Over the past few days I’ve been looking for some new iPhone games to get, and when scrolling through the recent titles I saw one named Almighty Mr. Ice. When I read the description, it looked like a simple little side-scrolling platformer, and was similar to Mario. I started to become genuinely interested in downloading it until I looked at the screenshots.

In this shot right here, everything looks relatively normal. It almost looks like a scene from Super Mario World on SNES. Pretty appealing, right?

Another normal screenshot. It shows the features of the Ice Shoe, and it’s abilities. Still nothing out of the ordinary.

WHAT IS THIS?!?!? EASY MODE: FOR LADIES AND KIDS? WHY FOR?!? Honestly? Aren’t we past this whole “women can’t play video games” type of mentality? Apparently not!

If the creator of the game simply said that easy game was for casual gamers, or for children, that would be fine… but to single out women as a whole, and apply that to the easy mode is ridiculous. Because of that, I didn’t download the game, an even though there are tons of positive reviews for it in the App Store, I won’t download it. I refuse to support a game that singles out women, and basically saying that women who play video games are so inept that they must resort to gaming on easy modes.

While I am not a fan of exclusive female gaming communities, because I feel that they actually help encourage the division between male and female gamers, I am strongly against discrimination towards female gamers. Every gamer is different. Every gamer has a different skill level. Why can’t we just leave it at that? Why do we have to have these arguments about how women shouldn’t be playing video games, or if they do that they will automatically suck? Sure some female gamers are terrible, but there are some truly awful male gamers out there too. As long as the player is enjoying themselves and having a good time, there should be no problem (but I should clarify that if I am playing a game with a team and there is a weak link, I won’t be too pleased because that holds the rest of the team back).

Anyways, without getting on a crazy soap box, my point to all of this is that it’s sad that there are still biases out there, and it’s a shame because I really wanted to play Almighty Mr. Ice. Now I won’t simply out of principle, and save myself the $1.99.

- Me

Yesterday evening, TweetDeck was released into the Apple App Store for download on the iPhone.  The iPhone TweetDeck application is available free of charge.  The interface is very similar to that of the full PC version of TweetDeck.  The column system remains, and is reminiscent of the iPhone’s Safari page switching style, in that the columns do not take the entire screen, but are slightly smaller.  Column switching is done with the flick of a finger, just like changing pages on your iPhone’s home screen.  It is an excellent translation from desktop to iPhone.  The biggest feature, however, is the newly implemented Sync, which allows your desktop TweetDeck and iPhone TweetDeck to sync all changes with each other, ensuring that whether on your PC or on your iPhone, your TweetDeck experience is consistent.  Any changes made in one reflect in the other.

TweetDeck for the iPhone: 2 thumbs enthusiastically up.

-Because I said so