In games sex has never really been properly tackled. Yeah every now and then someone gets some and there are woman with massive jugs in every game under the sun, but it is odd that few games actually try to tackle the subject. I’m not asking for QTEs or anything like that, just a more mature approach to the subject.   This is just a fun article used to point out the weird way sex is portrayed by the games industry. 

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Old sex games:

Ok so once upon a time games were not regulated by any games rating board. Back in the day (the 1980s to be more precise) anyone could publish whatever they wanted and consoles didn’t have updates and restrictions by their manufacturer.  This led to a few select developers creating their own erotic titles. These games were usually pretty poor and we don’t really get why anyone has purchased them game other than historical interest. Tell me does the picture below get you hot n’ steamy?

The game pictured above is probably the most famous of these old games and is called Custer’s Revenge. In the game you had to avoid arrow fire to reach the Native American and do your thing. Looking back it is a wonder that this game got released. Not only the game a poor man’s pornography but it also has you, General Custer, sexually abusing a woman. Not cool.
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The ‘Mature’ games:

Games love to hide behind a veil of maturity. If you are an adult game, that has adult themes, then you can have adult sexual moments right? Well yes and no. The reason why mature is in quotation marks is that I found most games with this label include sex in them for fun.  Games like God of War are labelled as mature due to the adult nature of the game, with the violence and head ripping ect. The actual fact is these games are probably the least mature of all. I’m not trying to attack the game (I love the series), but it’s like comparing Conan with Hamlet. That said the ‘maturity’ of these games is proven by the way it deals with sex. God of War had you play sex mini-games that were not required to complete the game but gave you extra exp points. It was a fun while it lasted (as always), but once you’ve done it once it gets pretty boring.

Dante’s Inferno is another game to fall under this classification. The game tried to blend a serious environment with a simplistic, primal character. Instead of just adding boobies everywhere, Dante’s Inferno goes all out and adds in a massive set of schlongs for us to gape at.  Hey, by adding nudity for males and females that makes it mature right? Well not really when it just turns out every monster in hell just loves being naked, even Lucifer himself likes to be in the buff…
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The RPG:

So you’ve been playing for 57 hours and you’ve finally done it. You’ve managed to get that hot alien chick drunk and taken her back to yours for some loving. Cue lots of feeling, kissing and touching and – wait, where’s the sex. This is your average RPG for you. The kind of PG film sex where the camera pans off to a roaring fire or something cheesy and you just know that it happened.  BioWare seem to love these scenes and somehow the game managed to even get berated by a panel on the Fox News Network, despite the fact the game’s sex scenes are so tame. I’m not saying I want full-blown close-ups here, but if RPGs want to us to take our virtual relationships further they need to start treating sex with some respect.

Mass Effect is a key example of this. I’ve been a huge man whore and slept with near to everyone on the ship, even Tali and I don’t even know how that works! So why doesn’t Miranda get jealous and smash Tali out of her suit and give her a hiding? Why doesn’t Jack start pummeling me with biotics for messing with the girls of the Normandy? RPGs have  made a backwards step here, not fully adding in the elements that deal with relationships, but tacking on crappy sex scenes for the fans. Meh, how else are we going to get to see alien sex?
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Suggestive characters and close-ups:

If we can’t show sex why not just suggest it, have a few laughs and show as much skin as possible without getting that M rating. Japanese games seem to love doing this. Look at Naomi in Metal Gear Solid. As the years went on and technology got better we got closer to seeing her chest. Japanese games seem to like doing this. Hell,  King Of Fighter’s character Mai has her sprite pretty much in a bent over position most of the time to show off her cleavage with added jiggle. Even the granddad of fighters, Street Fighter, does this too. Chun Li has had upskirts programmed in there since Street Fighter II for a reason.

In fact the worst game for this is one of my favourites – Bayonetta. Our heroine is constantly parading around in a skin-tight body piece. The camera regularly pans just behind one of her cheeks and not one of the ones on her face. This is linked with her regular one liners such as ‘Come on boys’.  The lollipop sucking, banter and  impossible flexibility of Bayonetta have all been created to make a sexy, but funny character. Of course Bayonetta is poking fun at other video games and takes makes the situation over the top, but still she fits perfectly within her world and as an example of how games love to tease.
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The accident/mods:

Every now and then someone thinks to themselves that they’d love to see their favourite female character butt naked. Now and then these people are smart enough that they can do their own mods and dreams become reality. This has led to some of the weirdest things out there. Mods have cropped up for everything from GTA to Dead or Alive Beach Volleyball. Nothing is sacred. There’s even a mod to play the whole of Left 4 Dead with Zoe naked.

The accident part of this article comes from GTA: San Andreas’ Hot Coffee. No secret is kept safe by developers now days. Despite the fact that the game had been out for ages and that it wasn’t accessible without some nerd hacking the media still sparked up its own flame war against Rockstar’s game. If you’re wondering what all the fuss is about check out the GTA’s sex romp below (skip to about 7 mins).
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Fake game-porn:

Now this is the kinda stuff you were looking for right? Well if you stumbled upon this looking for hentai images of Taokaka or Tifa from Final Fantasy VII naked, sorry. This isn’t what I am talking about.  What I mean are games that have been created for the sole use of having women jump, roll and wrestle each other in bikinis.

I’m talking about games such as Dead or Alive: Beach Volleyball. The game never was going to sell that well. You could play volleyball, hang out by the pool or even try out new outfits. Of course trying out new outfits also meant you could zoom in on every pixel that wasn’t covered on your virtual lady’s skin. Who wants to pay £40 to see cyber woman jump around a virtual beach? Well apparently quite a few people did, so many that the game even managed to get its own sequel.

If you think that’s bad things get worse.  Rumble Roses made things even more blatant. The pseudo wrestling game was an all women affair. No men at all. This game was for those that wanted to watch virtual women grope and grab each other all day long. When mud wrestling is one of the highlights of your series you know that something isn’t quite right. That said Rumble Roses got a sequel named Rumble Roses XX (don’t ask me why they just didn’t skip to XXX). During the lead up to its launch a journalist asked about the driving force behind the game. A Konami exec pretty much admitted to the allure of virtual women being the games biggest selling point. Just watch the video below and try to justify this game.
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Real porn:

There are some games out there that have gone beyond just creating huge jiggling breasts or regularly doing random close-ups of a peach shaped ass. For a few games that just isn’t enough. Unless there’s some actual naked people on the screen then something isn’t right. In 2002 developers Z-Axis agreed with this and BMX XXX was born. The game was a poor man’s BMX game, but if you were good at it you unlocked some FMV stripper scenes.  The idea was the better your score and the further you get in the game, the more you would see.
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The downright disturbing:

I’m quite a liberal free speech kinda guy, but when something like this comes along even I feel like censoring it. I’m not talking about Kathy Bates nude scene in About Schmidt. No, this is something much worse. In Japan there are games that let you sexually assault women.  The games have you stalking young girls and then abusing them in whichever way you see fit. I mean just look at the cover below and tell me that this seems OK.

Rapelay was the title that made the news due to the fact Amazon had a listing for the game on their site. Once this news had gone out the third-party listing was quickly taken down and we’ve not seen anything similar in the UK yet. While all the footage I could find was pretty tame the idea itself is still disturbing. Maybe it is just me but these games feel like they are a step too far. This is like Custer’s Revenge but for the modern-day.
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