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> Results: Pocket Pool
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The ESRB Says
Partial Nudity: GamerDad won pictures and video clips showing topless women. Sexual Themes: Yeah, the entire reward system is looking at scantily clad women. When I reviewed Online Chess Kingdoms I thought - HOW do you screw up CHESS??!?! Now I get to ask the same question regarding billiards, or pool. The physics aren't all that tricky - spin dynamics, collision detection, trajectory angles and friction are basically the forces at work. Ball speed translates into kinetic energy which plays into all of those other factors. There have been numerous games for various platforms through the years that have offered up a decent pool game - but this isn't one of them. The bottom like is that this is a lousy pool game dressed up for quick sale with a bunch of soft-core images bolted on top. The game appears to offer quite a bit of depth - there are about a dozen game types and twenty-nine pages of unlockable content. But since the basic pool game is mediocre, the options are all either cosmetic or don't work well (ball speed), and the unlockable content is little more than the images that appear on the sidebars of many gaming websites that cause you to install ad-blockers for your web browser. Nothing is very good - the balls shine like Christmas ornaments, the voice-overs sound like something out of a late-night cable TV ad, and the music has audible loop points and very short loops. It is always more fun to think about 'what is my favorite game' instead of 'what was the worst game I ever played' - and while I don't think this is THE worst game I've played, it is putting up some solid competition by being an utter failure in every possible way.  
There are some things that demonstrate such blatant objectification of women that it shames me to be a man who finds attractive women ... um ... attractive. This entire game is one of those moments. From the loading screens to the tutorial dripping with single entendre to the parade of scantily clad pouting women parading about in the unlockable pictures and videos, the game is shameless and shameful all at once. It is so bad that when I showed my wife she said 'it should be called Pocket Porn' - it is just embarrassing. It has nothing to do with the partial nudity or state of undress of the images, but with the gratuitous and sleazy way in which they are presented.
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