Gamertell

Product: Bazooka Café
Price: $34.95
System Requirements: Pentium II 300 mhz, 96 MB RAM, Windows 98/Me/2000/XP/Vista
Rating: 6.6/10
Pros: Good erotic art, low system requirements, funny and fairly well written
Cons: Low gaming value, culture shocks, grandma will think you’re a pervert
Overall: Selective adult fans will enjoy, not a good gift idea for Nana

You have to love the Japanese. Why? Because we dropped nuclear bombs on them, and that was rude. This is why we have to react with polite interest when they come up with #### that we think is weird culturally, like sushi or cartoon porn. In our culture, cartoons are for bright Saturday mornings and breakfast cereals. In Japan, cartoons are more likely to eviscerate each other with samurai swords or engage in lewd sexual acts. Which is probably a better way to sell cereal.

Which brings us to our game. Bazooka Café is a mixture of all of these things, except for evisceration and the breakfast cereal, because in Japan they call it “porridge.” I am a certified Japan expert.

Bazooka Café is what is called a bishoujo game, which translates literally as “pretty young girl.” This makes you think that Bungie might have done better to call it “bad-ass cyborg” instead of Halo, and you’d be right. According to Wikipedia a certain online source that my editor has expressly forbidden me to cite, and which I personally believe to be more accurate than the bible, these games will routinely sell a million copies in Japan. They don’t sell in western markets because we don’t do as well with freaky sex ####. There’s an entry for this phenomenon too, under the term “conservative Christian.”

You play Bazooka café by reading the story and then selecting different actions at certain points in the game, kind of like those choose-your-own-adventure novels you used to read as a kid. Each time you play through the game, you can choose a different action and unlock a different ending (read: sleep with a different women).

Seriously, this game has samurai swords. Well, actually they’re called Kendo swords and they’re made out of bamboo, but I hear they hurt like hell. Narumi is a waitress who works at Ariel café, and she also happens to be a Kendo instructor. She used to date Hideyuki, the game’s protagonist, who inherited from his father both the café and its corresponding propensity to attract women with Olympian proportions. Hideyuki soon finds that running the café will mostly involve tenderly contemplating the emotional problems of his staff while occasionally making comments like, “As a bonus, she has a huge rack as well.”

And just as the sensation of chewing and swallowing raw fish wrapped in rice and seaweed is fairly disconcerting at first, the notion of sitting down at a computer to seduce fake women is disorienting, and feels somehow to flout Darwin’s theory of evolution. Shouldn’t I be trying to talk to real women, you ask? But hey, let’s face it, usually that never works out so you might as well play this game where the women are impossible to not sleep with. We’ll learn a few interesting things about Japanese culinary culture as well, such as the fact that a lot of people have their drinks after they eat lunch instead of before. Also, there’s apparently much more restaurant sex than in America.

Design—6/10
Expect the traditional Japanese aesthetic on this one. Big eyes, small nose, ri-god-damn-diculous huge breasts in every god-damn scene. Truthfully, this ended up being kind of a turn off. They looked painful. In almost every instance where they were not barely sheathed beneath some strained fabric, I was thinking to myself that these girls are going to have serious back problems in the future.

There’s a preset number of stills for each scene that let you know how the girls are feeling based on the discussion. The ones for angry and sad are particularly well done, and fans of Manga will recognize these right away. A variety of backdrop scenes expand the location of the game so you don’t feel like you’re always in the restaurant, which can get to be tedious.

The voice acting is haunting. Passion may be the universal language, but dirty talk in Japanese waxes traumatic. A few times I thought I was being yelled at.

Features—6.5/10
This game features a truly exceptional save/load interface with over five pages/screens of save game slots. That’s a lot. There’s a gallery where you can view all of the “artistic cut-scenes” lets call them, for each of the game’s endings that you’ve unlocked.Included on the install disc is the bonus Valentines Day Special, which asks the tantalizing question “What if you didn’t have to choose?” This means threesomes. Lot’s of ‘em. The game also comes with a locker-sized poster that would be a fantastic way to get kicked out of Catholic school if you were looking for one.

Performance—7.5/10
The game runs well, even on my trusty old Dell Dimension, the first computer made in the early Paleolithic period. The game is only 546 MB, a little over 300 of which are the voice recordings. This is why G-Collections (the game’s distributor) makes a desperate plea not to pirate the game right in the instruction manual. They also ask you to call the authorities should you encounter one of the many roving groups of bishoujo game pirates that roam our city streets.

Overall—6.6/10
Here is the essential rub (no pun intended) for bishoujo — is it even a game at all? Some would contend that reading text and pressing the enter key does not a game constitute. After all, there are generally less than ten branch points in the game, and no matter which response you choose somebody is going to end up getting naked somewhere. The game even has an “Auto” feature, which is a polite way of saying hands free.

Barring masturbation, I was feeling fairly left out of the gaming experience until Narumi hit the protagonist with this line of dialouge: “If you’ve got enough free time to dance around like a little freak over there, then get your ass in the kitchen and help out! A bunch of customers just showed up.”

Which, of course, made me fall totally in love with her. And herein lies the real core of these kinds of games. We oftentimes judge games by their ability to establish an alternate reality, a complete and separate world. Admittedly, endowments often flout the laws of physics and physiology, and the protagonist is somewhat of a douche-bag (he would be sued and jailed in our country for sexual harassment, instantly) but there are still real characters there, each with their individual set of problems, desires, quirks, and ridiculously oversize braziers. Bazooka Café accomplishes this by forcing you to tap your way through literally hours of text before any of the clothes come off.

Which is probably why it confounds most Americans. They come to it looking for a game and find pornography or they come to it looking for pornography and find a game. Either way, they seem dissatisfied, generally give up and go get McDonalds. Little known fact: bishoujo is the real cause of the American obesity problem.

Read [J-List] Also Read [Play Asia] Also Read [G-Collections ] Read [Advance Anime Network]

EDITOR’S NOTE: J-List and Play Asia feature items not suitable for gamers under the age of 18. Please click with caution.