First, allow me an angry gibber. This website is so hideously constructed that in Firefox, the google ads overlap the text and the text runs out of the boxes, and having to actually click through the magazine and "pages" just reminds me of the bad old days when I actually had to touch paper. I am tempted to copy the entire article here, because it's good.

But for chrissake, catch the fuck up.

Anyway, this piece addresses the claim by Microsoft's Peter Moore that "...god forbid, even your mom will be [on the Xbox 360]." He turned out to be right, but perhaps only in the case of one Mrs. P, a mom who was foisted on the author's 360.

The conclusions are actually a little surprising to me. Her favorite game by far was "Condemned", which is in line with an earlier study claiming that women prefer immersive, story-given games that require problem-solving. But I would have figured the intense spookiness and violence of it would have put the lady off. I'm very pleased to read that she not only loved it, but got very good at it as well.

The biggest problem they encountered was the same as I've experienced with my own mother when introducing her to technology: she requires me to write down the steps that must be taken for every single task. She is at a loss to understand that once you've executed one program, you can execute them all. The control scheme is almost exactly the same from task to task, and opening Outlook is really the same as opening Firefox.

Mrs. P also has this problem, somehow unable to grasp that the dual analog controls for Prey were almost the same as the ones in Condemned, and had to start all over. I think this is the fault of generations of unintuitive controls being memorized by an insular game society. Perhaps the Wii will save us.

Even though the controls in Prey are similar to those found in Condemned, it was like starting all over again for her. It was difficult for her to get use to the initial movement controls, without swinging violently out of control and running off into the walls.

The final judgment was that the 360 has a long ways to go before mom would actually go out and buy one, but now I'm very tempted to run my own mother through the same gauntlet, perhaps on a different system. Hmm... Eliza Gauger

Warrior Woman [Primotech]

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