Alright, here we go, backlog golf – just gonna start alphabetically on steam, and… ok what the fuck is Action Taimanin? Oh god, I must’ve downloaded this when I was horny. Yup.

Every once in awhile I get curious about these pseudo-sex games. Even back in the 90s there were little strip poker type games going around, attempting to make a cheap buck by dangling the promise of a few softcore images of busty women behind the challenge of some game so basic the code and licenses were probably public domain (remember when every phone game was a bejeweled shell?). But the Japanese (as usual) have taken it to another level.

A part of me understands the appeal. It’s kind of the same feeling that gives me nostalgia for early internet porn. There was a goldilocks period of the internet when porn was just the right amount available. You had to hunt, a bit. You had to wrestle through brutal, obnoxious, virus riddled websites that link chained in infinite circles, teasing you with images from some forbidden video that didn’t exist. You had to guess URLs and see what would come up. The images and videos were slow and grainy. But those challenges gave the whole experience a healthy dose of foreplay.

So I kind of get the sex games. They are for people that want a challenge, a hunt – some foreplay to the experience. It satisfies something in our twisted little brains. But still, every time my curiosity drives me far enough to try one of these I leave thinking: WHY? WHY WOULD YOU EVER PLAY THIS? HOW COULD THIS POSSIBLY BE WORTH THE TIME & EFFORT?

I remember opening one where literally every gameplay element was a version of clicking repeatedly to generate money. Mash that mouse button to work your job. Mash that mouse button to exercise. Click all the targets as fast as you can. Buy gifts with the rewards, give the gifts to the characters, and try to improve your relationship until their clothes pop off. It was the most base version of “give me your time and I’ll give you a reward”. Somewhere out there I know someone designed a bot to click for them, a hamster beating the wheel he’d volunteered to power.

Whatever – it’s backlog golf so lets give it a shot! You’re presented with three busty characters of various hair colours (for variety). They loosely represent a mage/warrior/thief kind of choice of fighting styles. You seem to be in sort of a Ghost in the Shell type world where you’re super ninja secret agents battling terrorists.

You jump in pretty quick to the first level. You’re in a simple 3D world with a camera locked on based on the direction you’re moving. A few enemies pop up in the square and you can slash them to ribbons with a bit of button mashing. It has an arcade-y feel which is surprisingly satisfying for something so basic. Spacebar teleport jumps you around and you can hold the mouse down to trigger small combos.

I end up playing about 15 levels of this. They’re all small and quick, with a mixture of rainbow6 style snipers, little spider-y robots and some more decorated boss ninjas (and some giant demon dog at the end for kicks). Your health bar seems basically infinite and you can just happily bounce around mashing everything into the ground after which your character does a little victory cheer and shakes her humungous latex knockers for good measure.

Between levels you’re treated to some kind of unholy fusion of phone games and sex games. Pop ups come at you advertising some exclusive packages of I don’t know what, costumes? characters? There’s the usual multiple types of currency and plenty of places you can go to burn it all off. Your character levels up along with support characters and both can be customized, re-skinned, and infinitely upgraded. The game does the obnoxious hand holding common to current phone games where you have to follow a narrator through about 12 screens of explanation to make sure you understand the concept of an RPG.

And this probably goes without saying but, at the start and end of every mission you’re bombarded with a line of rotating characters and dialogue rambling on about your father and your mission and the global terrorists, with a healthy sprinkling of endlessly-boobed women telling your character they believe in you. I know this is a thing and I honestly believe there are some well written versions of these games that fill half the time with character dialogue, but every time I’ve experienced it I just end up mashing the skip button as aggressively as I can.

Between advertisements and bloated dialogue there are a few minutes of mindless, easy, arcade fun.

Chop, slash, dash, slash, combo, 37 consecutive hits, bambambmabmabmabm, WOW! You’re so talented Mr. Director of the boobed-ninjas (Charlie’s Angels?).

Alright, it was kind of fun, for my very low expectations. But it’s very bad. It kind of feels like an AI generated game; something that might pop out if you shook together 1000 phone games and some 3d sprites of anime women.

A few last funny notes:

• The second ‘mission’ (pictured above) looks like it was lifted straight from left for dead; from this lobby you go outdoors through a broken plane, walk down its wing into a scene of burning planes to fight the boss.
• When you finally get through all the exposition about being a director of a secret counter terrorist task force, you suddenly have a scene where you pop up as a high school student and then chat with your classmates about how you look tired because you’ve been off being a secret agent all night? LOL. Why are they always high school students, Japan? Why??

Before I ragequit I durdled through the menus a bit to see what you could buy. Lots of character costumes of course. Then I stumbled on this weird ‘private room’ section where you can buy scenes and characters, pose them and take pictures.

Who is really using this stuff? Maybe I just don’t have the patience and imagination of these young horn-dogs. Whatever, godspeed. I have no idea if there’s actual nudity in this game, and I don’t intend to find out.

D- : All the most obnoxious elements of phone game design, mixed with scantily clad women, doesn’t make a game. The ‘real’ game part of this was also terrible, but it ended up being pleasant just as a arcadey break from all the obnoxious storyline, ads and pointlessly detailed rpg screens.