DonFerrari said:
SuperNova said:
Personally, I probably would have actually liked the sticker-aspect growing up, especially if it allowed you to print out cutscenes, but the game selection is just dreadful.
Where are my Zelda-style adventure games? Cute-em-ups? Platformers? RPGs?
'I Want a Room in Loopy Town!', sounds like a life-sim/animal-crossing rip-off/decorating game, so that might have attracted me as a kid. I loved the Sims build mode, even though I was always frustrated with the lack of options.
'Lupiton's Wonder Palette' and 'Caricature Artist' sound like drawing apps/games in the vein of Mario Paint, wich.....eh...I've always much preferred to draw on paper, rather then with a mouse or controller. If one of those came with an actual wacom-style drawing tablet I might have been interested, but I doubt they were throwing expensive acessories at this console.
Contrary to what marketing will have you believe, obviously girls aren't just into pink, fashion, parties, romance and puppies. Although admittedly I've wanted a real-life puppy ever since I can remember, doesn't mean I was ever drawn to virtual puppy games though. I prefer my virtual pets with more claws and scales and the ability to spit fire.
As for stuff I actually was into as a kid, I was definitely more drawn to adventure games, RPGs, platformers, puzzlers, visual novels and life sims than sports games, fighting games and car-sims.
Art-style and atmosphere was a big draw for me, I absolutely adored the Capcom Zeldas and like just about any kid in the 90s loved pokemon.
Overall I feel like targeting any toy to just one gender, rather that trying for universal appeal is pretty dumb, but I get what they were trying to do. Female gamers were a largely untapped market before the DS and Wii came along (not that tehy didin't exist, but gaming still skewed male) and Nintendo has had great success with specifically targeting female gamers over the years. For Animal Crossing they assembled and all female led dev team and let them go wild in order to create something that would appeal to a wider audience and it worked well, so Nintendo tried to incorperate those experiences into their next consoles.
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If games before Wii/DS weren't largely targeted at a specific gender why would them the console ownership be so much bigger along boys?
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I didn't say they didn't target a specific gender, where did you get that from? I said they largely didn't target a female audience. Video games were largely seen as a boys toy and targeted that market predominently, starting with the 80s. That trend lasted untl the Wii/DS. Of course you will find the occasional attempt at a game (or even entire console) marketed at girls, wich got tracktion in the mid 90s but that didn't reflect the majority of the market yet.
Pong was still sold as a family game and by virtue of that the Magnavox Odyssey was sold as a family system/toy.
But by the late 70s the arcade scene was on the rise though and through a complex web of circumstances, wich include cans of worms like genetical predisposition, societal norms, the sexual revolution and other way broader topics wich are relevant as to why it happened the way it happened, most of the programmers for early Arcade and home computer games ended up being teenaged boys.
People will try to make what appeals to them, especially without any outside forces to persuade them otherwise. So just by virtue of most of the developers themselves being teeaged boys, the target group ended up being teenaged boys as well. It was a working system and it stuck around for a while.
There's outliers for sure, two big ones being all of Sierras games as well as tetris, wich both had broader audiences, Tetris being one of the first major games to hit the mainstream since Pong, wich means it reached older and female gamers. Consoles themselves did a lot to broaden the gaming audience as well, through sheer accessibility. All of those factors led to a rise in female gamers, wich eventually got noticed and served.
Unfortunately a lot of purely 'female targeted' games are utter shovel-ware garbage to this day, wich is why I said in the first place just targeting one gender is dumb and ideally you should strive for as broad an audience as possible.
