Bratz

"LISTEN. Female gamers are NOT all little girls into make-up and dancing. Now give us some darn action already!"

I am female. I am a gamer. I am not a nine year old girl, nor do I consider over-dressed beauty counter assistants to be my ''heroes''. I therefore get extremely annoyed when developers assume that I will identify with some giant lipstick with big hair. I appreciate that the female market is growing, but they have it all wrong. Girls don't want games like this. Heck, I didn't want a game like this back when I really was a nine year old girl - at the time I was playing ancient shoot em ups on my 8 bit Amstrad (please don't laugh at my age). Girls want pretty much the same games that boys want. It's really quite simple, but sadly the industry as a whole seems to be alien to this fact. This is why games like Bratz exist - no-one bothered to ask the female market what they wanted to play, and it's a huge discredit to what is in every other conceivable way a modern industry. You'd think that working at the cutting edge of leisure technology would mean that developers didn't have the gender stereotypical views of the 1950s, but it's hard to imagine anything else when you look at cases such as this.

So yes, this is a ''girl game''. It is up to you, the player, to take on the role of a deeply trashy big-haired wannabe and attempt to catapult them to fame and fortune by using their ''talent'' to its fullest potential. Any hint of realism (kneeling before a sweaty music industry executive) is lost, in favour of choosing the correct outfit for your girl, and dancing the night away by pressing some buttons on your GBA. There are five girls to choose from, all impossibly thin and made up to within an inch of their lives (the inch being comprised solely of foundation and their lives being their skin - this was a literal cliché). All the girls play the game in precisely the same way. The only difference is in their appearance. Superficial, yes, but then there's nothing that isn't superficial about this entire game. The whole thing screams ''bimbo''.

The mode of game play is to press buttons in time to the rhythm, in standard bemani style. You must hit the relevant button at the same time as the symbol for it is lit on screen in order to fill up a bar at the bottom of the screen to advance to the next stage. Initially it seems inoffensive, but quickly becomes hopelessly repetitive. That's pretty much all there is to the game. There isn't even any replay value, since all the girls are the same in all but appearance. It's mindless, brainless attempted fun, but it's so repetitive that it doesn't even stay fun for long. How shallow can a game be? If Bratz has anything to do with it, the answer is ''very''.

The graphics are exceptionally ugly. They too have been tinkered with in a frankly futile attempt to appeal to the fairer sex. For the last time, women do not all like flouncy pink cartoonish graphics, we do not all think that it's ''cute'', and no quantity of marketing could ever convince me that such nauseating tripe is anything other than tacky, cheap, patronizing and quite frankly deeply insulting to my intelligence. ''Oh, hehehe, it's a cutesy little pink fluffy heart! Awwww, how sweet!'' NO. Not sweet, TACKY. I'm a woman, I'm not simple, get that through your meaty heads now! This is a game that hurts the eyes, either through tears of frustration at being alienated by an entire industry, or through tears shed by vomiting at the sight of so many bright colors all on screen at the same time.

Music's quite catchy - have a point. There you go, two out of ten. No replay value, nothing attractive to look at, no game play that you can't get from something that's done a whole lot better than this, and no darn FUN.

Will someone please stop assuming that female gamers want to be associated with games like this?

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 07/31/03, Updated 07/31/03