The ultimate power-up is the penis. At least according to most major games, where the virtual dick is the ultimate Swiss Army knife: ignition key for power armor, suspension for surviving 40-foot falls, and a load-bearing member to carry infinite ammunition. Even when freed from physics and biology the developers display a constant need for cock.

iD Software

At least they stopped centering the guns.

They've got to be taking the piss by forcing half of all players to ignore their own gender. And I'm not just talking about the run-of-the-mill sexism, like armor that covers 2 percent of female bodies. I'm talking about games that went balls-out by completely excluding women.

#6. Final Fantasy Fears Cooties

Final Fantasy is the very last game you'd imagine excluding women. Sorry. Even the most inaccurately named first Final Fantasy had both sexes, and the main characters are androgynous enough to disprove gender binaries even though they're made of ones and zeroes. So it's weird that Final Fantasy XV decided on an all-male party because women are deceitful harlots bringing strife to the purity of male bonding.

Square Enix

The boys are back in town, and the town is out of hairspray.

As director Hajime Tabata explains: "Speaking honestly, an all-male party feels almost more approachable for players. Even the presence of one female in the group will change their behavior, so that they'll act differently. So to give the most natural feeling, to make them feel sincere and honest, having them all the same gender made sense in that way."

The implication that girls automatically bring lies and falsehood is a pretty Old Testament view for a Japanese fantasy series. Guys don't behave honestly around women? That's only true for idiot children and asshole adults. Though if you've ever played Final Fantasy you'll understand their cootiephobia. Most FF protagonists will attack 10 dragons any day but romantically approach the opposite sex like they were made of antimatter.

Which isn't to say there aren't women. In the background. The mechanic Cindy shows that Hajime has no problem with women working on heavy machinery in swimwear. She is so ridiculously underdressed even Final Fantasy fans complained, which is saying a lot since modern video game characters could use a belt catalog as an entire wardrobe.

Square Enix

Or maybe she's just 15-feet-tall, in regular clothes, and about to crush his head.

The worst thing is that an all-male party wouldn't have been a problem until Hajime's horrific excuse. Final Fantasy X-2 was all women, but then FF X-2 also replaced the combat mechanics with trying on dresses and the plot with giggling. To evenly match that level of gender stereotype, XV should have burping and farting special moves where you level up by proving you can grow a mustache.

#5. Nintendo Are Helpless Before Their Own Bullshit

Tri Force Heroes is a three-player co-op game. So more than any other game, you'd think they'd have character choice if only to help tell players apart. But all three players have to be the same guy in different colors. No, different colors of clothes -- of course he's going to be white.

Nintendo

"We decided against white clothes; they're a bit too on-the-nose in these hats.

Developer Hiromasa Shikata gives the most bullshit excuse in history: "The story calls for this sort of legend/prophecy where heroes will come together to help solve a problem. And in that, they are male characters. So, because the game is set with that as the story background, you cannot choose a gender; you are a male character."

So in the game that they wrote there's a story that they wrote featuring a prophecy that they goddamn wrote saying that you gotta have balls. And as mere mortals they're helpless in the face of prophecy. Despite digitizing sextuple testicles they still didn't have the balls to say, "Because we said so." Instead they sock-puppeted their own prophetic fan-fiction inside another fantasy to say that women are inferior. Bonus: You now understand most religions.

Nintendo

A Hyrulian priest seen prioritizing his dogma over someone asking for help.

In Zelda games, characters can turn into wolves, but they can't turn into women. A series so sexist even its own damsel dressed up as an androgynous stranger just to escape and kick some ass. The closest Hiromasa came to acknowledging women players is by helping them fill their "bullshit excuses" bingo cards. He mentions how the women who work for him are absolutely fine with it! Then digs his dick right through the Earth's crust with, "And to be honest, Link isn't the most masculine of guys in the world, depending on how you want to project yourself into the character."

Nintendo

"Stop helping, Shikata."

Nintendo finally acknowledged that women were just as capable of wearing green and lighting lamps with Linkle in Hyrule Warriors Legends. A remake of Hyrule Warriors. It only took them until the 48th Zelda game!

#4. Chivalry's Medieval Attitudes

The good thing is that Chivalry: Medieval Warfare doesn't exclude female characters because of appalling historical sexism. Any game claiming historical accuracy should have 99 percent of the players die in a field and the few remaining knights collapsing of heatstroke if they play for over an hour.

Activision

"Man (and only man), this stuff is heavy."

The bad thing is that they excluded women because of appalling modern sexism. Developer Steve Piggott wrote: "I actually think that adding female characters to a game like this would make it appeal less to females. Which at first sounds strange, but from my experience of the general maturity level of the internet and the unfortunately male dominated FPS market ... I don't think that it would add to the experience for women or men given the actions that would likely occur."

Translation: "Gamers are so poisonous that even reminding them women exist would simulate war crimes in a septic tank."

Further translation: "Those gamers are so toxic we'd rather surrender to them and eliminate women as even a fictional concept. We hope the 51 percent of all people we've ignored will understand that a few online jerks are more important than they are."

Activision

In-game simulation of developer's dialogue with women players.

Rather than confront sexism -- which would, remember, just be some angry commenters -- they agreed with the worst assholes in existence that everything would be much easier if they just didn't have to deal with women. When someone decides to avoid upsetting the assholes, they're agreeing with the assholes. They're being the assholes.