Overview: Was there a time I would've happily purchased and played 'The Guy Game'?

The Guy Game Platform(s): Playstation 2*, Xbox Company: TOPHEAVY Studios Type/Genre: Game Show Rating: M (17+, for nudity, language, crudity, drinking and sexual content) *-Reviewed • Official Site (Adult Content) • Arcade360 Index

I can imagine five or six guys in our college apartment, gathered around the game console laughing uproariously (perhaps a tad too uproariously) at each question and answer. Gradually, one after another of us grows bored and moves on to other things ... until coming down the next morning, they discover a subset of the group -- just one or two -- which has stayed up all night to finish the game.

Twice.

I'll leave it to you to decide if I'm the type that was discovered or the type that did the discovering, but at this point it really doesn't matter. Now officially out of advertisers' favorite demographic, I'm clearly not the person to whom this game was marketed.

So does a married father staring at the wrong side of 35 have any business reviewing 'The Guy Game'? Probably not.

That said, I still consider myself sophomoric enough to enjoy this sort of thing. I don't own a copy of any 'Girls Gone Wild' DVD, but I have paused on the 'GGW' infomercial while channel surfing late at night.

So I consider myself qualified to say 'The Guy Game' -- produced by Austin's TOPHEAVY Studios -- really stinks.

Modes: One to four players. You can also play any of the "ball-oriented" mini-games without playing the main game.

Game Play: Effectively, it's a dirty game show, filmed at Texas' own South Padre Island during a recent Spring Break.

A series of coeds (anywhere from three to four per "episode") are pulled up in front of inebriated crowds and asked trivia questions. If they get the question wrong, they have to expose themselves to the cameras and crowd. Your job is two-fold: Answer the question correctly yourself (earning "dollars" for some reason or another) and guessing whether the co-ed will answer correctly or not herself. In a later round, you're assured the woman got the answer wrong and you have to correctly guess which incorrect answer she gave ... choosing between two.

At the start of the game, the womens' naughty bits are obscured by the game's logo, and later by some pixelation effect. However, if you predict the answers often enough (getting the answer right yourself means relatively little), the game removes all barriers and you can see them nekkid. (The game then gleefully trumpets and stretches out every breast-baring in multi-angle slow-mo reminiscent of a severe knee injury replay during a broadcast of 'Monday Night Football.')

If you don't answer enough questions right, you're forced to replay that episode, with the women answering the exact same questions the exact same way. (You are, I should note, given the option of answering other really easy trivia questions yourself ... so you can really rack up the "dollars." But why bother?)

Since you can't advance the game until you clear all the episodes in a given level ... well, we're talking about a lot of time spent watching the same videos of the same women. Cute for a while ... then death by boredom.

Oh, I almost forgot. To make answering the questions even less important, at the end of every successfully-completed round, they make the three women from that episode perform a stunt -- jumping rope, hula-hooping, sack race, that sorta thing -- and you bet some of your "winnings" on which woman will perform the stunt best.

And they're topless, of course. Finish in the money, and you get a video of one of the game's stock models doing a sexy dance. Lose all your money betting wrong, and you see a fat guy doing the same dance.

Team play is a little more involved ... it still doesn't matter much if you answer the main questions correctly (it does determine who's "President" of the game, who can set new, arbitrary, drinking-game-style "rules" ... so I guess that's something) ... but when it comes time to guess what the girls say, it's all "team play," frustrating things further.

Technical Presentation: Load times are reasonable, I suppose. When mired in replay, you can advance past some of the question-asking scenes by mashing buttons -- but the answer "reveal" scenes (no pun intended) are mandatory. When you're trying to race through an episode as quickly as possible, that can be frustrating -- especially when the women are still blurred or obscured.

By the way, the game is "narrated" by a pair of guys pretending to be sports announcers. This isn't funny to start, and within about 20 minutes, it'll have you taking the pets hostage. ("Just make it stop!")

Ease of Use: A mildly-trained monkey could figure out how to make this game work. He'd have about as good a chance at guessing the womens' answers, as well.

Nice Surprise: Nothing immediately comes to mind. Well, some of the "ballz" games -- largely dressed-up versions of skeeball and the like -- are playable, in a "can you play it on your cellphone while you're waiting for movie to start?" kinda way. (Sadly, you can't.)

Enraging Quirk: Again, you get no credit, really, for answering the questions right. The entire game turns on whether you can predict the responses these women give.

That'd be fine, but at times the host (Austinite Matt Sadler) makes leading comments to the women after you've already guessed which answer they'll give. An example: With one co-ed trying to guess what business this particular man was boss of, Sadler abruptly advises her "He's British." Now, had he made that comment before I was obliged to guess her answer, I'd have selected the option that she'd say he was the "chairman of the BBC," which before his comment seemed like the less-likely answer.

When he's not getting in the way, the crowd will shout things to mess things up, further.

At other times, the game's just blatantly unfair. Asked to provide the name of the city that buys the most blonde hair dye (the answer's Dallas, by the way), I had to choose whether the duo answering would say "New York" or "Los Angeles." I guessed they'd say "New York." The first woman said "New York," the second said "Los Angeles," Sadler says they're both wrong ... but then I don't get credit for the prediction, even though one of them plainly said "New York."

Since that doomed me to a replay of that level ... 20 minutes of boredom ... I didn't take it too well.

Tip: Just get the 'Girls Gone Wild' DVD, if you must.

Bottom Line: The only people this game will truly appeal to are high school boys who trick their moms into thinking this is some sort of beach volleyball game so she'll buy it for them.

It's not that there's no market for risque video games -- 'Outlaw Golf' and 'Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball' prove that there is -- but they've got to at least be a little entertaining to make it worth your while.