At Ubisoft’s erotic navel gazing Playboy: The Mansion you slip into the role of the lord of the bunnies – Hugh M. Hefner. You start with a low share capital and a simple hut in the clear of the Sims inspired lives. At the push of a button, you call up a context menu and interact with your immediate surroundings – use objects or engage other people in a conversation. The latter plays a central role, because this is how you win friends and business partners. Complicated dialogues are not necessary: If you choose, for example, ‘romantic conversation’ or ‘discussion about the stock market’, then the participants babble together in an imaginary language. However, you should make sure that you get the right topics: You can find out what your counterpart likes and dislikes in one of the numerous menus. There you also hire employees, expand your building further or check what tasks you still have to do apart from completing an issue.
Parties, to which you invite celebrities and then win them over for help, serve as an important tool – be it for interviews, essays or the essential photos. In addition to the textiles of beauty, you also choose the environment and photographer before you press the shutter button. Nervous contemporaries do not have to be afraid of blurred images: Ultimately, it is not the finished motif that is relevant for success, but above all the degree of sympathy and familiarity of those involved.
Once you have everything together for an issue, it goes to print and yields income that you invest in expanding your empire – how about a whirlpool for the love grotto, for example, so that your girlfriend feels like playing wet games?
Playboy: The Mansion looks almost identical on PS2 and Xbox, the Microsoft console only offers a handful of additional details: You can include your own soundtracks in the Mansion stereo system and you can take more than just one picture per photo session.
