Remember when female characters were apolitical and just had huge boobs and their main characteristic was being horny for the gruff player character and also had nude renders published in Playboy :rage-cry:
Watching Grimbeard's review of the former I now realise that Darkwatch and Dark Messiah had the exact same dynamic where you had two big-boobed female supporting characters, a demure good one and a horny evil one and the game's ending depended on which one you wanted to be your waifu.
I know people make fun of Halo's Cortana for being blue and naked all the time but she was honestly just fine as a character. It wasn't until 3 and 4 where they started to lean on the waifu angle with her. Amusingly, the succubus from Dark Messiah was that game's Cortana and even had the same voice actor, just with much, much worse dialogue :cringe:
spoiler
Dark Messiah is one of the best action games ever made however. It's probably like 4 bucks on Steam, GO BUY IT RIGHT NOW
If you don't get why people praised Alyx's portrayal in Half-Life 2, remember that this was the standard for female NPCs at the time.
The PS1 and PS2 were heavily marketed towards teen and twentysomething males and UK PS gaming magazines started leaning heavily into something called "lad culture" that was apparently a big thing on the accursed isle back then
Yeah lad culture and lads mags were particularly cursed. They also outsold absolutely everything in publishing so any magazine or tabloid paper with a similar audience started replicating some of the worst aspects of them.