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Dad Hacks "Donkey Kong" - Now Pauline Rescues Mario
H_Fisher writes "What do you do when your daughter wants the girl to be the hero of your old video game? If you're Mike Mika, you hack the game ROM to reverse the roles. He even changed the 'M' at the top of the screen to a 'P.'"
You tell her to check her privilege and stop being a sexist! Oh, wait, wrong gender.
I hope he also fixed the final level bug.
There was a patch for DOOM that let you shoot Barney.
Maybe you shouldn't be taking your morality from Donkey Kong.
Let's count up all the female player characters that exist in video games that aren't sex objects, exist for a male character to save, or exist as a plot device (that is, female characters you can play that exist as characters in and of themselves, not as part of a plot to empower male characters):
April Ryan
Faith in Mirrors Edge
Chell in Portal (though you almost never see her)
Lightning
Princess Toadstool in Super Mario 2 (though this character is powerless in almost every other Mario game)
um... I'm out. I'd do the same list with male characters, but I'd exceed the maximum comment size.
I see gender roles are still alive and well, with Pauline using pink umbrella's and pink handbags in her quest to defeat Donkey Kong...
It's another article with something cool, vaguely mentioning something about gender biases, that ignites comments across game industry websites spewing reactionary sexist bullshit. Even as innocent and heart-warming as this story is, primitive individuals with no understanding of privilege can't help but attack the father and even the 3 year old, if you can believe it.
Are other industries as bad, or is the gaming industry one of the worst?
This ROM has the pie factory level, but it has the NES title screen. How's that work? TFA says the 2010 ROM, but what's that from?
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
He should have switched the big monkey at the top with the poor little oil drum at the bottom while he was at it, to reflect the full scope of societal changes that have occurred since the release of Donkey Kong.
In this new version, the girl fights to stop Big Oil at the top from throwing barrels at the cute little monkey at the bottom, while the guy just stands there watching the game. When she gets to the top, she's not rescuing Mario, she's stopping Big Oil from harming cute animals. Mario just happens to come out of his comatose state when she enters the room and feels compelled to feign excitement for her quest.
In college I had a roommate who felt very strongly that depressed people should not give in to pressure to take Prozac. So I "hacked" (I think I used ResEdit or something... nothing fancy) a Pong clone to replace the ball with a green/yellow Prozac capsule. That way he could "fight the good fight" by trying to deflect the Prozac in response to my repeated attempts to stuff it down his side of the screen. This made him a much more animated opponent in Pong, and I told him this only proved that Prozac does improve people's behavior. Which upped the ante as the game continued, in much the same way that Tetris starts throwing bricks at you with more attitude the further you get into the game.
Way to go Dad :)
Let's try to switch it further: Mario as the bad guy, DK must be rescued. Maybe DK has a daughter?
Gender equality is one thing - but he is still enforcing stereotypical gender roles with the pink handbags and brollies!
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
Would the title owners have sued his ass?
--
AC
My daughter was once playing with ktuberling, where you drag little characters on the screen and create a scene. One day I caught her rotating the mouse horizontally, because she wanted the little penguin to lay down instead of standing, and she was complaining it was not working. I'm an electronic engineer, but I have not all that spare time! :-)
On the other hand, I think that Apple and others could gain millions by hiring a bunch of kids as designers...
With all the hard work beating Donkey Kong she'll find herself ending up with a short fatty with a funny moustache that dresses like a pervert...
Pauline is not a very feminine name, and P is not a very feminine first letter either.
I hope for this poor girl she wasn't named Pauline.
On the other hand, M is a fairly feminine letter and there are plenty of feminine first names with it.
Parenting - you're doing it right!
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
He's publishing a patch but I assume you need the exact same version of the ROM that he used.
Could anyone give me a hint as to where I could find that ROM?
I'd love to load this on the ipad for my kids.
Thanks!
...I'd be mildly impressed. But this is the typical case where a man makes a woman look strong. Nothing to see here, move along.
Since I have no reason to hate you with a passion, I won't suggest you watch Twilight but aren't the males in that drivel just as much sex objects?
What really is the difference between Lara Croft and Fabian? Don't know who he is? Google it and you will find he is a model who appears on countless romance novel covers and NOT because he is a novelist.
Sex... wasn't really all that much a part of the original Tomb Raider. yes, she had big polygons, which most of the time you don't see since the camera is behind her. Meanwhile the women in Planescape: Torment had FAR bigger tits but nobody complained about that. Because part of the reason to have big tits in low-rez games was so the tits would be visible at all.
In Israel right now there is a law banning thin models. To protect the feelings of the whales. Because the only thin women are freaks who don't eat of course, not just a normal percentage of women who just happen to not overeat and have a natural slender built. To protect one groups feelings, another group is excluded. For every a-cup girl supposedly offended by doubt D Lara, there is a double D girl offended by every small titted heroine. Can't girls with big busts be heroes or are they condemned like blondes to always be stupid whores?
HERE IS THE SECRET
Every personality you see in the media, is a role. Doesn't matter whether you like said role or not. It is a role. Every actor acts a role defined by the writer. Media can NEVER show reality (which is why people who take 1984 as a prophecy as such idiots) because the writer WROTE everything as if he/she was god. A personality is self-destructive or succesful because the writer made it to be like that. In Far Cry 3 and the new Tomb Raider the "hero" goes from a snivelling coward to lean mean well adjusted killing machine because that was what the writers put in the plot. A different writer could just as easily have written a plot showing how both lapse into insanity. When backdraft was made, fire departments around the world saw an increase in volunteers and Pretty Woman has been claimed to have caused an increase in girls thinking prostitution always has an happy ending... for the girl. Mind you, the postman always ring twice didn't see more people wanting to be postman. Because the writers made on proffesion seem heroic while the other... wasn't. And many movies have shown hookers in bad light. The role an actor plays is not real.
REAL people are often WAY more complex then can be put in a 1.5 hour movie. Lara Croft breasts are often the joke of back pains... and? This is well known among women and those who live in the same world as them. Breast reduction surgery does exist and STILL women with small breasts want to be sultry big bossomed and big breasted women want to be slender and cute. And men want big cocks despite most women not particularly liking to be stretched to wide or to deep while men with actual big penisses wish that girls wouldn't run out the door when they get naked. We all want what we can't have because SURELY the grass is greener on the other side, so we all climb the fence and never wonder why so many people are climbing the other way.
BUT it is NOT the media's fault, it is our own.
Take publicity shots for say Star Wars. You can probably find some of Carry Fisher in her metal bikini and say "fan service". That is because all the pictures of Harrison Ford strutting it, don't appeal to YOU. But they ARE fanservice to a LOT of women. You drooled over Leia, they drooled over Han. Or Luke. Or Obi-Wan... women are weird or Jabba... my gf picked me after all.
You might think that a Lord of the Rings does not have much fanservice but just search the net. So... does that make the characters sex symbols? YES! Just not to you, but if SOMEONE drools over it, it is a sex symbol.
Sex sells, it always has done and both genders lap it up.
Sexism is only seeing it in one gender. Note the Israeli law on thin models ONLY applies to females. Because everyone knows bulemia
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
This is a win on so many levels.
I'd wager that first and foremost this dad did this without any ulterior motives. He simply made a lovely gift to his beloved daughter.
But he did more than that, whether he intended to or not.
He implicitly stated (to his daughter) that he, as a man, is perfectly ok with a woman rescuing a man. He may not even have done this consciously. His daughter may not even consciously see or understand this message. But he makes a nice example.
He also showed his daughter, that it is possible to change the "current state of affairs".
And yes, all of this would be a non-news if not 97% (made up on the spot, but probably not far from the truth) of all games reinforced the stereotype of the female damsel in distress with the male hero - or the sex-objectified heroine
.. a pink handbag and umbrella arn't the first things you'd pick. Not unless you wanted to ask him out on a date of course.
... let's just hope his daughter doesn't want two moms. Just sayin' we know what he'll be hacking next is all.
What is the deal with this "gender empowerment" thing? Guys like to play as female characters all the time. Read anything into it that you like. But the fact is that largely, the media fits the audience.
How is this gender empowerment when a man does it for a woman? At best it's "I want, I get" empowerment which is just kind of the wrong message I think here. "I deserve because I'm female" doesn't make sense to me and shouldn't make sense to anyone with a sense of respect.
What is this drive everywhere we look? "How can we change the world [superficially] so women feel more empowered?" The world got the way it was/is because of men doing a lot of things. Driven men. Hard working men. I'm not saying there aren't driven women and hard working women. I'm saying there's not enough of them to make a difference. So why are men responsible for women and their lack of interest or lack of ambition? The world already accomodates women who are driven and have ambition. Why do we have to do more?
"Oh hey! It's a game dude! Why are you making such a big deal out of it?" Because it's in childhood that expectations of life are formed. "Back in the day" people were extremely concerned about spoiling children. Well, back in the day, I was all for it... I was a child after all. But lately, I'm beginning to understand what it was all about. Childhood is a stage in which many of our ideas about life are formed. The notions we carry into adulthood were often formed during childhood. (Why do boys marry women who were like their mothers? Girls attracted to men like their fathers?) So yes, it makes sense we shouldn't spoil our children.
And what of it? A little princess of a girl goes out into the world expecting everyone to treat her like daddy and the boys at school did? The real world wants something in exchange and before long she wants what she had badly enough that she will give whatever it takes to get it back. We all know where this goes I suppose. Instead of catering, we should be teaching and training for the world they will live in. Parents should be teaching their children how to live in this world and if they don't like the world, how to help change it for the better.
"Women in the workplace." "Women in _______" We say these things like they are new ideas. These weren't exactly new ideas before I was born. Why are they still being studied 50+ years later? We know we can't make women more like men. And we shouldn't. It's an insult to women. So instead what are we doing? Making men more like women?!? How is that not an insult to men?
Okay... somehow my rant button was pushed instead of "wake up and get ready for work." Hope it was at least entertaining.
... dad had a convenient excuse to spend some quality time hacking.
Wife: Hey, why the fsck are you still sitting in front of that computer, its 1am! You love that thing more than me. I'm sick of it! Come to bed and treat me like a woman!
Dad: I'm giving matriachal empowerment to the characterisation of this game for the sake of our daughters self esteem.
Wife: Oh , well, ok then! Night!
Dad: Heh , sucker. Now, lets see what this ISR does...
"What do you do when your daughter wants the girl to be the hero of your old video game?"
Tell her "That isn't how the world works. Go make me a sandwich."?
Donkey Kong for Debian & Android Galaxy SIII please!
The three characters are Pauline, Donkey Kong (now Cranky Kong), and Jump Man.
Now that is cool!
Members of PETA hacked the game to make the human the villain and the monkey the hero.
Oh, wait...
Slinging beer in a topless bar. That there's a hack your grandpappy can be proud of.
I'd love to see more of Daphne in that see-through dress swinging her sword to save Dirk.... Of course, that's a bit more involved since it was all hand-drawn animation.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
The coder in me says, wow thats cool! The dad in me says, thats cute.
This remindes me of the mod my brother did for a company, Palm City Music many years ago. They wanted to make their own brand of Pac-Man. So they got Mark to reverse engineer the Pac-Man ROMs and modify the characters to look like the the head of Popeye and the energy pills to look like cans on spinach. The Ghosts? They became pirates.
stopping Big Oil from harming cute animals.
I know you love you some Sonic the Hedgehog, but I'm not sure it'd be so easy to hack Donkey Kong (Pie Factory Edition) for NES to correspond to your recommended plot changes.
Mario kidnapped the Princess (and the mother of the Koopalings), Koopa rescued her, and now Mario is running around killing everything in the Mushroom Kingdom.
If true, that'd confirm the theory I'd had all along: Goombas lived in peace, Toads invaded, Goombas hired the mercenary group Koopa Troop to freeze the Toads into blocks and take Peach as a POW, Mario had to meddle in this war and help the Toads.
One time I hacked Donkey Kong on Atari 2600 for a guy who wanted to propose using a message embedded in the game. The text in the screenshot looks funny because it's necessary to use a flickering trick to display text on the 2600 -- it looks better on the actual machine.
I'm sure someone above has already asked this, but I'm surprised it wasn't the first post. People have been easily hacking NES roms to switch around or replace sprites for about fifteen years or so. There is already a HUGE body of Donkey Kong rom hacks that change the game graphics, and there is no doubt in my mind that a version of this exact hack has been around about that long. You can find even more hacks of the original Super Mario Bros, replacing Mario with a woman, a klansman, Mike from MST3K, or just about anyone. Why is this particular hack suddenly news?
I'm fairly sure that cheap "romance" novels aren't marketed at men... but the covers on those are fairly oversexualized as well.
As for the big bulky superheroes... my wife was pretty happy with the scene where "Thor" went shirtless, so I'd say that's not "just for men" either.
I always thought I was saving my big hairy, yet easily influencable lover from that blonde haired vamp who tried to turn him around.
I considered it a tragic ending when he finally fell.
This is the equivalent of making a LEGO line of products for girls...it's stupid and unnecessary. I had no problem playing as a woman when Super Metroid came out for the SNES. Good job dad, you just made the gender distinction more distinct.
The only cool thing was the hack...not the intent.
This shows how bogus concepts like patriarchy really are. People are much more loyal to real things like their daughters than they are to virtual ones like their gender.
Given a choice any sane person would ignore pretty much any principle or law if following it would not be in their children's interest, because from an evolutionary point of view that is a very valuable trait - parents that don't will tend not to reproduce very successfully.
Once you work out you're basically a machine programmed to breed silly ideas like laws and morals all cease to have any real meaning.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
If Peach is a POW, better make sure nobody bumps her
How do you think the Koopalings got made? It appears to have been male Koopa Troop members (other than Bowser, apparently) bumping Peach.
>"What do you do when your daughter wants the girl to be the hero"
Sorry, you can't without a sex change operation. But you can help her be the heroine!
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/heroine
Mario rescued first.
http://www.romhacking.net/hacks/1225/
Subject line says it all. I want this.