What struck me as my character ran around the streets of BoneTown starting fist-fights with hippies while wearing no pants and sporting a superhuman erection is that the PC is the only place a game like BoneTown can exist. Say what you will about the quality of the game—and I'm about to say plenty on that topic—there is no other gaming system on the planet that allows you to buy and play an interactive smut playground.
Not to be confused with Out From Boneville , the E-rated premiere episode of Telltale's first episodic game series Bone, BoneTown is a raunchy, ridiculous and pornographic game that attempts to marry Grand Theft Auto's open world to a little Leisure Suit Larry humor and a lot of hard-core sex. The most I can say for the resulting game is that it'd make a pretty good gag gift at a gamer's bachelor party.
Nobody should buy it on its merits as a game; it's obviously a low-budget production, with poor animation, clumsy art and not much by the way of mechanics...though to its credit I've heard far worse voice work in more “respectable” games.
The quests I've played so far—that's admittedly not too many, due to lack of fun—have all been about punching people with the rudimentary and frustrating combat system, usually while on drugs of some sort. Then, as a reward, you're treated to a simple but graphic hard-core sex minigame that amounts to adjusting your thrusting “speed” and “power” meters to your partner's liking to get her off before your stamina expires. Of course, you have to work your way up to your shot at the top-heavy anatomically correct Barbie dolls by first getting it on with BoneTown's morbidly obese and crack whore populations. Completing the first quest of recovering a hooker's crack rock “rewards” you with a “gummer.” Until now I'd never known the meaning of that term, and now having learned it, I strongly advise against Googling it. Suffice it to say, it's not much of an incentive to play the next mission.
Perhaps the funniest part of the game is unintentional. There's a Fantasy mode that dispenses with the crack whore quests and lets your buffed-up avatar run around a mansion filled with sexy ladies who will do whatever you want, regardless of your qualifications. However, try as you might, you can never satisfy them—by design or by flaw, the sex minigame never kicked in for me, so there was no way to “win.” When you eventually run out of stamina, your partner inevitably verbally berates you for your lack of skills in the sack. Whose “fantasy” is that, exactly?
Overall, I'd say the most shocking thing about it is that it suffers from a surprising design oversight: the controls require two hands to operate.
So the game wasn't exactly Half-Life 2, but at least we acknowledge its right to exist. Consoles, by contrast, are tightly controlled platforms—in order to make a game for an Xbox, PlayStation or Nintendo system, you've got to get the blessing of the platform owner (Microsoft, Sony or Nintendo). While those companies are more than happy to grant licenses to games constantly trying to one-up each other in horrific gore or featuring innocent people being mowed down in an airline terminal, they draw the line at games that portray the very activity that created (almost) every person on the planet taking place between two (or more) consenting adults. Yes, there have been pornographic console games in the past, but they're increasingly rare. On the PC, meanwhile, you don't have to ask anybody's permission. If you want to make a sex game, you go right on ahead and make your sex game, you crazy bastard.
