Watch your feet now, because we're about to enter the most tangled area of this whole mess. You see, video games are unique in that most of the time the player will go all-out to identify with one central character. ln a film with a desirable female main character, a male audience could enjoy watching her fall in love by placing themselves in the position of the man involved. A video game affords no such flexibility. Few male players want to force themselves to have tender feelings of female fulfil ment or even to put themselves in the role of a woman in love with a man, and so the whole argument for these female characters being brave steps forward for feminism begins to come apart at the seams. The heroïnes of Phantasy Star and Valis are out for revenge for their brother and their friend - and nothing else. Deathtrap Dungeon's Red Lotus kills any man why approaches her. Both the characters in Resident Evil 2 have tender emotions, but only Leon is allowed to fall in love - Claire is relegated to maternai feelings for Sherry. ln this way, Lara Croft will never do anything more than drop hints that she's available (if a berk like Larson has a chance, who doesn't) so that she can skip with gay abandon and horrendous violence through the lives of everyone represented by Blake With Scruffy Flat on the Tomb Raider Ill TV commercial.

An unattainable woman may be, as Tony Gard once said, the most desirable, but this is another thing altogether. lt's also this simple element that pretty much spoils any optimism you may have been storing up about the advancement issue - female role models these women may be (weil, maybe not in Lara's case), but the overall picture is still one of a commercial market playing to a male audience. Surely in real terms there is no real advancement unless games start to be programmed either for a unisex audience, or towards female issues 10 the way that they currently are towards male ones as weil.

(BOX - Barbarian II) EARLY DAYS Pictured llere in ali its dubiou s glory is the advert that ran in computer magazines of the late eighties, and would have made your mum choke onher cocoa if she'd found a copy of it lying around in your bedroom. I found this copy of the advert in my enormous retro magazine collection, and, funnily enoup, it just seemed to fall open at that page.