Don’t Read This, part 2

After the Japanese porn industry icked me out (not hard, since I cringe at two guys on one girl scenes), the Japanese continued their assault using video games. You know video games – harmless little diversions with Italian carpenters jumping over barrels, yellow things muching dots and fleeing ghosts, or something featuring a pleasant Sunday drive*.

Naturally, the Japanese didn’t leave it at innocuous little diversions like Grand Theft Auto. They created the dating sim genre, which involves story lines wherein the main character (you) gets to have pixilated sex (or non-pixilated in some countries) as a reward for making the right choices. I played and reviewed Kana – Little Sister, which is the touching story of a boy caring for his younger sister who faces a shortened life filled with illness. If you do the right things for her, you will get to boink her before she dies. (if you make a lot of right choices, she doesn’t die but you still have sex) The creators of that game also made another one which implies you can have sex with any female character in the game. It’s available for Western audiences, whose squeamishness was placated by promising that all characters are over eighteen (your character is 20). I looked at the cover and I have a few questions:
1. Despite the ages, why are all the main characters still in high school? Is this supposed to be retard porn?
2. Am I not supposed to be disturbed by the fact that one thinks she is a fairy and eats out of trash cans?
3. Are the hinted themes of asphyxiation, drug abuse, and snuff films part of the sex bits, or separate diversions?
4. Why is your younger sister on the roster and why, despite being labeled as eighteen, does she look more like eight or ten?


If you think a line should be drawn delineating some as harmless role-playing games and others as pedophile rapist training material, then RapeLay is nowhere near that line. In that story you play a pervert who captures and repeatedly rapes a family of women, comprised of the mother, teenaged daughter, and her younger adolescent sister. This is supposedly the most extreme game of its kind on the market, but if you think it can’t get any worse than that, then be thankful you don’t have my imagination. Trust me – it can get way worse.

Despite my initial revulsion, I’m still against most censorship in the arts (using real children in porn is way out). I’m generally in favor of balance and drawing a line somewhere on just about everything, but having seen politicians attempt to ban mainstream pornography, heavy metal music, and gay marriage, I’m more than a little leery of giving them any more say in what people need. I agree that we don’t need RapeLay, but I also don’t see a need for sugary breakfast cereals, Adam Sandler movies, Barbie Fashion Show, or religion in general. Lending credence to my fears, this article rips on RapeLay, but by the end it segues into calling for a need to bring down GTA. I'm more of a "down with those people who are down on that sort of thing" guy. Besides, I may not complain if RapeLay (and Kana) are banned from the U.S., but if you try to take my Carmageddon games from me or insist that violent video games encourage violent behavior, then I'll feed you into a burning scroll saw.

* The Carmageddon series is as close to video game porn I can imagine using – senseless graphic violence, raw horsepower, and a heavy metal soundtrack, but it’s hard to masturbate while driving stick. Still, I’ll give it a shot if the developers ever come out with an Asian schoolgirl expansion pack.