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20080310 Monday March 10, 2008
Never Seen A Girl Before Games

Tiger Woods PGA Tour 07Male nerds, geeks and gamers have the stereotypical reputation of being absolutely clueless when it comes to women.  Conan O'Brien and his writers love to poke fun at nerds this way.  Of course, this isn't true, but it just might be true in the case of the geeks who wrote Tiger Woods PGA Tour 07.

We rented this game for our Wii.  My 4 year old daughter's favorite part of the Wii is the Mii editor.  She had lots of fun making herself and all of her friends.  So while she wasn't into playing Tiger Woods' gold game (that was for Daddy), she did want to use the game's character builder.

The in-game "Game Face" character builder is much more complicated than the Mii generator.  The characters are much more realistic than the Miis.  We built Daddy first, and it looked pretty close to me (a very athletic version of me).  We then tried to make my daughter.  The process first asks some quesions:

  • Gender.  Female.  At least the have that option.
  • Age.  She's almost 5, but 8 was the smallest value we could choose.  Fine, eight years old it is.
  • Height.  The smallest value was 5' 0" (152 cm).  While that is short, I know some adults who are shorter than that.  Hmmm.
  • Face.  No matter how hard I tried I couldn't get this girl to look younger than 20, let alone 8.  Did that parameter mean anything?
  • Body.  Here's where it gets good.  I now needed to select how big to make this "8" year old's boobs.  Hello!

Like the other attributes that wouldn't scale to the 8 year old level (let alone 5), the choice for breast size ranged from a B cup to D cup.  I don't know what they were thinking, but my first reaction was "stupid horny engineers!"

Yes, this game probably isn't for little kids, but it could be.  Michelle Wie started playing golf at age 4 and turned pro at 15.  If you're going to make age a parameter, and let me select age 8, then you'd better actually support it.  Don't just make all of the female avatars be your virtual fantasy girl.

BTW, if anyone knows of any good Wii games that let the Mii characters play together, let me know.


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