Monthly Archives: February 2015
Criminal Girls: Invite Only Review
Criminal Girls: Invite Only is a perverted, uncomfortable crack at a role-playing game. You find the trappings of a standard turn-based adventure here, from the incessant random battles to the monumental bosses with seemingly endless hit points. The multi-floored dungeons and rich progression system can last you dozens of hours, but with whipping the sinful desires of young girls acting as one of the core hooks, it’s difficult to take Criminal Girls seriously. What could have been a basic, if uninspired, JRPG is ultimately little more than a sleazy grab at an audience pining to watch bloated bosoms bounce at the touch of the Vita’s front and back screens. The overall package isn’t wholly without merit, but Criminal Girls is far too focused on satiating raw desire in lieu of promoting its few interesting features.
The peculiar narrative does little to contextualize the near-nudity and hyper-sexualized moments. You find yourself deep in the bowels of Hell as the game opens, greeted by an officious warden who tasks you with taking care of a medley of sinful souls. These female delinquents have been damned to a life in Hades, but if they can pass the Redemption Program and overcome the challenges ahead, their sins will be forgiven. Of course, each of the seven unique characters has been banished and disregarded for a reason, so it takes time to gain their trust and convince them to actually earn the right to be redeemed.
Relationships among the girls are built and then tested as you climb out of Hell, but one of the keys to unlocking special skills and stat boosts is through individual motivation. After gaining the universal currency through battles and treasure chests, you can choose the Motivate option at any save point to whip, drip liquids on, or tickle any of the delinquents. During these sequences--which become more involved as your character progresses--your girl of choice either sheepishly or aggressively questions your intentions as she dons an outfit that ranges from risqué to borderline pornographic. If you want your party to reach its full potential, your participation in these shameless sequences is necessary.
And surprisingly, these scenes were even more explicit in Japan. This is a touched-up edition of a PSP game released in 2010, with the motivation scenes being edited so that pink steam obfuscates portions of the screen before eventually dissipating at your touch. Moans and groans have also been removed, but somehow, the silence is even more unsettling.
The whole process is vulgar and unnecessary. The basic dialogue that litters your journey can be crude, drawing attention to one of the character’s breasts or bottom. But going from cheap sexual jokes to rubbing a stripped-down teenager on your Vita screen is a thematic leap that’s not only jarring but repellent. The story isn’t stellar by any means, but any emotional connection you build with these characters from dungeon to dungeon is immediately snapped once you throw them into such compromising positions.
It’d be easy just to disregard Criminal Girls: Invite Only if the surrounding elements were just as tasteless. However, the actual video game part, where you battle monsters and raise levels, is fun, and pretty novelbesides. Instead of controlling the action of all four party members in a given turn, you pick just one of four options. One girl might feel bold and want to do a solo attack, while another decides that an elemental ability is the best course of action. As your characters grow closer and learn new abilities, new provisional avenues appear. By the end, it’s common to see all four girls working together to dole out damage as a team or maybe even combine for a special duo ability dealing triple damage.
These combat quirks add a healthy dose of diversity to the moment-to-moment action. You have to scroll through your options and pick the proper technique for the given situation rather than simply hammer away at the X button until you’ve earned a victory jingle. The many useful offensive and defensive skills that become available make each of the seven characters useful, meaning that you likely won’t pigeonhole yourself to a specific combination of characters.
Surprisingly, the combat stays mostly fresh even in the face of innumerable random battles. There’s a medley of monsters waiting to greet you after every few feet, and the story often asks you to retrace your steps over and over again. If the environments were interesting, this wouldn’t be a major problem. Unfortunately, trudging up and down a featureless bend isn’t fun or exciting, and doing so just to make the bustiest member of your crew sweat through her top to grab the attention of a carnal boss isn’t a good enough excuse. It’s just a poor way to pad out an already lengthy experience.
You can escape from battles, but it’s not a wise decision if you hope to progress. Each floor of this dungeon crawler presents stronger enemies, so you’ll have to grind early and often to pass the later trials. I spent hours strengthening my party before attempting major battles but still found myself struggling because most of the late-game bosses use frequent healing techniques to make most of your offensive efforts toothless.
The turn-based action might be fun, but every other element of Criminal Girls: Invite Only does its best to stamp out its only saving grace. When it’s not pushing discomforting images of barely dressed teens in your face, Criminal Girls is leading you back and forth across a lifeless dungeon just so you can thumb through lines of dull dialogue. There’s enjoyment to be found within the game’s combat, but it’s just not worth stomaching the tedious design and perverse activities to find the pearl inside.
Criminal Girls: Invite Only Review
Criminal Girls: Invite Only is a perverted, uncomfortable crack at a role-playing game. You find the trappings of a standard turn-based adventure here, from the incessant random battles to the monumental bosses with seemingly endless hit points. The multi-floored dungeons and rich progression system can last you dozens of hours, but with whipping the sinful desires of young girls acting as one of the core hooks, it’s difficult to take Criminal Girls seriously. What could have been a basic, if uninspired, JRPG is ultimately little more than a sleazy grab at an audience pining to watch bloated bosoms bounce at the touch of the Vita’s front and back screens. The overall package isn’t wholly without merit, but Criminal Girls is far too focused on satiating raw desire in lieu of promoting its few interesting features.
The peculiar narrative does little to contextualize the near-nudity and hyper-sexualized moments. You find yourself deep in the bowels of Hell as the game opens, greeted by an officious warden who tasks you with taking care of a medley of sinful souls. These female delinquents have been damned to a life in Hades, but if they can pass the Redemption Program and overcome the challenges ahead, their sins will be forgiven. Of course, each of the seven unique characters has been banished and disregarded for a reason, so it takes time to gain their trust and convince them to actually earn the right to be redeemed.
Relationships among the girls are built and then tested as you climb out of Hell, but one of the keys to unlocking special skills and stat boosts is through individual motivation. After gaining the universal currency through battles and treasure chests, you can choose the Motivate option at any save point to whip, drip liquids on, or tickle any of the delinquents. During these sequences--which become more involved as your character progresses--your girl of choice either sheepishly or aggressively questions your intentions as she dons an outfit that ranges from risqué to borderline pornographic. If you want your party to reach its full potential, your participation in these shameless sequences is necessary.
And surprisingly, these scenes were even more explicit in Japan. This is a touched-up edition of a PSP game released in 2010, with the motivation scenes being edited so that pink steam obfuscates portions of the screen before eventually dissipating at your touch. Moans and groans have also been removed, but somehow, the silence is even more unsettling.
The whole process is vulgar and unnecessary. The basic dialogue that litters your journey can be crude, drawing attention to one of the character’s breasts or bottom. But going from cheap sexual jokes to rubbing a stripped-down teenager on your Vita screen is a thematic leap that’s not only jarring but repellent. The story isn’t stellar by any means, but any emotional connection you build with these characters from dungeon to dungeon is immediately snapped once you throw them into such compromising positions.
It’d be easy just to disregard Criminal Girls: Invite Only if the surrounding elements were just as tasteless. However, the actual video game part, where you battle monsters and raise levels, is fun, and pretty novelbesides. Instead of controlling the action of all four party members in a given turn, you pick just one of four options. One girl might feel bold and want to do a solo attack, while another decides that an elemental ability is the best course of action. As your characters grow closer and learn new abilities, new provisional avenues appear. By the end, it’s common to see all four girls working together to dole out damage as a team or maybe even combine for a special duo ability dealing triple damage.
These combat quirks add a healthy dose of diversity to the moment-to-moment action. You have to scroll through your options and pick the proper technique for the given situation rather than simply hammer away at the X button until you’ve earned a victory jingle. The many useful offensive and defensive skills that become available make each of the seven characters useful, meaning that you likely won’t pigeonhole yourself to a specific combination of characters.
Surprisingly, the combat stays mostly fresh even in the face of innumerable random battles. There’s a medley of monsters waiting to greet you after every few feet, and the story often asks you to retrace your steps over and over again. If the environments were interesting, this wouldn’t be a major problem. Unfortunately, trudging up and down a featureless bend isn’t fun or exciting, and doing so just to make the bustiest member of your crew sweat through her top to grab the attention of a carnal boss isn’t a good enough excuse. It’s just a poor way to pad out an already lengthy experience.
You can escape from battles, but it’s not a wise decision if you hope to progress. Each floor of this dungeon crawler presents stronger enemies, so you’ll have to grind early and often to pass the later trials. I spent hours strengthening my party before attempting major battles but still found myself struggling because most of the late-game bosses use frequent healing techniques to make most of your offensive efforts toothless.
The turn-based action might be fun, but every other element of Criminal Girls: Invite Only does its best to stamp out its only saving grace. When it’s not pushing discomforting images of barely dressed teens in your face, Criminal Girls is leading you back and forth across a lifeless dungeon just so you can thumb through lines of dull dialogue. There’s enjoyment to be found within the game’s combat, but it’s just not worth stomaching the tedious design and perverse activities to find the pearl inside.
iZombie Poster
Check out the new brainy poster for The CW's iZombie, which premieres on March 17th.
Pictured is "Liv" (Rose McIver), a former medical student-turned-zombie who absorbs people's memories and traits whenever she consumes their grey matter. Here you'll see her posing with, well, the thing she craves the most these days...
New Friday the 13th Won’t Be Found Footage
Producer Brad Fuller has revealed that Paramount Pictures' upcoming Friday the 13th installment won't be jumping on the found footage bandwagon.
In an interview with Esquire, the producer shot down rumors that Jason's next incarnation would takes some cues from Paranormal Activity. Fuller was a producer, along with Michael Bay and Andrew Form, on the Friday the 13th reboot, the most recent film in the franchise.
"There's always been this supernatural aspect to these movies," says Fuller. "It defies logic that, you see Jason get killed in every movie, including ours, the 2009 one. And then he comes back and no one's ever really investigated what that is. So that's something that I think about a little bit. Like it is supernatural, but what is he? Those are the things that we're toying with. Nothing has been decided."
Amazon Remaking Sigmund and the Sea Monsters
Amazon Studios has signed a deal with TV producers Sid and Marty Krofft to reboot the 70s children live action program Sigmund and the Sea Monsters, at least for a pilot episode.
The original half-puppet-half-real persons series followed two brothers who take in a young sea creature named Sigmund after he's thrown out of his strange underwater family. It enjoyed two seasons on NBC, running on Saturday mornings from 1973 to 1975.
“Sid found Sigmund swimming in the ocean as seaweed,” said Marty Krofft in a press release. “Boy, are we lucky to re-create Sigmund and the Sea Monsters with Roy Price and Tara Sorensen at Amazon Studios.”
The Kroft brothers made their TV debut in 1969 with the adventures of Jimmy, a dragon, and a talking flute in H.R. Pufnstuf. Other programs such as Land of the Lost, The Bugaloos, and Lidsville followed thereafter. They also gave comedian Richard Pryor his own award-winning Saturday morning kids' show Pryor's Place in 1984.
Panasonic Shows Off VR Headset
After showing off its prototype at a private press event in Tokyo, Panasonic has become the latest tech company to enter the market for virtual reality headsets.
According to Japanese tech outlet Nikkei, Panasonic not only demonstrated its own headset, but also an omnidirectional camera. A company spokesperson said it planned to put the camera to use at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, where the seven image sensors would allow viewers to choose their own angle to watch an event like long-jumping.
VR goggles offer a 90 degree viewing angle on an OLED screen running at 75 frames per second, though the most noticeable feature of the design at the moment is that it doesn't have an elastic band like most other full headsets but instead is worn over the ears like a pair of glasses.
7 People Who Could Replace The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart
The news hit us all last week like a stiff elbow to the gut (especially Viacom, whose stock dropped costing them $350 million in one day). Jon Stewart was leaving The Daily Show. Not years from now, mere months. Sure, The Daily Show changed hands once before - from Craig Kilborn to Stewart - but at that point, in 1999, The Daily Show wasn't the magnificent satirical late night think piece that it is now. So the question remains: Who will sit at that desk when Stewart takes his leave?
PS4 Darksiders 2: Definitive Edition Just Popped Up on Amazon
Darksiders II: Definitive Edition has appeared on Amazon, without fanfare or even a shot of the box art. The edition is listed for PlayStation 4 and has a price of $40.
The release date for the PS4 version of the 2012 game is listed as December 31, 2015, which is a standard Amazon placeholder date, meaning no release date has yet been announced.
Other Nordic Games properties were discovered residing on Amazon by allgamesbeta.com, including Legend of Kay HD, The Book of Unwritten Tales 2, MX vs. ATV Supercross Encore Edition, and ArcaniA: The Complete Tale. All the listings are for PS4, and all share the same placeholder date.
Broforce Alien Infestation Update Now Available
A new Broforce update featuring otherworldly enemies and terrain is now available on PC.
In the Alien Infestation update, the various bros of Broforce will have to fight a variety of alien types ranging from small to large, each with their own abilities not unlike those found in the movies Alien and Aliens. These enemies can spit acid, clamp onto the bros, and savagely rip them apart.
The update also takes Broforce to alien terrain filled with areas to explore and various platforming hazards to avoid. According to Free Lives, this is the largest Broforce update yet. Check out the trailer below to see it all in action.
A Steam Early Access game, Broforce is a pixelated side-scrolling shooter borrowing themes and elements from '80s and '90s action movies and TV shows. Their last update was themed around the movie The Expendables 3.
Broadway’s Frozen Musical to Include New Songs
The Oscar-winning creative team behind Disney's Frozen have signed on to adapt the animated film for the planned Broadway musical.
According to Daily Mail, writer and co-director Jennifer Lee will pen the show's book, with composer duo Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez writing new songs for the musical, which will obviously include the megahit single "Let It Go."
Alex Timbers, who directed Peter And The Starcatcher for Disney Theatrical, is said to have met with Lee, Lopez and Anderson-Lopez for "various work sessions" to develop the on-stage project. No production schedule has been set just yet, but rumors suggest a 2017 debut is possible.