Did this "guy" even play Portal? My brother, boyfriend, and I ALL played Portal together.

The turrets had FEMALE voices, OBVIOUS female voices. The woman who voiced GLaDoS also voiced the turrets. And how the hell was destroying the stupid companion cube a male figure? It was a pixelated box you needed to get through the level, so you HAD to depend on it, otherwise never get through the level.

And those who play first-person shooter games are not "forced" to like violence, it's how the game is designed. I'm female, and I've played Halo 1,2 and 3, Perfect Dark (N64 version), and Gears of War. I didn't love violence when I played those games, and I still don't love violence.

The game was anything BUT what this guy reviewed it as, and anyone who's looking for even a half-decent review should look elsewhere.

The guy who reviewed this needs to go back and actually play the game, then write a better review.

Portal was a fun and interesting game, not the feminist trash he reviewed it to be.

Alright. Last things first.

The guy above enjoyed Portal. He found it refreshing and a great take on today's gaming industry.He didn't say anythying about it being feminist trash. If you were implying that you thought the fact he thought the game was feminist, and therefore you think he degraded the game through your narrow standards, then your comment was voided by a subjected opinion without looking at both sides of the argument. Feminist isn't bad, it's just different.

The 'love for violence' thing was bringing attention to how a majority of new games involve simply killing the target, puzzles and entertainment restricted wihtin the gaming environment by how the game was designed, so, in part, you were correct. He was merely stating that he found Portal refreshing in that it didn't need to fall into menial stereotypes of what constitutes a 'good' game to entertain. In other words, you didn't just have to kill to have fun.

And the symbolism of the companion cube being male directly stipulates from the article, pulls itself from the already-discussed issues. It's a logical argument that anyone should be able to follow.


Personally, I really liked the article, even if I don't personally share all of the views. It was a clever and psychological approach to a clever and psychological game. I believe that, while some of the elements were present, the freudian approach to some of the views expressed above are a little outdated, and we live in a developing society with new ways of thinking emerging and the old 'sexist' and 'feminist' views are slowly begins to be uprooted by monogonous views that have no need to express sexuality.

The game itself was great, so all in all all three representatives have the same opinion, just in different thought scructures.

Dude I love FPS´s, I like violence, blood and killing, and I´m old school, Ié played almost everything, from wolfenstein to gears of war, I played portal and found it quite different from all the other FPS, perhaps a bit too short, but challenging and extremely cool.

All that feminist crap you wrote is just a racionalization, is like we say down in México, "una chaqueta mental" (a mental jerkoff) you took the fact of the female non oversexed female as the main character and started building several layers of bullshit over it.

The problem is not that, the internet is full of harmless bullshit, the real problem is that you´re ruinig the game, for me at least.

I almost can see the feminazi´s forcing themselves to play portal in order to make a stupid point instead of playing it just to have some fun, like it´s supposed to be.

Then every dimwit stupid enough to care about that, will put to doubt the existence of my balls just because I happen to be a male who likes a fucking feminist game.

I thought the article was compelling. It wasn't a review just a retrospective of the game and a possible artistic statement it's creators were trying to make. I don't know if it's really all that complex, but it's still interesting to think about.

i liked this, was it supposed to be written as the computer? because it sure seemed like it, if it was congrats on the irony factor and jesus christ people get over youself it is a review of a game, the reviewer has a right to field his/her's opinions and need not be oppressed bysome easily offened 'tard, love it for what it is.

An interesting perspective, but there are a couple of factual errors present which may invalidate the premise.

Starting from the most obvious, the only cube with a heart, and the only cube personified, is The Weighted Companion Cube in the level where you, the other cubes in the game are Weighted Storage Cubes, and are used both before you receive the Weighted Companion Cube and after you incinerate the Weighted Companion Cube.

Secondly, on the turrets, they can be defeated via a brute force approach (in some cases requiring speedy running towards them in order to get behind them before they gun you down, in other cases using a cube as a shield and knocking them over with it. And then there are those where your best bet for defeating them is to manipulate energy pellets, which in the levels they appear are usually your only means of progressing, and are very much the main male imagery of the game; if we go by the primitive Freudian analogy of the shape of the portal, they're very much a phallic symbol and require you allowing their emissions to enter into your portal in order to progress)

Those are the main factual problems I think are present in the article, but there's one more issue the article has - The assumption that a character in third person is an external entity who is a puppet while one in first person is an identifiable character the player embodies, and the amount of games with male third person protagonists which would mean that those few with female third person protagonists are under your metaphor the female objectification exception to the male objectification norm.

The reason I take issue with this assumption is that, if I recall the evidence I've seen correctly, it is more typical for players to not consider first person (or second person in the case of Interactive Fiction) characters in their own right, and so are more literal 'puppets' to the player to be manipulated, while third person characters tend to be more typically considered characters in their own right rather than simply a means of manipulating the virtual world the game takes place in via manipulating a puppet within that world.

RE: cerdoenbrama - What's wrong with mental jerkoffs? They're fun and healthy, just like physical jerkoffs. (Yeah, I'm fond of the concept of Death of the Author. Provided no-one pretends that this sort of thing is intentional on behalf of the author without going by Word of God evidence, then I start getting tetchy about them)