Cerise Magazine

In his turn, a player may move all or some of his units up to their maximum move distance. Once a unit has completed all of its movement, the player selects another unit and moves that one, and so on, until the player has moved all of the units he wishes to move.

- Warhammer 40,000 4th Edition Rulebook, page 15

You can [use gender neutral pronouns to refer to players], but the book doesn’t… It specifically says ‘his’. I mentioned it once to a female opponent, and she called me a sexist pig. Until I pointed it out in the book.

- Thoth62, discussing the finer points of said rulebook on Warseer.com

You can bet your life her face was red, since everyone knows your behaviour ceases to be in any way questionable if there’s a precedent in a book about space elves. (more…)

This time last year, I had never received a review copy of anything. I had never been invited to participate in an online debate. My connection to the gaming industry was strictly that of a casual consumer – I bought sourcebooks and dice with fair regularity, miniatures every now and then and a computer game whenever one particularly caught my eye. And then Andrea Rubenstein and I stayed up way too late one night venting our gaming culture frustrations at each other over an instant messaging program, the idea for this magazine was born, and everything rapidly became very different.

All of a sudden, I’m an editor of and frequent contributor to a gaming magazine. Whoa.
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As the weather gets cooler in my part of the world, I feel the urge to do some baking – it’s a perfect time of year to make cakes and cupcakes, and decorate them with spray-on food coloring. And with the creative application of stencils, I can create baked goods with gaming themes. And so, as it turns out, can you.
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Mass Effect, BioWare, Xbox 360, 2007

By some happy coincidence, Mass Effect, BioWare’s latest RPG offering, was released on my birthday, which meant I got a copy right away, and I didn’t even have to buy it for myself! I popped it in the Xbox 360 that night, and I haven’t stopped playing since.
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One of the things that keeps some women out of gaming is the sense that gaming culture is not only unwelcoming but potentially hostile to them. Where do women get this sense? One source is products, from both large gaming companies and more indie designers, which seem to objectify women in often violently sexualized ways. Below is a dialogue between two women, Elizabeth McDonald and Karen Healey, reacting to one such product, “Hot Chicks 3.1: Naked Distress” miniatures.
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Cooking Mama: Cook Off, Majesco, Nintendo Wii, 2007

Games like Cooking Mama: Cook Off are why I love the Nintendo Wii. Many gamers would assume that a game about cooking food with a matronly Japanese woman should not be fun, it should be stupid. Yes, Cooking Mama: Cook Off is a novelty game—one of those games you show off to your friends because it’s just so darn weird—but it’s a really entertaining novelty game. Imagine the control scheme of Trauma Center: Second Opinion and the off-the-wall action of Katamari Damacy meets the Food Network and you have a good idea of how the game plays out. The premise of Cooking Mama: Cook Off is that you are learning to cook under Mama, a kerchiefed, manga-style, incredibly adorable head chef. Mama guides you through fifty-five different recipes, presented as a series of minigames, from countries all over the world. You can also choose to compete against a friend, or against computer-controlled opponents for fabulous prizes to outfit your kitchen.

The presentation is simple but effective. Your kitchen is rendered in appealing cel-shading with bright colors and simple shapes. The food is depicted more realistically than the setting, with appropriate proportions and textures, and it often looks quite delicious. There are only a handful of musical tracks in the game, and although they’re catchy they become repetitive quickly. The sounds when cooking are great—chopping lettuce, pounding mochi, patting hamburger and stirring eggs all sound distinctive and realistic. It would have been nice if Cooking Mama: Cook Off had utilized the Wii Remote’s speaker, but no such luck. Mama pops up occasionally as a static 2D sprite, ready to fix you with her sparkly eyes and shout encouragement in her cute Japanese accent. Wonderfurr! At first I thought Mama’s thick Japanese accent might be a bit insensitive, but it makes sense in the game world (she is Japanese, after all) and it’s clearly authentic as opposed to an imitation meant to mock and embarrass. I showed the game to a group of international students enrolled in an English as a second language program and they loved it—if Mama’s accent doesn’t offend a group of Asian students struggling to master their own English skills, who will it offend?

Charming as they are, the graphics and sound are just icing on the cake (sorry, no more food puns). The real fun lies in the assortment of minigames, and their innovative control scheme. Mama’s recipes require you to chop, boil, stew, stir, grill, fan, wash, fill, peel, season, and manipulate food in dozens of ways. The Wii remote becomes your all-purpose cooking utensil: turn it upside down and swish it in a circle to stir sauce, hold it vertically and swing it down and to the left to crack an egg on the side of a bowl, turn it like a crank to work a meat grinder. The possibilities seem endless, but they’re not, which is one of the game’s main drawbacks. Once you’ve played it for a couple of hours you’ve seen every minigame, even if you haven’t mastered every recipe. After six hours I had unlocked everything and I was ready to move on, thankful I had rented the game instead of paying the full cover price of $50.

But even though I exhausted the possibilities it offered, I would rent Cooking Mama: Cook Off again for the sheer entertainment value. Everyone who saw the game loved it: me, my girlfriend, my girlfriend’s mom and little brother, my beer-swilling skier friends, the international students, and my hardcore gamer roommate all tried their hand at cooking with Mama. The game’s charming Japanese wackiness enticed giggles and shouts of encouragement from everyone. You haven’t heard backseat gaming until you’ve heard someone shout “Crack the egg, dumbass! Crack the egg!” If you’re looking for some light gaming for a weekend with friends, Cooking Mama: Cook Off is a good bet.