+ The Life and Death(ish) of Hentai Games +
+27/02/2025
++ Master List of Games +
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++ Once upon a time, I was a horny teenage boy. Now, I'm a horny + adult woman. +
++ I also (as is probably obvious from a bunch o0f other pages on + this blog) grew up in the golden age of the internet, when the + whole thing was new and exciting. A decentralised wonderland, + where you could find anything and everything. +
++ Which, obviously, meant there was a lot of porn on it. + The internet today is safe and sanitary, which. Like. OK. Yes, + it's safer for kids. But now that spaces are for + everyone, including kids, those rough edges are gone. + You're extremely unlikely to stumble upon someone writing about + the hentai comics of Sonic the Hedgehog + unless you're specifically looking for it. Adult only spaces + have been stripped away, smoothed off and siloed into very + specific places. Pornhub, Xtube... I know these names better + than I know my own grandmother's. +
++ Back in the day though, porn was everywhere. As detailed + previously, my first experience of pornography was on Sonic + Cult, but shortly after that, I discovered hentai flash games. + By accident, in fact. +
++ Flash games evoke nostalgia in basically everyone who grew up in + the 00s. For many it was Newgrounds or CoolMathGames, but for + me, it was funnyjunk. Funnyjunk was a content aggregator - it's + where I first saw a bunch of weebl's stuff cartoons, blode, + strongbad. It also linked out to a few other flash collection + websites, one was a site that collected hundreds of flash games. + Sadly, the name escapes me now. +
++ I played a lot of (relatively) tame stuff on that site! It was + all nicked from newgrounds or armorgames or whatever, but I had + a lot of fun hitting 'random' and finding Interactive Buddy, + Bowman 2, that penguin clubbing game, you know. But also plenty + of rougher stuff! +
++ Anyway, one day I hit random and came across a game called + Frank's Adventure - a top down lite RPG. I gave it a go, as I + always did, without really reading the instructions. +
++ Played through, ran around the world, played the skiing minigame + that Tye from Digimon offered you. After a bit of effort, I beat + the game, and got presented with this screen: +
+ +
+
+ + THAT'S A FUCKIN TITY. TITY? IN VIDEO GAME? I'M THIRTEEN YEARS + OLD THAT'S TWO OF MY FAVOURITE THINGS IN ONE! +
++ Now look. I'm not gonna pretend the art in this game is the best + hentai in the world. This is another of the 'pics' you get, and + other than looking a bit like Aerith it's pretty poor. Look at + the rendering on that pussy. Poor show. +
+ +
+
+ + But this experience flipped a switch in my brain. The idea of + being able to play video games and get rewarded for succeeding + with a titty was insanely enticing for me, a cumbrained idiot. + So I spent an insane amount of time searching out 'free + online sex games.' +
++ And with the aforementioned era of the internet, there was + absolutely no shortage of them! Which was great for me as + a horny teenager. But, sadly, this entire genre is disappearing, + at least in any kind of properly creative sense. +
++ Plenty of porn games still exist, but by and large they have a + decidedly different oeuvre than their heyday of the early + internet. They're on steam and itch now, which is cool, but if I + bring up the top selling adult games, well, the list looks like + this: +
+ +
+
+ + There's only one way to describe this: extremely fuckin' hetty. + Apart from that top result, which is some kind of FNAF porn + parody thing. Aside: furries fucking rule and they deserve the + world. +
++ And look. Politically, yes, hentai games of old are pretty het + too. Being 'rewarded' with sex for basic video game chores is + terribly objectifying. But the modern hardware and lack of + limitations on what people are able to make means the games + feel more het, more cookie cutter. Not to 'back in my + day,' but like everything else made in flash, hentai games had + real personality. You could track a creator's works and lineage + - Z0ne is probably the most well-known example of this, but + they're far from the only one. Mittsies is out there making + full-ass video games like Helltaker and Awaria now, which are + excellent, and they got their start making MLP porn games, many + of which had some pretty extreme kinks in them. Game recognise + game, Mittsie. +
++ So why am I writing this? Well, in short, I want to chronicle + some of these games. Revisit some favourites, if you will. Maybe + even do some analysis! Why do they work, why do they titillate? + What is it about porn games that buzzes a certain subsection of + brains just right? We may even find out something about + ourselves along the way. +
++ This will be an ongoing project, with this post being the + kickoff. I will be updating irregularly. I don't promise to + complete every game (some are huge undertakings!) but I will + play for at least half an hour or so to get some reasonable + impressions of each game. +
++ Cool. OK, some housekeeping. First of all, cards on the + table, I've dabbled in this field before. Long ago I made a game + called + Ace Attorney: The Dark Age of Love + for a porn game jam run by other noted lover of porn games, + eevee. (She's making her own game, + fox flux, + which is porny if you're weird with it! For any hets reading + this don't worry about it). It actually ended up getting + featured on + Kotaku UK, then later, the mothership itself. + It's not good, by any stretch, but I did make it to impress my + now-wife, so it did what it needed to do, and it has over 14,000 + downloads on Itch.io. It's probably the most statistically + significant thing I will ever do as a creative, which is weird + to think about. But the point is, I contributed to the scene as + well as consumed, and I feel pretty cool about that, honestly. +
++ Secondly: how do we play these games nowadays? Flash is + long-dead, after all. Well. That, my friend, is where + Flashpoint comes + in. Essentially Archive.Org for flash games, applets, headers + and so much more, it is an astonishing project that really + doesn't get the recognition it deserves. Flashpoint provides a + launcher, a packaged version of flash player that works on + modern hardware, ruffle (a flash emulator) for the games that + support it, and an exhaustive list of almost every flash Thing + you could possibly imagine, all in one convenient package. 18+ + flashes are excluded from the search by default, so we'll be + toggling them on in the config if you want to play along at + home. +
++ Thirdly: These games are all products of their time, and + may contain content that some may not prefer to see. I will be + operating to some extent under a [Creator Chose Not To Use + Archive Warnings] structure, where most things will not be + content-warned. I will, however, make exceptions for things we + may stumble across that include racism, homophobia, or other + things that fall under the category of hate speech. I do not + expect to see much of this, but there will likely be racist + caricatures from time to time. Additionally, any particularly + extreme kinks will be warned for; e.g. incest, lolisho, scat, + etc. Any screenshots containing warned kinks will not be shown + in-line and will only be text-linked. Everything else is fair + game and will be shown in-line, so don't read these entries at + work! +
++ Finally, this is a bit out of the realm of probably + expected posts for this blog, so entries in this diversion will + not be listed on the main RSS feed. I will be maintaining a + separate one (linked at the top) that you can subscribe to if + you want to know when I make a new post in this series. +
++ Cool, with all that said, expect the first post sometime this + week! I dunno what it'll be on. Maybe I'll let Flashpoint RNG + us. See you then! +
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