Hentai Game Review - Tokyo Tenma

Your blog hits have fallen through the floor.  Quick, give them a review of a mucky game.

Okay okay.  First off, the final part of Monster Girl Quest Chapter 3 has been translated to English.  You can find it here on RogueTranslator’s blog (and the actual game can be bought from here).  If you stumbled here by accident and are new to all this I highly recommend checking out Monster Girl Quest as it’s (still) the high benchmark for this type of game.

And so onto Tokyo Tenma.  I missed this first time around.  I like my monster girls to be bad and in control of the H-scenes and this looked more like a game where the hero shows the girls what for and builds up a harem through repeated use of his big “weapon” (Personally I have no ideological problems with that type of game – they just don’t stimulate my kinks).  Tokyo Tenma is a game where the hero does build up a willing harem of monster girls, but despite not featuring any Game-Over-Rape, the H-scenes are probably closer in tone to games like Monster Girl Quest and Violated Hero.

Fortunately, grabbing it later, after it was recommended on forums of Monster Girl Unlimited, meant I managed to miss all the game-breaking bugs that afflicted the game on release.  Most of that has been ironed out and it’s a pretty good game.

You'd be right to be concerned by those tails...

Plot- and mechanics-wise it’s very similar to the mainstream Shin Megami Tensei series.  A strange blackout hits Tokyo and both demons and angels show up for a ruckus.  You play a dude that posts the highest score in a mysterious game and gets a guardian angel or demon for a bodyguard as a prize (Either a Crow Tengu or Fenrir demon depending on how the player answers five initial questions).  The player can recruit other monster girls to their fighting team.  This is done through answering questions correctly, having the right inventory items to gift to them, or the right monster girl present in your fighting squad when attempting to recruit them.

There is no Game-Over-Rape (it’s not a sex battle game – let the girls beat you up and you get a simple “Game Over” screen to reward your uselessness).  The hentai elements are provided during the contract scenes when you recruit fresh monster girls to your team.  Meet the right conditions and you’re rewarded with two different H-scenes for each girl.  These can be skipped and viewed later (or re-viewed) at “Slave Rose” points on the map.  Oddly, given the method of recruitment and the “Slave Rose” facilities where recruits are “trained”, the H-scenes often have the monster girl in the dominant role (at least the ones I chose to view did).

Now who's the slave here again?

It’s also another hentai game with noble aspirations to be an actual game.  Each of the monster girls unlocks different skills as they level up.  As with most RPGs you’ll want to put together a balanced team (The sprite is quite useful for her healing magic).  At one point I thought the game might be a little too easy as it didn’t seem to matter how under-levelled the other girls on my team were.  Then in the later dungeons I ran into monsters with attacks (confusion, stun, sleep) that took my main (and highest-levelled) character out of combat.  Those fights didn’t go so well . . .

The artwork is fine.  One thing I liked is that the battle sprites aren’t completely static.  The animations are simple sprite transformations, but are very effective at giving the monster girl enemies a little extra – ahem! - jiggle and bounce.  Some girls will hit the spot, some won’t, and it will vary from person to person depending on their kinks.  There’s a good variety to choose from, so there should be something for everyone (although I was a little disappointed the pink slime girl in the tutorial fight doesn’t get a scene).

Sorry slime girl fans, she ain't available.

The game is a hybrid of top-down 2D RPG-maker type wandering about and pseudo-3D Dungeon Master-esque dungeon crawling.  As with most games like this you’ll have to struggle through some garbled machine translations to work out which quests unlock certain areas.  If you get stuck there is a helpful guide thread on the ULMF forums.

Overall the game isn’t up to the same standard as Monster Girl Quest and the artwork doesn’t match the lushness of the Violated Hero series, but if you’ve exhausted those games and want something new it might be worth a look.

And speaking of something new, I hope no one minds if I sneak in a plug for my brand new book, a tasty new collection featuring lots of delectably depraved succubus action.  If you like this type of game, you’ll also enjoy my books.

#52Books - Uh, sometime in 2013

Now that the last minute panic of getting A Succubus for Remembrance is nearly out of the way (there will be a print version - details here as soon as that's out) it's time to catch up on some of the other posts, such as the increasingly erroneously named #52Books.  I'm a little further along than books 21-24, but I'm still going to fall short by some way.  I'll try again next year with the additional resolution of not imploding like the England cricket team in Australia the moment a submission deadline looms.

Here's what I was reading just before that aforementioned implosion:

#21: William Hope Hodgson - The House on the Borderland

Hodgson’s The House on the Borderland is a fairly important weird text as he was one of the first to plough down that particular furrow, and The House on the Borderland is a very weird book indeed.  The majority of the book is the account of the un-named protagonist of the various weird things that happen to him within the eponymous house, which seems to be some kind of dimensional nexus.

Hodgson doesn’t waste any time as within the first few chapters his protagonist is under siege from hideous pig men.  He fights them off and then the book swings off into an audacious flight of cosmic weirdness where the man sees time accelerate all around him, eventually seeing the end of the solar system and travelling through some kind of rebirth that places him right back where he started.  The final segment switches back to more conventional horror as a more hideous entity than the pig men creeps up on both the house and the hapless narrator.

It’s an old book, so it’s not an easy read, especially as Hodgson seems to regard commas as caltrops to be sprinkled liberally through the text.  Despite that I never found it dull and the crazy inventiveness makes it easier to forgive the barely coherent plot.  It reads more like Hodgson is letting his imagination tumble out onto the page rather than cynically exploiting the “Insert Own Plot” con-trick much over-used by modern writers.  It can be picked up for free from the Gutenberg project and is worth a look for fans of old weird fiction.

#22: Brian Lumley - Hero of Dreams

Yay, for nostalgia.  Lumley is probably better known for his Cthulhu Mythos fiction and Necroscope series, but he also found time to pen this fantasy series set in Lovecraft's dreamlands during the eighties.  It's an unashamed fantasy romp and the main characters, David Hero and Eldin the Wanderer, are loveable dolts that would last about two seconds in modern GRRM-influenced fantasy, but who cares, it's fun.

I remember it mainly for the Eidolon Lathi, a sexy (until you find out what she is) monster girl queen that fired the imagination of my teenaged self in ways that were probably not entirely healthy.  If you want insight on where my ideas come from, some of the blame can definitely be left at Lumley's door. :)

#23: Shane McKenzie - Jacked

I really like Shane McKenzie’s novellas.  They move fast, have interesting ideas and don't faff about.  No insert-own-plot or look-at-how-clever-my-writing-is wankery here, just a simple idea executed very well.

Jacked features two employees trapped in a gym after weird green slime starts pouring out of the ground in a river.  Anyone caught in the slime is turned into a squishy, slime-spewing zombie and soon Sid and Gabe are besieged.  Unfortunately for them, also trapped in the gym with them is Crow—a monstrous, crazed steroid junkie—and it’s only a matter of time before being outside starts to look safer than being inside.

Fast and fun.

#24: Edgar Rice Burroughs - The Land That Time Forgot

Time to take another dip into the copyright-expired Gutenberg barrel to dig out another pulp classic.  I’ve always had a soft spot for monster movies and the 1975 Amicus adaptation was a favourite of mine while growing up.  The dinosaurs might look rubbery and immobile by today’s fx standards, but it’s always been a fun adventure romp.

The first half of the book is a masterclass in pulp adventure writing.  There’s the dastardly shelling of an ocean liner, the heroic capture of a German U-boat, betrayals and reversals, until both crews end up having to co-operate after fetching up on the mysterious and dinosaur-infested land of Caprona.  The film version wisely decided to give Von Schoenvorts’ character a little more depth.  In the book the dirty Boche are a fairly one-dimensional bunch of backstabbing assholes (understandable given the book was written in 1918).

Sadly, the protagonist, Bowen Tyler, ends up getting lost and isolated for the second half of the book and the book ends up getting lost with him.  After a wham-bam start the book peters out.

A Succubus for Remembrance is unleashed!

Finally, after a few hiccups, my new collection is out:

Think paranormal erotica is only about sparkly vampires and fluffy werewolves?  Think again!  You’re about to enter the bizarre and twisted universe of M.E. Hydra.  His sexy succubi and other assorted femme fatales will give you a wild ride, but be careful they don’t eat you whole in the process.

This, his fifth collection, contains thirteen tales of the darkest erotica.  A terrifying succubus wreaks vengeance on a group of former soldiers in “A Succubus for Remembrance”.  A man is sent by his therapist to an unusual nudist camp in “Iron Girders and Steel Springs”.  Two lovers look to a magical artefact to solve their problems in “The Skinning Knife”.  A sinister mobster engages sexy diabolic help to demonstrate “Ways to Break a Good Man, #1” (and no.2 and 3).  Bizarre and imaginative sex demons abound in a triptych of tales set in the hell-space universe.  Also includes an extra bonus tale, “Nazi vs. Succubus,” for lovers of extreme, no-holds-barred fiction.

Prepare to be surprised, shocked and aroused by these and other tales of fiendish femme fatales.  They'll give you pleasures beyond your wildest dreams, and terrors beyond your darkest nightmares...

You can pick it up from:

Directly from my publisher, Excessica (variety of formats)

Amazon.com (kindle)

Smashwords (variety of formats)

Barnes & Noble (nook)

and others...

The last tale is a little nasty.  Horror-head got a little carried away and squeezed out a horror-exploitation (I really shouldn't let him watch all those video nasties from the '70s and '80s).  I like to push things as far as I can, but that one might be a little too far for some readers.  The warning is there to steer them away as I don't want it to spoil their enjoyment of the rest of the collection.  (I might be worrying about nothing and it's actually unintentionally hilarious.  It's difficult to tell with these things sometimes.)

I hope you all enjoy it.  If there's any questions or you want to leave feedback, feel free to use the comments below and I'll answer what I can.  And please spread the word - succubi need new willing acolytes! ;)

And now i can finally get back to Phil's adventures...

"A Succubus for Remembrance" Excerpts - A Succubus for Remembrance

And we have a release date!  A Succubus for Remembrance and other tales of Femme Fatales is finished.  I'll be uploading the files tomorrow evening and it should be available from most online bookstores Friday or Saturday.  To whet the appetite here's another excerpt, this time from the title story:

* * * *

Greg Holmes was dreaming.  He knew he was dreaming because he was standing beneath the cliffs overlooking Kabul.

He knew it was a dream because he was on the other side of the world to Kabul and nothing—not wild horses, not masked men with guns, not even a direct plea from Her Majesty herself—would make him return to this wretched patch of rock, sand and sun.  It didn’t matter.  A piece of him would always be left here, frozen in time amongst the heat and dust like fossils in the sand.

He was not alone.

A woman stood at the base of the cliff.  As with most women from this part of the world she was covered from head to toe in a black burqa.  In itself that wasn’t an unusual sight.  What was unusual was the level of ornamentation added to her costume.  Exotic designs and symbols were stitched onto cloth usually as plain and black as midnight.  An exotic golden frill hung from the black scarf wrapped around her forehead.  The niqab covering her face was composed of gold and precious stones.  This was attire to attract rather than deflect attention.

And her eyes.  They simmered with sinful desire.

The sun plunged out of the sky and the cloudless blue of midday turned to the deepest indigo of night in a few blinks of an eye.  Time rushed around him as though he was standing in a time-lapsed film.  The only fixed points were him and the girl.

She turned and headed towards the entrance to one of the caves that carved deep holes into the rocky cliff face.  A warm orange glow emanated from within, promising warmth and shelter from the harsh desert night.  The same fires flickered in her eyes as she reached the entrance and glanced over her shoulder back at Greg.

The meaning was clear.  He followed her into the cave.

He was naked now.  So was the girl.  By the soft light of candles he caught glimpses of dusky skin, long lithe limbs, shapely swells of breasts and ass, and then the shadow-painted cleft of the most intimate part of all.

She beckoned him on with an outstretched arm, an exotic wraith painted in swirls of shadow and candlelight.

He stepped towards her, wanting—no, needing!—to put his arms around her and bear her down to the soft earthen floor of the cave.  Needing to feel her warmth between his legs.  Needing like a parched man needs water in the desert to hear her quiet sighs as they lay entwined together.

She opened her eyes and they flared orange like the fires of burning suns.  Like the balls of fire rising up from a city as airplanes rained destruction down on it.

Greg’s desire burned away to fear.

Something terrible with burning eyes awaited him in the darkness of that cave.

Yet he couldn’t stop.  Trembling legs put one foot in front of the other as he was drawn, inexorably, towards her outstretched arms.  Her eyes expanded.  Twin suns grew from tiny spheres the size of marbles into burning stars that filled his entire world.  They became his world and consumed him.  Beneath their scorching glare his body shrivelled to blackened charcoal and blew away like ashes before a bomb blast.

Greg jerked awake with a start.

The fuck?

Greg was not normally a dreamer and never as vivid as that.  He stumbled out of bed and walked into the bathroom to splash water onto his face.

He’d heard some vets complain of Post-Traumatic Stress, but he’d barely seen any action in Afghanistan.

Barely had still been too much.

Frowning, he looked down.  An erection was tenting the front of his underwear and showed no sign of going down.  He supposed part of the dream had been sexual.  He took care of it with his hand and returned to bed.

* * * *

A Succubus for Remembrance and other tales of Femme Fatales, out this weekend!

"A Succubus for Remembrance" Excerpts - Ways To Break A Good Man, 3

Still buried in the guts of editing and formatting A Succubus for Remembrance.  Watch this space, soon, etc, etc.

In the meantime here's another excerpt from one of the new stories, "Ways To Break A Good Man, 3":

* * * *

DCI Ben Millard noticed the girl with the flame-red hair as he was walking back to the station after lunch.  Or rather, it was her perfume he noticed first—a seductive melange of sensual aromas that surrounded her in a cloud.  The perfume tugged at his nostrils as he walked past, teasing him with fragments of half-remembered erotic exploits.  The scent seemed familiar although he couldn’t place it.  Maybe it was a brand Adrienne used to wear.

Millard pushed thoughts of Adrienne aside.  Not today.

Even though he was single now, Millard didn’t usually look at other women.  Old habits die hard and all that.  This girl was hard to ignore.  She stood beneath a streetlamp about fifty feet from the rear entrance to the station.  Her appearance was as attention-grabbing as her perfume.  Her slim figure was hidden beneath a glossy leather coat that extended down to just above her knees.  A pair of long lithe legs emerged from the hem of the coat and terminated in a stylish pair of black shoes.  Her hands and wrists were covered in a matching pair of black gloves.  Lustrous red hair cascaded down onto her shoulders in waves of shimmering fire.  Millard thought she resembled a starlet from an old ‘70s thriller.  Unusual to see a young woman embrace the old fashions.  Classy.  Most girls today were either aggressively dowdy or ineptly raunchy.

“That’s a bit of alright,” DI Martyn Ward said to him as they passed her and entered the station.

“Bit young for me,” Millard said.

“Never stopped Berlusconi,” Ward said with a wink.

Considering he was a detective chief inspector in one of the largest metropolitan boroughs, Millard’s afternoon was remarkably incident free.  He debriefed the team on the forensics results from the latest murder case.  Case was possibly too strong a word.  One young lad, Joe Turner, had stabbed one of his mates in a petty dispute over a girl.  They had the motive—as feeble as it was—the murder weapon, and both Turner’s fingerprints on the murder weapon and his DNA at the crime scene.  This wasn’t one for the casebook of Sherlock Holmes.

Oh, the young lad would continue to swear black was white even when given irrefutable evidence of his guilt, but it would be enough for a jury.  Millard was sympathetic to the plight of disadvantaged youth, but—god help them—they didn’t half make it harder for themselves.

And that was mostly it for the afternoon.  Millard took advantage of the brief respite to get stuck into his paperwork backlog.  No doubt another alcohol-sodden city-centre weekend would leave him with a full plate of work again when he came back in on Monday.

“Hey boss.”  Ward popped his head around the door as the hands of the clock swept around to five-thirty.  “Looks like we’re all done here.  We’re going to have a poker night over at Chris’s.  You in?”

“Yeah, su—”

Millard pulled a face.  He looked at the phone sitting on his desk.  There was still one item sitting in his in-tray.

“Sorry, Martyn.  Still some work I need to get done.  Maybe next time.”

“Sure, no problem, boss.  Give us a buzz if you change your mind.”

Millard knew Ward was trying to help.  They all were after that . . . business with Adrienne.  The frustrating thing was this time he would have come along . . .

He looked at the phone again.

. . . if there wasn’t something else he had to do.

Millard carried on with his paperwork for another ten minutes or so and then got up to stretch his legs.  He walked over to the window and watched as most of the staff headed out to either their homes or their local watering holes.  He was tempted to say sod it and join them.

He noticed the girl with the flame-red hair was still waiting underneath her streetlamp.  Her arms were folded and she glanced left and right along the road.  She couldn’t be a working girl, could she?  She’d have to be a bit daft to set up a pitch here, not fifty yards from the largest police station in the city.  Poor lass must be waiting for someone.  No doubt they’d be in for an earful when they finally showed up.

* * * *

This one has links with another story in the collection and features a returning character from the last collection (Freedom).

Coming soon (providing I don't collapse from overwork :) ) . . .

"A Succubus for Remembrance" - Cover

And we have a cover . . .

I still don't have an exact release date as I'm in the middle of the annoying fiddly formatting stuff at the moment.  It was supposed to be last Friday but has been revised to: 'as soon as I get the annoying fiddly ebook formatting stuff done and upload it.'  This should take place within the next week.  I'll put a post out as soon as it's up.

"A Succubus for Remembrance" Excerpts - Vernon the Volunteer

I was going to post a new excerpt yesterday but had a horror journey back from holiday that culminated in a car that wouldn't start and a flooded kitchen.  Fun times.

I still don't have a concrete release date as I'm still waiting on a few things like a cover and some final editing tweaks.  Usual #ChaosWriting, in other words.  I'll update here as soon as the new book goes live (hopefully sometime next week).

In the meantime here's an excerpt from the third of the hell-space stories in the collection, "Vernon the Volunteer".  (It's also a little bit more NSFW than the other excerpts).

* * * *

“—give a demonstration of the techniques used by H-space indigenous life forms to overwhelm and subdue opponents.”

Vernon didn’t really hear the doctor.  He was still staring at the girl who’d joined them up on stage with slack-jawed appreciation.  Holy shee-it.  Were all the girls of H-space as hot as this?  She was fucking smoking.  She looked like a lingerie model.  That was all she was wearing as well—lingerie.

Well kind of.

Vernon didn’t know what it was.  Some kind of inky-black substance covered her boobs and pussy like a cloud.  Didn’t bother Vernon that much.  Why be bothered about that when a super-hot babe was standing in front of him.  Vernon certainly wasn’t.  Like he wasn’t bothered by her horns either . . . or those yellow eyes . . .

Vernon frowned.  His brow furrowed.

. . . or her wings . . . or her tail . . . or the way she looked like a . . . devil . . .

Then she smiled at him with a face that looked like it belonged on the cover of a magazine.

No, it was way better than that.  Model types were all haughty, stuck-up bitches.  He could see she wasn’t like that.  She was more like one of those pretty actresses that play the sweet girl next-door, and were just as nice as the characters they portrayed.

Vernon knew a girl just like that back home.  What was her name again . . .

Vampyrotiea’s eyes met his.  Her smile looked innocent and sweet on the surface, but there was a little curl at the corner that promised naughty pleasures once the lights went out and it was just them, alone.

. . . oh, he couldn’t remember.  Didn’t seem important.

“Vampyrotiea is a succubus,” the doctor said to him in a quiet voice.

Vernon’s eyes remained fixed on Vampyrotiea’s.  The doctor’s voice was an irritating mosquito whine in his ear he tried to ignore.

“Sexual intercourse with her will kill you.”

“Uh huh,” Vernon said, not caring what the doctor said.

She was gorgeous.  Amazingly, beautifully, gorgeously hot.  She had the full package—nice rack, peach of an ass, long toned legs.  And she was smiling at him.

Him!

“I’m so sorry, son,” the doctor said before walking away.

“Uh huh,” Vernon nodded again.

His hands were pointing forward from his sides.  He had the strong urge to reach out and grab her round the waist.  No.  Mustn’t scare her off.  He had to be smooth.

“What’s your name?” the girl asked.

She placed a warm hand against his cheek.

“Vernon,” Vernon replied.

His hand itched at his side.  He ached to slide it over the curve of that peachy ass, to feel her smooth skin beneath his fingers.

“I’m Vampyrotiea, Vernon,” Vampyrotiea said.

She caressed his cheek.  The strange inky-black substance covering her breasts flowed up her arm like the tendrils of a plant.  Didn’t seem important.

“I want you to do something for me, Vernon,” Vampyrotiea said.

He picked up a strange scent.  It must be her perfume.  Fancy perfume.  Expensive perfume.  Sexy perfume.

“I want you to pull your pants down.  Can you do that for me, Vernon?” she asked in a voice as smooth as the most expensive silk.

For a babe like her, of course he could.  Vernon undid his pants and dropped them and his underwear to the floor.  His boner popped up like a flagpole.

Vampyrotiea’s eyes lit up.  She murmured sexily and her other hand stroked up and down his shaft.  It was soft and gentle, just like her smile.  Twin tendrils of darkness slithered down her arm and nudged against his exposed boner.  Ticklish.

“I want you to fuck me, Vernon,” Vampyrotiea said.  “Fuck me hard from behind.”

She turned around and bent over a chair with her legs splayed apart.  That peach of a bubble-butt ass was right in his face and waggling invitingly.  The oily black cloud swirling between her legs parted like rainclouds before the sun and for a moment Vernon glimpsed . . .

. . . something like a maw.  A circular maw like the mouth of a lamprey, but with no teeth.  Instead Vernon saw rows and rows of fleshy lips.  It gaped open, deep purple in color and lined with pulsing black veins . . .

. . . the folds of her exposed vagina, moist and dewy-dropped with arousal.  She glanced back at him over her shoulder.  Her luscious lips were bunched up in a sultry pout and need smoldered in her eyes.  She was eager for him.  Desperate for him.

* * * *

I don't think this demonstration is going to end well . . .

Apologies for the continuing vagueness over the release date.  Keep an eye out here and I'll post as soon as the book hits the (virtual) shelves.