down the Thorian probably know what I’m talking about.)

I think my only other complaint about the game is pretty minor, but it still annoys me. There are a lot of things that will pop up on the screen that you can look at and gain XP. By using the term “look at”, I’m being generous. All you really do is click on it and gain XP. Yay, you found a computer, have some XP. I don’t understand being rewarded for not doing anything. If they’re trying to get you more XP, why not build more into what you gain from finishing tasks and killing things? I can understand getting points in WoW for discovering new areas, but you don’t click on rocks and get points.

All in all I’m ready to get going on the next planet in the game and see where it all takes me.

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