Gamertell

The latest Japanese dating-sim (aka bishoujo or hentai) game to be released by G-Collections is Amorous Professor Cherry. Available for PC CD/DVD (Windows 98, Me, 2000, XP, Vista; $39.95), the sexy sim includes English text with Japanese voiceovers so you get to enjoy the essence of the acting while being able to understand what the heck they are saying.

What they are doing, however, is graphically clear in any language.

In the game you are a young school boy named Kouta who has a crush on his appropriately-named and uber busty teacher…

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Check out the gallery: Amorous Professor Cherry screen shots

Time to keep you up on some of the bishoujo games from Japan (see what I did there?)

J-List recently stocked its supply of dating-sim game Snow Sakura released by G-Collections in December 2007. Snow Sakura stars student Tachibana Yuuji who is left to live with an uncle when his parents head to Hawaii for business. There, he meets back up with some cute cousins and childhood friends and enjoys some romantic moments in the snowy countryside…

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Check out the gallery: Snow Sakura screen shots

Text in videogames is a tricky thing. It can either help enrich the experience or slow the game to an agonizing pace. Sure, back in the days of Zork, a text-based adventure was actually a genre, but now it’s often an overlooked element of a larger game.

I’m not talking about MUDs here - I’m talking about the more standard graphic-based games that rely on conversations to progress the game. Forget the talking heads where you button mash to get to the next bit of action. I’m talking about games where text plays a crucial role in the action.

In reviewing Mass Effect for an upcoming CiN Weely column, I realized that there is a rather unexplainable difference between the way American games treat text-based interactions versus most Japanese games. Well, at least the DS and PC dating sim (aka bishoujo) games I’ve played.

In the games Mass Effect as well as Knight of the Old Republic, text-based conversations involve a…

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Product: Bazooka Café
Price: $34.95
System Requirements: Pentium II 300 mhz, 96 MB RAM, Windows 98/Me/2000/XP/Vista
Rating: 6.6/10
Pros: Good erotic art, low system requirements, funny and fairly well written
Cons: Low gaming value, culture shocks, grandma will think you’re a pervert
Overall: Selective adult fans will enjoy, not a good gift idea for Nana

You have to love the Japanese. Why? Because we dropped nuclear bombs on them, and that was rude. This is why we have to react with polite interest when they come up with #### that we think is weird culturally, like sushi or cartoon porn. In our culture, cartoons are for bright Saturday mornings and breakfast cereals. In Japan, cartoons are more likely to eviscerate each other with samurai swords or engage in lewd sexual acts. Which is probably a better way to sell cereal.

Which brings us to our game. Bazooka Café is a mixture of all of these things, except for evisceration and the breakfast cereal, because in Japan they call it “porridge.” I am a certified Japan expert.

Bazooka Café is what is called a bishoujo game, which translates literally as “pretty young girl.” This makes you think that Bungie might have done better to call it “bad-ass cyborg” instead of Halo, and you’d be right. According to Wikipedia a certain online source that my editor has expressly forbidden me to cite, and which I personally believe to be more accurate than the bible, these games will routinely sell a million copies in Japan. They don’t sell in western markets because we don’t do as well with freaky sex ####. There’s an entry for this phenomenon too, under the term “conservative Christian.”

You play Bazooka café by reading the story and then selecting different actions at certain points in the game, kind of like those choose-your-own-adventure novels you used to read as a kid. Each time you play through the game, you can choose a different action and unlock a different ending (read: sleep with a different women).

Seriously, this game has samurai swords. Well, actually they’re called Kendo swords and they’re made out of bamboo, but I hear they hurt like hell. Narumi is a waitress who works at Ariel café, and she also happens to be a Kendo instructor. She used to date Hideyuki, the game’s protagonist, who inherited from his father both the café and its corresponding propensity to attract women with Olympian proportions. Hideyuki soon finds that running the café will mostly involve tenderly contemplating the emotional problems of his staff while occasionally making comments like, “As a bonus, she has a huge rack as well.”

And just as the sensation of chewing and swallowing raw fish wrapped in rice and seaweed is fairly disconcerting at first, the notion of sitting down at a computer to seduce fake women is disorienting, and feels somehow to flout Darwin’s theory of evolution. Shouldn’t I be trying to talk to real women, you ask? But hey, let’s face it, usually that never works out so you might as well play this game where the women are impossible to not sleep with. We’ll learn a few interesting things about Japanese culinary culture as well, such as the fact that a lot of people have their drinks after they eat lunch instead of before. Also, there’s apparently much more restaurant sex than in America.

Design—6/10
Expect the traditional Japanese aesthetic on this one. Big eyes, small nose, ri-god-damn-diculous huge breasts in every god-damn scene. Truthfully, this ended up being kind of a turn off. They looked painful. In almost every instance where they were not barely sheathed beneath some strained fabric, I was thinking to myself that these girls are going to have serious back problems in the future.

There’s a preset number of stills for each scene that let you know how the girls are feeling based on the discussion. The ones for angry and sad are particularly well done, and fans of Manga will recognize these right away. A variety of backdrop scenes expand the location of the game so you don’t feel like you’re always in the restaurant, which can get to be tedious.

The voice acting is haunting. Passion may be the universal language, but dirty talk in Japanese waxes traumatic. A few times I thought I was being yelled at.

Features—6.5/10
This game features a truly exceptional save/load interface with over five pages/screens of save game slots. That’s a lot. There’s a gallery where you can view all of the “artistic cut-scenes” lets call them, for each of the game’s endings that you’ve unlocked.Included on the install disc is the bonus Valentines Day Special, which asks the tantalizing question “What if you didn’t have to choose?” This means threesomes. Lot’s of ‘em. The game also comes with a locker-sized poster that would be a fantastic way to get kicked out of Catholic school if you were looking for one.

Performance—7.5/10
The game runs well, even on my trusty old Dell Dimension, the first computer made in the early Paleolithic period. The game is only 546 MB, a little over 300 of which are the voice recordings. This is why G-Collections (the game’s distributor) makes a desperate plea not to pirate the game right in the instruction manual. They also ask you to call the authorities should you encounter one of the many roving groups of bishoujo game pirates that roam our city streets.

Overall—6.6/10
Here is the essential rub (no pun intended) for bishoujo — is it even a game at all? Some would contend that reading text and pressing the enter key does not a game constitute. After all, there are generally less than ten branch points in the game, and no matter which response you choose somebody is going to end up getting naked somewhere. The game even has an “Auto” feature, which is a polite way of saying hands free.

Barring masturbation, I was feeling fairly left out of the gaming experience until Narumi hit the protagonist with this line of dialouge: “If you’ve got enough free time to dance around like a little freak over there, then get your ass in the kitchen and help out! A bunch of customers just showed up.”

Which, of course, made me fall totally in love with her. And herein lies the real core of these kinds of games. We oftentimes judge games by their ability to establish an alternate reality, a complete and separate world. Admittedly, endowments often flout the laws of physics and physiology, and the protagonist is somewhat of a douche-bag (he would be sued and jailed in our country for sexual harassment, instantly) but there are still real characters there, each with their individual set of problems, desires, quirks, and ridiculously oversize braziers. Bazooka Café accomplishes this by forcing you to tap your way through literally hours of text before any of the clothes come off.

Which is probably why it confounds most Americans. They come to it looking for a game and find pornography or they come to it looking for pornography and find a game. Either way, they seem dissatisfied, generally give up and go get McDonalds. Little known fact: bishoujo is the real cause of the American obesity problem.

Read [J-List] Also Read [Play Asia] Also Read [G-Collections ] Read [Advance Anime Network]

• Get yer favorite gamer some nifty skivvies for Christmas
• Dreamcast modded into a Windows PC
• Panasonic makes a move for 3D Blu-ray

Japanese import site, J-List/J-Box, is releasing two new dating sim (aka bishoujo) DVD games: Exodus Guilty Vol. 1 and Tea Society of a Witch. Both are playable on any standard DVD player (or any other DVD playing device you have lying around your house) and played using the DVD remote.

From the descriptions, it also looks as if both games forgo the usual nudity and strong sexual content found in many bishoujo games, though “tea Society” still has a “Mature” rating. As with most Japanese bishoujo, the art is colorful and usually quite wonderful.

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From our favorite Japanese import site, J-List/J-Box, comes a PVC figure based on the Shining Tears PS2 bishojo RPG. This 1/8 scale figure (as if she was a real person) of sex kitten and ass-kickin’ ninja, Mao (meow!) “Beast Quarter,“ is 8.5 in. tall and priced at $65.

The Mao figure is produced by Eye Scream, which specializes in high-quality collectible figures, usually of anime ladies who tend to wear outfits that show more panty than a Victoria’s Secret catalog.

For those who have not tried a bishojo (aka bishoujo) game…

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