Mount Voluptuous
By Christopher Cole
Review: David Whyld
Genre: Adult
Download: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/aifarchive/
Just to try something different, I decided I’d play an AIF (adult interactive fiction) game. Now I haven’t had a whole lot of time for them in the past because while I like the adult side of things as much as the next voyeur, I've found that the games leave a lot to be desired, but a couple I've played recently (The Backlot (TADS) and Ghost Justice (ADRIFT)) proved quite a bit better than I’d expected so I figured I’d give another one a try. And what better game to start with than the new one by the undisputed king of the AIF world?
The idea behind Mount Voluptuous is straight from the pages of a torrid 70’s sex flick: you're the boss of a modelling agency (the Mount Voluptuous of the title) who specialises in models who are, well, voluptuous. (Although ‘voluptuous’ here seems to mean chubby or flabby as much as anything else.) The general premise of the game, as far as I could gather, was to get as many models to your house as possible and… you can probably figure out the rest for yourself. This is an adult game after all.
So what was it like? I have to admit, the introduction didn’t impress me much and neither did I find the locations particularly enthralling. Location descriptions were very workmanlike (i.e. they told you a basic description of what was there but no effort was made to give them depth or make them seem real). There were countless items that you should have been able to examine but couldn’t. Some were minor and most probably don’t affect the storyline in any major way, but sometimes attention to detail is what makes a game seem better than it really is. The very first location, your office, has a poster on the wall of someone called Bettie Ballhaus (you can tell she's a porn star by the silly name) who can’t be examined. Examining the window shows a backyard and a pool which also can’t be examined.
There were also a lot of instances of the writer skipping over basic and very obvious commands. An ever-ringing phone is present in the first location yet despite the fact that it’s said to be ever-ringing, you're not able to answer it. A considerable amount of guess the verb is involved with actually using the phone. Examining it informs you that you can make calls simply by dialling the number yet any attempts to "dial [number]" or "call [number]" failed miserably. I later on found out from the Yahoo message boards that despite what the game says, you actually don’t need to type "dial" at all, you just type the number you want to call. Ouch! How come the beta-testers didn’t pick up on that?
This lack of care is evident throughout most of the game (or the parts that I played anyway). Most locations contain items for which descriptions are either missing or so short as to be pretty much irrelevant. While I'm aware that the majority of people play AIF games solely for the sex scenes, it’s still disappointing when so little effort has been expended on making the rest of the game enjoyable to play. Window dressing can make a whole lot of difference to a game sometimes. It’s even more disappointing that after playing another of the writer’s game (a Lara Croft non-AIF effort), I know he’s capable of a lot better than this.
Making progress is difficult due to the game often misleading you into thinking you need to do one thing whereas in fact you need to do something completely different. I tried to watch a few of the DVDs in the TV room because a description of the TV told me I could, yet no matter what I typed I couldn’t get a single thing to work properly. Mount Voluptuous also uses the dreaded "ask [name] about [subject]" form of conversation which is a nightmare game of guess the subject matter. Here it was especially bad and wasn’t helped much by the fact that the people I was able to converse with all seemed slightly less intelligent than the furniture. Now I don’t know if porn stars are naturally a bit dim or if that’s just a preconception made about them (a big boobs = small brains kind of equation) but if the ones featured in this game are anything to go by, then their reputation for being dim is well founded.
I suppose a review of an adult game just wouldn’t be complete if I didn’t mention the ladies you can encounter (for want of a better word). Unfortunately with a couple of exceptions they're nothing much to write home about and this probably ruined quite a lot of the excitement that the game might otherwise have held for me. Call me old fashioned but when I see a woman with rolls of flab on her frame, my first thought isn't "cor! What a stunner!" but "yuk! Put some clothes on, love!" My reaction to most of the ones here was of the latter variety, although if Sydney Moon happens to want a back massage one day I certainly won’t be saying no…
How far did I get? Not very far alas. The game seemed a real slow mover and despite it being a game about sex, I didn’t manage to get any (aside from one unfortunate instance that ended in me being arrested for rape). I met a couple of porn stars but after struggling with various conversation pieces with them, to no avail, I just found myself losing the will to continue. My attempts to have sex with the porn stars met with about as much success as my conversation attempts. There are no hints and no walkthrough available. For a game like this, which seems steeped in guess the verb, a few hints would have been a godsend. Without them I was unable to get anywhere and in the end I just quit.
I was hoping I’d like this game but I didn’t. I might have enjoyed it more if a little extra effort had been made on making the non-sex side of things (the location descriptions, the items, etc) a bit more interesting, and it might have perked matters up if the conversation system hadn’t been such a nightmare to use; yet with all the hassles I had, I really couldn’t recommend this game to anyone who isn't a massive fan of the adult side of the market and even then you're really going to have to work your damnedest to get any kind of enjoyment out of it.
3.5 out of 10
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