Viper V-16 (PC) review "Rise follows three young girls, and whether you turn right or left at each of the two junctions determines who (if anyone) gets kidnapped and raped. Squeezed in and around your three in-game choices are some lurid story scenes. My favorite scene is when the two brainwashed women seduce the third girl — every hentai game needs some hot lesbian action!"

Viper V-16 contains two hentai games. Neither one is good. Rise, a game that revels in debauchery, is the cover piece.

THE BEGINNING
Watch the introduction. Choose to "escape" (lose instantly) or "think about the situation". Go left or right at the first T-junction. Go left or right at the second T-junction. Fight the final boss.
THE END

Yes, this is the shortest CD-based game ever created. Even Slime World on the X68000, which was designed by bored Japanese students, beats this for depth. Rise follows three young girls, and whether you turn right or left at each of the two junctions determines who (if anyone) gets kidnapped and raped.

Squeezed in and around your three in-game choices are some lurid story scenes. My favorite scene is when the two brainwashed women seduce the third girl -- every hentai game needs some hot lesbian action! The Japanese voices are actually pretty well-done. The music's pretty good, too. The translation is absurd.

"Around the white man there are some wird kind of creatures,which remind of some characters from a special tv program. There are no doubts: they are not normal customers who came to eat."

That's pretty funny, and it might even be intentional. Unfortunately, most lines barely make any sense.

WHITE MAN: "We appoint you as maternal womb of our human kind of underground men"

It's cool how he talks about preserving humanity while flanked by giant insects.

The premise is silly, but then I didn't expect anything else. Martial arts expert AKIRA (red-headed tough girl broken spirit fetish) is working part-time at a restaurant with her friends SAKI (short blue hair older woman fetish) and KARIN (blonde bespectacled purity fetish). One day, the aforementioned not-normal customers show up and carry all three girls away to serve as maternal wombs to preserve the dying underground race of humans that look like insects. I don't know why the underground men waste their time on anal rapes and gushy blowjobs if they're so concerned about procreation, but every plot has a small hole or two.

SAKI: "they thought to preserve their semen using women from human being as maternal womb, because we are genetically similar to them.. isn't it a logical thinking?"

KARIN: "Why did they choose us?"

SAKI: "Probably because we were the only ones aroudn here"

KARIN: "Really, for such a reason?"

SAKI: "Do you think there has to be a reason to hunt, for some mother fuckers?"

Just when you're getting used to some faux-philosophical discussion, Saki drops the F-bomb. I like how she starts out by explaining the reason for the villains' actions, then ends by saying they don't need a reason. This is the same character who later forgives the "mother fuckers" once they actually make a mother of her. The other two girls then wish Saki and her new underground husband a long and happy life together.

In the end, the moral message of Rise is that it's okay to rape girls as long as you have a good reason. That's not what I'm looking for in my videogames.

. . . . . . . . . .

Imagine, the other game included as part of Viper V-16, is long enough that it almost feels like a complete game. It's also pretty bad, although not quite as morally reprehensible as Rise.

Playing out like a standard dating sim, Imagine starts out in your bedroom (without any kind of introduction sequence) and actually gives you choices. Like looking around, thinking, or moving. After Rise, that's an astounding amount of gameplay!

If you stop and think a few times, you'll find out that the protagonist is attending college for Computer Science. He doesn't attend very many classes and he doesn't work much, but he complains about his lack of free time and not being able to meet people. Basically he wants to hook up with a nice showbiz girl now so that he can mooch later on in life. And brag about banging her.

Of course, this is all just a pretext for screwing the blonde-haired sporty chick (who turns out to be a virgin), the short-haired brunette chick (who is also a virgin), or the blue-haired classmate (who is NOT a virgin). Only the last of these -- her name's Haruka -- is even worth discussing.

When you first meet Haruka, you're provided two options:
1) Look at Haruka
2) Talk to HAruka

Yes. It's spelled like THat.

If you look at Haruka, your hero thinks to himself:
"Ah, Haruka is here. I wonder what he's doing in this place."

I could have sworn Haruka was a girl.

Talk to Haruka and she leaves, saying she doesn't "want to disturb". You think to yourself, "what disturb... I want her to stay more... I should have told her straight away".

Welcome to a world without punctuation or capitalization, where the hero can't even articulate his own thoughts clearly.

From this conversation, the hero irrationally concludes that Haruka is hot for him. But then the hero has an atypically rational thought: "maybe I'm just getting high in my head?" Then the school bells ring and he exclaims, "ohp, it's time for the lesson..."

Ohp indeed!

After some more scenes of talking about really boring things like lunch, Haruka randomly stops by your dorm room and you have passionate sex. That's when you make the horrific discovery... she's not a virgin!

"instead of being happy that I fucked her, I was worried about it..."

The hero calmly explains to his chick-friend that Haruka having been screwed by another dude makes his "hurt burn". So of course, his chick-friend asks the logical question: if Haruka had been a virgin, would he have stuck with her forever and ever? And the hero stammers, "eh? n...no..."

Brilliant.

A lot of hentai games try to include some kind of moral or philosophical message to justify the game's existence (as though being porn isn't justification enough). Imagine begins with the back-of-box question: "Can you manage to make one of the girls you meet fall in love with you?" Imagine ends with gooey sex. That should tell you everything you need to know about the game's message.

//Zig

Staff review by Zigfried (May 30, 2005) Zigfried likes writing about whales and angry seamen, and often does so at the local pub.