Gender Wars, The Game Where Men And Women Declare War On Each Other
thegamer.comStrategy and tactics games were having a moment in the '90s. StarCraft, Commandos, Homeworld, X-COM, Command & Conquer, Cannon Fodder—all stone cold classics. But when people reminisce about the genre's glory days, 1996's Gender Wars rarely gets a mention. Yes, that's right: someone really made a game called Gender Wars, which is exactly what it sounds like. It's a tactics game that imagines a dark future where men and women are at war. Not a metaphorical war, but an actual violent conflict.
"Back in the 1990s, men and women were bound by a 'politically correct' society to treat each other as equals," reads the ridiculous blurb on the back of the box. "But it couldn't last. Living without the harmonising influence of their natural opposites, each faction reverted back to their stereotypical ways. Small arguments eventually provoked separation on a global scale and the struggle for sexual domination erupted into the bitter and bloody Gender Wars." As far as premises go, it's certainly imaginative.
Related: Max Payne Is The Greatest Action Game Ever Made
It's also really stupid. For some reason, gender equality has driven the citizens of this sci-fi future to regress into old-fashioned (even for a '90s video game) male and female stereotypes. The women are obsessed with shopping and bad at driving. The men are beer-swilling oafs who always leave the toilet seat up. It's the laziest kind of 1970s stand-up humour. The stuff you see printed in birthday cards for middle-aged men. Yet someone decided to base an entire game around it—and it's about as funny as you'd expect.
It's also a bad game, being a brazen rip-off of Bullfrog's classic cyberpunk tactics game Syndicate—but with none of that game's style, atmosphere, or
Read more on thegamer.com
