Midweek Hotness: Origins Edition

This week I'm going to talk about some of my early influences.

Sometimes it's hard to define them until long after they've been encountered, but looking back I think these two video games had an out sized effect on how my fetishes first developed.

No real sexy images this week, I'm afraid. We'll have to use our imaginations.

Agent USA

Taking the time machine way back into the eighties, there was an edutainment game called 'Agent USA.' The main idea was to teach kids about geographical locations by forcing them to take train tickets to different parts of the US.

It seems anachronistic now, and even then I believe plane travel was far more prominent than passenger trains, but it still makes a useful framework for a game.

The main conceit of the game was that there is a Fuzzbomb somewhere in the USA, which is infecting people and turning them into fuzzbodies. Fuzzbodies travel diagonally until they hit a wall , then bounce off in a 45 degree direction. If they get close to another citizen or you, they'll start chasing you, but only at a 45 degree angle, so they're not impossible to avoid.

Fuzzbodies can board trains and travel to different locations, turning more citizens into fuzzbodies as they're touched. It's basically a zombie plague, and if you do nothing you can eventually reach a game over scenario where everybody has been turned into a fuzzbody.

You play as mister white hat, while all the normal citizens around you have black hats (an amusing parallel to computer hackers, I know). In your personal wallet, you start with a small number of crystals. Your job is to grow your bank account to one hundred crystals, travel to where the fuzzbomb is in the USA, and touch it, without getting touched by existing fuzzbodies.

Each city has an informational map that can help you locate which cities have been fuzzed, and where the fuzzbomb is located.

Each city also has a ticket booth where you can catch a train to another city. Tickets are free, but you have to type in the whole city name to get a ticket. Also, not all routes travel to all cities. Some trains are slower than others. While you're travelling by train, time passes, you swap time zones, and the fuzz bodies spread.

To grow new crystals, you set them out anywhere in a city and more will materialize next to the existing ones. You do have to be careful to keep crystals away from the civilians, as they'll snap them up like they're actual money if you're not careful.

You do have the ability to move towards a civilian and push them away, which is useful if you only have one black hat you need to deal with.

Eventually you'll encounter fuzz bodies wandering around. If you get too close to one, it will start chasing you. You can turn it back into a black hat citizen by dropping a crystal in front of it. Civilians can hold multiple crystals and will resist being turned into fuzzbodies if they are holding crystals.

Eventually it gets difficult to avoid the fuzzbodies and it becomes a mad dash to turn them back into civilians and to grow new crystals. If a black hat has crystals, they'll even try dropping some themselves to save their fuzzed buddies.

Once you have enough crystals, find the fuzz bomb, touch it, and victory is yours! If you don't have 100 when you touch it, however, you're instantly fuzzed and it's game over.

All this seems fairly straightforward. It's the fuzzpocalypse, and you need to stop it. So how does that play into a mind control fetish at all?

Much like sonic the hedgehog, every time you get touched by a fuzzbody, you lose half your crystals. Eventually, you run out, and if you're touched one time too many you get turned into a fuzzbody yourself.

Here's where it gets interesting, though - becoming a fuzzbody does not trigger a game over as you might expect. Instead, you wander around the city, with no control over yourself. You watch, helpless to resist as you walk from city to city, touching black hat citizens and turning them into more fuzzbodies, recruiting them to become just like you.

If your fuzzed body takes you onto a train, you'll travel to another city and continue the recruitment by touching more civilians there. The only way to get back control over your character is to pick up a crystal dropped by a friendly black hatted civilian, and that could be very tricky if you never gave any crystals to civilians. Especially since you have no control over which city you travel to when you're fuzzed.

This was my first encounter with the serial recruitment trope, and it left quite an impression. Sure, there's not much hotness potential with being fuzzed or being turned into a zombie, but if you replace that mechanism with being mind controlled by insects or worms to spread their species to more unsuspecting citizens, you can quickly turn it into some great fetish nightmare fuel.

Heck, the fuzzbomb could even be a malfunctioning AI that has decided to recruit new female robots to help it take over the world by turning civilians into carbon copies of its favorite robotic maid. The possibilities are limitless!

If you'd like to watch a video of a play through of this game, you can find one here. The C64 had better graphics and sound than other systems for this game, but I believe I originally played this game on the good old Apple IIc. Ask me if I've ever beaten Captain Goodnight or Karataka on the Apple II...

Duke Nukem 3D

Growing up, I had played several of the early Duke Nukem games, but Duke Nukem 3D had the biggest effect on my young mind. My mother would never have approved if she had known what I was playing, but as she wasn't all that interested in video games, she didn't pay as close attention as she might have.

The story, as with all Duke Nukem games, was rather shallow. 'Somebody is stealing all the babes! I gotta go rescue them so I can get home in time to watch Oprah!"

In Duke Nukem 3D, it was various aliens stealing the babes. But they weren't just stealing them - no, they were also altering them. That's where the sexual intrigue came into play.

In various places babes could be found cocooned, bound to a fleshy pole made of vines, or even suspended from the ceiling. Most of these were hidden in out of the way spots, of course, almost like easter eggs for the interested explorer.

Not only are the eyes of many of these babes red, but many of them are clearly being used for alien breeding purposes.

This is probably the first time I realized that I wasn't into quite the same sexual stuff as other people. It was a rather confusing time, to be sure, but eventually my understanding solidified into what I qualify as 'squick' (that's probably an excellent discussion for another time).

At one point I even found a sprite viewer, and was able to locate the sprites I liked the most and flipped through them. I recall being disappointed that there weren't that many, but hey, there probably wasn't a huge budget for making those kind of sexy sprites.

Sure, what happened to the 'babes' in Duke Nukem 3D is horrible, and the Duke was right in kicking the alien's asses. But that's only because the aliens were assholes.

If you're picking up females from another race for breeding purposes, why would you treat so them poorly? Sure, as the invasion proceeds, you could expect to capture more of them, but it's just a bad policy to treat your broodmares as expendable.

I suppose I could term this the 'Aliens' syndrome, or the 'extremely deadly virus' problem. If you kill all of your hosts too quickly, there won't be any left to propagate the species. It makes for a good horror show, but a poor strategy for keeping a species alive.

And it's not nearly as sexy to me. But, of course, that's not what the horror show writers care about.

If I were the aliens, I'd make my captured females as comfortable as possible, alien environment permitting. Even better if you can slowly alter their minds or transform their bodies to like being bred. If, once rescued, your new cows want only to come back to you, the war is already won. Your enemy won't want to kill them, because not only would that be bad press, but it would be morally wrong for them to do it.

That leaves the door open for you to rescue them later, and because they're ready and willing to be your slaves, they'll welcome you with open arms. It's always easier to make the choice to be taken care of in luxury than to live hardscrabble in a resistance force.

That's what the aliens would tell you, anyway. Take it from them, it's far better to not resist.

If you're lucky, your new slaves might even assist you in recapturing them so that you can breed them further. This is also a great way to pick up new breeding stock if your current slaves have appropriate family members to capture.

If you want a primer on what can actually be seen in the game (it's not really all that much), you can find a page about the Duke Nukem babes here.

Now I'm done taking a trip down memory lane. Next week it's probably time to talk about another hentai! Stay tuned!