For Me It Was Tuesday

Soda51's oeuvre consists for the most part of extremely short games with ham-fisted messages. For Me It Was Tuesday is no exception. Here, we follow two girls as they go to the arcade to comment on two boys playing Street Fighter. At least, that's what I think is going on; on the one hand, the game suggests that you are playing one of the girls and are also playing the Street Fighter game, but on the other hand, the girls continually make sexist remarks that would make no sense when addressed to another girl. So the fiction of the game refuses to become very clear. Either the girls are commenting on two hapless boys, or they have some thing going on where they trash talk to each other as if the other girl were a buy.

The piece is highly non-interactive; you just press a couple of links, and they change what you see next, but there's no meaningful agency.

So why am I giving the game 2 stars? Because the stream of insults the girls engage in are sometimes spot-on as gender-inverted parodies of the stupid things that some male gamers say to female gamers. This makes the current game slightly better than the other Soda51 games that I've played, and that should be rewarded.

Original review:
This game is just a short story with about 10 pages of screenshots from Street Fighter, where a couple of women comment on your (a man's) playing abilities, with some lewd references thrown in.

Not much to see here.

Edit:Christina Nordlander pointed out that this game actually reverses the the roles of male and female gamers, where female gamers experience criticism and harassment. The game works much better with this interpretation, but it's still short and childish (although the subject matter is childish people, so is this genius on the author's part? It's hard to know with Soda51.)

As other reviewers have noted, it isn't clear whats really going on - are the girls playing and insuling each other? Are they insulting Ken & Ryu? Are they wathcing other people play and insulting them? If so, one or two people? It isn't clear, and might actually change during play.

Anyway, here's the deal: you play Street Fighter in this game. You pick wether you play Ryu or Ken. It'll show you a graphic from a game of ST and it'll give you a choice of two moves, with their conventional notation (→↓↘+P for a Shoryuken, etc). The match has just started: do you punch, or kick? Ken just threw a fireball, do you jump or duck? Depending on the option you pick, you'll get a different graphic; ducking a hadouken will get you knocked on your ass, and so on. Depending on your choices, you can either win or lose the match. This part of the game is a pretty accurate representation of playing Street Fighter in the form of a CYOA. If that was the whole game, I think most people would play it and say "heh, cute. It's street fighter!"

Adding in these girls throwing insults at you over the top totally destablizes the experience & makes it into such a different game that neither of the other two reviews even mentioned the CYOA implementation of Street Fighter!

Due to a few of their other games I think the intention was probably indeed for it to be read as a kind of feminist inversion of sexist trash talk, but apart from a couple bits ("You play like a man!") the comparison doesn't really hold for me. Something like "You're pretty good with that joystick, and by joystick, I mean your dick!" doesn't work at all if you replace 'dick' with 'pussy' or something, there is no cultural provision for a sexist weirdo saying to a girl "you're probably good at jerking off", you know? There's something specific to male masturbation that gives it that kind of shameful quality, like jerking off is pathetic (as opposed to haivng sex), which lets it be used as an insult. For this reason it has a more natural analoge in femdom humiliation clips; the women are playing on the man's own neurosis about his sexuality and the role implied by his gender, and calling into question his ability to succeed as a man or men's ability to succeed at dominating women. But, this is also mixed in with lines that do read like a straightforward reversal, as above (and "pretty good, for a man!") and some lines could be easily read as both ("Just face it aready, women are better at videogames, we have better manual dexterity, its genetics!"). So, the fictions worldbuilding isn't really easily grasped, either - is this an upside-down world where theres a matriarchy, or are these women making fun of the man's ability to live up to expectations of patriarchy? It isn't clear, or changes during play.

That said, if you choose to read it as two women insulting each other, all of the lines work kind-of well if you imagine them as transmisogynist insults, each girl trying to imply the other is really a man. That's likely not the intended reading, but its part of the games success, I think, that by refusing to define the fictions actual subjects, such comparisons between different kinds of languge (misogynist jeering, fetish humiliation and cis women's transmisogynist banter) become possible.

Anyway, the game isn't saying a whole lot, I guess, but what it says it says convincingly.

In this Twine game, you play Street Fighter II (as either Ryu or Ken) while Chun Li and Cammy make inverted sexist comments about how boys aren't real gamers or whatever. It's funny, but I think something's a little wonky with the CYOA Street Fighter combat. I thought I was winning until I lost. Then I played again and thought I was losing until I won. Either the game is wonky or I am. Whatever. It was cute enough.