Bears In Games

Johnny and guest host from gamesters.ca Max take a good, hard look at the first four Final Fantasies. Provided that you think Final Fantasy starts with Final Fantasy III.
Final Fantasy III starts us off with its slightly creepy child-warrior look, and confusingly androgynous protagonists. But all is not lost in this game: it does feature one of Final Fantasy's hottest bosses, the Djinn! So that's something right there.
Final Fantasy IV does have a chubby bear as a playable character, but it's Cid. And Cid in this game could, based on your viewpoint, either look like A: a potato, B: a biker bear, or C: a gollywog doll. He's got some freaky lips. Other than that, not a lot of bears, though it does have girls wearing inappropriate bikinis. And is Yang a bear? He ain't hairy, but he is burly.
Final Fantasy V is a critical darling but overlooked step in the series. It had a great implementation of the job system, but not much of a plot. The beauty is in the excellent combat. So what does it offer us as far as bears go? One of the protagonists is an older guy with a moustache, and he and the hero, Buttz, seem to be cruising their mysterious (or Mister-ious) pirate friend. They think he's hot.
Final Fantasy VI drastically changed the way that games dealt with cinemas, characterization, and presentation. Does that mean it has good characterization? No. It just has it, period. And this is a big step forward for the JRPG genre. So while some of the dialogue is clunky and terrible, there are definite emotional high points. Also, is Sabin a bear? Sure he is. Because they say so in the game.

Elite Bear Agents, Bears In Sims, and a slightly off topic look at Midnight Club: Los Angeles make up this week's too hot for TV episode of Bears In Games!

Elite Beat Agents is a bizarre music action game from INiS that just so happens to feature a lot of big guys, bears, and chubby guys. A spin off of the Japan-only Ouendan series, you tap along with the beat to progress the story. We take the time to look at four different bearish characters, and pause momentarily to see what secrets a young girl's dead father holds. Snotty Japanophiles will tell you that Elite Beat Agents has nothing on Ouendan, and that the music list sucks. Perhaps I have more tolerance for the sort of cheap licenses this game pulls, but it's not so bad. They generally go with the action on screen, and hey, it's got YMCA for the wet-suited bear Captain Brooke, David Bowie's Let's Dance, and Jamiroquai's Canned Heat! That's more songs that I like than the average Guitar Hero game. But I do have a terrible taste in music. I did miss out on some bears, though; the multiplayer features some exclusive story modes that I can't really show via emulation, and one of them has a very hot (for the creepy / funny super deformed art style, I mean) shirtless fat guy in a leather vest and hat. Hey! And did I mention big bear in wetsuit? I think I did. Moving on.
The Sims 3 was a big release this year, and it's better than it had any right to be. Honestly, it's just a polish of the Sims 2. But the Sims 2 needed a solid polishing, so hey! On the Bears In Games Facebook Page, I asked for anyone who wanted to be in an episode of Bears In Games for the Sims to sign up, and I actually got a few replies. So we've got Jack, a would-be writer and then sometimes paramedic / heartbreaker, Tom, the guy that pretty much everyone had a secret desire to kiss, Robbie, who watches a lot of television, and of course me, who in this case becomes a police officer and lounges around in underwear a lot. Oh, and has some anti-social habits.
Finally, I review Midnight Club: Los Angeles. This game sucked. Looks pretty in cut scenes. But the motion capture sucks, the characters are awful, awful people that you'd never want to have a conversation with, and the amount of T-Mobile product placement made this game virtually unplayable for me. Fools.
What's next on the Bears In Games plate? Well, I've recorded Final Fantasys III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, X-2, and XII and should be recording audio for that with Max from gamesters.ca this weekend! Get ready for a pileup of Final Fantasy fun. Given that I was stretching the capacity of Blogger's 100mb upload limit with this one, I may have to break the RSS feed version into two chunks. Because that's a lot of Final Fantasy. Also getting Robbie (from the Sims) over for the Bears In Games One Year Anniversary episode... the subject? It's a secret. A sexy secret.
If you want to see Bears In Games in better quality, you can always check out the Bears In Games youtube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/BearsInGames

Firstly, Johnny checks out the Bears of Beijing 2008! Or should it be BEARjing? Huh? In this episode of BearsInGames, Johnny is inspired by the hot burliness of Olympic athletes Manolo Martinez and Matthias Steiner into renting and playing a few events in Sega's Olympic tie-in Beijing '08. Did it deserve the critical drubbing it received? Can you play as your favorite bearish men? In short, yes, it did, and no, you can't. All you need to see about this game is contained in the video. Plus: a bulge-tastic montage. Next up: Legends of Wrestlemania for the 360. Ah, wrestling. Johnny has already covered Capcom's fantastic take on the subject, so let's look at how the WWE has brought together some of the best wrestlers of all time into one game. With Bam Bam Bigelow, Jim "The Anvil" Neidhart, Arn Anderson, King Kong Bundy, Andre the Giant, The Iron Shiek, Nikolai Volkoff, The Rock, and Stone Cold Steve Austin, you're not wanting for hot burly bear wrestlers. Though hopefully you like them well-muscled; most are disturbingly shiny and on steroids. (I mean, more steroids then usual.) Also: Johnny Barnstorm and Wil "Dubs" take on men online in oddly polite encounters! Lastly, UFC Undisputed: is it a fighting game or hardcore bear porn? Seriously, Johnny can't tell. There are just some points during the training where... well... let's just say that it sure looks like the fighters are really, really good friends. And having sex. UFC tries hard to be awful; the soundtrack is about ten decibels louder than any other game out there, and there's about an hour of recorded dialogue of the guy who runs UFC ranting about how it's the ultimate match of the ultimate fighters and they're modern day gladiators, and... ugh. But the game itself? Damn good. Nice to watch. Though the fighters themselves are modeled sans crotches. Weird.

Unlike the set characters found in Japanese RPGs, western RPGs almost exclusively deal with created characters, with modifiable skill sets, gender, background, and most of all, looks. The downside is that this can lead to lifeless tabla rasas on which you are supposed to project yourself, egotist that you are. The upside? Big hot bears in RPGs! Who doesn't want that? So, firstly, we look at Bethesda's shake at the hugely popular Fallout franchise. How hot can a man wandering the nuclear wastes get? (If Mad Max's leather bound bears are any help, plenty hot.)Then we head over to the fantastic futurespace that is BioWare's Mass Effect, and finally check out the creepy troll-things that you can create with Bethesda's Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion!

Just what is the gayest 16-bit game of all time? CHO ANIKI! But, that's a bit of a foregone conclusion. And at BearsInGames, we like betting on the underdogs. So we're counting down the top five gayest games during the wonderful era that brought us the Blast Processing of the Sega Genesis, the Mode 7 scaling and rotation of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, and the... Johnny Turboness... of the Turbografx-16! Watch in awe as we look at beefcake Boris Vallejo paintings, chubby bear giants in metal briefs, bear thugs with crotches the size of cantaloupes, rescuing Madonna during her Like a Virgin phase, the precursor to Soul Calibur, bad 90s press junket commercials with far too many crotch shots, secret passages into XXL London, the single gayest secret character of any game ever, and the best sprite-based animation you've ever seen! Plus even more Haggar!

How are gays portrayed in modern video games? Johnny takes a look at what gays look like to game designers, and the hows and whys of their use in the games we play. We check out the Just Us Guys store owners in Aruze's Shadow Hearts: From the New World, Makoto from FROM SOFTWARE's Enchanted Arms, Jann from SEGA's Valkyria Chronicles, and Bernie and Brucie from Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto IV. How do they stack up? Are gaymers going to enjoy their video game counterparts? Are any of them big burly bear men? Don't get your hopes up.



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Next time: The Top Five Gayest 16-Bit Games That Aren't Cho Aniki!