My College Experience was NOTHING Like This….

If you read yesterday’s post, On Books & Reading, or: Reading Habits, the TBR Stack Got Bigger, and a Quick Life Update, you probably noticed that not only did I mention (and tag) “adults-only games” and “Fresh Women – Season 1” in the categories, but I also included a few “safe for work” (just barely, though) screengrabs from the game FreshWomen – Season 1, a visual novel game that is most decidedly not safe for work (NSFW).

As I mentioned yesterday in that same blog post, I am going through a difficult time in my post-Miami life, a phase that began on a somewhat bright note seven years ago when I became attracted to the woman who I now refer to, with some sarcasm, as the Caregiver but has gradually morphed into my present circumstances.

I don’t want to delve into those “present circumstances” in this post; it’s a too-complicated tale, for one thing, and second, it’s not a pleasant thing to do, dissecting a failed relationship or the reason why I am in Tampa instead of my more familiar area in South Florida. All you need to know is that I’m not exactly at my apogee of contentment and that one of the few activities that help me stave off depression is gaming.

I’ve written about my gaming predilections before; if you’ve read my many reviews and post-game reports on A Certain Point of View, Too, you know that for the most part, I like traditional computer game genres – flight simulators, wargames, space exploration games, and franchise games like Star Wars: X-Wing and Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. (My two favorite games, at least since 2020, are Cold Waters and Regiments, both of which explore different aspects of a Cold War gone hot.)

That having been said….

Maybe it’s because I have been out of a romantic relationship now for over two years, and maybe it’s because I have always been a sex-positive straight male with a healthy libido, but as of late I have purchased three adults-only games from Steam. Since July, I have bought the following “visual novels” from either Dr. PinkCake or Oppai-Man:

• Being a DIK – Seasons 1 & 2
• Acting Lessons
• FreshWomen – Season 1

Now, I’ve always been at least a little curious about computer games in the adults-only genre. I’d be lying – big time – if I claimed otherwise.

As I wrote – back in July – in And Now, Something TOTALLY Different: A Quick First Impressions Look at ‘Being a DIK’:

Back in the 1990s, when I subscribed to Playboy magazine, I read a short article about an adults-only computer game titled Virtual Valerie.

Virtual Valerie was created by a guy named Mike Saenz and released in April of 1990 by a software developer called Reactor, Inc. It was described as a dating sim, and because the object of the game was to help the titular Valerie achieve orgasm, it was one of the more notorious cyber erotica games of the time,

Back then, of course, the Internet was still in its initial stages and Amazon and Steam were only in the imagination of their respective founders. And because none of the stores where I used to buy computer games seemed to carry Virtual Valerie, I never played it, much less held the CD-ROM package in my hands.

I mention Virtual Valerie because I had always wanted to play a computer game that featured erotic content that was both graphic and yet had a story with relatable – or at least believable – characters, familiar situations, and nice renderings of attractive characters having various kinds of sexual adventures.

Of course, this was in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and back then games were sold as physical media and not as digital downloads, so acquiring X-rated games was a difficult task. I did, eventually, get the Jenny McCarthy Playmate CD-ROM (which was not a game but a digitized Playboy video gatefold), but as far as gaming was concerned, I would not lose my cherry till I got Being a DIK.

Because that game has “puzzles” and free-roaming “quests,” I have not played Being a DIK for a while. The visuals by Dr. PinkCake and his team of programmers and visual artists are great, but I’m stuck on a chapter and can’t move forward until I figure out how to get all the objects in the “free-roam” at the fraternity house.

I did, thankfully, do a complete playthrough of Acting Lessons, which is also by Dr. PinkCake and exists in the same universe as Being a DIK, but omits the quests and sticks to the choice-driven visual novel format.

I have been playing Regiments a lot – too much, it seems at times – and I do get horny (disabled folks have sex drives and desires, too, so don’t get judgmental with me), especially now that I’m single again. However, I had no interest in doing another playthrough of Acting Lessons even though the plot does take different twists if you make different choices when you start a new game. And that “free-roam” quest thing in Being a DIK bugs me, so I decided to see if there were any other sexy visual novels I could buy without spending too much money.

And, obviously, since I’m writing about FreshWomen – Season 1, I found one of those on Sunday night.

As I wrote in a rare blog post on the original Blogger version of A Certain Point of View:

On August 19, 2022 – around the same time that MicroProse released Regiments – Steam “dropped” FreshWomen – Season 1, an adults-only “visual novel” created by an independent game designer, Oppai-Man.

Like Dr. PinkCake’s Being a DIK and Acting Lessons, FreshWomen is a game in which you play a college freshman who has just arrived at the fictional Minerva Bay College in, I assume, a city called Minerva Bay. And as in those other racy games by Dr. PinkCake, your mission is two-fold; solve a mystery about your recent past and have lots of sex with almost every female character – from the sexy blonde in a nearby apartment to the cute gamer you meet in an arcade in the mall where you have just gotten your first job.

Here’s the game’s description on FreshWomen – Season 1’s Steam product page:

FreshWomen is a choice-driven adult Visual Novel focusing on the best parts of life. Become a freshman attending Minerva Bay College, romance girls and solve a mysterious incident. Your journey will be filled with comedy, drama, and lots of sex.

First Impressions

Since I’ve already written one blog post on Blogger and have not eaten much since this morning, I don’t have the energy or inclination to write a detailed critique of FreshWomen – Season 1.  The art style and tone are like those in Being a DIK, as is the college setting. There is, as the developer’s Steam blurb claims, “comedy, drama, and lots of sex,” as well as tropes from both college-set dramas and comedies and adult films.

As I wrote earlier today in A Certain Point of View:

Since FreshWomen is a fantasy and not a documentary on modern college mating rituals, getting your character laid (and with spectacularly beautiful women) is ridiculously easy. I mean, when was the last time you lived in an apartment building with a stunningly beautiful neighbor who wanted you to see her naked through a half-open apartment door? Or a sexy landlady who was willing to go down on you after you fixed a sink that her out-of-town husband had never gotten around to repairing despite promising to do so?

Clearly, FreshWomen is not for everyone, nor does it have any loftier goals than making lots of money from eager, horny, and primarily male gamers by presenting impossibly beautiful women and good-looking men (even the villain in the story is handsome) in a game designed primarily for the male gaze.

Side Note to Game Designers

It would be cool, and I mean really cool, if Dr. PinkCake, Oppai-Man, or any of the developers who create adults-only games consider the female consumers who might be interested in adults-only games but find that most, including Acting Lessons and FreshWomen, only have male point-of-view characters and are designed for mostly male players.

I’m not saying that there’s nothing in FreshWomen that a woman who is shopping for a “sexy” game would like. On the contrary, many women who are not LGBQTI watch porn and can appreciate another woman’s beauty for aesthetics, and there are plenty of gorgeous ladies for both sexes to admire.

However, I think that playing a game as a male character is not a turn-on for many women who would otherwise not mind playing a game in this genre. And if developers can create sexy games for male audiences, they should also do the same for women who are adventurous enough to play games like FreshWomen but would like a more feminine sensibility to them.

I’m a guy, so obviously I like this (and the other two adults-only games I own).

But a woman who might want to try playing a game with lots of sexual content might not, because the protagonist is male, and while some women don’t care about that, there are those who do.

Food for thought there.

It’s still early afternoon here in Lithia, Florida, but I need to take my shower and get into clean clothes, so I’ll just wrap up this post here. Until next time, Dear Reader, stay safe, stay healthy, and I’ll catch you on the sunny side of things.