The Guy Game (Xbox)

Back before free adult content was just a search bar away, people looking for such things essentially had to pay for what they could find. Workers in the adult entertainment industry are definitely entitled to proper pay for their work, but Girls Gone Wild built a business off of approaching drunks girls at bars and parties and having them flash the camera, their consent and personal information provided certainly dubious due to the circumstances. At this time, the video game scene very rarely featured nudity, let alone footage of real women baring their breasts, but Jeff Spangenberg must have been inspired by the party atmosphere of Girls Gone Wild because he went on to direct a game simply titled The Guy Game. However, whereas watching Girls Gone Wild was a passive experience and would often go beyond simple shirt lifting, The Guy Game added such a degree of needless complexity to the act of seeing even a single uncensored chest that any chance of the title being titillating went down the drain.

The Guy Game was filmed on location on South Padre Island, Texas, the participants either being beach-going babes or ladies who were spending their night at the Tequila Frogs bar during Spring Break. There are twenty playable episodes to The Guy Game, each one starring at least three women but occasionally featuring a team entry to bump the number up to four and the total number of ladies featured above 60. The player’s role in The Guy Game is to play a trivia game, the promised reward for doing well at it being the chance to see these real women flash their chests for a few seconds each. However, when you start playing a round of The Guy Game, you’ll notice something unusual. The first time a woman lifts her shirt, you’ll see a large logo for The Guy Game censoring their chest. To get rid of this, you would think that maybe you need to get the right answers to the trivia questions answered, but that is not the case at all.

The trivia questions the game asks the player are almost entirely irrelevant to the content on offer. If you pick the right answer, you will get a cash bonus, but the cash is just a point meter that doesn’t really play into much besides who wins a specific episode of The Guy Game. The Guy Game is, apparently, meant to be played as a multiplayer competition, players able to interfere with each other with special abilities, earn extra cash with a roulette, prevent losing cash with powers like Immunity, and otherwise vie for the top spot in a game where it’s rather unlikely you’d get another player to sit down and play with you. If you wait a while to pick your answer during this round, two of the four multiple choice answers will disappear leaving only one right and wrong answer, but answering earlier provides a bigger cash reward. There is a very small reward for coming out on top at least, although this is automatically provided in single player play. Each player is asked to pick a cheerleader model to represent them during the game, and if you have the most cash at the end of the game, you get to see a short video of your model dancing, usually in her underwear for the bulk of it and with such strange editing and posing that it’s hard to get excited about this “reward”. If no one has any cash at the end of the round though, the game punishes you by having an obese man do a video where he poses sexily instead, and surprisingly he seems to put more heart and energy into it than some of the girls. The models in general make some uncomfortable looking faces in their evolving set of menu images, and while these will also get progressively raunchier as the game goes on, seeing the more revealing images requires you to do well at the real meat and potatoes of The Guy Game: the Flash-O-Meter.

Each episode of The Guy Game has its own dedicated Flash-O-Meter you need to overcome before the game starts removing the censorship from the live action clips. Your answers to the trivia questions do not impact it at all though, the player instead having to engage with follow-up questions to the trivia. The first six trivia questions of an episode require you to guess whether or not one of the girls provided the correct answer to the question, and since you hardly get to know any thing about these women, it’s basically just guessing and hoping you’ll be correct. A wrong answer does nothing to the Flash-O-Meter, but correctly guessing if the girl is incorrect or not will start to build the meter up. If it’s in the Soft and Squishy range you will see The Guy Game logo when girls flash the camera, if you reach the Sorta Chubby part of the bar then it will use traditional mosaic censoring instead, and once you’ve finally hit the Super Stiff level, the Flash-O-Meter shatters and the nudity the game drew in players with is finally on full display for that episode.

However, there are some complications to this meter still. If in these starting “Foreplay” rounds a girl gets an answer correct, she does not need to show her breasts, and even if that wasn’t a factor, you need to guess at least five of the girls’ responses correctly as soon as the option becomes available to even fill up the meter to Super Stiff. Your rewards for both regular questions and the rounds where you guess if the girl got it right start to diminish as the timer starts, and while you have a second to input your answer before it begins dropping, taking time to think can drag out filling the Flash-O-Meter even more. The range of trivia is certainly strange as well, covering topics like Star Trek, chemistry, and history that the game doesn’t expect girls to get right while then handing them easy questions about the human body or food. There is definitely a lot of pop culture questions rooted into that specific point in history, the 2004 release of the game meaning that the sitcom Friends was so fresh in the minds of people they can ask about specific activities in an episode and the girls will get them right. Knowing Justin Timberlake’s first solo album may still be arguably relevant today, but there are also questions that even relate to specific then-current events or certain undoubted records. This complicates trying to fairly guess if the ladies will get the question right, and that’s even before you consider that the host, Matt Sadler, will sometimes give them clues or misread the question. The on-site audience can even provide hints to the girls, giving them right or wrong answers that further make it basically impossible to accurately predict how the round will go.

This is a lot of complexity added to seeing girls lift their tops for only a few seconds, but we’re still not quite through it all yet. After the Foreplay round is the Ballz round which exists only for cash accumulation. Only your cheerleading model is shown during this step, the player either able to play a game where they try to roll their ball into moving targets, push smaller balls out of a rectangular arena with their large ball, or play a strange form of soccer where the big balls can pick and shoot the smaller one. These can thankfully be skipped because they are only there for the hypothetical multiplayer scenario the game wishes would exist, but it’s very likely that after the Foreplay round you still haven’t seen any women actually expose their breasts uncensored. So, after six frustrating trivia questions and a dull round of Ballz that isn’t even well designed if played due to low stakes and easy goals, you move onto TitWitz for six more trivia questions where you might be able to break that Flash-O-Meter if it’s still lingering around.

Besides the regular multiple choice questions directed at the player, the goal has now shifted away from guessing if the girls get the questions right or wrong. Instead, all the questions in these rounds were answered incorrectly, meaning there will always be some of what the game reeled players in with, but to potentially fill the Flash-O-Meter if it’s still present, you need to now guess which of two incorrect answers they gave. All the problems with the Foreplay round and the reliability of getting the answers right return here, meaning it is actually possible to get through all 12 questions, many of which have unskippable portions, without breaking the Flash-O-Meter. Even if you were content not seeing uncensored breasts after all, filling the Flash-O-Meter is required to unlock more episodes, meaning you will have to repeat an episode that can take around 20 minutes even with every skip possible and quick answers made. You can skip the flashing portions if you hammer a button to lower a paper bag over the scene, but at the end of the round we have what is meant to be the game rewarding you for breaking that meter: The Hottie Challenge.

The Hottie Challenge only has one part of interactivity: you bet on which girl you think will win a physical contest. These physical contests will involve things like seeing who can hula hoop the longest, jump rope the longest, or win a sack race. Many of the same Hottie Challenge designs are repeated across most of the episodes, only for the game to start whipping out new ones near the end like a jumping jack contest and a fight with large rubber balls was weapons. The girls are almost always going to be topless during this because they are given a huge head start if they do so, but if they refuse it they’re guaranteed to lose. Two color commentators will try to spice up the event by talking constantly during it and cracking the easiest ribald jokes that can be cooked up, but they do sometimes come up with something funny and help avoid making the awkward act of watching a woman jump rope for a minute silent as well.

However, these commentators suffer a similar problem to most of the game, and that is that its humor really fails to land. Each new question is introduced by a female host who uses a very small set of innuendos that repeat by the time you’ve played your second episode, wearing down your patience as you can’t skip these recycled intros. Matt Saddler recycles material as well, repeating the line about loving his job when women lift their shirt or calling men in the audience gay for trying to give the girls answers. Perhaps the strangest bit of joking around comes from the commentators shaming a girl for her appearance as if The Guy Game didn’t select her for participation in the first place. Admittedly the crowd was mild for her Hottie Challenge round, but the unusual hostility featured during the round feels counterproductive in a game that makes you put so much effort into receiving so little reward. In fact, the girls are probably the best part of the game, and that’s not a comment directed towards their looks. Some of the girls bring a lot of personality to the affair. Jecca and Beth both enjoying being participants in this lurid game show whereas many girls almost seemed practically forced to flash their breasts for even half a second, Davina and Amber both are talkative and engage with the host quite a bit, and sometimes the audience interaction can be fun when there’s a proper back and forth between them and the contestant.

However, no matter how charming the girls are, there’s a point where you realize that The Guy Game will not be providing any sort of titillation. While you can unlock videos and pictures for later viewing, the process of getting them is long and arduous because of how convoluted breaking the Flash-O-Meter is. Because of the frequent unfairness of filling it up, the frustration of having to randomly guess at whether or not a girl will get the right answer or even the right wrong answer, and the slow pace of the game as it refuses to let you skip ahead at many parts, those brief moments where women might reveal their breasts uncensored are hollow. I practically had an existential moment where I had to evaluate why people even find boobs arousing because the game had made seeing them such a grueling process that the few seconds of flesh showed as reward feels empty, and that’s before you even factor in some of the girls clearly not wanting to show their chests. There is something to be said for earning nudity in a game rather than just being given it, but that is because it satisfying to see your reward when it is properly earned rather than gained by way of random guessing. On top of that, a game with adult content usually at least knows to give you a hearty amount of the material for your efforts. Even The Hottie Challenges where all the girls are pretty much topless the whole time hold little of value since getting there was so agonizing, and while there are definitely plenty of attractive women in the game, the structure has robbed them of their appeal by making the gameplay so painstaking that it goes beyond simple objectification. Pushing through all the barriers to seeing these clips in their original form makes it nearly impossible to enjoy what little the game is willing to finally give you for your efforts.

THE VERDICT: Perhaps The Guy Game could have pleased some teenagers or frat boys if was a lightly interactive version of Girls Gone Wild, but the convoluted and aggravating structure to the trivia game attached to brief flashes of bare flesh completely destroy any chance of this game being appealing as interactive entertainment or titillating through erotic content. Having to guess how girls will incorrectly answer questions is a complete toss up in episodes that last nearly half an hour and can require you to replay them if you didn’t do well enough at guessing. The humor grows old fast and the girls lose their appeal as the effort expended and time wasted to get the uncensored versions of their antics is poorly reward with brief and sometimes awkward nudity. There are so many better ways to get what this grueling game offers that there is no good reason to slog through this miserable experience even by those desperate for the tiniest shred of sexy material.

And so, I give The Guy Game for Xbox…

An ATROCIOUS rating. Even ignoring any ethical issues with the way the women were approached to provide footage of their flashing, The Guy Game has made such a mess of seeing bare breasts that it’s hard to imagine any audience for it. The idea that some college bros might set this up for a raunchy party is incredibly absurd once you see all the trouble you have to go through to even see the content these imaginary participants would be hoping to see. Unless one devoted player was sitting there getting every Flash-O-Meter question right, it’s likely this party would see only seconds of actual uncensored flashing that the player would have to call everyone over to see it since the trivia rounds are otherwise so slow and full of repeated lines and annoying filler that it won’t be holding the attention of an audience for long. The game is structured in what seems like a deliberately frustrating manner, your rewards miniscule and robbed of their potential for arousal not only through the effort you have to put in to get to them, but by the odd framing the live action footage has. Seeing girls briefly compete in a sack race topless isn’t the satisfying climax to playing what is basically a worse version of the game show Street Smarts. Trimming the fat would do a lot for making this less of an excruciating play and removing things like needing to fill the Flash-O-Meter to unlock new episodes seem like a no-brainer, but instead The Guy Game thinks players would rather unlock extra trivia for beating the game so they can play through all 20 episodes again with new questions that the girls don’t even answer since they have to stick to the recorded footage for their part in the game structure.

If The Guy Game was just a simple artifice through which you could see some topless women having fun on the beach then it would be far less offensive, because while this game would probably be proud to learn it had bothered people by providing plenty of lewd images and footage of young ladies, its much greater sin was making it so incredibly boring. The trivia isn’t all that bad, the girls are certainly attractive, and sometimes the game does land with some of its humor, but all of its dragged out to the point nothing can overcome the dull crawl the game expects you to suffer through just to see some breasts for a few seconds. Even if the game didn’t get into hot water over the age of a girl featured in the final episode of the game, it would still not deserve to be played, so many other forms of adult entertainment providing erotic content that is either much easier to access, better directed, or more enjoyable to earn through gameplay.