J-Mate

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Reviewed by Yeou-Shiuh Hsu Publisher: Songa/Holibox Europe Available at: J-List Cost: $24.95 Art quality: Cute, superdeformed characters and sexy adult anime illustrations. "H" factor: Great "normal" as well as monster/tentacle sex. Sex: Higher resolution movies that are fun to collect and hot to watch. Overview: Bishoujo Monopoly-style board game. Tons of fun. High replay value.

No one can precisely know for sure when games were invented, but one can boldly declare that we civilized human beings have a passion for them. One of the precursors to modern board games, Mancala, was born on the fertile banks of the Nile river. Monopoly, a board game invented at the height of The Great Depression, has been translated into 26 different languages and remains a best seller to this very day. Why do we love board games so much? That's a cosmic secret privy only to Buddha himself, but Hobibox Europe hopes that Viper Paradice will engage your undivided attention and keep you deeply entertained. There had been a whole series of Viper Island desktop accessories and toys prior to the creation of Viper Paradice, so Sogna is not inexperienced in the art of creating puzzle games. Whether the Bishoujo game company Sogna, whose sole claim to fame is producing ero-games with fluid full-screen animation, make a competent board game remains to be seen. Are you ready? Then let the game begin!

I've got to hand it to Sogna, if there's something they excel at, it's drawing sexy, attractive female protagonists. Featured prominently on the cover of the case of Viper Paradice, and on the splash screen, are Asuka, Carrera, Mika and Akira, each representing their own Sogna alphabet series. These four animated poster girls are your default selection of animated tokens, which actually don't have any impact on the gameplay, only cool to look at, just as picking the battleship in Monopoly as your token will not miraculously give you an edge over picking the terrier. Once you've selected the character you desire, and no pun was intended, you can play the game by choosing from a selection of three different victory conditions: complete a predetermined set of laps around the board, collect a predetermined sum of money, or collect all the movies. There are three different paths around the board to choose from as well, which helps to relieve the Deja Vu syndrome that plagues most board games. Up to four human players can play Viper Paradice, but you are credited for the movies you've collected only if you defeat 3 CPU opponents. Once CPU randomly determines the starting order and 'fortunate dice', 4 cards are handed out to each character, and the game begins.

Each character takes her turn rolling the die and moving the appropriate number of squares. There are seven types of common squares on a Viper Paradice board:

Sogna had evidently planned out the game mechanics quite carefully, because the map layout plays as well as it looks. There are very few dead squares in Viper Paradice, so dull moments where nothing happens will be few and far in between. Most of the time you will be busy making some extra cash on the side here, paying some taxes there, purchasing Utility cards or Movie cards, and appreciating the technical excellence of Viper ero-animation movie clips. There are many movie clips recycled from previous Viper releases, as well as about 25 or so brand new ero-animation movie clips drawn exclusively for Viper Paradice, albeit at half the usual size and resolution for normal Viper releases. If you think your [dubious] skill of rolling critical misses will make a loser of you, put your fears to rest, because the road to victory lies in the cards. You can take a turn moving a number of squares equal to your die roll, or using one of the cards in your inventory. Five distinct types of cards can be earned or purchased in a normal Viper Paradice game:

You earn most of the cards found in the game when you land on a pink plaid square, but may also earn them if your die roll matched the 'fortunate die' as well. Cards do not have to be used immediately when you earn them; because each character can hold up to a maximum of eight cards in her inventory, it opens up a whole plethora of strategies. A Utility card like double dice allows you to roll two dice instead of the usual one die, whereas another Utility card like Line Change allows you to swap a row of movie clips you've collected with those collected by one of your opponents. These are just two examples of the many different Utility cards you will come across in Viper Paradice. Telecards don't seem to do very much, but if you collected a set of them, some mysterious benefit is supposed to materialize. Event cards cannot be either sold or discarded, but these also are supposed to provide some continuous benefits or detriments. It appears that Hobibox Europe had once more screwed up their localization effort, by rushing Viper Paradice out to retailers with a lot of gameplay bugs, as well as strange Engrish. This is probably why a lot of gameplay elements that were supposed to take effect in game never actually do so. For instance, a Event card like Vumper is supposed to prevent its owner from ever taking more than one step each turn; another event card like Small Movie is supposed to reduce the size of the movies during playback. In actuality, none of the Event cards provide the effects they are supposed to carry out. Such a gameplay bug may seem trivial, since neither beneficial nor detrimental event cards have any impact on the game. Upon closer inspection, these bugs are disruptive to strategic planning against your opponents, because switching your detrimental event cards with one of your opponent's fails to deter her, thereby destroying your chances of catching up to other players. The broken Event cards are such glaring demerits, that the overall score for Viper Paradice in Gameplay is docked a few points.

Sogna discarded their traditional preference for CD-DA for this Viper release, and adopted MP3 files instead for BGM accompaniments. These BGM are accessed on demand, so when one MP3 track is over, the whole game freezes up for a brief second or two as the second MP3 loads. They are all excellent and catchy in my opinion, but there are a total of maybe only 3 or 4 BGM accompaniments, and taking into account the average time for a full Viper Paradice game is roughly an hour or so, you'll soon grow tired of them, and probably be better off playing the game without sound. If you want to collect the 95 movie clips in order to complete the movie album, it's a given that you'll be playing Viper Paradice over and over again, because in each game you can collect a maximum of four sets of randomly selected movie clips.

The graphics of Viper Paradice are fairly good, pretty much everything is rendered colorfully and beautifully; the game engine even supports some smooth sprite scaling with minimal pixelation. Interface is clean and easy to navigate with a mouse, but if you don't want to use a mouse, Viper Paradice can be navigated with a keyboard as well. If the game is too slow for your taste, you have the option to increase the speed of the engine. The game also supports quick save, so you can return to play Viper Paradice from the place you last left off. Even at half the size and resolution, Viper animation reigns supreme as the sovereign of technically brilliant ero-animation, and is the primary incentive for attracting Bishoujo gamers to replay Viper Paradice over and over again. Sogna succeeds once again with another Viper title, filled to the brim with the sweetest animated booty, and that's the inescapable truth.

Epilogue: On two separate instances I sent electronic mail to Hobibox Europe to notify them of the gameplay bugs mentioned in this review. They quickly replied to say that they were unaware of the bugs, and would discuss them with the original publisher Sogna in hopes of finding a remedy. There is a history of Japanese companies rarely maintaining close communication with their foreign overseas subsidiaries, hence I am not holding my breath that Hobibox Europe will release a patch for fixing the bugs anytime soon.

My final grades for Viper Paradice are:

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