Game Review: My Boyfriend

I was way too excited for the new My Boyfriend game. I anticipated all the fun of Sim dating, plus my favorite guilty pleasure (changing my avatar’s clothes every five minutes), without all that tedious eating and sleeping and meter-watching of actual Sims. I really wanted to like it. I wasn’t lying in angry-feminist wait for objectionable themes, I wanted to blog about frothy dialogue, cute outfits and imaginary boyfriends.

But it was awful.

The game opens with you and your best friend arriving at a resort full of  fun activities and hot guys! Unfortunately, the dialogue is stilted, partly because it’s EFL, and partly because I hoped for witty banter. There’s a lot of clicking ok, only “ok” is an awkward agreement. The dialogue was so awkward that I couldn’t always tell who was supposed to be an attractive possible friend and who was a mean girl to be thwarted with my killer wits. I could tell which guys were potential boyfriends, though, because the minor NPCs only had one line to say.

As you walk around the resort, white stars appear over activatable items, and you have the option to participate in different resort activities. Whether you choose to relax in the sun, rent waterskiis, or swim in the pool, you don’t play a minigame or even watch a little cutscene animation. You watch a clock tick. I’m not exaggerating. You watch a pink clock tick. Um, when does the fun start?

Other activities do involve minigames. These are activated by talking to an NPC. I’m usually a big fan of minigames (see also: all my recent hidden objects game reviews), but these minigames were awful. AWFUL. We’re talking incomprehensible directions, repetitive gameplay and bizarrely uneven difficultly levels. For Step Aerobics, you need to click the right color in the right order five times to complete level one. For Kareoke, you need to click the right color at the right time FORTY EIGHT times to complete level one. Wait, one is more difficult than the next by a factor of ten?

Your character can also experiment with makeup, but the extremely limited choices forbade either adorable looks or hilarious fashion trainwrecks. (If you think makeup doesn’t lend itself well to a videogame, check out the facial minigame in Nancy Drew Dossier: Resorting To Danger for a makeup game done right, or Sims 3 for recreational avatar decoration.)

I really wanted to like My Boyfriend, but we have to break up. This just isn’t working out.

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6 Comments

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  By Amanda d'Adesky, November 6, 2009 @ 10:02 am

  Oh, good grief, that sounds even more boring than I would have feared. For some reason, I just knew they were going to screw this thing up. Glad you took that bullet for us!

  Also, when did Mystery of Cleopatra come out??? I only worked on that game a month or so ago. . .oh, wait. When did it get to be November? Has it really been 3 months since I was testing for that game? o.O

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  By Meg, November 7, 2009 @ 12:17 pm

  I had REALLY high hopes for Boyfriend, I just love making Sim relationships and drama. (Which is somehow totally different from still playing dolls…)

  Cleopatra just came out, I tried to jump on it and review it as soon as it was released, but then my non-gaming life got in the way so it wasn’t quite as immediate as I’d planned. (I also helped test it a little bit, but I still thought the scrolls puzzle was really unclear.)

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  By Amanda d'Adesky, November 9, 2009 @ 10:51 am

  The scrolls puzzle wasn’t so bad for me, but the bell puzzle was murder. It’s the one in the Docks section, where you have to rotate the grooves on the bell face to line up all the dots? You can ring the bell to open the gate whether you’ve completed that puzzle or not, but it still bugs me to this day that I didn’t solve it. The lack of proper tutorial on that part was terrible!

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  By Lunarhound, January 2, 2010 @ 4:10 pm

  So-called “pink games” are the subject of much debate and ridicule on womengamers.com. The problems many people seem to have with them are the assumptions they make about females in general, but I don’t really think that’s what’s wrong with them. Their real problem is that they aren’t aimed at gamers, they’re aimed at girls who want to play dress up and go on pretend dates. This in itself isn’t a bad thing, but it means that they can afford to cut corners and put less time and thought into the product, because their target audience probably isn’t going to notice.

  My youngest sister, when she was twelve or so, used to love the Playstation game, Mary Kate and Ashley’s Winner’s Circle. It was an ugly, sloppy, clunky excuse for a horseback riding game, with graphics that looked like someone tried to force an Atari 2600 to do 3d and controls that felt like they were designed for primates without opposable thumbs. But all attempts to convince her to play something better were in vain, because she wasn’t a gamer and she simply didn’t see the problems with it. All she needed to be happy with it were the fact that there were horses and she could play as one of the Olsen Twins.

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  By Meg, May 6, 2010 @ 2:25 pm

  I’m OK w/ girls liking a pink game because they actually like pink or shopping or ponies. I just resent the lack of games for girls where you play, say, a spy or an astronaut.
  Meg´s last blog ..Tiger Eye: Curse Of The Riddle Box

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1. Simpson's Paradox » Game Review: My Boyfriend — February 22, 2010 @ 1:41 am

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