Review
Release Date: 08.31.2004
Platform:
XboxDeveloper:
Topheavy StudiosPublisher:
GatheringReviewed by
Samuel Altersitz on 10.15.2004
| Review Rating: 3/10 | User Rating: 1.5/10 |
Oh, how the mighty have fallen. Jeff Spangenberg, former head of Retro Studios (which brought us
Metroid Prime) has been reduced to becoming the head of Topheavy Studios, the developers behind
The Guy Game. No longer is Jeff re-creating one of gaming’s legendary heroes for an all new adventure in the current generation of consoles; no, instead he is bringing us a game in which young college girls try to answer trivia questions on camera with the penalty for missing a question being to expose their bare breasts for the crowd to see, and for the players of
The Guy Game to try and see as well. The fall from grace is often hard, and I think Jeff hit the bottom with a wet splat.
The Guy Game claims to be a party game that is centered around drinking and bare breasticles; both things that appeal to teenage boys as well as frat boys in college. OK, I can admit, bare breasts appeal to any guy at any age, but there are better ways to see them if you don’t have a girlfriend with whom you have an intimate relationship... and there’s a lot of free exposed mammary glands on the Net. One could argue that the Net was designed for porn, and they'd be partially right.
Your Xbox, however, is not readily designed for pornography, even the super softcore type portrayed in
The Guy Game. First of all, you either need to mod it, or buy the DVD remote to play porn DVDs. Problem number one with getting pornography on your Xbox. Problem 2 is, of course, hiding said porn from others, especially when you are in the living room on your Xbox. Problem 3 being that there’s free porn on the Net, so why pay for porn DVDs to play on your Xbox?
That said,
The Guy Game is a trivia game with drinking game rules. Specifically, the rules for the drinking game Asshole. Although, instead of cards, you earn virtual money to keep score on who is president, vice president, treasurer, and asshole. Answering questions correctly, and quickly, earns you more money; while answering them wrong, and quickly, loses you more money. The person with the least amount of money is the asshole of the game.
The trivia questions all begin with a score of $800. As time ticks away, the monetary value of the question diminishes, until it reaches zero. One interesting thing is that if you let it get low enough, the game will automatically remove two wrong answers from the four originally given.
Of course, the trivia alone isn’t enough to pump up your score. Up in the right you will sometimes see a marker appear; either a G (for
The Guy Game), a sort of roulette wheel thing, or arrows that flash. With the G, the first person to push the stick in the correct direction will win $250-$1,000, while pressing the wrong direction takes $250-$1,000 from your score. This marker disappears after a few seconds, whether a direction is pushed or not. The wheel has a marble going around it, and each player can choose a direction to place their colored marker; should the marble stop on that marker, then the player of the coresponding color receives a bonus $1,000 to their score. And the arrows light up a pattern on the directional pad or the left analog stick; following that pattern also nets the first player to correctly do so $1,000.
Another way to get more money is to hit the match score on the money meter. Correctly hitting this score with your answer awards you with a bonus to your main score. The scores drop fast, though, so it’s harder than it sounds.
There is the bonus part of each round as well. The bonus starts at $400 and counts down. The bonus money score is what is used to actually see the girls’ bare chests.
For, you see, the bonus score is what powers the Flash-O-Meter. Getting the Flash-O-Meter up out of the blue, into the green, and then into the red is how you can see unedited tittays (as Dave Chapelle as Rick James would say). The Flash-O-Meter begins in a large blue area, noted as “Soft and Squishy”. In Soft and Squishy, the girls' flashes are censored by
The Guy Game’s logo, much like a black bar. Getting to the green part brings you to the “Sorta Chubby” section, where the logo is replaced with pixelization instead. And getting to the red “Super Stiff” section allows you to see unedited footage of the girls baring their souls for the camera. And sometimes from multiple angles as well as in slow motion.
Getting to the super stiff part also unlocks the episode for future, er, reference, and removes the Flash-O-Meter from that episode, leaving you at super stiff for the entire thing. Failure to get the super stiff rating keeps that episode locked, and it cannot be replayed on the same saved game.
Luckily, for those who just want to see the girls, there is a FAQ on
GameFAQs with the answers to the questions and the correct bonus answers. The game does not mix up the trivia unless you have unlocked the episode beforehand, so you don’t need to worry about the questions not being the same. Mixing up the trivia for you and your friends does not change the questions asked to the girls in the videos.
There are 5 sets to play through, of 4 episodes each, or 20 episodes all together. Each one has between 3-4 girls in it (sometimes there is a team of two girls, other times it is just all single girls), for over 60 girls, or over 120 pairs of breasts, for you to try and gander at in the main game, plus the cheerleaders.
Each episode consists of a few rounds. Round one is called the “Foreplay” round. This is a trivia round, where the bonus is guessing if the girl gets the answer right or wrong. Next is “BallzOff”, a mini game in which you and your other players control giant balls on top of a picture of one of the “cheerleaders” in the game. Round three is the “Titwitz” round; every girl answers every question wrong in this round, and the bonus is dependent upon you guessing which wrong answer the girls will give. Round four is “BallzOn”, another mini game using the balls on top of a pic, and is only available in multiplayer.
The fifth round is only available if you make it to super stiff on the Flash-O-Meter, and is the “Hottie Challenge”. This is the round in which you bet on which girl will win the challenge. Use a button to bet on the girl you think will win, then choose how much you will bet. If you choose correctly, you get rewarded with a video. The hottie challenge has the girls competing, physically, to win. Sometimes it is a jump rope contest, sometimes a hula hoop contest, sometimes a sack race, etc. The catch is the girls who choose to do the challenge topless get some sort of bonus over those who don’t go topless. Most choose to go topless. Winning the hottie challenge opens up extras such as photos (sometimes of girls and their uncensored fun bags) and videos that were taken while they were filming the video for the game at spring break.
Oh, in single player, if you bet wrong, you get punished by seeing an overweight guy do a striptease instead of your cheerleader.
Gameplay breaks down as follows:
You start off by choosing a “cheerleader” for yourself. This cheerleader shows up in your colored box, and, as you get bonus questions right, will strip down in the picture until she is topless (this is just changing still pictures). Get the bonus wrong, however, and she puts her clothes back on. This actually lets you know how well you are doing while playing the game. Then, you get into the trivia part of the game, and go from there, watching the Flash-O-Meter and hoping it fills up. Win the hottie challenge and watch your cheerleader do a short dance on video.
You can unlock new cheerleaders by winning hottie challenges.
Although the layout and presentation of
The Guy Game is fairly simple, the graphics used in the background and for the ball mini-games are very crisp and sharp, and the cheerleader pics are very high-res as well. Video, while not full screen, is good quality and compressed using the DIVX codec. “Fun” things to do when wanting to skip the censored video is to constantly hit the A button to “bag a hottie”, or press Y to pause video (censored or uncensored). Wow, such fun...
Another thing to note about the graphics is how the Flash-O-Meter is pretty phallic in and of itself. You have an upward pointing arrow, and as it moves it shoots white stuff out of the top of it. Failure to move the meter shows the white stuff sputter and drip out. I think you can get the picture here.
The sound is also actually pretty good, both in the video and with “Lucky Lucy” asking questions as well as Steve and Dick doing commentary between videos. A word of warning, though, for those of you somehow not offended by nudity, but offended by profanity - there is quite a bit in the game. The F-bomb gets dropped more than once, and other profane statements are heard now and then as well. Lucy will actually make fun of you if you pause the video, saying how you'll go blind or asking if you're going to actually play the game.
The actual game itself, though, leaves a lot to be desired. Most of the trivia is fairly simple, although there are some harder questions here and there, and you can pretty literally play most of the game with one hand. [Insert crude joke about using one hand while playing here.]
Also, finding people willing to play multiplayer with you might be hard, unless you follow some of the rules of the game Asshole... mainly drinking, and lots of it. I’d have to bribe my friends into playing, even if we were drunk as skunks.
Seriously, I felt funny renting this game, but I did need something I could give a low score to and feel good about myself, since it seems obvious that the people at Topheavy didn’t care about really making a good game, and more likely just wanted an excuse to get coeds and models (for the cheerleaders) topless for a while.
At most, this game is a rental, and even then just if you want to see how taking a great multiplayer trivia game like
You Don’t Know Jack, adding flashing girls (and trust me, not all of them are all that hot... there are a few that I wish wouldn’t have participated in the game, let alone flashed...), reducing most of the trivia to dumbass questions that makes you wonder how these girls got into college in the first place, adding pretty sexist commentary, mixing, and seeing how bad it can be.
Honestly, I could have given
The Guy Game a slightly better score, if the game had done a few things. First off, if the trivia questions were better and more varied; I've seen repeats of at least one question in the game. Honestly, this trivia isn't even on par with the first edition of the great multiplayer trivia game series
You Don't Know Jack, which is around 10 years old now. Secondly, the game could have been better if the girls were actually asked the extra trivia questions you can use once an episode is unlocked; it would at least add some challenge for multiplayer if you replayed an episode after it was unlocked. This game is on DVD, and only has slightly over 2 hours of video on it. Since there isn't a whole lot going on in the game, there should be tons of room for more video of the girls being asked different questions, especially because the video is compressed under the DIVX codec.
And, seriously, if you don’t have any other way of getting porn for yourself, you don’t know how to surf the Net. You can’t go three URLs without finding naked chicks.
