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Cutey Fatty: Slimming Sim or Diet Riot?
September 6th 2002, 04:26 CEST by m0nty
One of the more interesting games shown at the recent ECTS show was Cutey Fatty from Korean developer Wecom, a "scrolling shooter" which hearkens back to the halcyon days of the C64 when game concepts were refreshingly ridiculous.
There is a girl names 'Cutey Fatty' weighs over 100kg but she really wants to be a super model. So she has to lose weight fighting her favourite foods around the town. Her enemies are hamburgers, chocolate cookies and ice creams and so on. She should defeat the enemies and lose weights with getting vegetables and fruits in every stage. While the game playing, the scale is indicating her real time weights and she can lose weight more easily with intensive exercises if she finds secret door. And Toto her pretty dog helps to defeat the enemies.
C&VG previewed it rather sheepishly, including some screenshots but misspelling the dev firm's name as Wacom (perhaps confusing them with the tablet manufacturers). There are precious few other articles about it available on the Web. The CEO of Wecom is a lad by the name of Kim WonHyuk, and a splash screen from Hexus Gaming gives a taste of the anime-inspired artwork. Wecom's only other gaming credit that I can find is an arcade conversion of the game Her Knights from the Korean handheld gaming machine Gamepark GP32, mentioned in passing here. This gives a hint of the heritage of Wecom in the GP32 market, further discussed on the front page of Hexus, a GBA-type device featuring cutesy anime girl-oriented titles like Princess Maker and dating sim Therapy.
There is no questioning the silliness of the premise of this game, but gaming is full of titles with stupid starting ideas. A monkey in a ball, I mean really. Two plumbers saving a princess, how gauche. There are many games which, while absurd on the outside, are carefully abstracted from real life psychological events: it could be argued that RPGs are thinly veiled allegories for a teenager's rite of passage, for instance.
Is Cutey Fatty an inconsequential piece of frippery, or do feminists have to mount their high horses to defend the sisterhood against negative body imagery? Eating ice-creams and other sweet foods was the object in many platformers like Bubble Bobble, so is it such a crime to turn that cliche on its head? Do game developers have to resort to such obvious emotional manipulation to reach that all-important teen female demographic? Is this another beachhead made by Asian developers in their quest to make the world safe for hentai? What are the supar sekrit codes to unlock the bonus tenacle rape level?
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