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This has the feel of being a project by a teenage boy who was just learning how to code in BASIC (there are limited graphics and no animation, so it's just input/output and variable-handling) and didn't have much worldly experience beyond a few "Penthouse" magazines stolen from his dad's dresser to work from. The progress through your relationship is pretty nonsensical and sometimes counterintuitive, there are some inexplicable dead ends (don't bother smoking pot at a concert or going to Hawaii) due to bad program design, and the final sequence is abrupt and pretty stupid. It's unenlightened at best and more than a little bit sexist and immature in most respects.



But still, I got a few minutes of entertainment out of it. There's a sort of dumb humor to some of the options you're given -- it's like playing a game your 13-year old nephew designed. (You catch a foul ball at the baseball game. "Give it to your girlfriend" or "Chuck it at an old lady in front of you"). The right course of action is almost always obvious, but even the wrong answers usually don't have much consequence. There are a handful of sequences that have their own warped meta-narrative that are a bit surprising or even slightly clever. And it's mildly amusing to try to get yourself in the author's mindset and try to guess what it is he thinks you should do next.



Approaching it from a mature adult's perspective is the wrong way to go -- the game expects you to dump your girlfriend frequently in order to lock in "points" that you've gained from successful dates, which in turn allow you to build a "better" girlfriend next time, which makes future dates far easier and more interesting. Once you get to 100 points, you can create a "perfect" girlfriend in every category, which allows you to get into the "BIG PARTY" finale (but you first have to unlock two code words from encounters in two specific prior dates in sequences that, again, make no sense at all). It's not much of a game and certainly not the kind of thing that you'll want to experience again after playing through it once, but I did get a small chuckle out of it now and then.

- February 13, 2015Yeah, pretty dumb and juvenile.