SimuSex

The Good
In my first year of college I was exploring the wonderful world of public FTP servers when I stumbled across this odd program. It was surprising to find it in a DOS games directory along with other things like Doom, Paganitzu, and ZZT. Our species seems to have a need to extend sexuality to every conquest imaginable, be it film, print, airplanes, or the Internet. Maybe it wasn't that surprising. Naturally I downloaded this, without telling anyone, and brought it home on floppy to investigate.

Despite the obviousness of the name Simusex, I was still half expecting a Civilization type game or a crude Maxis inspired game with some adult themes, not an actual environment to simulate sexual intercourse. The title screen, which was the best part, cleared that up. That's exactly what this is supposed to be. What I discovered wasn't very good, it certainly wasn't sexy, but it was hilarious. That's what is good about Simusex, it is childishly amusing. Something that you'll look at for exactly two minutes, chuckle and then forget. I guess the other good aspect is not having to worry about STD's.

The Bad
Simusex is not a game since there doesn't seem to be any objective. Do the characters on screen climax? Who would stick around long enough to find out? The gameplay mechanics consist of picking one of 10 activities, the screen switching to a marginally appropriate, but static depiction of your "partner", and then using the mouse to do whatever. The mouse cursor will transform into the body part needed for each scenario, and some minimal animation will be the alleged payoff. Even viewed in the context of this program's time frame, there really isn't much to this.

From looking at the screen captures one can see how cartoony the virtual participants are; even the sound effects printed on the screen are cartoonish. Shloop. Slish. Squeek. If the user doesn't have a Sound Blaster this is the default behavior. Even with a Sound Blaster the audio samples used are 8-bit VOC format and poorly recorded.

The Bottom Line
From a college humor point of view Simusex is the sort of thing you'd email to a friend as a joke. This is the software equivalent of those pens that undress the lady when turned upside down.