Platform: Xbox

Genre: Simulation

Publisher: Microsoft

Developer: Red Entertainment

ETA: Spring 2003

Be notified of site updates. Sign-up for the Newsletter sent out twice weekly.

Enter E-Mail Address Below:

N.U.D.E. @ Natural Ultimate Digital Experiment

There’s nothing like giving a game a provocative title to help get people’s attention, but I can honestly say I’ve never seen one quite this blunt or in-your-face.  Hell, I’m not even sure a company like Rockstar, with its very controversial image, would go to this extreme.  But here we are with a game called N.U.D.E. being published by Microsoft.  But despite the name, the game isn’t at all naughty, or at least that’s not the developer’s intent.  There isn’t a whole lot of information to go on with the game so far, but with a title like this we had to do some investigating.

Essentially N.U.D.E. follows in the same teaching and training tradition as the Sega title Seaman (first “Seaman”, then “Nude”, I’m a little scared what any follow-up games in this genre may be titled).  However, instead of taking a creepy looking fish with a human-esque face and teaching it to interact, you’re training a robot girl named P.A.S.S. (Personal Assistant Secretary System) how to act like a real human.  

All of this is done through the Xbox’s Voice Communicator, much like the vocal interaction in Seaman.  Things start off slow since PASS is pretty much right 

Advertisement

out of the box and has no knowledge of any sort lurking in her mind, so she’ll start out mimicking your words and slowly start to go off on her own with conversation, emotion, and wandering around to the point where she can finally fit in and appear totally human, not just a robot.  What I want to know, though, is if she’ll eventually dream of electric sheep.  

It’s nice to see that the Xbox is finally getting a came that could be considered quirky since there just haven’t been many that could be described as such for the system.  But looking at all this I think it’s pretty safe to say that even if this game sells several thousand copies, only a handful of gamers will actually try to make PASS act human right away.  Everyone else tries to train her to be the naughtiest robotic temptress you ever did see.  Right now there’s only a Japanese release set for N.U.D.E., but who knows, maybe the game will see the light of day on these shores.  There’s already quite a few niche titles on the Xbox out this way, what’s one more?

- Mr. Nash

(February 7, 2003)