Here it is. Hope it was worth the wait.
For the last couple of games I’ve focused on how much more fun you can have when you are allowed to do what you want and play as you wish. Younger readers who have grown up in a gaming market where women actually outnumber men in terms of people who play games might not realise that this wasn’t always an option. The next sentence comes with the risk of sounding well in advance of my actual years. You see kids, in my day girls and presumably women (if they had even been given a second thought) were expected to play dross like Mary King’s Riding Star and enjoy it because as everyone knows all girls like ponies.
I’m not opposed to horses in my video games just in case some equine rights protesters were getting ready to picket my little corner of the internet. I adore shadow of the colossus, I’ve loved horse riding segments in the Legend of Zelda or Assassin’s Creed series and I’m incredibly disappointed that horse meat is off the menu of British supermarket lasagnes. It’s just if there is to be a horse riding segment in any game I’m playing I want it done well. Surely if a game is entirely about horse riding as in there is literally nothing more to this game other than horse riding (it’s a dressage game endorsed by one of the leading dressage riders in the world) then you will be guaranteed fantastic horse riding mechanics.
If you made this assumption then you will be sorely disappointed. A decent portion of the game is spent simply looking after your rather terrifying looking horse. This scores points for teaching children about the responsibilities of owning an animal but loses all of them again for being incredibly tedious and uninvolving. Any children who did play this would surely grow up to neglect their pets from the sheer force of the traumatic tedium the game inflicts on them. When we get to the riding ring things sadly don’t improve. The game uses an isometric view point and some awful graphics to show a horse sliding around a ring whilst the player tries to judge jumps on this horrible interface. Almost as if to combat the terrible and lazy camera choices a magic line leading you to your next obstacle is drawn reducing player involvement to simply following exactly what the game tells you to do. The end result is something that is frustratingly complicated whilst being insultingly simple at the same time.
There was a time when males and females were compartmentalised into categories of who would play what game (I don’t have children so this might still be happening but I’m not aware of it.) Boys would be pushed towards age inappropriate titles whilst girls sadly were swamped by small, cute animals, fairies, sparkly things and pink. In some toy fields this branding works because the output product could claim to be of comparative standards between the two sexes. Unfortunately in gaming this hasn’t always been the case and Mary King’s Riding Star is a classic example of the attitude of some game developers to female customers. The game is shoddily made and monotonously dull to the point of being insultingly bad as if the assumption is that any rubbish with horses in will sell well just because of the target audience. It is arrogance of the highest order and shows total contempt for the player a huge gaming demographic if they just can’t be bothered to put the effort in.
Rory's Retrospectives 