(no subject)

[which_chick]

This is the funniest video game review I have read in... in... hell, since Aestheticism.com reviewed Devil May Cry. [Full disclosure: I do not actually PLAY video games. I just read reviews of video games.]

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Really? I found it kind of sweet and wistful. I suppose it helps that the game being reviewed sounds like the King Lear of "Look and Think" computer porn games. Albeit a King Lear cast entirely with beefy, hairy homosexuals... I suppose I've been spoiled by Something Awful (http://www.somethingawful.com/)'s hentai reviews of much, much worse "games".

Mitch H.

[which-chick.livejournal.com]

I probably should have pointed out that it was funny-to-me and might not be funny for other people.

I'm not sure what, short of measuring the actual LOL events generated by any stretch of prose, would quantify and clarify the ways in which things amuse me in a more helpful way. Probably counting the LOL events would just scare people... and should I count things like hisses of amusement differently from squeals of delight differently from solid grin-n-chuckle events? That just seems like a can of worms to me.

I found the entire review well-written, literate, and fun. The solid review and social commentary in the thing were also useful -- the review would have been half as much fun if there hadn't been valid and interesting points to build an artful concoction of prose upon. I've always found that a stylin' way of saying things is helped along considerably by having something to say.

Highlights of prose, in my very own, somewhat unqualified opinion:

And since there have already been plenty of games involving nurses, OL [office ladies – B], cheerleaders, policewomen and schoolgirls of different ages, chest development or optical healthiness, UGCP decided to focus on a widely ignored sexual archetype: the big sweaty muscular construction workers. This didn't make you grin? Clearly, you have no soul, Mitch. Look! It's got a colon! Used properly! In a review of a gay foreign porn video game! How can you not like this?

The biggest problem is elsewhere: as if the universe hadn’t been already rough enough to gay men, who already have to cope with AIDS and the drag queen phenomenon, it also created the unmovable rule that says that when a Japanese girl (and more and more often western girls who wish they were Japanese, and a few hundred pounds lighter) who foolishly thinks she has the slightest talent for drawing wants to create something slightly erotic, it invariably involves a couple of men. I bust a gut here. Hell of a slam at the yaoi fangirl, isn't it? And yet... and yet... I know more than a few just like that, present company excepted, of course. Also, another colon. :)

While you’re supposed to play as Hideki and fuck by proxy with all the other characters, Hideki, being also a man, is as much potential gay masturbation material as any other character of the game; which means he takes as much place in the CG as his partners. While most straight porn game heroes are reduced to a pair of hands and a censored penis to allow more identification freedom to the player, Hideki has at least as much existence as any other character of the game, up to the point some that players would have rather spend time with him than the others. -- This is a cogent and very useful analysis of how-porn-works, particularly the notion of fuck-by-proxy.

Maybe I should remind you we are in gay porn world here, and if you are not familiar with the works of Tom of Finland, think about something of elephantine proportions and you won’t be far away from truth. I am familiar with the work of Tom of Finland, thanks, and I always appreciate references to the arts.

... the point here is that the game blatantly refuses to respect the basic gay porn rule about the perpetual anal cleanliness I described earlier. By this point, I was grinning so hard my face hurt.

[(Anonymous)]

I didn't say I didn't appreciate the artfulness of the critique, just that I didn't find it laugh-out-loud funny. I got the points argued and all - especially the fuck-by-proxy elements - I guess I just took them at surface value. I suppose I just find violent crudity and direct abuse, such as that doled out by the recently-resurrected Filthy Critic (http://www.bigempire.com/filthy/) or the misanthropes of the defunct Etchi Attack, more laugh-out funny than this sort of thing. Humor-through-familiarity might dictate that one has to be steeped in the conventions of something like yaoi to find certain things laugh-out-loud funny? I dunno.

Mitch H.

[which-chick.livejournal.com]

I usually prefer artfulness over violent crudity and direct abuse. The only way violent crudity and direct abuse get my vote is if they are startlingly well done... and in that case they're impinging on artfulness, albeit artfulness of the violently crude and directly abuseful sort.