It is amazing how a few recent gaming announcements have had a unique effect on me.
No, it wasn't the fact that the Xbox 360 HD DVD Drive was price-dropped (again). And, no, surprisingly it was none of the recent leaked info on "Mario Kart" for the Wii. It was actually news about a genre that seems to fade a little more each and every year, as well as the characters within it...
By now most gamers are aware that "Street Fighter IV" has been announced. If you happened to miss yesterday's leaked Famitsu news, a few more original characters have been added to the roster: E. Honda, Dhalsim, and Chun-Li, the last of which was extremely important for me to hear. Why?
Because Chun-Li matters.
You see, my dear Multiplayer friends, I have had an ongoing infatuation with Chun-Li since I first laid my hands on a SNES controller (I was too young to be hanging around at the arcades back in those days). Chun-Li was my first gaming crush, and she has shaped the way I look at and play fighting games ever since the early '90s.
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Girls don't want to be cops. How do we know? Ubisoft asked.
Lately, the leading game publisher of the Tom Clancy games and the "Far Cry" series has been doing research on games for pre-teen girls. And what have they learned? A quarter of DS owners are young girls but less than 10% of DS games are aimed specifically at them. With that, Ubisoft surveyed girls and found that the top activities young girls enjoyed included fashion, cooking and taking care of animals and babies.
The result: the creation of the Imagine line, a series of video games targeted to 6-14 year-old girls. Unveiled at E3 in July, it's the first non-licensed brand of games dedicated specifically to girls by a major publisher. Based on Ubisoft's study, the first games in the line, to be released later this month, are "Fashion Designer," "Master Chef," "Animal Doctor," and "Babyz." "We did research, and we are studying the market… that's what the girls actually like, so we should try to fulfill their needs," Shara Hashemi, Ubisoft’s Brand Manager for the Imagine line, told Multiplayer in an interview last week.
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