Lula: The Sexy Empire

Most you'll see here is tits, so keep that in mind. There are a few digitized photos of what I assume are erotic models and porn starts of the mid 90s, but you'll be looking at cartoons pretty much all the time. The game proper is divided in 3 parts. You automatically advance from the first when you reach 50k dollars, and from the second when you reach 2 million (not counting anything on the bank). The third part, the sex shop chain, is, by far, the most boring, because now you have to wait A MONTH for most things to happen. This game is full of bad design decisions, though I'm not entirely sure what I can blame on being an old game and what on bad execution. For instance, to open the options menu, you have to interact with a certain item in a certain room. At a new game's beginning, that's on a room you CANNOT access outright and you can lose access to later on during this 1st part. This bit about having to be in a specific room to change options is extra annoying due to the game speed slider being there. * The amount of guessing you have to do to find out what and where you can interact with things is very annoying. Rooms don't have any kind of indication of what things can be interacted with and where are possible exits. You have to find and memorize those. * The keyboard is pretty much useless. Other than F1 for a help page about the room you're in and Enter when you can input text or number, you don't use the keyboard. Oh, in some rooms, F1 brings up a help video with no subtitles instead of any text * The help text in most rooms overflows * Regarding game speed, there are 7, with the fastest being something like 1 in game hour every 6 seconds. During the last phase, this is too slow. * Loading a game might randomly break something, like thinking you don't have an equipment, despite having it. * During the movie studio, you can give plastic surgery to your actors, but there's nothing anywhere stating what difference it makes, if there's any

Let's get this out of the way. It's the most NSFW game I've ever seen on GOG. It makes the Leisure Suit Larry games look appropriate for Sunday School. It is raunchy, sophomoric and completely gratuitous. If you are offended by nipples and crotch shots, steer clear. It's also a pretty damn good game. The graphics are surprisingly good and crisp. The voicing and soundtrack is straight outta 80's porn, and perfect for it's job. And at it's heart beats a better than average management sim. I didn't want to believe it either, but strip away the pr0n and it's smarter than your average sim. But if you strip away the pr0n you are missing the point, and someone I won't invite to my next Halloween bash.

I remember playing this way back in college. A friend of mine reached out to me. He was like, 'dude you play computer games, right'. I am like, yeah. and he was like, 'then, you will love this game, but lock the room door first and wear a headphone before playing'. and then, I played this game. I played it multiple times. I was surprised to see this game here on GOG and today there was some sale and I got it for a dollar and half. Okay, the actual review (based on my old play experience and also this GOG version) The game is fun, as long as you dont mind some R rated nudity, 80s style narration and some old school hand drawn 'visual novel' style story telling. It is sort of like a basic business simulation. Like, really basic. You will figure out what you need to do within minutes and there are almost no challenges. Click here, do this do that, get money, buy this paper, buy that equipment. in between you get treated to some naughty pictures, hand drawn cartoon animation and some, okayish, funny lines and dialogues. The game will only appeal if you can really bring down your expectations to a very low level. If you like movies which fall into the category 'so bad its good', and you relish in the awfulness of it all, then, yes, this is game is for that. However, the game has this last level, which, even today, I have no clue to how to play. When I was a kid, i was disappointed with this. Now, after all these years, I have told myself that the first level (escaping the small town) and the second level (the movie studio thing) is the entire game. Just ignore the third game and assume that game is over when you finish second level, and you will enjoy it. Now, some notes about the GOG version. It runs fine on my gaming PC with windows 10 and a 1060 6 GB. So, the game has no issues running whatsoever. It crashes every so often, especially after a video plays. So, best to save every now and then. You will have to quit GOG Galaxy and restart gameplay.

It's fairly funny and chapter 1 is ok, chapter 2 is actually fun. Chapter 3, however, is a fucken grind, I can't say I beat it but I watched let's plays where people grinded it for hours (same experience as myself) and abruptly got a gameover.

There used to be a genre of games, largely coming out of Germany, that might be called "User Interface As Puzzle". Games where the approach to victory isn't immediately obvious, and actually doing things in the game required puzzling out how the UI worked. You might see some tributes pop up from time to time as short games on sites like Itch, but like Interactive Fiction games it is now largely a dead genre outside of some very niche locales deep in the web being kept alive by die hard fans. Vangers. MadTV. Lula. Is Lula good? No, not really. It gets grindy once you've figured it out, gameplay is pretty simplistic, and the third act is massively underbaked. Is Lula interesting? Yes. It scratches the same itch that gonzo comics used to, hand drawn acid trip inspired insanity, mass produced on the boss's copier the last day before the artist quit his mail room job. It's has a retroactive appeal for the days before managing a game's controls could be solved within thirty seconds of booting it up, when weirdos with no credentials could turn out labors of love that nobody could summerize as "It is [game a] but with some of [game b]'s mechanics/theming and [genre X]'s standard control scheme". MadTV is a better game that fits the same ouvre I've tried describing above, one that stands on its own merit as a 'capital G' Game, but that doesn't render Lula without merit. I think if you go in with less of a desire to "Play a good game" and more of one to "Wrestle with a museum piece and witness the unfolding of an artist's intent" you'll probably have a good time.