Platform: Playstation 2

Genre: Trivia Game

Publisher: Take 2

Developer: Topheavy Studios

ESRB: M (Mature)

Released: August 2004

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Score: 2.0 / 10

Pros:

- Breasts

- On occasion, said breasts are attached to some

attractive girls

- Amusingly pretentious manual

Cons:

- Lots of grueling work to see those breasts

- Slow, plodding pace

- Lots of unskippable banter that is hideously NOT

FUNNY

- Retarded trivia questions

- The host

- All kinds of demeaning towards women

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"...this game is just an all-out embarrassment."

Back in the early days of CD-ROM gaming, the full motion video genre was a terrible, terrible pox upon the land that, thankfully, died once everyone realized how inane it was. Unfortunately, Take 2 Interactive has brought this girl out from the pasture, and she's been hanging out with the wrong people. This is The Guy Game, a trivia contest that focuses on two things: (1) breasts and (2) hurting your soul.

It seems as if the creators of The Guy Game really wanted to take a vacation to some island paradise during spring break, so they backed some equipment and went to one of those islands that clearly don't have public nudity laws. Rounding up a bunch of college girls who desperately want attention, they held a game show and video taped the results. The game is pretty simple - the host asks the girl a question.  First, you have to see whether you can answer the question. If you guess right, you'll earn some points. Second, you have to guess whether the girl can get this question right or wrong – if she gets it wrong, she has to flash the crowd. Herein lies the major challenge to the game – at the beginning of the match, the girl's goods are completely obscured by the game's logo. If you can correctly determine if the girl answers the question wrong, then you fill up the Flash-O-Meter. Once you get this meter halfway, the girls are now obscured with pixellation. Full it up all the way, and you get to see some skin. Here, the manual specifies that you should "pay close attention to the 

mini-interviews" and "use glimpses of the girl's personalities as clues to figure out their possible strengths in specific field", as if it were somehow pretending to be more than a guessing game. Which, by the way, it isn't.

In the second round of questions, the host generously tells you that all of the girls are going to get all of the questions wrong, all the time. Not only are you guaranteed some flashing, but this time around you have to guess which wrong answer the girl will pick. There are only two options given so you always have a 50% chance of succeeding. 

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The final round revolves around some kind of physical activity, like jump roping. You have to bet on one of the three girls to see who will get the most points. Also, the girl will get extra points if she executes said activity whilst topless. One begins to wonder what these girls are actually competing for, as there doesn't seem to be any prize, but most of them are more than happy to doff their tops while they jump up and down.  The box says there are over 200 girls in this game, and somewhere, 200 fathers are very, very disappointed in their daughters.

This is, for the most part, all there is to The Guy Game. There are a few mini-games, all of which features the suffix "-ballz" to make it extra funny, and are maybe slightly better than any number of inane Flash games you can play online. These are perhaps the features because you can just skip them if you don't want to play them.

While you can play the game alone – it features a pause button to freeze frame the video just for reasons as that – the designers really mean for this to be a party game. The rules when  playing in multiplayer are slightly different, in that it is structured after the classic drunken card game A$$hole. The person in the lead is the president, who can set down rules for the rest of the players, and the a$$hole just gets beat up on.  The party atmosphere is what The Guy Game is created for. And by "party atmosphere", I mean a room full of drunk guys. Let me reiterate: that only way you can remotely enjoy this game is if you are very drunk, and in the presence of other very drunk people. No one will admit that have good judgment when they're liquored up, much less surrounded by a mob of nitwits, which is apparently what the designers are hoping for.

Because otherwise, really, this game is just an all-out embarrassment. The prevailing theme in The Guy Game is that Hot Girls Are Dumb and Should Be Punished. It all feels unnecessarily cruel, but those in it for the boobs are probably not going to be conscious of how demeaning it is, nor care for much in the way of moralizing. Even if you can get past the inherent dirtiness, The Guy Game is just plain out unfun. There's nothing to this game other than the video (which isn't even full screen), and the interface, which is surprisingly boring. You Don't Know Jack is one of the only other trivia games out on consoles, and it succeeded in at least having an amusing host and lots of funny questions. The Guy Game's trivia would feel at home a junior high school academic bowl, mixed with an occasionally bawdy question (I hope you guys have caught up on your knowledge of semen.)  Regardless,  you end up wondering why they ask so many questions about tidal waves or episodes of "Friends".

The obnoxious host not only asks questions, but also deals out unnecessarily bad jokes at every turn and constantly updates the crowd (and you) on the state of his erections. Additional commentary is provided by Lucky Lucy, a disembodied voice who makes inane

comments at every turn. "Is that a question in your pocket, or are you just happy to see t***y?" she growls in a voice that would suggest a very depressed lap dancer begging for a few more singles. There are also two commentators who REALLY want to pull off the

chemistry of those funny guys from Spike TV's Most Extreme Elimination Challenge, but they fail, completely. None of these voiceovers are skippable, and you will have to deal with the same repetitive awfulness every time you play.

Which unfortunately, in order to unlock everything, you'll need to play a lot. You can't even play the final stage unless you've filled up your Flash-O-Meter, in which case you'll have to start the stage from scratch. Your second time through will be easier, because the questions don't change (additional trivia is provided once you beat a level, but these questions aren't asked to the girls and feel tacked on.) The further cruel trick: you can't fill up your meter until you're near the end of the stage, so if you want to see each and every uncensored bit of

breast, you'll have to – yes – play it again, from scratch. You figure maybe that the game would just show your the boobs after finishing the level without having to deal with the actual game, but no. This is entirely congruent to a porn video without a fast forward button.

There is nothing – absolutely nothing – in The Guy Game that is a positive feature, outside of the breasts. I am almost entirely sure some fundamentalist church, sponsored this game in an attempt to lure young horny teenage guys with lustful sirens and instead being rewarded with pain, terribly unfunny pain. I'm not even trying to be pretentious and say that I'm above seeing topless girls - I'm just saying that they should maybe make a fun, energetic game around it and not this zombifying romp of displeasure.

- Kurt Kalata

(November 1, 2004)

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