Well it looks like Playboy: The Mansion won’t be under the tree this year! Citing quality issues, developer Groove Games has pushed the game into early next year. Now why is this here? Why do I care? Well actually, I don’t care about the game itself at all and had no plans to promote or buy it. What I have is the morbid curiousity of one passing a traffic accident in the all too common gaper’s delays we have here in Chicagoland. When hyped up games miss the crucial Christmas shopping season, the best time of the year to release any game, it usually means something catastrophic has happened.
So this leads to the question of, just how badly does Playboy: The Mansion suck at this point? There’s been a bit of a flurry of titillation games released lately. There’s the Guy Game, a new Leisure Suit Larry game, and you even throw in the Sims 2 for that matter. With the exception of the Sims 2, I wouldn’t expect very much since the main selling point of these games is boobs, boobs, boobs! So why the delay? screenshots of the game look pretty good, so it must be play mechanics, or maybe the bounces are not just right. Or maybe the thing just isn’t any fun… Polygonal vixens alone do not a good game make! This reminds me a bit of Showgirls, a movie so bad that even the gratuitous nudity could not make it interesting! Could it just be the curse of the licensed game? Games based on movie and tv licenses are notorious for sucking big time, cough! Matrix! Cough! This usually happens because the game is rushed out with the idea of making a quick buck off of naive fans of the property the game is based on.
Well, perhaps Playboy fans should rejoice. If promises of quality are delivered on, they may just get a good game afterall.