I Play Porn Games For The Story // 26.06.2011

Hey people unfortunate enough to find their way on this thread, it’s time for another blog entry about things including but not limited to porn games! This week was crazy in the real life department, but no-one cares about all of my sensitive white girl problems, it’s time for the things that really matter! You know; porn games... and other stuff!

Back To The Future

I bought Telltale’s Back To The Future series, or whatever, as soon as the first episode was released. This was probably due to a combination of just finishing Monkey Island at the time, and being super hyped from it being more Back To The Future greatness. Well the final episode was released a few days ago, and the story so far has been good enough for me to pretty much drop everything and play the proceeding part as soon as it’s released.

So I really enjoyed this one, I felt the story arc wrapped up pretty nicely, the puzzles were well thought out and rather varied, and the cameo from Michael Fox as Marty’s great grandfather is a great touch. This is also, however, the most videogame of the entire series, and this is where I think the whole thing sort of breaks down. I really like Back To The Future, as a movie series. These games do an amazing and faithful job at continuing that story, but this is at the expense of forcing Marty to solve puzzles instead of, say, being on a skateboard with Tannen and troupe in tow, luring them into some kind of humorous manure filled situation.

Having said that the story goes in rather interesting directions, and concludes in an amazingly silly way. It’s like they looked at the ending to Back To The Future 1 and thought to themselves “yeah let’s do this, but let’s make it a billionty times crazier”, so much so in fact, that the last shot before the credits is the Delorean flying away from the camera, turning and going straight for the camera. Cue ‘Back In Time’ starting and the result is me throwing my hands in the air with a rather definitive “AWW YEAH”.

Turntable.fm

What do you mean it’s not a game, well fuck you, I’m not making any more banners probably.

So Turntable is pretty awesome. I was introduced via the whiskey media twitter feed and have since spent most of my time there listening to good, bad and sometimes terrible music. To the point in which I’d spent hours in the Giant Bomb room in the afternoon and love it, and then go back in at night and quickly back out from all the shitty rock that gets played. Rather predictably I’ve spent most of my time in the anime centric rooms, where Ana sometimes is and being considerably awesome playing Panty & Stocking songs or whatnot. Or, you know, in the Anime Vice room; that somehow can degrade from anime songs to playing the vocal tracks from Sonic Adventure 2 and the Pokémon 2BA Master CD in under an hour. This got to the point that I made a ridiculous Pokémon and Nicki Minaj mashup just for a quick laugh one night.

But it looks like I’ll never be able to use it ever again! Due to the music industry absolutely hating anything that helps them sell music, looks like it’s blocked for any non-US residents. Oh well, looks like I’ll be going back to playing shitty mashups on iTunes instead.

Misc.

I went to Rufi ‘I ask stupid questions on live shows and somehow get them asked’ 91’s place to do our usual thing. While there we found some time to play videogames. Magicka was first up due to the new PvP patch, and that was alright. Admittedly it would have been a lot better if I wasn’t stuck with the controller while he was mashing away on the keyboard, not cool bro. I got my revenge with Super Street Fighter IV though, as we played a bunch of matches on all random and I beat him pretty much whenever I wasn’t Gen. I also had the pleasure of being in the presence of the most intense Mass Effect argument ever, and only being able to nod and not know entirely what the hell was going on. So that was pretty dope. Oh and I played a little bit of Team Fortress 2 which was cool, the new Soldier weapons seem pretty fun. I also got the most impressive kill I’ve ever gotten after 600 hours of playing but I can’t work the new replay controls so I ended up losing it.

Sengoku Rance

Hot holy DAMN do I love this game, like oh man it’s so much fun. Ok, to start off, to me Sengoku Rance is one of those games that, if I’m extremely bored, I could easily load up and immediately start having fun. I’d be having so much fun, in fact, that if I was to start playing on Saturday morning, I’d check the clock and realise “oh god it’s so late I have to write that stupid blog and post it in like an hour fuck.”

Hypothetically speaking, of course.

So what can I say about the story of this game. I can say GAHAHAHA, what I just linked you to there dear readers is the porn music. That’s right! The porn music. In almost every other visual novel, the sex scene will have a delicate piano piece to set up a passionate scene between the characters. But not Sengoku Rance, instead it plays this jaunty piece. I love it!

But for real, the story is rather great. The main character is Rance, who comes to Japan with the goal to conquer the entire country, while concurrently getting it on with as much woman as humanly possible. As he conquers a few territories, rather unsurprisingly other territories will not take too kindly to that and declare war. Meaning you’ll have to be careful about which ones to take over and try not to have too many clans against you at any one time. While this is happening, the leader of the Oda family (the family you are secretly controlling) gets possessed by a demon and resurrects the Demon Army. And then at that point you best try to take them down as fast as possible.

This is only the main story; however, there are a ton of different things to do here. Once you complete the game there are three other non-canon storylines that completely change the entire story. On top of that there is a route in which you can stop Oda from being possessed, meaning you can play freely without the pressure of the Demon Army looming, and a free for all mode, where you can start as any of the families and try to rule Japan as any of them.

The gameplay is turn based, almost Risk like in design. You start with 2 actions per round (that can be upgraded to I think 5) which can be used for a lot of stuff. In any territory you own you can search for a dungeon for items, talk to named generals in your army to advance a character specific story, hire new generals of increase that territory’s power. In neighbouring territory’s you can declare war or prepare to battle in that specific territory. In territories you’re warring with, you can attack them, once all of their buildings are under your control (each battle won gets you one building) you control that territory. Most of these actions cost points in either search; construction or negotiation. You can assign up to 5 generals to reach the desired number of points. When choosing to battle you can select up to 6 generals to fight. Once a general is used, they cannot be used again until the next round. After your turn is finished, the opposing families can move, advance some story elements or attack your territories, in which you have to defend with your remaining generals. Once all the families have moved, the next round starts; and the process is repeated.

The battle system is reminiscent of jRPG battles. Your army can have up to 6 generals, each of whom has their own army. These armies count as both that general’s health and their attack power, so for instance attacking with a small army will be rather pointless. Generals are divided into different classes; you can get warriors, tanks, musketeers, archers, monks, mages, ninjas, and a bunch of others. Battles last for 24 turns or until one team has been completely defeated. Any defeated generals on the opposing side can either die or be captured, where they can be recruited as generals. Most territories will have the main story characters be captured automatically when that territory is defeated.

I think that covers all the basics of the game, and if you take anything away from this week’s blog it’s you should at the very least try this game out. It’s a lot of fun with a wide interesting cast of characters, interesting story beats, and one hundred porn scenes. I don’t like bringing up the porn aspect of porn games but dude there is a lot, if that’s your thing.

Oh look at that I actually watched an anime this week, how bizarre.

To Love-Ru

So after threatening myself with this prospect last week, I got around to watching To Love-Ru. This anime is weird. Whether it’s good weird or bad weird, however, I still haven’t decided yet. There are some amazing parts but these are coupled with, and I can’t believe I’m complaining about this, with gratuitous amounts of fan service. I don’t mind the odd part here or there, but I can only handle so many aliens that conveniently eat away at clothes and also conveniently only seem to target females before I get fed up.

Maybe I should back peddle just a little tad here. In this anime you follow the adventures of Rito Yuuki, a generic high school student with a crush on a girl in his class. But uh oh! Every time he tries to confess his love he always finds himself in rather stick slapping situations that keep preventing him from doing so. The anime starts with one such event, in which uh oh! A flying saucer crashes down right in front of him. Later on an alien called Lala shows up and uh oh! He accidently proposes to her, and she just happens to be the goddamn princess of the universe. Now this bland generic high school student has to balance his high school life and becoming king of the universe. I’m sure I don’t have to explicitly say it but hilarity does in fact, ensue. In fact the entire first half of the series features almost any female who happens to have a voice actor be succumbed to the ever so potent power of love, whether they like it or not. The second half then feature said girls being all anime and whatnot. The last 3 episodes, however, someone accidently flips the plot switch and shit gets real for a while.

As far as character arcs go they looked in the generic stereotype barrel and picked out a few here and there, and slapped some with “also an alien” to be all original or something. I will admit, however, my favourite character arc was in fact for a guy. But suddenly! The guy is an alien, and whenever he sneezes, he turns into a girl! I’m going to go on record and say the male version of the character is the best member of the harem which makes the latter half super frustrating, when he only ever shows up for comic relief, and the female counterpart is the main focus. Why won’t any harem anime just have the guts to have a male character in the harem for some interesting and forbidden love? Ugh, maybe I should just go re-watch Gravitation... again.

Speaking of not being gay, the fan service as previously stated, is rather prominent throughout the entire show. Now don’t get me wrong, I like boobs, but there is a limit. Lala first shows up via teleporting into Rito’s bath, completely naked, because her teleporter can’t teleport clothes. In one battle against a giant frog, the spit doesn’t damage people, but rather erodes clothes. I’m not an expert on fighting but I don’t think that’s going to be that effective in battle. Even tentacle having enemies that... well, you get the idea. You get all of this, most of them resulting in some if not all the girls completely naked on the screen, yet the accidental kiss between Ren and Rito cuts away before contact is made FUCK SAKE ANIME WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING.

I’ve also seemed to overlook a huge part of this anime; yo, aliens. So there are quite a lot of aliens in this anime, some number of them conveniently look exactly like humans. But somehow, the human characters are surprisingly fine with all of this. For instance when Rito’s sister Mikan finds out Rito is marrying an alien princess she seems to take it rather well and becomes fast friends with Lala, instead of, you know, freaking out. Similarly when the girls at school find out Lala is an alien princess they pretty much all go “yeah we figured”.

Yet I still enjoyed watching it, there are some really funny parts and just a competent well rounded harem comedy anime, if a little generic. But who knows, maybe the sequel will completely change that! I’m guessing not.

And that brings us to the end of another week! I’m still programming that game of mine; I encountered a super small bug and my solution way to completely rewrite 2 month of work to be more compact. Short version is decimals are the devil, long version, well, will be a story for another week.

Hey people unfortunate enough to find their way on this thread, it’s time for another blog entry about things including but not limited to porn games! This week was crazy in the real life department, but no-one cares about all of my sensitive white girl problems, it’s time for the things that really matter! You know; porn games... and other stuff!

Back To The Future

I bought Telltale’s Back To The Future series, or whatever, as soon as the first episode was released. This was probably due to a combination of just finishing Monkey Island at the time, and being super hyped from it being more Back To The Future greatness. Well the final episode was released a few days ago, and the story so far has been good enough for me to pretty much drop everything and play the proceeding part as soon as it’s released.

So I really enjoyed this one, I felt the story arc wrapped up pretty nicely, the puzzles were well thought out and rather varied, and the cameo from Michael Fox as Marty’s great grandfather is a great touch. This is also, however, the most videogame of the entire series, and this is where I think the whole thing sort of breaks down. I really like Back To The Future, as a movie series. These games do an amazing and faithful job at continuing that story, but this is at the expense of forcing Marty to solve puzzles instead of, say, being on a skateboard with Tannen and troupe in tow, luring them into some kind of humorous manure filled situation.

Having said that the story goes in rather interesting directions, and concludes in an amazingly silly way. It’s like they looked at the ending to Back To The Future 1 and thought to themselves “yeah let’s do this, but let’s make it a billionty times crazier”, so much so in fact, that the last shot before the credits is the Delorean flying away from the camera, turning and going straight for the camera. Cue ‘Back In Time’ starting and the result is me throwing my hands in the air with a rather definitive “AWW YEAH”.

Turntable.fm

What do you mean it’s not a game, well fuck you, I’m not making any more banners probably.

So Turntable is pretty awesome. I was introduced via the whiskey media twitter feed and have since spent most of my time there listening to good, bad and sometimes terrible music. To the point in which I’d spent hours in the Giant Bomb room in the afternoon and love it, and then go back in at night and quickly back out from all the shitty rock that gets played. Rather predictably I’ve spent most of my time in the anime centric rooms, where Ana sometimes is and being considerably awesome playing Panty & Stocking songs or whatnot. Or, you know, in the Anime Vice room; that somehow can degrade from anime songs to playing the vocal tracks from Sonic Adventure 2 and the Pokémon 2BA Master CD in under an hour. This got to the point that I made a ridiculous Pokémon and Nicki Minaj mashup just for a quick laugh one night.

But it looks like I’ll never be able to use it ever again! Due to the music industry absolutely hating anything that helps them sell music, looks like it’s blocked for any non-US residents. Oh well, looks like I’ll be going back to playing shitty mashups on iTunes instead.

Misc.

I went to Rufi ‘I ask stupid questions on live shows and somehow get them asked’ 91’s place to do our usual thing. While there we found some time to play videogames. Magicka was first up due to the new PvP patch, and that was alright. Admittedly it would have been a lot better if I wasn’t stuck with the controller while he was mashing away on the keyboard, not cool bro. I got my revenge with Super Street Fighter IV though, as we played a bunch of matches on all random and I beat him pretty much whenever I wasn’t Gen. I also had the pleasure of being in the presence of the most intense Mass Effect argument ever, and only being able to nod and not know entirely what the hell was going on. So that was pretty dope. Oh and I played a little bit of Team Fortress 2 which was cool, the new Soldier weapons seem pretty fun. I also got the most impressive kill I’ve ever gotten after 600 hours of playing but I can’t work the new replay controls so I ended up losing it.

Sengoku Rance

Hot holy DAMN do I love this game, like oh man it’s so much fun. Ok, to start off, to me Sengoku Rance is one of those games that, if I’m extremely bored, I could easily load up and immediately start having fun. I’d be having so much fun, in fact, that if I was to start playing on Saturday morning, I’d check the clock and realise “oh god it’s so late I have to write that stupid blog and post it in like an hour fuck.”

Hypothetically speaking, of course.

So what can I say about the story of this game. I can say GAHAHAHA, what I just linked you to there dear readers is the porn music. That’s right! The porn music. In almost every other visual novel, the sex scene will have a delicate piano piece to set up a passionate scene between the characters. But not Sengoku Rance, instead it plays this jaunty piece. I love it!

But for real, the story is rather great. The main character is Rance, who comes to Japan with the goal to conquer the entire country, while concurrently getting it on with as much woman as humanly possible. As he conquers a few territories, rather unsurprisingly other territories will not take too kindly to that and declare war. Meaning you’ll have to be careful about which ones to take over and try not to have too many clans against you at any one time. While this is happening, the leader of the Oda family (the family you are secretly controlling) gets possessed by a demon and resurrects the Demon Army. And then at that point you best try to take them down as fast as possible.

This is only the main story; however, there are a ton of different things to do here. Once you complete the game there are three other non-canon storylines that completely change the entire story. On top of that there is a route in which you can stop Oda from being possessed, meaning you can play freely without the pressure of the Demon Army looming, and a free for all mode, where you can start as any of the families and try to rule Japan as any of them.

The gameplay is turn based, almost Risk like in design. You start with 2 actions per round (that can be upgraded to I think 5) which can be used for a lot of stuff. In any territory you own you can search for a dungeon for items, talk to named generals in your army to advance a character specific story, hire new generals of increase that territory’s power. In neighbouring territory’s you can declare war or prepare to battle in that specific territory. In territories you’re warring with, you can attack them, once all of their buildings are under your control (each battle won gets you one building) you control that territory. Most of these actions cost points in either search; construction or negotiation. You can assign up to 5 generals to reach the desired number of points. When choosing to battle you can select up to 6 generals to fight. Once a general is used, they cannot be used again until the next round. After your turn is finished, the opposing families can move, advance some story elements or attack your territories, in which you have to defend with your remaining generals. Once all the families have moved, the next round starts; and the process is repeated.

The battle system is reminiscent of jRPG battles. Your army can have up to 6 generals, each of whom has their own army. These armies count as both that general’s health and their attack power, so for instance attacking with a small army will be rather pointless. Generals are divided into different classes; you can get warriors, tanks, musketeers, archers, monks, mages, ninjas, and a bunch of others. Battles last for 24 turns or until one team has been completely defeated. Any defeated generals on the opposing side can either die or be captured, where they can be recruited as generals. Most territories will have the main story characters be captured automatically when that territory is defeated.

I think that covers all the basics of the game, and if you take anything away from this week’s blog it’s you should at the very least try this game out. It’s a lot of fun with a wide interesting cast of characters, interesting story beats, and one hundred porn scenes. I don’t like bringing up the porn aspect of porn games but dude there is a lot, if that’s your thing.

Oh look at that I actually watched an anime this week, how bizarre.

To Love-Ru

So after threatening myself with this prospect last week, I got around to watching To Love-Ru. This anime is weird. Whether it’s good weird or bad weird, however, I still haven’t decided yet. There are some amazing parts but these are coupled with, and I can’t believe I’m complaining about this, with gratuitous amounts of fan service. I don’t mind the odd part here or there, but I can only handle so many aliens that conveniently eat away at clothes and also conveniently only seem to target females before I get fed up.

Maybe I should back peddle just a little tad here. In this anime you follow the adventures of Rito Yuuki, a generic high school student with a crush on a girl in his class. But uh oh! Every time he tries to confess his love he always finds himself in rather stick slapping situations that keep preventing him from doing so. The anime starts with one such event, in which uh oh! A flying saucer crashes down right in front of him. Later on an alien called Lala shows up and uh oh! He accidently proposes to her, and she just happens to be the goddamn princess of the universe. Now this bland generic high school student has to balance his high school life and becoming king of the universe. I’m sure I don’t have to explicitly say it but hilarity does in fact, ensue. In fact the entire first half of the series features almost any female who happens to have a voice actor be succumbed to the ever so potent power of love, whether they like it or not. The second half then feature said girls being all anime and whatnot. The last 3 episodes, however, someone accidently flips the plot switch and shit gets real for a while.

As far as character arcs go they looked in the generic stereotype barrel and picked out a few here and there, and slapped some with “also an alien” to be all original or something. I will admit, however, my favourite character arc was in fact for a guy. But suddenly! The guy is an alien, and whenever he sneezes, he turns into a girl! I’m going to go on record and say the male version of the character is the best member of the harem which makes the latter half super frustrating, when he only ever shows up for comic relief, and the female counterpart is the main focus. Why won’t any harem anime just have the guts to have a male character in the harem for some interesting and forbidden love? Ugh, maybe I should just go re-watch Gravitation... again.

Speaking of not being gay, the fan service as previously stated, is rather prominent throughout the entire show. Now don’t get me wrong, I like boobs, but there is a limit. Lala first shows up via teleporting into Rito’s bath, completely naked, because her teleporter can’t teleport clothes. In one battle against a giant frog, the spit doesn’t damage people, but rather erodes clothes. I’m not an expert on fighting but I don’t think that’s going to be that effective in battle. Even tentacle having enemies that... well, you get the idea. You get all of this, most of them resulting in some if not all the girls completely naked on the screen, yet the accidental kiss between Ren and Rito cuts away before contact is made FUCK SAKE ANIME WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING.

I’ve also seemed to overlook a huge part of this anime; yo, aliens. So there are quite a lot of aliens in this anime, some number of them conveniently look exactly like humans. But somehow, the human characters are surprisingly fine with all of this. For instance when Rito’s sister Mikan finds out Rito is marrying an alien princess she seems to take it rather well and becomes fast friends with Lala, instead of, you know, freaking out. Similarly when the girls at school find out Lala is an alien princess they pretty much all go “yeah we figured”.

Yet I still enjoyed watching it, there are some really funny parts and just a competent well rounded harem comedy anime, if a little generic. But who knows, maybe the sequel will completely change that! I’m guessing not.

And that brings us to the end of another week! I’m still programming that game of mine; I encountered a super small bug and my solution way to completely rewrite 2 month of work to be more compact. Short version is decimals are the devil, long version, well, will be a story for another week.

I feel ashamed that Sengoku Rance sounds familiar to me. I haven't played it, but I should, just so I can make a blog called "I Play Porn Games for the Porn." (Ironically, I can't understand how people play porn games for the porn. How am I supposed to get anything out of the porn while I'm playing a racy RPG? Jedi blowjobs?)

i always find it really weird when there's some hentai game that isn't reading material or DOAX2 with sex. nice writeup, though. i wouldn't mind if every sex scene in everything ever replaced romantic pianos with generic rock.  
 
also, speaking of ridiculous fan service, it's kind of what got me to stop watching High School of the Dead. i know i'm not the one to talk here since i like the Dead or Alive series, but every scene just had serious tits up all in your face. it went from being awkward to "oh, nice. there's another boob shot." it got kind of annoying after a while. i'll end up going back to it though, because i don't watch a lot of anime and zombie killing seems pretty alright. 

This image pretty much sums up the Rance series of games.  

@AjayRaz said:

@Mento said:

This image pretty much sums up the Rance series of games.

hehehe. really? does it have a good sense of humor at least?

In one scene, Rance says "Purple dildo! Ta-dah! Let me explain. This purple dildo is a dildo!"

It's definitely got a sense of humour at the very least.

Oh dear god, I died over the white girl and no homo links. This was a great read, homie.

And we miss you on turntable.fm. :<

@Mento: Yeah if you can catch it on sale I'd recommend it. I was thinking about waiting for the full series to come out back in December but the first episode was just too tempting.

@AjayRaz: Yeah the fan service in High School of the Dead is also pretty bad. But in To Love Ru the majority of the fan service is intercut with shots of nearby males who are looking at the girls with either hearts for eyes or just generally creepily. It's... unnerving.

@Video_Game_King: That's a good reason as any to play it! And to be honest I can't see why anyone would either. The majority of the ones I've played I end up skipping through the porn sections. Yet at the same time if there's an option to disable them completely I'd keep them in. Maybe I'm just weird.

@Sparklykiss: Miss you too! I hate choosing my own music, it's way too much responsibility. : <

I usually read hentai manga for the story.

@InfiniteGeass said:

I usually read hentai manga for the story.

Hell yeah, quite clearly the story is the main draw for those!

@InfiniteGeass said:

I usually read hentai manga for the story.

Hell yeah, quite clearly the story is the main draw for those!

Fucking shit up!

Gutted about Turntable seriously such a bummer... I guess now you have more time to play Mass Effect at least.

Also Huey Lewis & the News! Mother fucker you are stepping up your game to 11

@Video_Game_King said:

@Psycosis said:

@InfiniteGeass said:

I usually read hentai manga for the story.

Hell yeah, quite clearly the story is the main draw for those!

It is? What about the boobies?

Real men obviously only read them for the intense narrative.

@Rufi91: It's kinda weird now that I think about it that I used the Power of Love reference in the anime section when I ended up talking about Back To The Future, oh well.

If you like Rance you'd probably like Daibanchou.

I watched To Love Ru, and... I'll say that I kind of liked it. The fanservice was a bit much, but I liked it a bit more when I realized what it really was: Urusei Yatsura but where the character in the Ataru role wasn't a hit-on-everything-with-boobs douche (no, really, that was his defining character trait), and where the character in the Lum role wasn't psychotic (her defining trait, aside from her shapely figure and her tiger-print bikini, was electrocuting Ataru whenever he looked at anything that wasn't her.)

@Psycosis: You betta promise me I'll be back in ti-i-ime!

You should read books instead.

@AuthenticM: Books are for schmucks, schmucks I say!

@Count_Zero: Yeah, actually now that I think about it it's sorta inline with DearS as well, although if my memory serves me well (which I really doubt it does) it wasn't as harem based, despite there being multiple love interests. I guess there's quite a lot of anime that just falls into this generic pool of 'comedy harem + x', and just so happens that in these ones the 'x' is aliens... You know when I type that all out I understand why people hate it so. Christ.

@Bocam: I tried Big Bang Age a few months ago but the game mechanics were just weird to me so I couldn't get into it as much. It's also a much darker universe in which you can't save every girl and to drive that fact home they just show what terrible things you unintentionally did to some of these girls. I'll probably go back to it and try it again but first impressions were poor.

@Psycosis: True. Though, the thing is, Comedy Harem + Aliens is kind of how the whole thing started. Urusei Yatsura was the first major series in this genre to get really, really popular back in the late '70s, and everything that came after in some way mimics that - with the primary difference, I'd say, is that they all realize that Lum is a character without any real universal appeal outside of her looks. The show is very much like Family Guy, except replacing the reference comedy with jokes about horrible people being horrible to each other. Subsequent series went more of the Tenchi route once that series aired, in an attempt to make the characters more likable and thus giving the series more shelf life. Some have succeeded more than others.

Anyway son we ending up 35 65 in Street Fighter so suck it! :P

Ah man, I keep getting behind on these.

To Love-Ru sounds like a guilty pleasure, if anything. Last one of mine was probably that "Majutsu Index something-something". I just don't know if I want to watch that sort of anime anymore (probably).