[GAME MASTER]Playboy: The Mansion
Published: 18 Aug. 2005, 21:28
Start out in a practically empty house with a Playboy bunny, one Playmate, and a tiny budget. Hire photographers, models and journalists; make friends, throw parties and start publishing Playboy magazine.
Each issue requires minimal material: a cover shot, a centerfold, interview, articles, reviews, pictorials, and so forth. As the editor, it is your job to assign and select the contents.
This sounds like a bunch of work, but after a couple of hours you get the hang of it.
Of course, it takes a lot of socializing. As Hugh, you have to meet a lot of people and keep up good relationships with them in order to get them to give you quality material.
You can also flirt, kiss, make out and have sex with all the women you want and have up to four steady girlfriends who live in the Playboy Mansion and receive a certain amount of money as an allowance.
Sex scenes, however, are “symbolic” in some sense ― while the act itself is very graphic, Hugh doesn’t take off his pants. And he is always on the bottom. I wonder what the real Hugh would think about this.
The two most interesting aspects of the game are market forecasting and the photo shoots.
Before releasing an issue, Hugh has to decide on what kind of content will go into the magazine; polls show the public’s interest at the time in nine different areas such as sports, fashion and technology.
According to those trends, you’d want to get related content.
For instance, if sports is “in,” maybe it’s better to have the latest tennis star on the cover instead of some fashion model. If politics is what the public is interested in, you want to have a column on the private life of senators, not how to grow organic tomatoes.
When it comes to photo shoots, you get to choose the model, the clothes (or no clothes), location, and photographer. While she poses, you position your mouse to focus on the model and click away.
Photo taking is one of the most fun aspects of the game, especially since the models give some great poses and move around the location while you zoom in and out and change their clothes for the perfect centerfold or cover shot.
The only disappointing factor, however, is that your photography skills don’t really do much in determining the actual quality of the photo. The quality of the photo rather is decided by the selection of the model. Oh well.
Also, game (mouse) navigation is extremely poor, so don’t expect any camera or character movements like that in the SIMS series.
The interior decoration part of the game is also lousy, so you can forget about spending hours and hours to make your mansion a graphically pleasing place, although lighting, furniture and other items do create changes in the scenery when you are taking photo shoots inside the house.
While it has amusing elements and plenty of large-breasted cyber women, the game gets to be repetitive once you’ve done about six or seven magazine issues.
“Playboy: The Mansion” falls short of a true business simulation game, and yet it not a true adult simulation game either.
by Wohn Dong-hee
with the Korea JoongAng Daily
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