The basic design seems heavily influenced by The Sims. You’ve got a fully customisable home-cum-office and it’s populated by various staff and girlfriends who interact with your Heff character, each other, and things around the mansion. You’re looking down on proceedings from a god-like perspective, although you do actually have your specific character to control: which does make it quite distinct from the ‘life simulator’ of the EA mass seller. But effectively you have a big customisable toy mansion with pool, garden, all mod cons and a load of bunny girls. Within these grounds, you’ll have to set about arranging for each copy of Playboy to hit the newsstands so that you can earn more cash for increasingly velvety sheets and more obscenely vulgar artwork to adorn the mansion.
The actual gameplay is quite unusual, at least for Western release games, with a heavy emphasis on directing conversation between Heff and the other characters, as well as between the NPCs themselves. It’s fairly simple, you just choose topics according to which type of relationship you wish to develop, and sit back. Invite a load of famous people round to the yard for a party, butter up celebrities for cheap interviews, chat to interesting people about interesting things and get them to write an article, then go hit on the ladies. You’ll be after a cover girl for each issue, a centrefold, and just maybe, one or two lovelies for one’s wicked way.
Yes, your character can get jiggy with a biggy in this game. And like Leisure Suit Larry, that’s going to have a certain puerile significance attached to it: but please note that we’ve at no point used the word ‘erotic’ in this review [just then permitting]. In fact, it’s actually a bit dark. In an early Bond kind of way, it’s about using the girls to get them onside. You need the services of a talented female photographer? Just give her some lurvin’ on the settee and she’ll be at your beck and call. And if an existing girlfriend just happens to be stood there watching, so what? In fact, why not make a little introduction. Yup. That works too: suddenly there’s two topless girls hugging each other and giggling.
Oh. My.
