Not only that, but cheating isn’t exactly a huge problem in this genre, so it’s a heavy handed solution already and one that’s even less necessary to consider.
If you like prog metal and hard rock, I’ve yet to find a better soundtrack than Guilty Gear XX. The fan favorite is “Holy Orders (Be Just or Be Dead)”, but for my money, the best songs on the soundtrack are “Existence” and “Awe of She”.
Never in my life have I heard anybody say “Are you going to get new game …? I’ve heard you can play as a black woman in this one. So cool.”
I have. It was more along the lines of, “Dragon Ball FighterZ has no waifus” or “there’s no one with any melanin in this game [until they found out about Nagoriyuki in Guilty Gear Strive]”. I would not be the least bit surprised if Street Fighter 6 is more popular with women than any previous entry after taking the bad male characters from previous entries and remixing them as women (Manon, Lily, A.K.I., Kimberly).
I predicted Dizzy. Venom would have been like my third or fourth guess. I never would have called Lucy, even if you told me to start guessing guest characters.
I haven’t played Forbidden West yet, but I had a very different experience from most with Zero Dawn. I think a lot of people view these games as Ubisoft style open world checklists, but if you turn the difficulty up a few notches, it really forces you to engage with the mechanics. A game where you used to just charge headlong into a fight you were surely going to win changes into one where you need to pay attention to weaknesses, lay traps, and pick off their deadliest weapons. Plus, you end up actively hunting certain machines for their upgrade parts, because those upgrades become more crucial to your own success.