X-Change

Game Plot: X-Change, like many Hentai games, is something that could have only come from Japan. It's a romance/sex simulation anime game with a twist; you start the game as a horny teenage boy and get turned into a horny teenage girl. Once you're a girl you naturally have sex with everything with two legs and a pulse including such "Junior College" luminaries as "The Insane Lesbian Nurse", "The Insane Lesbian Chemistry Lab Partner", "Your Insane Lesbian Sister", and "That Good Old Molesting Gym Coach". That's among several others.

Gameplay: The first third of the game is a tedious chemistry lab cleaning simulator in which you get to make riveting decisions like which chemical shelf you want to organize first and which type of glassware you want to wash first. Each of these decisions is made at least twice because lord knows selecting a menu option once is just not enough when it is something as fucking vital as picking what type of glass you want to clean first. This faux interactivity is one of the real treats of getting to play Hentai games. In pretty much every one of these reviews you'll get to read a little rant about how all you do is select every option from the menu until all options have been exhausted.

Examine me naked? That sounds like standard procedure for a school nurse! And fuck am I happy about it!This holds true for most of X-Change but they throw in a few curveballs that admirably branch the plot and lead to different endings (there are at least 6 different endings). Less than admirable is the fact that once again the good old Hentai makers have decided that one of the best educational tools for a growing man who turned into a woman is being raped by two or more other teenage boys. In my ending, the crazy lesbian nurse brought in two teenage boys to gang fuck my character. This so enlightened her to the wonders of being a woman that she turned down the cure for her accidental sex change. As we all know, nothing says "well-adjusted woman" like quietly accepting forced sex, or even better, coming to enjoy it.

Now before I continue with the gameplay, please allow me to rave about one of the innovative features in X-Change. Most Hentai games have variable text display settings that range from "one letter appears on the screen every five minutes" to "you can't quite bake a loaf of bread in the time it takes to have this conversation". X-Change, however, has an option that lets your computer display all of the text and pictures leading up to the next decision you have to make as quickly as it can. This feature is completely useless for people who want to see the sex, but for a reviewer like me who already has enough shitty material to write about and just wants to finish the game, it is a Godsend. Kudos to you, whatever crazy Japanese company made this.

I'm really not sure who this game's target audience is, although if it's the average Japanese teenage male I need to start being a lot more afraid of Japan than I have been lately. All of their games seem hell-bent on asserting male dominance over women by having huge-breasted maidens getting raped right and left. This game switches it up slightly by having your male character getting turned into a woman, and then getting raped right and left. Somewhere around the part where your character's dick does a three-sixty and rockets into his abdomen I lost all sense of a coherent Japanese sexuality. Which I guess I should have expected since here in America I like lesbian porno and my neighbor has a video he jerks off to that's nothing but a sound loop of barking dogs and a naked woman throwing darts at balloons.

Difficulty: It's hard to say that a game where you have no real defined goal is difficult, especially when all you do to influence the outcome is make about five different choices. I don't know if the ending I got ("Gang rape makes me decide to stay a woman") was the good one, I don't think there is a good ending. Assuming there are six endings total, here are my guesses on what the other five are.

• Gang rape makes me pee somewhere public while I cry.
• Gang rape makes the football team win the tournament and I become a cheerleader.
• Hot lesbian sex with my insane sister influences me into remaining a woman and ultimately running off to some underwater city where they let two women get married.
• The gym coach grinds into my crotch until my belly swells up, a door opening sound effect plays, and I lay a giant egg from which a cartoon penguin with lazy eyes emerges, dons a top hat, and does a soft-shoe routine.
• I decide getting raped is for the birds, take the potion, and get back to what's important: being the raper instead of the rapee.

You will note that all six endings suck. The only positive ending I can envision for this game would be one of the above with the added sentence "Then a brick flew through the window and caused me to lose all memory of the preceding 24 hours."She is obviously in cahoots with that goddamn nurse.Defining Moment: Immediately after getting a lesbian sex exam from the nurse that started with me being forced to strip naked I went to talk to my chemistry lab partner. She told me she needed to examine me and that I had to strip naked. Much to my complete lack of anything resembling surprise I was presented with the option (which I chose) to engage in lesbian sex with her. Seriously, how hard is it to come up with a different scenario for lesbian sex? I know these guys are probably spitting one of these games out every half-hour or so, but for the love of Christ I've seen better plot concepts randomly float together in a bowl of Alphabits.

Final Thoughts: This game - and I call it a game in the same way I would call a "Choose Your Own Adventure" novel a "staple of 20th century literature" - was about as entertaining as clipping your toenails with a miniature set of clippers so small that they break every time you try to use them. It's only saving grace was the fact that I could cut my play time in half by simply skipping all of the content leading up to one of the monumental decisions. If this game is any indication of what it's like to be a woman I will never say anything bad about a woman ever again, even if she shoots me in the stomach and takes my shoes.