LoveLoveShow!

Weeeee! I have no idea what's going on here.Game Concept: I spend a lot of time in my Hentai reviews for Something Awful grousing about how completely abhorrent the interface and gameplay of most Hentai games are. While my opinion of the shallow gameplay options afforded the player in Hentai games still stands, thanks to "LoveLoveShow!" I now have something far worse to compare them to. The whole concept of the title is that you play really simplistic (yet artificially difficult) puzzle games and if you complete the puzzles you are rewarded with one or two screens of hardcore cartoon porn.

This sounds deceptively non-horrible to those few of you in the audience who have endured as many "look and think" games as I have. Yet for all their stupid simplicity those games have never made me want to throw my computer monitor off of a cliff and then chase it down to my screaming, cursing death on the rocks below. "LoveLoveShow!" managed to accomplish this and so much more with the vast - I use the term with such venomous sarcasm that I'm actually pointing out I'm being sarcastic - number of enjoyable puzzles you can play to view cat women being raped with bananas.

Warning: this image does not adequately convey the shocking boredom of this game.While the opening screen seems to promise three different challenges to the player with "Game A", "Game B", and "Game C", there are actually only two different games. The first, "Game A", is a version of the card game memory where you flip over cards and try to match them using the amazing power of your short term memory. The images on the tiny cards are of course anime girls, most of whom look so similar that I couldn't tell them apart even when they failed to match. You have such a limited number of card-flips allowed that you essentially have to be lucky and match a pair on your first try or you might as well start over. Once you have successfully matched all of the cards you are treated to two screens, usually one was pornographic and one was not. I assume these images were recycled from some other game because they make absolutely no sense on their own, running the gamut from cat girls jumping in ponds to karate girls being raped with rope.

"Game B" and "Game C" are in essence two versions of the same game; the ever popular "image scramble". You get a few seconds to look at a hentai picture of some pink haired floozy being violated by green tentacles before the image scrambles into about twenty squares. You then have one space that you can move around to reorganize the picture. Once again I would have had difficulty without the frustratingly time consuming "one square" limitation thanks to the nonsensical nature of the tentacle rape image. With the limitation in place I found games B and C absolutely impenetrable. I have never excelled at puzzle games, but trying to rearrange a picture that gave me a headache before it was jumbled up is nearly impossible for my feeble brain.

Click the image for a large and unscrambled version of the horror.I would definitely not be doing this game frontier justice if I didn't mention the unbearably awful music. It's sort of a cross between one of those high-frequency noise-emitters that were used in science fiction movies to represent "technology noise" and a chorus of the loudest and most annoying birds on the planet. The first time I played the game I was wearing headphones and I tore them off my head in shock and disgust with the first screeching of "LoveLoveShow!". Needless to say most of the rest of my play through of the title was done with the volume off on my speakers. For scientific purposes I did subject myself to the chorus of hell for a single round of the memory type game and I believe I can now prove empirically that Japanese people are evil.

Difficulty: The difficulty really varies on this game from "Game A" to games B and C. While "Game A" is extremely difficult I was able to play through about eight levels of it in a little over an hour of frustrating card flipping and memory lapses. Game's B and C are in a difficulty league unparalleled by almost any game I have ever played and I was not able to complete a single level of either no matter how long I spent meticulously shuffling squares around. Maybe there's some secret to it that involves geometry and some sort of Asian thaumaturgy that my white barbarian brain could never comprehend.

Unfortunately, it is impossible to visualize the game's music.Defining Moment: The first time I played "Game B". This awful picture appeared on the screen and while I was still trying to fully comprehend the complexities of the ooze-dripping tentacles and screaming pumpkin-headed woman the image disappeared. Then it was replaced by a scrambled up version and I think at that moment, somewhere, an angel fell from grace and into the eternal fires of hell. Because I feel shitty about not fully reviewing a game I sat there and played those fucking puzzles until I was ready to chew off my own leg to get out of the trap. Nothing. I gained nothing for my efforts other than the soul-crushing knowledge that I was bested by a Hentai game.

Final Thoughts: "LoveLoveShow!", from what little I admittedly experienced of its pornography, seemed to feature very little of the perversion common in most other Hentai games. Since I couldn't tell which girls were sisters, moms, or ten year olds I was not particularly offended by the many fruit-hungry cartoon vaginas I saw. That is the ONLY fucking thing saving this from being the worst Hentai game I have ever played. Every second spent in its chamber of horrors was like a hundred hour marathon of maximum-difficulty "Microsoft Reversi". If the music were placed on CDs and sold I would buy all of them just so that I could launch them into the sun through the sheer force of my hatred.