Knuckle Pine Dash review

Knuckle Pine Dash
Price (as of early 2010): $12.66

Amazingly, the basic premise between Knuckle Pine and Knuckle Pine Dash is the same: Get in the ring with Pine, and if you beat her, you get to put your thingie in her you know what. If you lose, you get laughed at in a Duck Hunt-esque manner and you have to go home to, I guess, pleasure yourself, or maybe sleep with your wife. Unless she was watching the match and won't sleep with you either. Ladies like a winner. Unless this is H/C fic.

Man, I'm way off topic already. So the basic objective is the same, but some of the details have changed. Instead of just boxing until one of you is knocked out, you now go three rounds with Pine, and whoever has more health left at the end is victorious. (I'd really like to know who's judging these matches, by the way.) In the case of a tie, Pine is awarded the bout. I personally find this to be a little weird; The first game, I thought, had kind of a underground boxing type of feel, where two combatants get in the ring, Pine putting her body on the line, and you putting, uh, I guess your pride, or maybe your face if you get beaten up. Having three rounds - and judges; that sill blows my mind - kinda dilutes this whole atmosphere a little bit. I mean, there isn't even an audience, as far as I can see; Maybe in the first game you and Pine just met in a boxing ring to settle your differences. But what's happening now? All right, I'll tell you, what's happening now is that I'm thinking about this way too much. Oh, and uh, also, between rounds, both of you can get your health back (by picking random cards, same interface as how you box.)

In addition, Pine has been hitting the gym in between games; While she's something of a puss in the original game, she's now quite a tough cookie, and you'll probably win as often as you lose. Both of you now have super punches (marked as a V on the cards). If you draw a V and she doesn't, she gets pounded. If she draws a V and you don't, she knocks your punches out of the way and throws a punch in your face. If you both draw a V, you both go crazy punching each other.
Lastly, you can remove both Pine's top and bottom by clicking in between her boobs and just above her panties, respectively, although removing each piece will make you take as much damage as a super punch as Pine is scandalized by your ungentlemanly behaviour.

Now this all sounds good, but I don't think the three round match length really works to the game's advantage. In the original game, it's easy to forgive the fact that there's no skill involved and you're just picking numbers because the match is over so fast. It's harder to ignore this during a three-round slugfest. It can become particuarlly annoying if you find that you're losing the match, or if you want a specific outcome like winning on points; There's no way to take it easy on Pine, and there's no way to do better, just keep picking numbers. To this day I've still never won on points because you can't run the clock out. The only thing you can do to actually effect the match is to deliberately click Pine's clothes off, which is dangerous since she gets a free super punch.

Other than that there's the H-mode; I think you can do more things than just zoom zoom in her boom boom, but I'll be fucked if I can figure out how. There's also endless boxing mode.

If it seems like I complained a lot, well, I did. Maybe these are all minor complaints, but since (spoiler alert) they're fixed in 3, I'd have to recommend you either pick up the original and save $4 or get a paper route to afford the extra $6 you'd have to pay to get the third game.

Recommended? Gosh, don't you read? I humbly recommend you pick up 1 or 3, kid.

On the Ropes review

Yeah, thought I forgot about these? I'm just lazy. There's a reason there's a tag for posts called "laziness".

Name: On the Ropes
Price: $18.22 (as of 12/1; review text has an earlier price from when the price was lower)

What we got here is a 3D first person boxing game. Actually, this game feels a lot like the western version of the Pine series, so I'm probably going to be comparing them throughout a little bit. In fact, these are both first-person boxing games where you nail the girl if you beat her - but where Pine is a blonde cartoon, this lady is a blonde 3D Poser model. Hmm.

When you launch the game, you've got just Tutorial, Start, and Exit. The Tutorial is, uh, a tutorial, and Exit quits. Start puts you into the ring with your opponent:



The bar at the top is her life, and the bottom is yours. During the match, buttons appear on the screen, her attacks or yours. Click on the button to either block her punch, or hit her yourself, that's all there is to it. Whoever runs out of life first loses.

The game's difficulty seems balanced just about right, which is to say I lose about as often as I win. I've found that if you have trouble, keeping the mouse moving or hovering over her face can help. Unfortunately, most of the actual gameplay is just waiting for the buttons appear, which isn't terribly thrilling. The only thing happening on the screen is your opponent breathing and your hands moving slightly while you wait for a button to show up. You can't take her top off during the match or anything like that - it's very straightforward.
I have to say I do prefer Knuckle Pine's more turn-based boxing more relaxing and easier to enjoy, but this game does rectify one of my complaints about that series, which is that Knuckle Pine is all luck - this game's all dependent on your skill. So marks for that, I guess, but I'm not a big fan of twitch reactions, which is what you'll need for the buttons.

So that's the match. If you lose, you just fall over, and she stands over you while the screen fades for like three seconds, and you can try again, or not. I'm going to make the same criticism as the Pine games here, which is, why doesn't anything happen to you if you lose? Hmph.

Anyway, if you win, your opponent gets thrown - yes - on the ropes:



Clicking any of the icons punches here there. On all these screens, you can punch her as long as you'd like, but it's the same animation and sound effect all the time, so it gets old pretty fast. (Since there's a sound effect for each button, maybe they could be randomized.)
When you're ready to move on, clicking on her chest removes her top, which gives you another menu.



Same as before, although now you can punch her in the tits, and I recommend you do, because the animation for it is hilarious. I don't know how to make an animated GIF, so I tried to capture how it looks with this screenshot, but you probably gotta see it to believe it.



Anyways, from here you pull off her bottoms, and then you can stick it in. This removes the punch icons (thankfully) and gives you two: One of a hammer - I have no idea what this does; I assume clicking on it makes you thrust faster - and one a little white fountain. Click that, and you spurt on her crying face. Nice.



And that's it, it just takes you to a "AGAIN?" screen. There's nothing else to the game; It's lacking the Pine game's endless boxing or jump straight to the end mode, which I think is a shame. unfortunately, there's basically no replay value, since there's only one girl, and only one set of things you can do to her, and you'll have to go through the not particularly thrilling boxing match itself to do them again.

Overall, I think this is a good first effort, but there's some definite room for improvement. To begin with, taking the endless boxing mode and skipping straight to the end aspects of Knuckle Pine would do alot to give the game some more bang for the buck; I also think a discount may be in order, considering the compitition - as of right now the game costs $17, which is the same as the latest Pine game, which I think you'll get a lot more playtime out of. It's hard to recommend at this price, and I think cutting it by 3 or 4 dollars would go a long way towards making this game more attractive. All in all, though, this game just needs maybe a few extra girls and a few extra things to do to them, and we might have a winner. In fact, if it's too much work to make extra girls, how about some basic things like changing her hair, etc?

Can I also make a suggestion to both this and the Pine series: How about an option to make the player a woman? We're not all mixed fans. Well, I guess that might not work in the ending. I dunno. I'm just spitballin'. New boot goofin'. Probably time to wrap this up.

Recommended? Sure, if you know what you're getting into. You read the whole review, right?

Name: Bokkoboko!!
Price: $11.69 (lulz)

Shit! This is just a bunch of audio files! Arrrggghhhh. I guess I should have read this more carefully. Damn it. Next time I'm just going to get "I know!! I'll Have My Little Sister and Big Sister Help Me Masturbate!! 2". Fudge.

Recommended? No!

Knuckle Pine review

(drumroll)
And now, the first DLsite game review!
Knuckle Pine

Name: Knuckle Pine
Price: $7.64

Knuckle Pine is a very simple first person boxing game. The premise is that Pine here thinks she's such hot shit that anyone who beats her can have thier way with her, and you're stepping up to the challenge.


The game itself is, as stated, very simple. You and Pine both have life bars on the left and right side. At the bottom of the screen are four squares. Clicking on one reveals a value, 0, 1, 2, or 3. Pine also gets a number, and whoever has the higher number lands some punches and does some damage.

You can click on her chest to take her top off, and then further clicking on her chest has your boxer kind of brush her nipples with his gloves, which makes her very angry and provokes a strong counter punch.
The timer bar on the bottom counts down, and if it hits zero, the game picks a box for you - as far as I can tell, the CPU picking a box for you has just as good a chance as topping Pine's number as you do. I guess this is uh... one hand mode? Gross.

Honestly, I found the game to be exceptionally easy; I had to go out of my way to lose - I took her top off and then kept attacking her nipples until she knocked me out. (More on what happens if you win or lose later.) The game's biggest weakness, I think, is that the boxing match itself is really short - one of you is gonna be knocked out in under a minute. Pine could put up more of a fight, too, but I wouldn't want the game to be too hard. You can always get her top off and then attack her chest if you want to handicap yourself - but, again, since the matches are over in under a minute, it's kind of pointless.

So, after the match is over, one of two things happen. If you win, as promised, you have your way with her; you click though some scenes of her getting nailed. The first part where you're fingering her is in third person, then first person when you're actually giving it to her. When you're done, she's upset and punches you out, which brings up a YOU WIN? screen and the credits.
If you lose, though, nothing happens except Pine says GOODBYE BABY with her thick accent. I kind of wish something else happened when you lost; let Pine have her way with you, so to speak - have her take off those shorts and sit on your face, something like this. Maybe in the sequel.

Once you've cleared the game once, you see this screen on startup - top option plays the intro, middle option takes you right to the match, bottom option takes you right to the fucking. Actually, the middle option might make it so you can box Pine forever; After clicking it once, our life bars never went down, no matter what I do. I'm going to assume this is a feature and not a bug.

(Update: I've been told the menu options are Begin Match, Free Battle, Pine's Room - "Free Battle" must be endless boxing mode.)

Being able to choose which part of the game to go to is nice and adds a little - I don't want to say replay value, but being able to skip to the part you wants makes it a lot more likely that you'll fire the game up again. Which is good, because you'll be done with it in about five minutes. There's something to be said for not having it take half an hour to beat your opponent (with some games we'll be seeing later), but the boxing part could stand to be a lot longer. (Or you could do Free Battle.) As long as you know what you're getting into length wise - if you see yourself beating up poor Pine repeatedly - it's hard to go wrong for $7 and change. And, yes, I'm going to be dazzled by the cheap price as we go through these games.)

(I tried to get a picture of her victorious with her top still on, but even without chosing an option, Pine can't lose unless I throw the match by getting her top off and making her angry. )

Recommended? With reservations; Read the whole review instead of just this, lazy.

Do bear in mind the game has two sequels (linked in the post below this) - they both feature more stuff than this game, so you may want to consider them instead. Then again, I haven't written a review for those yet, have I? Harumph!

DL Site games

So, I just now discovered the english DLSite (thanks to this site), and low and behold, there's some very interesting games on there. I toyed with the idea of trying to make YouTube videos out of them, but I think in the end it's not really suitable - they're either all short, or they have nudity (damn it youtube, everyone has nipples, what's the big deal) or they're in Japanese and I don't want to deal with the endless LOL WHAT DOES THIS SAY SPEAK AMERICAN DUR comments. So instead I'm just going to review them here on my blog. Amazing, right? Here's the lineup of games I'm going to tackle (in no particular order):

rengokuring - menu-based wrestling game?
rengotougi - the sequel
Knuckle Pine - boxing game. Reviewed here.
Knuckle Pine Dash - the sequel
Kunckle Pine TURBO - the second sequel.
OL Fight - Uh, looks like you beat up a OL. Haven't tried the demo yet
On the Ropes - boxing game. Reviewed here.
Pit Viper - a spiritual sequel.
Misaki fights underground battles in the erotic wrestling - Heh, I love discriptive titles.
Fight Club WILDCAT 2 - actually, I have no idea if this is a game or not. Supposedly "This work has several ending patterns which change depending on your choice", which is good enough to get it on this list.
Fight Club WILDCAT 3 - See above.
Harenchi Wrestling: I don't know exactly what this is, but it frankly looks pretty terrifying.
Bokkoboko!!: Again, not sure if this is really a game. One way to find out. Reviewed here.

Obviously, this is going to be a long and ongoing project. If you think I'm missing any, drop me a line or leave a comment and I'll add it to the list.

** Update **

I forgot to mention this, but I'll update this post with a link any time a new DL site product gets reviewed.