Emmanuelle

EMMANUELLE by Piper

Reprinted with permission from:
The ST CLUB Newsletter
9 Sutton Place
49 Stoney St.
Nottingham

Sex and software: so far the two seem to have had an
unhappy alliance. For one thing, what's been on offer has
generally been "lowest common denominator" stuff, like the Strip
Poker variants, with little to recommend them aside from just
how much lipid is pumped into the particular young lady's
primary fat storage areas. For another thing, it makes the disks
all sticky.
Emmanuelle, from the French company Coktel Vision, is an
attempt to put something of the erotic into the normal
sleaze. Based (however loosely) on Emmanuelle Aran's original
novel, it has you chasing around in Brazil to try to find the
lovely Emmanuelle and convince her to fly off with you to Paris.
Sounds good so far.
To accomplish this task, you can't, unfortunately, just pick
up a phone and ask the lady if she'd like an all-expenses-paid
holiday in Europe. No, no, much too easy and straightforward.
Instead you have to find three statues, each of which
represents one of the three laws of eroticism (you don't want
to know) which will help increase your erotic potential to
the point where Emmanuelle will find you irresistible. Now, I
don't know about you, but in all my vast experience of being
turned down, it's never yet been because I wasn't lugging
three pornographic statues around with me. Maybe I've just led a
sheltered life. Still, I'm willing to try anything once.
Enough scene setting, let's see the game.
Before getting into the program, you have to negotiate the
copy protection, which consists of correctly identifying two
colours on a colour chart provided with the package. This is a
little vicious (one wrong answer and you're dead), but means
that the disk itself is completely unprotected, so the program
can be copied onto a hard disk or one double sided disk (it
comes on two single sided disks), a very welcome facility which
I hope other companies will consider incorporating. The
program has the added advantage of being usable (just) with a
mono monitor. It's little things like that which make you think
that the company is actually considering the needs of its
clientele. Expectations rise.
The title screen is a real pain, since it can't be bypassed.
You have to sit and watch fireworks going off over Rio, after
which you get a burst of sampled carnival music. Nice enough the
first time, but irritating afterwards. You're then on a hill
overlooking Rio. You can move from place to place by pointing the
cursor at the area you want to go to and clicking, after
which you'll have a short delay as the location loads from
disk. Places of interest include the hotel, the beach, the
casino (where you can play roulette and make yourself quite
obscenely rich) and the poorer part of town. At each
location, you can interact with characters by pointing the
cursor at them and clicking. They may immediately say something
or just turn politely towards you, at which point you'll be
offered a choice of three different things that you might like
to say to them. It's here that the game really starts to fall
apart.
When first meeting an attractive young lady at a bar, is
your first urge to go up to her and say "How about a quick
pet"? No? Well, how about "Let's go to it, baby"? Me neither.
(Anyone who answered "yes" to one or other of the above
questions should rush out and buy this game immediately and
play it well into the night, which will at least keep you off
the streets for a while). Using the wrong approach causes an
abrupt termination of conversation.
If you do choose the right things to say, you are taken
off for a bit of bedspring testing (you've probably all seen the
screen shot by now) which tends to tire you out a little.
Presumably, your efforts are quite feeble since you end up back
at the place you'd just come from without your recent partner.
For a change of pace, you could always try picking a fight
with one of the gentlemen in the poor district. This sets you
down on the beach controlling a rather wimpy looking figure as
he shuffles towards a Schwarzenegger lookalike. One of the best
ways of beating your opponent is to make him look up, then whack
him viciously a few inches below his navel. Quite fun to see the
first time, but again there's nothing there to make you want to
go back for a rematch.
The game is so blatantly sexist that it's almost a spoof.
If it had gone a little further, it might have worked at that
level, but it didn't and it hasn't. Instead what we have is
another game whose entire raison d'être is to provide puerile
titilation for hormonally overactive adolescents. Maybe it
works in French, but in English, this is a real dodo. Avoid.

Distributor: Active Sales and Marketing, Studio Centre, 1
Ranelagh Gardens, London, SW6 3PA. Tel: 01-384-2701
Price: £19.95
Value for Money: 2