Okay, really now?

Okay, so there's this. In case you're a non-clicker-reader, that link talks about yet another irritating outsider writing up a looney article about racism in games. "Why is it looney?" you might ask, heart all a-flutter. Not because there's not racism in games, oh no. It's because the examples they pick out are absolutely, one hundred percent off the mark and racist free. Let's take a quick look, shall we?

The first Racism In Games outbreak I heard of was when early footage of Resident Evil 5 was shown. It basically showed our hero Chris Redfield shooting a bunch of angry black people. If you were just given the clip out of context and were the kind of black person constantly on the lookout for any sort of an affront to your skin color so you could feel like you're a part of the Special Victims Give Me Attention Group, then the video probably looked pretty bad to you. However, let's look at it in context:

It stars Slab of Man Chris Redfield as the controllable main character, who is white as the driven snow. He is white because he is from Colorado. In case there are people here who are not aware, Colorado is home to a total of four black people. Chris has lots of experience with viral outbreaks that turn people crazy and deadified, so he's called in to Africa to deal with with the situation when one rears its shambling head. Now, i'm not on the Capcom team, but i'm pretty sure they chose Africa because that place is home to every single massively horrifying and deadly disease this world has ever seen. See: Ebola, AIDS, Nigerian Email Spam. Turns out, as is usually the case in the Resident Evil universe, in order to sort this mess out and stay alive, Chris has to shoot a lot of infected people in the face. Now, I have it on very good authority from an African-native friend of mine (Hi Rachel!) that there happen to be quite a few black people in Africa. Ergo (and now try to follow me here, easily offended attention seekers), Chris is going to be shooting a lot of black motherfuckers in the face. I would also like to point out that not every person that is infected that Chris shoots in the face is a black person, as it takes place in South Africa and that is home to a fairly sizeable international contingent.

Now, let me point out a couple things here: First off, Capcom is a Japanese company, and Resdient Evil is made by Japanese people. Trust me: if Capcom was actually going to do something racist, you would fucking know it, as Japanese people to this day have no fucking clue about anything resembling racial sensitivity. It stems from the fact that there's only one race on their little island. They don't have any black people at all (well, that's not true, they have Bob Sapp). This leads me gracefully into my next point: By being whiny little attention faggots, they made Capcom make the game WAY more racist than it was before.

What Capcom ended up doing was including a black sidekick named Sheva to tag along with Chris. This seemed to quell the uprising, which is maximumly silly. "Now a black person is shooting black people as well, so there goes all the racism" is a retarded sentence. What these twats inadvertantly ended up doing was basically forcing Capcom to create and flesh out an African native black person, which is a recipe for culturally insensitive hilarity. Amazingly, Sheva on her own is a fine character. However, when one looks at the alternate costumes and weapons one can unlock for Sheva, one of them is, I shit you not, a leopard skin tribal bikini and bow and arrow weapon, complete with face paint and bone necklace. Capcom was one baby step away from putting a fucking bone in her nose and naming the getup her "oogah boogah" outfit, i'm sure.

What's funny about that is that no one said a fucking word. Not a soul. She was a black person shooting black people, so everything is a-okay. This proves that these people don't fucking give a shit. They saw something and went "HEY I CAN RUN MY MOUTH TO GET ATTENTION" and then as soon as they filled themselves with all the attention they could get, they wandered off to pass out and digest it all. If they actually did care about rooting out racism in videogames, they would have leaped on Street Fighter IV the very second it came out.

There's a grand total of one black person in the game, and he's a retarded thug boxer. Moreover, Dhalsim is like what a Japanese person would come up with if he had never seen an Indian person or their culture before but had them described to him through a game of telephone. Zangief is just as much a caricature. El Fuerte is the third most racist videogame character i've ever seen (right behind SNK's Lucky Glauber and Square's rendition of Jim in their NES Tom Sawyer game). He's a luchador who loves cooking and all of his moves are named after Mexican food. Oh, also he's also an idiot and bad at both things he does. Hell, even Americans get it bad: There's a rich blonde pretty boy, a blonde guy in the military, a fat stupid blonde biker, and a redheaded cold-hearted businesswoman.

That's just THAT game. Street Fighter has a long tradition of culturally insensitive characters and not a WORD has been uttered in its 25 year existence. Birdie was black in the Street Fighter Alpha games, but was white in the original Street Fighter. Capcom's reason? "He was sick that day" (no, i'm not joking). That's not how black people work, Capcom. Dudley is a snooty British guy from old money fighting to win back his family's Jaguar. Sean is technically Brazilian, but he's really dark skinned, has dreadlocks, and fights with a basketball so I'm counting it. Dee Jay is a Jamaican with such a toothy grin he might as well have been named "Sambo" and is such a stereotype that he pulls out his maracas the instant he wins a fight, like he has them on him at all times. T. Hawk is a huge American Indian who's name is basically "Tomahawk", and who wears face paint and hair feathers all the time like any Indian actually does that anymore. Cody is dumb blonde American white trash who got thrown in jail because he was too violent.

It doesn't stop there. In Megaman 6 for the NES, one of the Robot Masters was Flame Man, who was decked out in a turban, pointy shoes, curly moustache, and who shot oil. His stage consisted of oil pits and oil barrels, against a muslim mosque arabian backdrop. And don't get me started on Oil Man.

There's all that out there plain as day, and the first time anyone ever uttered "racism" and pointed it at videogames was because black zombies were getting shot? Their credibility is zilch.

You Aren't Going to Like This One

Due to events of late, I've been dwelling on my own age and mortality. Life really is short, and the age limit for people being old and worthless is lowering every day. The thought that keeps tickling the back of my mind is that if I don't meet the woman who's going to be my wife soon, I'll have very little to offer. Additionally, I'll be getting very little in return.

Still, I hold onto the hope that there's someone out there for everyone; that somewhere out there, there's a girl who finds my particular quirks and personality adorable, and my frame handsome. A girl who, for whatever reason, has lived the specific set of life experiences that has bred the specific set of mental problems that leads her to find me irresistible. I hope I get to meet this girl someday, really get to know her inside and out, and have us both realize beyond a shadow of a doubt that there's no one else in the entire world that we'd rather be with.

Then, I hope to God I have the strength to deny her all of that, and leave her forever.

(I told you that you weren't going to like this).

I've been in love before, several kinds. I've had the short but explosive affair fraught with drama, the relationship borne out of desperation, the long-term love that comes from deep within and looks past flaws. I've seen it all and one thing that remains constant (save for one instance) is that no good deed goes unpunished and loyalty is rarely if ever rewarded. The world's rules, not just the rules of girls, are specifically designed to make sure that good people with intelligence never win. They never get what they want. The shallow, the stupid, and the evil get what they want readily, and the smart and virtuous have to fight for every scrap of happiness.

I'm pushing thirty. The girls in my relative age range are as well. Aside from a couple of patches of companionship, I've been alone. I'm not complaining, merely illustrating that me and loneliness and solitude are best pals. We go way back. I've learned to deal, our fucked up society has forced me to adapt to it. So what the fuck would a girl, even the perfect girl, have to offer me at this point? Companionship? Companionship at this point would be more alien to me and require more work that simply doing what I've been doing for the better part of twenty years. Sex? Yes dream girl, please come and try and tempt me at the point in our lives when half our looks are gone and most of our prowess. Chances are, by the time she's my age, she's already fucked all the guys she's wanted and her fun time is over. Meanwhile, I've had to sit over here with nothing during my prime years, all because it probably took her the better part of fifteen years to figure out what was important. Love? Anyone who's not a retarded teenager knows that love is equal parts happiness and sorrow. It's not great fun times. It's not something to look forward to, it's something to dread. Children? Yeah fucking right. The less said about that the better.

So let's see here: All my best prospects at this point could offer is a rapidly deteriorating body, a lifetime of sacrifice, hard work and appeasement, really good friendship stapled onto furious torrents of sorrow, an added truckload of responsibilities, rugrats I wouldn't know what to do with, and a space-shuttle-sized pallet of letting down someone important to you and being let down yourself.

On the other hand, causing whoever she is to realize that she'll never truly be happy or get what she wants will get me something I've craved all my life: justice. Let me get this straight: Perfect girl gets to basically date whoever she wants whenever she wants, as do all girls who even look remotely good do; spends the better part of her life probably rewarding despicable and underhanded behavior of unworthy idiots with loyalty of both body and mind during the prime years of her life; chances are, along the way she'll even have rejected or ignored someone very like me; eventually, it comes back to bite her in the ass hard, and she learns a valuable lesson about what to actually look for in a guy; now that she's older and her looks don't quite work as hard for her as they once did, she decides to settle down and look for a guy who'll give her what she truly needs: stability, loyalty, sacrifice, and true companionship; not once during this whole life journey will she ever truly want for whatever it is she was craving at the time, at least not to any meaningful degree. She will never truly know long periods of loneliness, despair, uncertainty, unrequited desire, or hopelessness.

So basically, she gets everything she wants, and I get nothing I want, namely a normal young life filled with all the ups and downs everyone's supposed to experience, and I'm supposed to roll over and take that and be happy about it because that's how life works for guys like me. Oh how lucky I am to help her deal with the decades of mental problems other guys have caused her because of her initial terrible taste in guys. Fuck that shit. No, the scales will be balanced. Whoever she is right now, on her deathbed I want her to know the sting of the years that could have been experienced but were instead gobbled up by that ravenous monster we call time; I want her to know the deep, all encompassing despair of primal, basic desires never to be fulfilled. I want her daydreams of children and motherhood to be to wither and die. Most of all, I want her to close her eyes for the final time knowing deep down to her soul she was not nearly as happy as she could have been.

Once that happens I'll be able to die happily myself, knowing I've finally gotten something I've always wanted: equality. She will finally know what it's like to live as a nice, shy guy who has no chance to learn how to navigate the insane mental jungle gym and unwritten rule pop quiz girls have always required of guys just to get a little love and companionship.

Pretty irrational, emotional, hateful, and crazy right? I totally agree. Just following your lead girls. Welcome to your own medicine, enjoy your stay.