In the summer of 2014, I was working on Official Nintendo Magazine. In the fall of 2014, Official Nintendo Magazine was closed down forever, and I was moved to Official Xbox Magazine. I had never owned an Xbox.
NSFW warning: Scantily-clad cartoon women
One of my new responsibilities as rapidly-learning Xbox writer was to review the games on Xbox Live Arcade. This was a service on the Xbox that provided download-only games to players, which meant all the weird shit ended up there. A lot of good stuff, tooâgames like Braid and Castle Crashers originated thereâbut a lot of the games that were risky, strange, or just otherwise unsellable made their way onto the platform through XBLA.
And then there was Xbox Live Indie Games, also known as the charmingly-acronymed XBLIG, which is my second favorite gaming acronym to say out loud, after âCOD: BLOPS.â
If XBLA was the weird but creative younger brother of Xboxâs mainstream store, XBLIG was the cousin who would sit in the corner and eat glue. I was surprised if I ever found a game that warranted more than a three out of five in the magazine. XBLIG games had to be under 500MB, under $5, had to come with an eight-minute demo. This was more than enough time to get the gist of most of the games. It also meant that just about anyone with basic coding skill could get something on the platform. It was the console version of Newgrounds.
Also, there was so. much. smut. OXM was a family magazine, which meant that even though we reviewed Grand Theft Auto V and many other games with swearing and tits, it wasnât exactly top-shelf. Any kid could pick it up. Luckily, my XBLIG reviews were only 50 words long, and no one seemed to mind if I reviewed the smut, as long as I kept it vaguely PG. But I donât have to do that now!
The one XBLIG game I remember most was Island Adventure 4, a game in which I, playing as a first-person faceless man, had to explore a cave to find my way to the secret, hidden bay to find where two giggly, bikini-clad ladies had gone. The title screen promised that this was the âconclusionâ to what I can only assume was Island Adventure 1 through 3, but with the scant eight minutes of play time, I can only assume that the first three games were about a guy who canât fucking navigate caves.
I spent eight minutes, eight grueling minutes, trying to find my way out of the labyrinthian cave network, coming up time and time again at dead ends or places Iâd been before, somehow. It was like a spelunking Groundhog Day, only with infinitely more boredom, because at least Phil Connors got to look at groundhogs and Andie MacDowell instead of a blue, low-resolution cave wall.
There was also this recurring theme with sexy XBLIG games: all the ladies featured (usually in skimpy clothing) were always really, really shiny. I could have seen my face in their dĂ©colletage. Iâm not sure what makes boobs that shiny. Is it really oily skin? Were they just always wet? Was there some kind of secret boob-buffing make-up trend in the mid-2010s that I missed out on? I guess weâll never know.
I looked up Island Adventure 4 while writing this piece. Well, actually, I looked up âsexy XBLIG cave game,â because I didnât remember the name, but it came up anyway. It seems like there was, indeed, more to the game than just helpless cavern wandering, but itâs hard to figure out exactly what the game was about from snippets of people looking for walkthroughs.
âHow do you get the coconut down from the tree,â asks one player, while another says âmonolith and oil. Now what?â Given that Island Adventure 4 begins with two buffed buxom ladies bending over you, proclaiming themselves to be âsexyâ before running off into the jungle, I guess I assumed that the game was about, I donât know, frolicking with the ladies. Maybe âmonolith and oilâ is just code for âpenis and lube.â
âŠI might still be stuck in the cave.
