Paradise Heights Publisher: Otaku Publishing Cost: $34.95 US Technical: Minimal. Windows95. Graphics: Ugly, Grainy Sound: Unmemorable at best. Voiceovers. NPCs: Shallow, one-dimensional. Writing: Atrocious Plot: What plot? Interface: Ornamental. Sex: Lousy. Kinkyness: Mostly vanilla, but with some bondage and 'heavy' S/M. Also a menage a trois. In Short: Pathetic. Okie-dokey, this just about wins my award for lamest, dumbest, most uninspired H-game in history. Premise: a rich uncle has asked you to take care of a small apartment complex he owns while he's on vacation. The complex has five other apartments, each occupied by a lovely young woman, and yadda, yadda, yadda. Of course the girls turn out to be a raging nymphos, which sets the testosterone-crazed hero up for the time of his life, provided he can elude his cousin Misa, who's just itching to report him if anything strange happens. This game appears to be several years old, but even so, the graphics simply suck. They consist of grainy, pixelated sketches of women set against grainy, pixelated monochrome backgrounds. The interface is inexcusable- you suppossedly have freedom of movement between scenes, as well as the ability to make decisions at certain points, but this is all window dressing. You're clearly told what you're suppossed to do, and doing anything else results in a message restating what you should do. For example, if the game says you have to go back to your apartment, you HAVE to go back to your apartment. Any attempt to do something differant results in a "You shouldn't do that" message or something similiar. The NPC development is practically nil: You meet all the women first day, and learn basically everything about them within the first few days. A few have secrets that are revealed later and then immediately buried again. All the encounters feel rushed, even the sexual ones. The sex is badly done, too- thin descriptive text and bad dialogue juxtaposed with explicit pictures and zero interaction, blah. What's more, as with a lot of bad H-games, the sex takes precedence over everything else, instead of being cleanly integrated into the story. The game plays as if you're fast-forwarding through a porno to get to the "good parts." One character shows up for a brief sex scene, and then disappears and is never heard from again. About halfway through the game, the writers decide a plot might be nice, and tack on some business about perverted pranks, and a stalker or something. The pacing, relevance, and overall appeal of this plot is roughly analogous to "Detective" without the instant death rooms. And the final plot twist/revelation is worse then the end of "Rippled Flesh." The other day, I was faced with the choice of playing through Paradise Heights a second time (something I do with every H-game I review, to determine linearity) or starting on Three Sister's Story. With hardly a concious thought, the former was out of my CD drive and the latter was in. Which basically says it all about the appeal of Paradise Heights. -Craxton