Nerding Day: Playboy The Mansion (Patreon)

What do you imagine when you think about the Playboy Mansion? Oh, there were definitely quirky sexy parties that happened from 1953 - 1988 and then the deeply sad non-sexy parties that happened from 1989 until the rest of eternity. I’m just saying, maybe revolving your entire brand around an aging nerd in pajamas wasn’t the best strategy for continuing success after he passed on to take his seat at the right hand of the Father. Still, when you hear the words Playboy Mansion, you think money. You think babes. You think it must smell so bad in there that it’s almost crazy, and their Febreze budget has to be through the roof.

So if you were going to make a video game based on Playboy, what would you focus on? The hot models? You know it! Throwing big parties with celebrities? Hell yeah! Making money with topless photoshoots and famous writers doing interviews? That’s just the business life! Imagine a video game where all the attractive women kiss up to you and the men do all the dirty work as you just let the money roll in. And now imagine that it looks, sounds, and plays like a glacially slow version of The Sims to the extent that owning a pornography empire is somehow one of the most boring things you can do. They managed to combine my two favorite things: interactive electronic entertainment and dem titties, yet inexplicably turned both into the opposite of fun.

Welcome to Playboy: The Mansion for the PlayStation 2, a game in which you run the - sit down because this one’s a twist - Playboy Mansion. Also, I know my brain has been broken because I keep trying to write it as “PlayBoy” as if it’s a video game system. I dunno, man. Playboy. PlayStation. PlayBoy. It makes less sense in the standard way! Fuck. Why doesn’t anyone care about this shit except for me? Why am I the only one standing up for things that matter in society? It’s like everyone is a fucking zombie, man. I’m tired of everyone being so phony and full of their own bullshit. You’re all a bunch of posers. Get the fuck out of my column! Get the fuck out! Get the fuck out now!

Right from the start, you can tell Playboy: The Mansion is going to be the height of class because the opening movie is just a series of photographs of sexy women and a young Hugh Hefner with a rock song so bad that it would literally cause you to get worse at boxing if it played during a training montage. This opening movie isn’t the most offensive part of the game - that would be the game itself - but it is a funny look into a brand that’s very excited to show you how good things were at one point in the distant past.

Let me back up a bit to give the game some context. This might come as a surprise to you if you were born after 9/11 (a blessing since you’re never required to always remember to never forget), but it used to be much harder to see a naked person. Especially a naked lady! Naked guys you’d run into all the time. The locker room at the public pool. The locker room at the gym. Inside my neighbor’s house when I was six. We’re not exploring that last one, but we are moving right along! Don’t worry, that guy’s dead now. The point is, back in the day, it was nearly impossible to see a naked woman on purpose. It was so rare that there was an entire genre of comedy in which a character sees a little bit of ankle and their eyes pop out as their head turns into an old-timey train whistle.

But now? Hoo boy! I see naked men and women whenever I want! And sometimes when I don’t want it either! Somehow I’ll be looking up the lore behind an obscure Elder Scrolls character on a random wiki and get eight pop-ups with ladies younger than the PlayStation 3 showing their butts and their boobs while I’m just trying to learn more about Indoril Nerevar. Put those butts and boobs away! This is a time for learnin’, not a time for yearnin’! Although maybe in my short time left on Earth, I’d do better to focus on butts and boobs rather than a fictional universe made by a faceless conglomerate terrified of ever touching that fictional universe again. I’m easily past the halfway point in my life, which is actually a blessing. Something that helps me fall asleep at night with peace in my heart is imagining how much better this website will be when I’m dead.

Either way, thank God the Playboy game came out in 2005 immediately after everyone learned how to see naked people online for free and it no longer took six hours to download a nude drawing of Lola Bunny kissing a basketball. By the way, I strongly deny the claim by the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association that me being completely unfuckable is my fault and therefore not eligible for treatment under my insurance plan.

So when this game came out, the idea of Playboy being the sexiest thing possible was far in the rearview mirror. We were already long past the point of serious interviews with important people like Martin Luther King Jr., which was a real thing the magazine did and a super awkward way to bring your history class to a screeching halt. In fact, the only memory I have as a kid of seeing a real Playboy issue was when I was 13 and babysitting my cousins. While showing me where all the cleaning supplies and bandaids were, my uncle opened a closet door and revealed - I swear to God - a five foot stack of Playboy issues going back decades. He told me, “You can look at these, but don’t show them to my kids.” I said, “That’s okay. I’m just gonna babysit.”

But Playboy still has some cultural cache and I’ve spent enough time not talking about the game in detail. And that’s only because the game is really boring in detail. I spent hours playing this game and maybe five minutes having fun. Four of those minutes were putting out the first Playboy magazine issue, which is a fun little bit of dopamine that fades fast. It’s satisfying the first time you hit a button and then another screen tells you that you just earned a bunch of fake money. The rest of the time you do it you’ll hate being alive because you have to wrangle talent, but I’ll get into that in a second. Oh, and the other minute I enjoyed was quitting the game after getting enough material to write this article.

I mentioned The Sims before, and Playboy: The Mansion desperately wants to be The Sims. It wants to be like that game far more than it wants to be sexy, which is the only thing I share in common with it. Nearly every aspect of the game plays like a slowed down, worse version of Maxis’ final baby, from the emotion-based conversation trees to the decorating to the pointlessness of existence being revealed as you buy furniture and don’t feel any happier. Hell, the characters even speak to each other in a Simlish-style nonsense language. That was charming in The Sims, but it’s weird here as characters doing it as they randomly take off their bikini tops or smoke a joint mid-conversation. That’s right, kids! There is a joint in this game! Whoooooa! Better not let mama see that! It’s rated M for mature! I guess it was either show two people at a party cartoonishly smoking weed or feature a movie star and a model doing heroin together in the grotto as their lives fall apart.

There are four main differences between The Sims and Playboy: The Mansion. The biggest is that you play as Hugh Hefner walking around his mansion. In other words, it’s The Sims, but you only directly control one Sim. What makes this great is that, rather than your Sims just interacting with each other at a party or continuing speaking after you put them together, Playboy: The Mansion expects you to do everything. Walking around is awkward because of the perspective, but at least it takes two different commands to go up and down stairs like it’s motherfucking Dragon Warrior on the NES. Yeah, I know it’s supposed to be Dragon Quest, but we got Dragon Warrior originally and I’m not fucking here to show you my little video game graduation cap. Oh, and in terms of socializing, conversations literally stop every 10 seconds so you can choose the next subject of the completely indecipherable gibberish language. A lot of the game’s progress depends on making friends with models, movie stars, politicians, artists, and more so you can fill out your issue with photos and interviews and essays.

On the bright side, the game has basically two sets of NPC bodies (boy and girl) and a few options for heads and hair. So whether you’re interviewing a woman Supreme Court Justice or a poet, they have giant tits and will whip them out whenever they want. And if it’s a man, you know they’ve got a surfer bod and dad rock fashion, bro! I think this might be an intentional bit? Like leading thinkers being hot women? I guess? But if that’s the most entertaining thing in the game, we’re in a bad, bad place.

Also socializing in the game takes so fucking long it made me hate sex. You have to talk to everybody and you have to keep talking to everybody until they like you enough to do a job or sleep with you. Yes, that’s how real life works, but it should take a little bit less time in a simulated world. Whether during a regular working day or at a party (both of which occur in the same places and are almost functionally identical), you need to spend your whole time gassing up everybody so they want to give you content for the magazine.

If they’re a woman, you can improve your friendship, business relationship, and romance with that character. If they’re a man, you can improve your friendship and business only. Sorry, losers, the Playboy Mansion is too special for that gay shit. This is the holy ground where Bill Cosby partied with Woody Allen. Hugh Hefner can’t flirt with a male rock star! The massive turtles holding up the world would shiver in sorrow, causing our entire plane of existence to tip into the void. Seriously, though, somehow this game can feature the most polygonal boobs I’ve ever seen in one place but The Sims having two men kissing is just a little too much for it.

That’s the second difference between The Sims and Playboy: The Mansion. Both actually have sex, so that’s out of the way. The Sims did it by blurring the naked bits and turning the sex into a comical little interlude. Playboy: The Mansion does it by just showing boobs randomly and making you hit on your employees until they give in. The boobs don’t bother me, but the creepiness definitely does, which is probably a good sign for the remaining shreds of my morality. But the boobs are so corny and dopey that it’s almost the opposite of sexy? We’re talking about the PlayStation 2 era, so when a woman takes off her shirt, it’s just two solid flesh-colored orbs sticking straight out of her torso. We do not have jiggle physics. If you remember those mods that de-blurred The Sims and allowed you to see naked stuff, this looks like a crappier version of that. Fucking in The Sims is genuinely more romantic and erotic, and that’s not a sentence I ever thought I’d write! But, hey, at least the Playboy game has an unlockable big boob mode!

Oh, another reason Playboy: The Mansion is worse than The Sims: the music. Oh my God, the fucking music in this game. It’s all a combination of early 2000s edgy teen boy rock… and smooth elevator jazz. The Sims had that delightful light classical music that really made you feel like you’re building a home in a nice neighborhood! Doot doot deet! I’m putting down a fun couch! I get that might not work here. The rock music feels like it’s intended to show you this isn’t your dad’s Playboy! But the jazz would make Jesus Christ crucify himself. It actively makes the building mode less fun because you have to listen to it. On the bright side, said building mode has almost nothing interesting to add to your mansion so it’s not that important. There’s a bookshelf. Another bookshelf. Wait, I unlocked a massage table! Finally, my top floor that for some reason isn’t allowed to have parties is complete!

The last reason The Sims is different from Playboy: The Mansion is that I never wanted to keep playing Playboy: The Mansion. You’d think a game in which I run a business where topless women beg me to hang out with them would be a lot more addictive than putting a fire alarm on the outside of my house so then thieves can’t get in. You’d be wrong. It’s almost like the two games looked at their themes and used the gameplay loop for different purposes. For The Sims, they used building, decorating, and socializing to show that even mundane, everyday events can be a time of excitement and wonder. For Playboy: The Mansion, they used building, decorating, and socializing to show that even incredible jobs like taking photos of naked hot people are completely boring experiences that will drain your life. And, no, I didn’t try to build a doorless room around a person because these NPCs have suffered enough.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: CommonCentz, who tried to put in the naked heff cheat code but it just made heff explode!

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