Chicks Don't Skate?

Skate 2 lets you create a female avatar, but man does the game make assumptions about who is playing. Your character is a dude by default. And all the game's dialogue skews towards the masculine. So characters will call you "dude" and "man" right to your face. Even your best bud uses "he" and "him" when talking about you.

Interestingly there's in-game lore to back up these irregularites. If you watch the opening for the game you'll see that the player character has just been released from prison (it doesn't appear to be co-ed). When you jump into the game and customize your character you're getting plastic surgery. That's how they solved the problem of character customization in the first game as well. Your body gets smashed in a horrible traffic accident. The Gonz, moonlighting as a surgeon, fixes you up (to the tune of Slayer's "Raining Blood") and thats when the game lets you tweak your own looks.

So, technically, if you chose to play with a female avatar in Skate 2, you're not playing a natural-born woman, so much as a post-operative transsexual. I guess it makes sense, now that I think on it, that the achievement/trophy around switching to female avatars is called "Gender Bender."

Still, I imagine female skaters (there's got to more than 14 notable pros) or female fans of skateboarding games might feel funny about the way all this all plays out -- especially when they get labeled a gender bender for switching to the sex that god gave them.

Pictured: Legendary Z-boy Peggy Oki.