Virtual Valerie Game : MacPlaymate : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive (2024)

Reviewer: Puffy333 - April 30, 2023
Subject: A Sex Game that Gets Distracted Away From the Sex

Virtual Valerie is the follow up to MacPlaymate. The year of publication is wrong here; MacPlaymate was developed by Mike Saenz in 1986 and published by PEGASUS Productions in 1987. Virtual Valerie game was published by Reactor Inc, Mike Saenz's own studio, in 1990.
When the draw of the game is meant to be the sexual fantasy, this game is a lot more interested in just having a ton of little fun details and animations tucked away all over the little corners of Valerie's apartment building and room.
Yeah, you can take off Valerie's top and watch her touch herself, but you can also check out her bookcase, find a hidden room with a trap door that sends you to the basement, where you can find an bomb that looks very worrying but it doesn't seem to be going off anytime soon and you can't really do anything about it, so you just head back up to Valerie's room, who will greet you as if you just arrived and didn't bail her in the middle of foreplay.
The sexual fantasy part seems underwhelming. Yeah she'll take you to her room where you can pound her with 2 devices, but with her monotone voice cycling through the same 3 lines with no clear distinction on what makes the line change, a static pose that you can't adjust, and no real clear 'end' eventually makes you bored and you end up leaving the pound session to explore the rest of her much more interesting apartment.
Compare to the original MacPlaymate, which as limited as it was, did keep it's focus on what the user might want in a sexual setting, from partners to costumes to different masturbation methods. Virtual Valerie is distracted by how much more it's able to fit into a CD ROM, from 3D models to short videos and more audio then before. There's plenty of ways that could be incorporated into the sex itself, but it never seems to have crossed the creator's mind. Heck, the panic button, which is mean to cover your screen to hide the porn at any point, is only present when viewing her on the couch, not when you're actually in her bedroom. I suspect the dev copied and pasted a lot of code from the original MacPlaymate for Valerie on the couch, but didn't think about how to implement it for the newly coded areas. My dude, that panic button was a selling point on your game's packaging!!!
I think that actually adds to the charm of Virtual Valerie. There's a lot of assumption about how sex sells and how everyone is purely absorbed with sex, and the game itself seems to believe that hype. Seeing where all the details went, however, I think it's clear the creator was much more interested in experimenting with the new technology before him instead of getting anyone off. Considering the original MacPlaymate originated from this sense of experimentation and play with brand new technology, it's not too surprising Virtual Valerie got so sidetracked.
I'm deeply thankful I'm able to emulate this game directly in browser, and I thank you for the effort of uploading this game to the Archive. I don't think Valerie will get anyone off anytime soon, but I'm still laughing at how Valerie's kitchen is completely devoid of food; girl what do you eat!!!