honey come bingo

A few days ago, I decided to play a BL game I had set my eyes on a long time ago, Honey Come Bingo. It isn't exactly a new game, but I didn't get the chance to play it before because of the whole "Me Turning Into a WoW Zombie" deal. Right now I feel the WoW-addiction has waned enough to allow me to play other games, and Honey Come Bingo was on the top of my list.

HCB is a gay porn doujin-game. I've been helplessly addicted to drawn gay porn for a long time, and over all those years I played a few BL games. The ones aimed at gay males are, sadly, very few and far between, so it's not like I ever had a broad variety to choose from. My favourite - or rather, the crowd's favourite - is Hunks Workshop, the little masterpiece by Massanori everyone loves, and for a good reason (namely, it's great). Go Fujimoto's Ore to Mahou no Koibito and the earlier games by Gai Mizuki (the man behind Honey Come Bingo), like G-Case and Loops, were highly entertaining too.

People don't usually look for inspired gameplay or mind-blowing complex plots in BL games. They usually want porn. And those games deliver (usually) high quality porn in a (usually) "funner" way than clicking thumbnails on pixiv. While playing Honey Come Bingo, I had no clue what was the story (BL games usually have an option for fast-forwarding dialogues, let's just say I made good use of it), and the gameplay is a rather simple board game: after the first two or three matches, I started to win almost every match.

However, "winning the board game" doesn't seem necessarily to be HCB's main goal - it's more about unlocking those wonderful CGs, and there seems to be a few more ways of doing that. During the matches you are up against three AI-controlled opponents, and each player has two or three sets of "gems" spread over the board. If you gain control of a tile with one of their gems, you get to keep the gem and start to "win their hearts" (or something like that, I got that off Anonib - my understanding of the game didn't get that far). What I quickly realized was that after they lose enough gems, you get CGs showing them taking their clothes off... and those are definitely some of the most gorgeous pieces Gai Mizuki has ever done (considering the guy's a freaking monster, they are obscenely good). And if you talk to them in between games, they can start to like you too - I even got to see superbly drawn flashbacks of two characters who loved me when they lost their last gems and were kicked off the game.

...now, let's move on to the highest point of the game. I have to bold this following part: Honey Come Bingo features the best cast in a gay themed game ever. I'm not exaggerating, the cast is that good. As usual, the character you control is the least attractive one (this seems to be a trend in BL games), but your opponents... Jesus Christ, those are godly specimen of steamy, manly, muscular, unshaven oyaji meat. There's seven of them, and fun fact: the family name of each of them has the kanji of a weekday (seven weekdays, seven opponents... get it?).


They are, in order (left to right - click for higher res pic!):

- Wakatsuki Toru (若月徹), 27 year-old baseball player.
- Hino Yutarou (火野勇太郎), 31 year-old actor.
- Mizushima Gou (水島剛), 29 year-old K-1 fighter.
- Kimura Tadanao (木村忠尚), 22 year-old university student and rugby player.
- Kaneda Masaru (金田優), 26 year-old employee of a delivery company.
- Hijikata Takeshi (土方武), 33 year-old gambler (and full-time hottie).
- Hibino Kingo (日比野欽吾), 46 year-old president of a company.

(my favourite is obviously the blond gambler oyaji, Hijikata. *swoons* He was always the last one to join the bingo for me, so I had to kick at least three other hunks for him to show up in all his mighty goateed glory)

Unfortunately I didn't get to play much so far, and I didn't even bother trying to decipher the nihongo to get a grasp of what's going on. A shame really, because when you actually understand what's going on those games become ten times more interesting (a friend once told me the outlines of Niikura's storyline in Hunks Workshop. suffice to say it made me like the guy even more than I already did), but there's tons of dialogue and if you don't understand Japanese enough, like me, it's probably an exercise in frustration even attempting to make sense of it. But for people looking for some majorly well done oyaji/gachi-muchi porn by the god named Gai Mizuki, Rainbow Shoppers still has copies for sale, or you can download the game illegally - this is the huge interwebz afterall. And you could always download solely the CG pack, but I honestly feel that working hard for your porn makes it all the more exciting. :)