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8-bit Girlfriend review

Game: 8-bit Girlfriend
Platform: Xbox 360
Genre: Dating Simulation
Developer: Jaded Horizon

Staff review by Gary Hartley

June 29, 2010

I’m a big fan of the Indie scene on the 360, and happily drop more money on it than I do on the ‘professional’ contributions over on the Arcade side of downloadable content. For very little cash, I’m able to tap into a well of creativity that would otherwise lay dormant and reap my financially acceptable rewards. For the sultry sum of 80mps (about $1) I’ve stolen games like Lights End, Z0MBIES and Breath of Death VII, all titles that made countless people sit up and take notice of a service Microsoft once seemed oddly determined to keep hidden in the bottom drawer.

Maybe those games have spoiled me. Maybe now I expect a bigger bang for my 80mps than I should reasonably expect. I pondered this deeply while I played the opening minutes of 8-bit Girlfriend. Several seconds later, when I had finished my cerebral workout and decided to give an initially engaging game a fair roll of the dice, I had already seen everything it had to offer.

8-bit Girlfriend wants you to think it’s more than it is. Listen to it promise to give you “what you secretly wanted to do back in Dragon Warrior“. Forget all that “But thou must love me!” shenanigans -- apparently what that now infamous scene really needed was playground innuendo with the subtlety of a half brick and a silent prayer that Ted “Saving The Minds Of Our Kids” Woosely was looking the other way for a second. Cunningly, the game doesn’t outright tell you what it is, but it hints at a deeper meaning. It promises parody but delivers overly-simplistic features designed to further a wad of jokes carefully removed from the James Bond pun-writer’s wastepaper basket.

What you get is the chance to woo one of four girls. How you achieve this is by suffering through a basic question-and-answer scenario where the girl of your choice asks you a question. Answer it right, get another question. Answer it wrong, then it’s game over, and you have to start again from the beginning of the dialogue branch. The answers are sometimes humorous, sometimes groan-worthy but each girl can be wooed in about a minute with a bit of common sense and a lot of trial and error. As such, the big claim on retro parody isn’t actually present: the retro claim is more a transparent bait to seize upon nostalgia and excuse the MS Paint graphics.

You’ll probably get a laugh or two out of 8-bit Girlfriend (especially if you try and woo the lesbian thief with a constant cascade of serial lies and futile bouts of surrealism) but then, the game’s over and you’ve no reason to revisit. It’s geeky-cool that the boozy item shop girl has set her difficulty to super-easy and that answering correctly to the princess’ question about the colour of her panties leads her to label you as a perverse peeper, but there’s nothing beyond that. 8-bit Girlfriend is a paper thin joke that doesn’t even stay around long enough to wear out its welcome.

More Reviews by Gary Hartley
	Hudson Hawk (NES) Lame Duck.
	Labyrinth X (Xbox 360) Trial and error so tedious, it even takes the gleam off barely-covered anime tits.
	Spec Ops: The Line (PlayStation 3) Come suffer alongside me. You'll thank me for it.

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