Lula 3D

“Are You From the Movies or Something?”

“Put on some decent clothes! Your ovaries will catch cold.” German release, front cover.

Let’s talk about sex, baby.^[♫] Specifically, with regards to video games centered around the premise of simulating intercourse, presumably for the purposes of player self-gratification. It’s a thematic element which has existed since nearly the dawn of the home console — from almost the very moment that third-party studios were first granted access to the Atari 2600, and as several quickly set about developing primitive pixelated pornography; primarily seen in the output of ‘American Multiple Industries’ (releasing titles under the Mystique and PlayAround labels), including such titles as Beat ‘Em & Eat ‘Em and Custer’s Revenge. From there, Japanese developers picked up the ball and ran with it; producing interactive erotica across home computers, arcade cabinets (typically of the “strip mahjong” variety), and even on the Famicom Disk System. Believe it or not, this seedy scene is where companies the likes of Enix and Koei got their starts in the industry, publishing doujin soft works on PC — developing titles prominently featuring the word “Lolita,” appealing to a very particular subset of computer-bound creepers. In any event, Japan would hold the dubious distinction of serving as the primary domain for pornographic games in the years to follow; where barring a handful of unlicensed NES games (such as the infamous Bubble Bath Babes) and a run of Leisure Suit Larry titles, North America had largely managed to suppress their “adult games” scene, with the industry fearing the moral panic that would surely arise if they had attempted to promote such works.

While the West remained largely repressed and as the East indulged in their urges, the territory between would begin to explore themselves heading into the mid-90s: Europe found themselves in the cultural [and geographical] center of an erotic software revolution, with German publisher CDV Software’s release of an uniquely risqué 1997 business management simulation. So marked the debut of Wet: The Sexy Empire — alternatively titled Lula, in order to highlight its lascivious lead ingénue. And on that day, a franchise was born, as folk flocked to the prospect of full-frontal nudity on their personal computers. Only one aspect seemed to hold the series back: Its 2D presentation of hand-drawn pornography was only gonna carry them so far, as Lula sexily strutted into the coming 21st century. The obvious solution, then, was to give the ol’ gal a full 3D makeover, and give proper polygonal depth to her graphic assets. After years spent delaying and “perfecting” their work, CDV were finally able to deliver on their eagerly anticipated adventure title in 2005, with the launch of Lula 3D. Only, Lula’s adoring public seemed none too keen on her leap into 3D, as the title would go on to be heralded as one of the worst adventure games of all time. But what had gone wrong? What had poor little Lula done to deserve all this?

In this article – our sixty-ninth here on the Bad Game Hall of Fame – we’ll be exploring the contents of Lula’s three-dimensional sexual escapade. And in doing so, we’ll be exposing everything… By which I mean, examining the whole of the Lula franchise leading up to its ill-fated fully-polygonal turn, attempting to track its troubled development, and exploring all that the 2005 entry has on offer. In the process of doing so, we’ll be making an effort to treat these titles seriously as works of some form of artistic expression — for as seriously as you can take a series of games that don’t appear to take themselves very seriously at all. What I’m trying to say is, we’ll be making an effort here to not just write off Lula 3D for the simple fact of its sleaziness, as so many others seem inclined to do. Perhaps given a more fair perspective, there are elements of Lula 3D’s adventure game design which will shine through as admirable, buried beneath the admitted layers of perplexing puzzle logic and technical incompetence? I suppose there’s only one way for us to find out. Here’s hoping y’all like stacked blondes!

“You’re Working With a Situational Nudo-Realistic Approach, Right?”

“His classical language of imagery has always moved me deeply!”
Photo of Carsten Wieland, borrowed from Wieland’s online portfolio.

Lula began life as the brainchild of Carsten Wieland — a German cartoonist specializing in erotic illustrations. Aaand that’s all that anyone who’s attempted to chronicle Lula’s history seems to say about the guy: Other than that brief description, few has seen fit to provide any further info on Carsten and his portfolio prior to entering into the games business. Naturally, I’ve got the hot scoop for y’all: In the last years of his grade school education [in the mid-1980s], he discovered his passion for art after discovering Franco-Belgian comics, and took on work at a printing and publishing house.^[1] From here, he plied his trade doing art for children’s books (bet you didn’t see that one coming), as well as personally exhibiting his own paintings and other projects — all while pursuing a degree in graphic design at Folkwang University. He went on from here to win an international competition hosted by the Comic Salon, and used that renown in order to further pursue his dream career in cartoon illustration; penning for Germany’s version of ‘Heavy Metal’ magazine as well as a satire magazine ‘Kowalski,’ and contributing in some capacity to the animation business. All this is to say that Mr. Wieland was already a proper accomplished artist, whose work has since gone on to span decades and all varieties of mediums. He appears to be the kind of creative who enjoys challenging himself to keep up with new formats and technological advancements, and manages to find success within seemingly all of them. Perhaps owing to this mindset, he couldn’t turn down the chance to learn the trade of the games industry, which he was invited to join in the early 1990s.

Wieland’s first credited game [as far as I’m able to discern] would be 1993’s Space Job — a German-language Amiga / DOS adventure title produced on behalf of regional department store chain Karstadt. It serves as a combination of advertisement and job recruitment for the company in question, which sees you alternate between working for one of their retail stores in a grounded present-day setting (performing menial tasks such as stocking shelves and dealing with customers); before beaming into space and/or the future, where you can spend your free time [and your paycheck] on all manner of futuristic entertainment or developing skill points (both conveyed through a variety of minigames). The goal – it seems – is to ascend to the vaunted rank of ‘Department Store Manager,’ which will apparently entitle you to a life of riches within a future ruled entirely by Karstadt. It’s the sort of oddball advergame premise that makes me wish I knew the German language, so that I could thoroughly explore this goofy game world for myself. Lacking that second language though, all I can attest to is the quality of graphic design I’ve seen in screenshots and video, which all seems to be very impressive: Despite limitations in resolution (the game being contained within a 320 by 200 pixel window), Carsten’s finely-detailed backgrounds and depictions of human / alien / robotic form all manage to shine through. According to Wieland, he was given “completely free [rein] with the concept and design,”^[1b] and chose to do all his art with traditional pen and paper before digitizing them through software. Evidently, this process wound up being very complex, and he would eventually have to concede that he was better off producing digital art from scratch in future titles.

The next several years saw Carsten continuing to develop his style in digital art, and contributing to multiple different games by different studios; largely in the simulation genre (including Big Sea: The Better One Will Win, Dime City, and Hollywood Pictures), occasionally for point-and-click adventure titles (Tom Long: Time Adventure, and Chewy: Esc from F5), and even the odd action platformer (Clif Danger). From the fact that he was also credited in developing the concepts for many of these titles, I’d gather that Wieland was still most comfortable with rendering static assets — elaborate backgrounds and detailed character portraits that didn’t have to do much moving around on the screen. With that in mind, you can get a sense for the “ideal” sort of games that Wieland would be most likely to produce / involve himself in: Highly themed, methodically-paced adventure and/or simulation titles, which gave him the opportunity to show off his art and let it linger on the screen — making sure that players would have plenty of time to appreciate the detail he put into them. What’s surprising is the fact that his games were still fairly chaste at this point (save for the occasional attractive lady occupying his backgrounds), devoid of the “erotic” content that would come to define the bulk of his later output. As it turns out, Carsten already had such a game in mind: One he had been working on since 1992, set to star a certain voluptuous blonde who delivered sass and sex appeal in equal measure. I think y’all already know who I’m talking about.

Meet Bazooka Sue: An anthropomorphic pig-woman whose character concept was recognized as “a mixture of Kim Basinger (because of the exaggerated curves) and Miss Piggy (because of the lousy outfit).”^[2] The first the world got to see of her came with her self-titled game’s announcement at 1992’s Autumn ECTW (European Computer Trade Show), where at that point in development, the game was apparently intended as a pastiche of classic films; with much promotional ado paid to locations and plot elements lifted from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, and plans already in the works for a follow-up game that’d center itself around Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca. Ultimately though – over the course of the five years it took to actually develop the game – it’d morph into a more standard cartoon point-and-click adventure, set in the fictitious ‘Swamp Rock’ Louisiana as you square off against a mad scientist Dr. Bruth. During the extended production, the game would change its target platform from Amiga to DOS, as the design for the titular Sue would change significantly as well; lessening her pig-like features (namely in her facial structure and proportions), until all that remained were a snout and tail tacked onto a more traditionally-attractive / humanoid buxom blonde. (A massive downgrade, if you ask me.) The final product still has its share of Hitchcock references (you do eventually explore a facsimile of the Bates Motel and family house, as well as the exterior of the school from The Birds), but seems to indulge more in general references to cartoons and animation; the likes of an ‘Acme’-branded storefront in the town square, a candy shop owned by Tex Avery, and a cast of characters who take clear design inspirations from the classic era of Flescher and Warner Bros. All in all, a great excuse for Carsten to show off his artistic chops in a fresh setting [compared to the number of his previous games grounded in more realistic worlds].

“What a perfect ass! I’m happy it’s mine!”
German magazine advert for Bazooka Sue.

Now, I know the question on everyone’s mind right now: “Does the pig-lady fuck?” And the answer to that question is yes, though perhaps not in as much graphic detail as you might hope to see (?) — never rising too far above the level of “suggestive.” The lewdest that Bazooka Sue gets is during its ending, where one of the last shots you see is Sue fully naked (albeit with nipples and genitalia obscured) about to have sex with a duck. I make a point of all this because it all seems to indicate the direction Carsten was wanting to take his games in – towards full-on adult content – but which he hadn’t been allowed to fully commit to, likely due to disapproval on an executive level by his employers. Sure, Europe was considerably less shy about adult-only titles than the likes of North America at this point, but that doesn’t mean that games of that nature ever actually sold particularly well: Their perceived “novelty” value in addition to the fact that they couldn’t be marketed / sold through traditional channels effectively guaranteed that they would never make for a particularly profitable venture. Bazooka Sue’s own failure to make a dent in the market was testament to that fact. As Wieland would acknowledge with the benefit of over a decade’s hindsight:

“The development work, which started in 1992, dragged on more and more due to increasing disputes and financing difficulties at Starbyte [the game’s publisher]. […] License offers were coming from the USA and Japan, and the German trade press almost fell over themselves with their advance notices. But when it was released in 1997, nobody was actually excited for it anymore. And it was no longer able to meet the high expectations. Nevertheless, in retrospect, I am proud to have single-handedly drawn this adventure, with its flood of graphics and amount of animation.” ~ Carsten Wieland, lead designer / artist for Bazooka Sue^[3]

Despite the odds stacked against him, Carsten remained committed to his concept: He’d patiently wait for the opportunity to form his own development studio, so that he could pursue the creation of his dream games without the worry of executive interference. He and co-founder Carsten Korte would establish New Generation Software in 1995 (after the two Carstens first met during production of Big Sea: The Better One Will Win), and lay the groundwork for their new company by not immediately jumping into the adult end of the business — instead producing other genre titles, including a cult hit 3D first-person shooter for AGA-enabled Amigas titled Trapped 2. Doing things in this order would help ensure that the company still had reliable revenue coming in from more easily marketable games, and provide them with a fallback / safety net in the event that Wieland’s debut adult-oriented game proved a failure. And during its development, that seemed to be a very real concern among staff, who would release the upcoming title under the sub-label ‘Interactive Strip’ in order to obscure New Generation’s involvement. There was even worry from Wieland himself, who felt that the game in-progress wasn’t shaping up in the way he had hoped; until inspiration struck, and everything seemed to subsequently fall into place:

“The character LULA wasn’t originally in our game concept. It was only during the implementation of the game that I realized: Something is still missing! Today I think it was mainly this character and CDV’s ingenious marketing that made this title so successful.” ~ Carsten Wieland, lead designer / artist for Wet: The Sexy Empire^[4]

That title in question would be 1997’s Wet: The Sexy Empire — alternatively advertised as Lula: The Sexy Empire or simply as Lula, depending on your region of the world / whether or not you’re looking at one of the game’s several re-releases. Regardless of its title, the game’s premise remains the same: Playing as a bank robber betrayed by your crew, you find yourself abandoned and alone in the seedy town of Wet Rock, stuck in the middle of the desert without the cash on hand to stage an exit. While lounging by a motel pool and contemplating how you wound up there, you’re approached by a voluptuous woman who seems to take an instant liking to you — a failed actress en route to Vegas, who finds herself similarly stranded in town after the passenger bus she was riding on broke down. Following a night of tequila drinking and casual sex, our protagonist is struck by an idea: Make some quick cash by partnering with your new friend Lula to produce and sell porno. Through a business simulation-style interface, you invest your money in purchasing the necessary equipment (both photo and video cameras, lighting, and the necessary film stock), keeping up with the rent for your room, providing toys and partners for Lula to play with, as well as paying a biker gang to keep the feds at bay. After selling enough materials through a conveniently-located distributor, you can earn enough money to buy yourself a new identity and skip town, where the next phase of the game begins: Running your very own porn production company.

This next stage of the game is far more involved, as it requires renting a number of buildings (a studio for shooting, a props warehouse, an office for your writers, etc.) and hiring on cast and crew; which enable you to involve yourself in every aspect of production for your movies, and to improve your production quality as you gain access to higher-end equipment and services. Past a certain point, you’re able to customize nearly every facet of your movies; from deciding their plots, props, sets, runtimes, the actors involved, and even what soundtracks will accompany them. Unfortunately, none of this actually materializes as something you can sit back and watch for yourself, à la 2005’s The Movies: It’s all just granular detail for the sake of making the simulation aspect more elaborate, and theoretically increasing the value of your movies as you go on to sell them to the distributor. You can even go so far as to put your competition out of commission by hiring the biker gang again to disrupt their productions, and track your ascent to dominance by checking the sales chart at a local porno shop. Eventually, you start dealing with dollar amounts in the tens of millions, which takes you to the final phase of the game: Managing your own chain of adult stores, and working towards launching your own satellite network in order to broadcast Lula’s own dedicated television channel into homes across the globe. Good luck having enough patience to get to that point in the game, though: That second phase becomes a particularly monotonous drag, where the level of micromanagement required to produce each individual movie is pretty severe.

The truth of the matter is that The Sexy Empire simply doesn’t make for a particularly compelling or engaging sim: It gets so bogged down in its own minutia and necessary constant vigilance, it becomes chorelike in its tedium. It’s also something of a bug-ridden mess, with technical hiccups and crashes that disrupt the flow of gameplay, and a save system that fails to track certain key variables (such as active product orders during the game’s second phase). If there’s a single saving grace to the game though, it is undoubtedly the artwork of Carsten Wieland — finally unchained from corporate oversight, returning to his pen and paper style, and allowed to be as unrepentantly horny as he wanted to be. Most screens are populated by pretty ladies in various states of undress, or otherwise immaculately detailed in terms of backgrounds. Almost every location you can visit also comes with its own easter eggs enabling you to sexually harass your staff, either by undressing them or turning on TVs set to thumbnail-sized porno loops. There’s even limited animations that play out representing the porn you’re shooting, as well as for randomly-occurring interruptions to your operations; such as “feminists” picketing outside your studio, and complaints from your cleaning crew. There are some jarring visual elements though in the form of digitized photos representing actresses during casting processes, as well as a small handful of live-action FMVs where a poorly-dubbed blonde (presumably representing a “real-life” Lula) tutorializes you between phases of the game. These assets stand out for the fact that they’re completely incongruous with the rest of the game’s aesthetic, and don’t really do much to titillate on their own.

That’s the other thing about Lula: As far as adult games go, it provides precious little in the way of masturbation material — something you’d assume would be abundant in a game about the porno industry. Really, it’s the simulation aspect that represents the core focus of the design, where all the nudity on display is little more than set-dressing for the former. While it’s all considerably more explicit than the likes of a Bazooka Sue or what have you, none of it is substantive or stimulating enough to warrant pulling down your pants and doing whatever it is you might like to do down there. That being said, Wieland’s renderings of the female form are still quite charming in their own way: Lula as the leading lady obviously gets the most love in terms of appearances over the course of the game, and can be made to assume different positions depending on what screen you’re on. But there’s also a gaggle of gals who stand in for the different roles in the production process, who still manage to make an impression despite being relegated to static poses within single screens. I’m not ashamed to admit that I find the punk who runs the copying facility to be pretty cute, as well as the lady who handles all your editing. How long these gals might help to stave off the monotony of the gameplay though is obviously gonna depend on your own personal predilections. One thing’s for sure: If the game world wasn’t populated by Carsten’s pin-ups, it’d be a frankly unbearable bore, and likely do little to compel even the most die-hard simulation fans to stick with it to its end.

“Look at this! Didn’t Mother Nature do
a wonderful job?”
German magazine advert for
Wet: The Sexy Empire.

Now, here’s the kicker: Despite every complaint I just levied and largely middling-to-low review scores not doing it any favors, The Sexy Empire still went on to be a huge success for New Generation and their publisher CDV Software. (The company’s branding is typically stylized in lowercase, but presented in uppercase within this article for readability.) According to Wieland, the game would go on to sell upwards of a million copies over the course of its lifetime^[4b] (reporting in September 1998 would indicate it had already moved 185,000 units within Germany by that point in time),^[5] and did so largely without the benefits of international distribution. For what it was worth, Take-Two Interactive picked up publishing rights outside of Germany, and eventually brought the game to the United Kingdom and North America. But when it came to trying to shop the game in the USA, they were reportedly met with considerable backlash… at least, as “considerable” as a limited release porn game was liable to warrant back in 1997. In truth, I doubt that most folk who would’ve protested the game’s release had even noticed it came out [seeing as it was likely relegated to a mail-order / online catalogue item], and that oft-touted claims the game was “banned in California” lack any real attribution. If there’s any evidence that any of the Lula games were ever actually banned within any one of the fifty states, I certainly couldn’t find it during my research. Regardless of all that, Lula had proven that there was indeed a market for Western-produced adult games, even if it only seemed to currently exist within Germany / Europe. (Japan were still largely content to source their interactive smut domestically.) And with its success, sequels and spin-offs were a guarantee, which CDV swiftly ordered into production.

The first follow-up release to capitalize on Lula’s newfound fame would be Lula Virtual Babe (also known as Lula Inside), released in 1998. Serving to cash in on the likes of the Tamagotchi fad and the emergence of “desktop assistant” software for Windows, Virtual Babe is a program you’re meant to check in on on a daily basis; where you can feed, buy presents for, and ultimately have sex with Lula (provided that she’s “in the mood” to do so). Truth be told, this barely rates as a “video game” in my mind: It’s more just an application that you can launch if you’re looking to momentarily distract yourself with thumbnail-sized images of tame sex. Maybe if it came with a feature where you could attempt to hold a conversation with Lula (something on the level of an AOL Instant Messenger chatbot), you could at least amuse yourself with dirty talk on demand, and pretend you’re in some sort of relationship with Clippit’s hot human sister? Lacking that, I’m just not sure what role or value Virtual Babe is meant to hold in someone’s daily routine: It’s not interactive enough to qualify as entertaining, and the art is downgraded to the point where I just can’t imagine anyone getting anything out of it sexually speaking. Though Carsten Wieland is given lead credit for the art on display, I’m guessing that most of it was actually produced by one Birgit Benner (credited as providing ‘Inc & Paint’), as it’s all done digitally and lacks the attention to form / detail seen in Wieland’s usual work.

Wieland would return in full force though for the series’ next installment: 1999’s Wet Attack: The Empire Cums Back — alternatively titled Lula 2: The Sexy Galaxy. And boy howdy, this one is is a doozy: A convoluted sci-fi premise sees you inhabiting a down on his luck future-taxi driver (à la Bruce Willis’ character in The Fifth Element), who stumbles upon a distress signal recorded by Lula – acting here as the ambassador of the planet ‘Pleasure Six’ – whose galaxy is under siege by the army of the evil Pimperator. Operating as a pacifistic planet, Lula’s people lack the means to defend themselves, and must rely on outworlders for help. Naturally, our taxi driver heeds the call, and vows to rescue Lula — clearly motivated to take action by her emotional plight, and not just because he wants to have sex with her. All this backstory is filled in by means of an FMV cutscene featuring 3D-animated environments and characters, which unfortunately signals the new direction for the sequel’s in-game presentation: Primitively pre-rendered 3D assets made to replace Wieland’s beautiful hand-drawn art, immediately deflating the whole affair. For what it’s worth, Wieland does claim credit for contributing to the “in-game graphics” and “animation of the game characters and all 3D cutscenes,”^[6] but it’s clear that 3D wasn’t an artistic medium that he’d mastered yet. It’s not that the visuals on display are completely devoid of merit – in particular, the lush environments – so much as the fact that Wieland’s traditional style simply doesn’t translate here, and that so much of the original game’s charm (if that’s what we’re calling it) is lost in the process.

It doesn’t help that the gameplay this go-around is a confused cross-genre mess; jumping between a side-view point-and-click adventure style, grainy interactive FMVs during sex scenes, cockpit-view space shooting, isometric perspectives on managing a space brothel, and a hell of elaborate menus representing your space travel and business management hooks. These all correspond to different phases in the gameplay loop; which see you exploring alien planets on foot, commandeering and kitting out your spaceship (hi-lariously christened ‘The Tit’), and keeping your crew of female recruits content by providing them with sex. There’s clearly an ambition here to bring more variety to the table than in Lula’s first outing – pulling from all different manner of genres Carsten had by now become familiar with – but none of it seems to have been given the sufficient time or care needed for any singular aspect to have been fully fleshed-out. Past a certain point, you can even start opting out of having to have sex with your crew by hiring gigolos to do the job instead, which points to a realization by the developers as to how tiresome that particular mechanic could be for players. And once you cut that bit from the gameplay loop, the game effectively loses its sole element of eroticism, save for the knowledge that the walls of text on the commerce / trading screens correspond in some capacity to trafficking unseen sex. At that point, why even bother making this an adult game? Hell, why even brand it as a Lula title when her role in it has been downgraded to a glorified cameo?

Despite what seems to be a clear lack of direction or any connection to the Lula brand (as ill-defined as that brand may have been by this third entry), CDV and New Generation clearly expected The Empire Cums Back to be a success on the same level as The Sexy Empire, and put serious money toward marketing and promoting it: The game’s launch was celebrated by means of a seemingly lavish “Lula Lookalike” contest held across the cities of Hamburg and Munich, in which models were paid to appear / compete dressed as Lula (sporting blonde wigs and outfits vaguely reminiscent of her in-game appearances), as well as made to perform stripteases for an audience of horny and inebriated German men. Let’s just say that this style of promotional event hasn’t aged particularly well, and leave you to watch the footage for yourself — recorded as coverage for the German television program Liebe Sünde (‘Love Sin‘), dedicated to subjects of sex and the adult industry. The event was also covered in the pages of PC Joker magazine’s August 1999 issue,^[7] just two months after Wet Attack had featured on the cover of a previous issue and been given a full three-page feature.^[8] All this is to say that CDV were certainly putting in the work to get the game’s name out there, and awaiting what they hoped would be a major return on their investments.

Unfortunately, all this marketing didn’t amount to much when the game’s release was met with more in the way of low-scoring reviews, only to see it fail to rise to the same level of sales as Lula’s debut game. It’s hard to say that this shouldn’t have been completely predictable: In their attempts to “correct” the flaws of the first Lula game – namely, its underwhelming gameplay – the Interactive Strip team seemed to entirely neglect the aspects that had actually left a positive impression the first time around, and managed to produce a title that failed to satisfy what anyone would’ve actually wanted in a sequel. The goofy sci-fi premise strays so far from the world that had been previously established (grimy though that world may have been) and winds up feeling like the result of slapping the Lula name on some completely different game already late in development by the studio. The 3D art fails to live up to the charm of Wieland’s 2D work, and comes across so stiffly as to undercut its intended eroticism. Perhaps most bafflingly of all though, it fails to incorporate its leading lady in a truly significant capacity, and thereby fails to please folk who had grown a fondness for / attraction to her. The only impression that a fan of the original game could come away from Wet Attack with is the feeling that Wieland and company must’ve somehow been embarrassed by their previous work, and had done everything they could to try and completely distance themselves from it short of cutting Lula out completely.

The ramifications of Wet Attack’s failure were immediate, as New Generation Software [and the Interactive Strip label] seemed to quickly fold in its wake. The studio had achieved a surprise success with the original Lula – discovered the potential for an IP that could have sustained them for years to follow – and just as quickly squandered it by investing so heavily in such an utterly baffling sequel. In any other timeline or universe, I’d be writing this article about The Empire Cums Back, and discussing how it ended a franchise before it had even gotten started. But of course – seeing as we do reside in this universe (unfortunately) – there was inexplicably still more Lula yet to come. As a matter of fact, CDV already had a Lula-themed pinball game – Lula Flipper (alternatively Lula Pinball) – waiting in the wings, which they would release [as part of a combo pack with Virtual Babe] just a few months after Wet Attack — produced without any involvement from Interactive Strip, despite the fact that its table designs were largely built from pre-existing art Wieland had produced for the previous two mainline games. Only one pinball table out of the four included seemed to have unique art on display: One titled ‘Pleasure World,’ in which none of the girls who adorn it even seem to resemble Lula? If I didn’t know any better, I’d say that the game’s developer Independent Arts Software had already been prepared earlier – intended for their previous pinball game 3D Flipper XXL (which itself features a somewhat risqué Baywatch-inspired table) – but were encouraged to save it for inclusion instead in this new Lula-themed game commissioned by CDV.

With New Generation having to close their doors, Wieland and friends would soon establish a successor studio to their previous venture. Only this time around, their focus as developers would be clear from the start: Now operating as Redfire Software, the new company would specialize almost exclusively in adult games, in which Wieland could indulge in fetish art to his heart’s content. This newfound philosophy was apparent as early as in Redfire’s debut title: 2000’s Patti Pain’s Bondage Poker.** As you might be able to surmise from the title alone, Bondage Poker is a riff on strip poker, where your female opponents find themselves in increasing states of bondage up as you win hands of five-card draw. Now, call me a prude if you must; but bondage just isn’t my bag, and so Patti Pain doesn’t do much for me personally. But I get the feeling that Wieland had been chomping at the bit for a while to produce a game centered around BDSM, seeing as this one is chock-full of lovingly-rendered ladies in all manner of restraint. That and the fact it’s a theme he’d return to again in future games point to Wieland being a fan of the ol’ “Alice in chains” routine. To each their own, I suppose. The point here is that Wieland was hoping to use Redfire as a means of promoting all manner of kink-driven games, and to demonstrate their “belief that hardcore gamers (Meaning players who enjoy hardcore pornography, as Redfire seems to interpret that term — Cass) have just as much right to top quality as the mainstream gamers” (as per copy on the company’s bio).

“Look, my tits are totally tan!”
Inside Chessie: Desktop Babe worldwide release, front cover.
(Censored by me for comedic purposes.)

A visit to the Redfire Software website in the early 2000s would showcase their product range in the form of a cavalcade of animated GIFs. But perhaps the most eye-catching page element was a simple line of hyperlink text written at the top, which dared readers to ask “WHERE IS LULA…?!” The link would take you to this page, which provided a cheeky answer to that query (translated here from German to English): “Where is Lula, many fans of the platinum-blonde natural breasted wonder have been asking themselves in recent weeks. After the great success of her first two comic game titles and the subsequent 3D complete flop, the porn star has gone on vacation for an indefinite period of time to regenerate her libido. It was rumored that Lula was so frustrated with her trip into space and the 3D augmented breasts that she planned to quit the business altogether unless she was offered comic roles again.” This edition of the ‘Redfire Chronical’ [sic] – Redfire’s cutesy name / presentation for their news feed – would further go on to promote their planned “replacement” for Lula: Their new company mascot, Chessie Moon, who was planned to debut in the upcoming release of Inside Chessie: Desktop Babe. If it’s not already obvious, this program was intended as a spiritual successor to Lula Virtual Babe, in the same way that Chessie was clearly intended as the studio’s own successor to Lula — meant to be her dubiously-canonical “little sister,” even (according to a product description). Needless to say, Chessie never caught on in cultural zeitgeist in the same way as her older sibling, despite being a near carbon copy of her design.

We could spend the next several paragraphs continuing to follow Redfire’s sexual software exploits; between catering to camera-carrying vouyerists (Ibiza Babewatch), “funny animal” aficionados (Chicken Farm), and even those of the cro-magnon persuasion (Caveman Zac). Wieland would even get around to finally producing that Casablanca-inspired game concept he’d been kicking around since the early 90s, in the form of Airline 69: Return to Casablanca… along with a series of sequels, which eventually appear to devolve into gross “Nazi chic” fetishism. Unfortunately, traveling down this tangent would only take us further away from Lula, as the next installment in that series would not actually be produced by Redfire Software: When New Generation folded, CDV retained the rights to Lula, and would sit on them for several years — until the time was right to try again at a new installment. That work would evidently begin in 2001, with a project under the working title of ‘Lula: Wild Highways.’ And though Redfire would not be the studio developing it, Wieland was brought on in an individual capacity to design the game’s concept and characters, which originally seemed to adhere to the 2D “comic” style he thought best fit Lula.

Unfortunately, CDV would double down on rendering Lula’s DDs in 3D, and commit to that direction with the public announcement of Lula 3D in April of 2002 — still utilizing the same road trip premise and cast of characters Wieland had created for them. A press kit for the upcoming title would be carried by a small handful of games news sites, where it was indicated that an internal development team at CDV would be aiming for a launch in the “second half of 2003.”^[9] Another detail of note would be the game’s choice of engine: Named ‘Vulpine Vision’ (what would eventually become the Havok Vision Game Engine), it would be the same framework used to power another game of in development by one of CDV’s subsidiary studios (NuClearVision Entertainment) titled Psychotoxic — a female-lead first-person shooter with cross-dimensional travel and psychic abilities. Without going too long on another tangent [since Wieland wasn’t involved in the project]: Psychotoxic would survive a cancellation, undergo multiple changes in publisher, wind up releasing in an unfinished state, and ultimately go on to be hailed as an all-time worst in its genre. It’s definitely a game we’ll have to cover in detail some other day here on the Bad Game Hall of Fame, since it’s the sort of overly-ambitious / poorly-executed mess that’s right up my alley.

Returning to Lula 3D: Included with copy bragging up the power of the Vulpine engine were further boasts as to how many polygons the game would be pushing. Evidently, locations would be rendered with as many as 100,000 polygons, while characters would be allotted upwards of 5,000 apiece — a number slightly higher than the 4,400 used to sculpt Lara Croft’s in-game model for Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness.^[10] I address these numbers not because they were impressive for the time, but for the fact that polygon counts are an absolutely meaningless metric. As it turns out, you can render a character with a trillion polygons if you so choose to, but they still won’t count for much unless they’re in service of an especially striking visual style! And to be clear, the early screenshots provided for Lula 3D weren’t anything to write home about: Sure, the environments adequately depicted the grimy streets and storefronts that the game would take place across, but the character models on display spoke to a cast lacking the charms of Wieland’s expressive caricatures. In particular, Lula’s early model came across as especially unflattering, where whatever attempt at “realism” (?) was being made here did little to convey her as the alluring sex goddess that she had been established as. Worse yet: A set of 2D character concept art (1, 2, 3) that Wieland had originally been commissioned to produce would often be included within those same preview articles, and pose a stark contrast to the work of CDV’s 3D artists being put on display, where his style continued to prove untranslatable into the new dimension.

If all this comes across as me being overly-concerned with video game graphics (typically the aspect I care least about when it comes to evaluating a game), it’s only because CDV seemed to be pushing visuals as Lula 3D‘s primary selling point above anything else. That at least makes sense for a title ostensibly intended to titillate — where a player’s enjoyment may well hinge on how attractive / detailed the character renders are. But if these early screenshots represented the best CDV had to offer, they were gonna be in for a nasty surprise when the critics got proper hold of the finished product. Matthias Mangelsdorf – a preview editor for AdventureCorner.de – would be so bold as to openly speculate that “players will probably want the old 2D comic look of the beautiful leading actress back,”^[11] seeming to suggest what a final verdict might’ve looked like had the game settled on this design for Lula. Perhaps noting this backlash from critics and potential consumers, CDV would eventually order a full makeover for Lula’s in-game model, which was delivered to them by Psychotoxic’s developer NuClearVision. And according to NuClearVision’s online portfolio, that order from CDV had been a fairly urgent one: “A new, contemporary Lula had to be invented and realized under great time pressure. After two weeks of work, a new Lula emerged with a new style and look.”^[12] The result was still a far cry from Wieland’s vision, but at least seemed to represent a step forward in that direction. That being said, the decision to rework elements of the game mid-development seemed to have come at a great cost: The first in a series of delays that would see Lula 3D release a full two years later than initially projected.

We can track the game’s delays through the Lula3D.de website; first established on August 29th of 2003, and advertising a launch window in the “second half of 2003.” By October, that release date would be pushed back to “the beginning of 2004” — updated alongside news that two other CDV titles (Psychotoxic and Sabotain) had been canceled outright. As a make-good for this delay, the site would offer a mail-order Lula calendar for the upcoming year (titled ‘The Sexy Calendar 2004’), which they had previously teased as a “surprise in store for all those faithful admirers of our buxom blonde.” In or around April 2004, a table at the top of the homepage made to indicate the game’s planned release dates across the world (broken down across Germany, the UK & USA, and vaguely-defined “Other countries”) would be updated to reflect a new “2nd quarter 2004” estimate, without any accompanying news posts to explain or excuse the continued delays. The only element on the website that would continue to see any further updates would be this table, as it would be changed with the passing of each missed launch window. Even after the game’s release – and knowing full well that the website’s URL would be printed on the game’s German cover – the Lula3D.de website would never update to reflect the fact that it ever actually came out; continuing to indicate a “1st quarter 2005” release date in Germany (with other territories still frozen in perpetual “tba”) until as late as January 2007 — shortly before the website went offline.

Despite the neglect paid toward updating the website, CDV would still actively keep the gaming press abreast of Lula 3D’s continued development: The game would feature as a recurring part of CDV’s E3 booth between 2002 and 2005… though it never actually showcased on any of their kiosk screens. I guess that doesn’t really count as “featuring,” does it? Evidently, it was kept relegated to a verbal subject between CDV’s representatives and inquiring press, which IGN’s Stephen Ng would speculate [within a 2004 booth report] was due to “fear of offending conservatives and moderates” — folk who might’ve taken umbrage with such a gratuitous game being in clear sight on a show floor.^[13] Funnily enough, Stephen would go on to point out the fact that CDV’s booth that year was sandwiched between playable demo kiosks for Playboy: The Mansion and a Tecmo booth “parading scantily clad Dead or Alive models” — going so far as to admit that convention attendees were setting up post in CDV’s space for the sole purpose of leering at all the booth babes from afar. And that just about sums up the state of the games industry / journalism in the early aughts, in the event you weren’t around for it!

“No aesthetics in the world any more! And no love! Yes, sir!”
Promotional screenshot for Lula 3D, circa 2002.

In the October 2003 issue of Russia’s Game.EXE magazine, an interview would be conducted (and later translated into English by Gamers Hell) with Lula 3D’s producer Martin Depp — the man “responsible for the [game’s] content, deadlines and all the stuff that makes the game world go round.”^[14][15] As a magazine which routinely covered adult games – even dedicating whole issues to the subject – interviewer Alexander Vershinin’s questions were largely focused on the subjects of marketing and how “graphic” the game intended to get. Curiously, one of the very first questions Alexander asks begins with him stating that “There is almost no information on Lula 3D in the net: No previews, no ‘first looks’” — a claim I would contend to be demonstrably untrue, but which Martin surprisingly has no rebuttal for. After another awkward exchange where Vershinin ponders why Lula “[has] any reason to look like Pam Anderson so much” – to which Martin can only respond with a befuddled [or possibly facetious] “Who’s Pam Anderson???” – we finally start to get into some more substantive questions. When asked what kind of action the gameplay would contain [beyond its core adventure game hooks], Martin reveals that active combat would feature heavily: “Lula’s got to fight with everything she’s got, like fists, feet, guns or a pan. Yes, a pan.” When pressed on how sexually explicit the game would be, Martin goes on to describe the process of motion-capturing a variety of sex acts: “We had tons of motion capture moves — not for the fighting action only, but for the erotic action as well. Lula will have a lot of sex with various partners, she’ll strip and pole dance, and there are many cut scenes showing everything. You can save those scenes and watch them again and again, with a free camera mode!” (Stick a pin in that supposed “replay” feature for later.)

In a shocking turn, Vershinin dares to ask if Depp would “allow [his] own children to play the game,” which receives a frankly baffling response: “Depends on the kid’s character and game experience, not on his age.”^[14b] Rather than spend time unpacking that reply (I’m sure CDV’s legal department had plenty to say to Martin post-interview), let’s just move right along, shall we? Vershinin poses a couple different questions with regards to the state of the adult game market, such as why the “definitely profitable niche” remained untapped in the West in the wake of Leisure Suit Larry. Depp’s reply reveals something like CDV’s motivation to resurrect Lula: “I loved the Larry series. But they were very American. Due to censorship, they always stopped showing more when it became interesting. And 10 years ago, there was no Internet as we know it today, offering tons of erotic pictures and movies for your computer. There HAVE been games, but just silly, cheap ones. It’s not enough to show nudity only: A game has to be fun to play — and when it’s erotic, it’s even better.” In his closing question, Vershinin asks Depp to speculate on the appeal of “so-called hentai games,” and if they had the potential “to conquer the Western audience.” Depp’s prediction here misses the mark so completely as to prove downright embarrassing (with the benefit of twenty years hindsight): “I don’t think they’ll conquer the western world: The Asian ‘preferences’ are much too different. Just think of their schoolgirl-in-uniform-fantasies.” I’d like to take this opportunity to poll my own audience: Can any of you even think of a single adult game in the last decade that doesn’t hail from Japan, or otherwise take most of its aesthetic cues from hentai?.

I feel it’s important to highlight that interview since it speaks to the state of the adult games market in the 2000s, and because it reveals several of CDV’s intentions for Lula 3D. There’s a clear motivation to push the genre past the point of mere novelty, and a theory that incorporating more conventional action game hooks into it would be one of the keys to wider acceptance and appeal. Not only that, but CDV clearly believed they were innovating within the field by producing sex scenes in full 3D — something which Martin seemed to believe “no one [had] really done yet,” outside of heavily self-censored affairs as seen in something like 2002’s Mafia [which Depp mentions by name].^[14c] The impression I get from reading this is that CDV felt spurred on by a perceived opportunity to be the “first” in their field to stake a claim in this corner of the market, and that the decision to develop the game in 3D (rather than return to Lula’s time-tested 2D roots) was their attempt at providing a “unique” selling point. I put these words in sarcastic quotation due to the fact that by the time Lula 3D eventually released, it had already arrived too late: Titles such as the aforementioned Playboy: The Mansion, Leisure Suit Larry’s return in Magna Cum Laude, and even The Guy Game were by this point starting to push the limits of the console market; while PC gamers already had access to full-fledged three-dimensional sex simulators, the likes of 3D Sex Villa and Virtually Jenna. And that’s not even mentioning the games we were starting to see imported from Japan, which were receiving proper localizations written for international distribution. As CDV attempted to distinguish themselves from that lot with a focus on providing both action and eroticism in equal measure, it begged the question: Was that balancing act even something consumers were interested in seeing, or would they just prefer to keep their porn and their video games separate from one another?

Come June 22nd, 2005, the European territory (excluding the United Kingdom) would serve as the initial testing grounds for CDV’s sexual software experimentation, as Lula 3D finally made it to market (value priced at £19.99).^[16] The game would later release in the UK on February 10th, 2006 — a delay likely due to either a late start on localization, or issues in locking down retail channels. All that remained on CDV’s itinerary was a North American launch, which had to overcome numerous obstacles in order to secure a digital distribution deal within the region — the only route they could go after having apparently been denied any opportunities for retail distribution.^[17] It would appear as though a deal struck with Playboy to promote / give away a limited number of subscriptions to their ‘Cyber Club’ service is what ultimately allowed them to offer up the game for sale — a process you would initiate through the Lula3D.com website (which was actually maintained to an extent, unlike the Lula3D.de domain), and which presumably downloaded the game from Playboy’s servers.^[18] Naturally, Lula 3D‘s North American release would go on to miss one more projected release date: A planned launch in March 2006 came and went, before finally materializing on April 11th. At long last, consumers could see for themselves what all the years of fuss and teasing had amounted to, in the form of Lula’s latest release.

** Full disclosure: I’m not entirely sure if Patti Pain’s Bondage Poker is, in fact, Redfire Software’s debut game? There’s evidence that points to Ibiza Comic Poker preceding Patti Pain by a year — games database entries that contend a 1999 release year for this island vacation-themed poker title. But I’m inclined to disagree with this speculative date: The original RedfireSoft.de online catalogue features nothing in the way of proof / promotion for it all the way through to 2004, at which point they transitioned to a new domain (RedfireHard.com) where the game now suddenly appeared under their ‘Products’ list. What’s even more telling is the fact that characters from Caveman Zac (a game from 2004) appear on the playing cards, which strongly suggest a later release for Comic Poker. Nobody in the entire universe but me cares about this pedantic bullshit.

“Dumb as a Hammer, but Hard as One Too!”

“I’d say: Posture 9, dynamics 9, and sound effects 7 points.”
German release, back cover.

Following the events of Lula: The Sexy Empire, our lovely leading lady Lula decided to continue her career in the adult film industry, and appears to be doing pretty well for herself: Her image adorns the front of every porno mag, DVD cover, and even framed paintings; across seemingly every place of business in the United States. Folk recognize her on the streets, and women come to her begging for the opportunity to feature in her X-rated productions. And why shouldn’t they? Those lucky enough to find themselves under her employ get to hang out at her lavish Beverly Hills mansion (one of the properties you wind up buying in The Sexy Empire), where Lula has settled comfortably into the role of director on a top-of-the-line film set. Clearly, the lessons she learned during her time with her former bank robber turned business partner (and possible ex-husband, if in-game references are to be inferred correctly) stuck with her, and she’s applied them towards running a porn empire known the whole world over. Unfortunately, there may have been one vital lesson she failed to pick up on: Paying for effective security at your place of business. I’m telling you, you can’t expect to run a multi-million dollar operation without providing a constant supply of beer to a scuzzy biker gang.

This becomes a problem on the day of shoot set to feature a set of triplets, as a crew of armed kidnappers stealthily infiltrate the property and steal the trio from under the crew’s noses. Their criminal act is only revealed when Lula’s producer Brian goes to call them from their room to the set, and initially mistakes the messy scene of the crime as the result of “one hell of an orgy.” (Is he implying something of an incestous nature to it here?) It falls on Lula to do the detective work, realize the true nature of what took place, and to decide whether or not to rely on the police to solve the case. Hilariously, if you should elect to try involving the cops; they waste your time over the phone and refuse to so much as show up (true to life), and the game immediately ends right then and there with a frustrated Lula throwing her phone at your screen. Instead, you as the player must choose to investigate the kidnapping on your own, and control Lula as she embarks on a road trip spanning multiple states — solving the case on your own, and rescuing the triplets from their captors. And if you should happen to deface a national monument and kill a few cops along the way? Well, that just adds a little bit of excitement to the whole adventure.

Lula 3D represents the first installment in the series to actually let you play as Lula, as she’s controlled by means of mouse and keyboard within self-contained 3D levels. She can be made to walk and run, interact with people and objects in her environment, and use items she picks up along the way. In other words, all the standard actions you’d expect in an adventure game; plus a couple surprise minigames along the way, which switch you to a first-person view. As a matter of fact, you can toggle between first and third person perspective at most points during the game, depending on what suits your preference. Of course, playing in first-person will deprive you of the pleasure of staring at Lula’s butt, which occupies the dead center of the screen in your behind-the-back camera view. It’s pretty obvious that the intended experience by the developers is this third-person perspective, where the work put into Lula’s animations can be fully appreciated in all their sexy (overly-long) detail. It’s also clear to see that Lula is the stand-out character model in the game, owing to NuClearVision’s work in re-imagining her late into development: Her design stands out from everything around her; being of a markedly higher render quality, given the most carefully-keyframed animations, and generally failing to mesh stylistically with every other character in the game.

The bulk of the graphic work done internally at CDV isn’t terrible, per se: Environments are often elaborately rendered, and non-playable characters look appropriately detailed for the year they were produced… that year, of course, being 2002; where it seems most of the work on the game had already been completed (judging from preview screenshots, and how closely they match up with the final product). In the three years it took for the game to actually go gold, you’d figure that CDV’s team might’ve taken some of that time to polish things up a bit — maybe update their character models some to closer match the level of detail seen in Lula, or implement dynamic lighting effects? But alas, Lula 3D can’t shake the feeling of being stuck in ‘02, and lacking in comparison to its contemporaries in 2005. Not to make too fine a point of it, but the industry was in a state of rapid technological advancement through the aughts, and Lula 3D got left in the dust. Further evidence to that fact is the lack of customizable graphics settings; which are instead provided to players solely in the form of three selectable presets, where the ‘High’ setting can only scale the resolution to a maximum of 1024 by 768 pixels. Furthermore, there are no native options for running the game in a window, or doing much else to future-proof the game for modern PCs. These are features and options that the Vision Engine was more than capable of providing, but which CDV evidently saw no reason to implement into their game — likely not wanting to bother with creating higher-resolution 2D assets for anything larger than the old XGA standard, or to have to draw up alternate widescreen-friendly versions of the UI elements. It’s unfortunate, but this stuff really does detract from the PC gaming experience, and makes all of CDV’s early bragging about being on the cutting edge of graphic design seem totally out of touch.

Bearing all that in mind, allow me to retake my comments on the quality of character and world rendering: While the environmental texture work can be impressively varied, those efforts are offset by sometimes primitive geometry and a total lack of lighting / shadow effects. The world of Lula 3D comes across as flat as a result, and undermines the attention to detail that clearly went into populating it with so many interactables and background details. Funnily enough, the assets most likely to catch your eye are the paintings and pornography that litter so many of the scenes, for the fact that many of them are lifted from pre-existing Carsten Wieland art — between his older renders of Lula for The Sexy Empire, as well as a few pulled from the likes of Patti Pain’s Bondage Poker and Ibiza Babewatch (and possibly some other Redfire Software titles). As always, Wieland’s work is the clear stand-out in every game he contributes to… even as Lula 3D fails to credit him for anything beyond his ‘Story / Design’ work, in a glaring omission on CDV’s part. The closest they get to actually attributing his art to him comes in the form of a couple of the interactable paintings, on which Lula will comment something like “An unknown masterpiece by Carsten!” The most subtle of wink-nods imaginable, and a joke likely to fly over the heads of 99% of players. And when those paintings are further tossed into a mix among dozens of other half-baked Photoshop jobs parodying the works of Van Gogh and Andy Warhol (“Oh, Andy. We’ll never forget you… especially all your leftover cocaine”), it just winds up feeling like they’re being used as filler material here: JPG files inside a directory of disorganized images the team could pull from when they needed to fill an otherwise empty space on a wall.

Which brings me back to the matter of the character models: Without continuing to hammer home the point I’ve already made about Wieland’s style not translating to 3D space, let me say instead that you can clearly tell which characters were at least conceptualized by Carsten for the ‘Wild Highways’ design, and which were just hastily assembled by the CDV team in order to occupy space. Key characters most likely envisioned by Wieland benefit from carefully decided wardrobes and/or comically-exaggerated facial features (especially the villains, who are often uniquely grotesque), while more generic fill-ins generally seem to pull from a small pool of interchangeable / generic bodies and faces. But not even every key character gets to benefit from Wieland’s comparatively creative visions: Your producer Brian – who I’d qualify as a main character in the story – gets dressed in a white t-shirt and greenish khakis, and has a face that stands out only because it bears a [likely unintended] resemblance to Gordon Freeman’s Half-Life 1 depiction. But where Lula 3D truly fails is in its attempts to render uniquely sexy women — what should arguably be the main draw in a game meant to celebrate the female form, and within the world of which are most frequently seen engaging in sex.

It’s here where the recycled faces and body models do a true disservice to those who enjoy a variety of ladies, since everyone [besides Lula] adheres to identical measurements and only the slightest variations in facial features and hairstyle. For as many women as you may be able to find either having sex or walking around in the nude, none of them actually stand out from one another, or engage with you in a capacity beyond moaning while someone else is fucking them. Ironically, the more dressed a woman is generally tends to indicate that they’ll stand out more amongst the crowd, and likely play a more substantive role in the story. I hate to say it, but it’s something that Wieland realized a while ago: “The clothes make the woman,” and the player’s gaze often gravitates more toward ladies in provocative dress than the fully nude gals standing right beside them. I’m far more likely to remember the game’s Marilyn Monroe impersonator clad in her iconic white dress – who you never get to see naked, mind you – than I am the “fifth naked woman caught mid-sex on a park bench” you come across during the game. Where discovering girls having public sex is meant to be some sort of treat for the player / incentive to explore environments, these numerous instances all blend together for their lack of uniquely-crafted characters and frankly unimpressive looped animations. For all the talk of motion-capturing actors simulating sex that the developers used as reference, there’s honestly very little in the way of scenes you’ll want to stick around to watch play out — even in the rare instances where Lula actually involves herself.

Frankly, all the sex in Lula 3D gets to be a bit tiresome past a certain point — so constant as to prove an unwelcome distraction when you’re just wanting to advance the plot. Insert your own joke here about “playing an adult game for the story” being akin to “reading Playboy for the articles.” But it really does ring true: Stopping the game dead in its tracks to watch Lula play with a vibrator on a bed or go skinny-dipping (save for keeping her boots on) in a pool doesn’t serve it well, considering how briefly these cutscenes run and how unimpressive the animations prove to be. When it comes to matters of “insertion,” Lula 3D suffers from the problem of phallic objects simply clipping into a character’s model rather than being deliberately inserted — never observed spreading holes open and coming back out with anything in the way of visible wetness. The camera never zooms in or lingers on these intimate details that would prove truly erotic, as the developers knew full well they lacked the capacity to manipulate their models / render genitalia in a way that lends itself to closer scrutiny. The end result is scenes of masturbation looking like Lula is just slapping herself in the crotch with her toys rather than putting them inside herself, while the sex scenes featuring multiple partners read as disconnected character models going through non-synchronous motions in close proximity to one another. Sure, you can tell that the intention in a given scene may be for Lula to be eating out or fingering a female partner; but for all technical intents and purposes, she’s just rubbing her lips against and vaguely gesturing her hand in the general direction of a vagina (all while both their faces remain eerily static).

And then there’s the fact that the developers shy away from depicting male genitalia — deliberately choose angles and positions that obscure penises from view, and opt for an intrusive ‘Censored’ bar in the single scene that sees Lula engage in prolonged intercourse with a male. I don’t know if this comes down to a matter of “content restrictions” still limiting what can be visually depicted in an ‘USK 18+’ title within Germany, or the developers simply not wanting to spend the time modeling penises for reasons of their own insecurities? Either way, it detracts significantly from the appeal of the scenes shown in the game; where even the most aggressively heterosexual cis male would likely admit to you (in lengthy and explicit detail, if you let them) that the size and shape of penises featured in man-on-woman porn is a contributing factor to their enjoyment — where seeing how large a dick a woman “can take” is part of the appeal. Seeing that genitalia on-screen as a partner interacts with it plays into a penis-owning viewer imagining their own participation in a scene, in the same way that an individual who receives pleasure from filling their own orifices may fixate on those corresponding points of entry. What I’m trying to say is: If you’re going to sell a game based centered on the premise of displaying graphic hardcore sex, you can’t just decide to shy away from rendering penises on characters who put them to use. All that leaves in Lula 3D that might excite a player are the so-called “softcore” scenes; the likes of pole-dancing, strip-teases, and general nudity. But again: These scenes rarely tend to last long enough for a player to fully enjoy them, the character models on display aren’t up to visual par, and they often arrive as momentum-stopping distractions during portions of gameplay where you may find yourself simply wanting to get back to being in control.

Oh, that’s another thing! None of the sexually explicit scenes in the game offer you any form of interaction, as they all play out in pre-scripted cutscenes. Considering that Lula 3D does feature minigames of several varieties, it’s a surprise that CDV’s team never went so far as to tie that level of interaction in with their sex animations; where a player could be made to maintain a rhythm or otherwise participate in helping Lula to achieve climax. This is the sort of stuff that separates true adult games from those which simply incorporate sex as a novelty — as only briefly in-focus elements meant to grab momentary attention, before returning to a title’s core gameplay. And y’know the thing about games that shoehorn disconnected sex scenes into the middle of more conventional gameplay? Those moments usually wind up feeling more awkward than erotic, and often prove uncomfortable for a player rather than immersive. (The example in my mind is the infamous “lap dance scene” in Metro: Last Light.) In the case of a game though like Lula 3D that puts sex front and center, the complete lack of these hooks is what serves to take a player out of the experience. Seeing every instance of erotic content within Lula 3D fail to prove compelling, that leaves it with the traditional adventure game portions having to carry most of the weight… and finally brings us back to a subject matter which I’m way more comfortable / qualified to explore.

Now, as we get into Lula 3D‘s gameplay, I want to share with you the three main factors I most heavily weigh / judge adventure games by: The quality of the writing and stories they convey, how compelling the characters you encounter along the way prove,** and the intuitiveness of the solutions to their logic puzzles. While I still intend to cover all the other general design and technical facets of Lula 3D, I’m making a point of these three aspects here to try and establish a focus on them in particular. Because it’s my belief that if any one of these three factors should fail catastrophically in their implementation, they take the whole game down with them — render the rest of an adventure game’s design moot, seeing as it’s already failed to get the essentials right. At least, that’s how I personally tend to look at them, and how I’m gonna approach evaluating this game from here on out.

From the moment you take control in Lula 3D, it sets to work immediately establishing what to expect from its gameplay loop: Each location you’ll visit as Lula will be presented as a self-contained level, where completing a list of goals will enable you to move on from there and onto the next in linear fashion (meaning there’s no need or way to revisit locations after finishing them). Most typically, your end goals will require unlocking doors or cabinets containing vital items or information to your quest; and so your goals prior to that usually center around finding ways to bypass those locks — not always by the traditional means of a matching key. Instead, you’ll find yourself exhausting every line of dialogue across every NPC in a given area, interacting with every indicated hotspot, and gathering an assortment of tools that’ll enable your progress. So far, so standard. But Lula 3D does throw a few spanners into the works, whether it deliberately sets out to or not: Aside from its often unconventional puzzle solutions, there are instances where progression can be outright bugged, and soft-lock you in a state where completing your goals is impossible — the cardinal sin of adventure game design, if ever there was one.

Take the game’s starting area in Lula’s Beverly Hills estate / film set: Your first mission is discovering the circumstances of the triplets’ kidnapping, by unlocking your security office and reviewing the footage recorded on your cameras. (“The newest model of the Stalker TV! It can record up to 690 hours in one go!”) This all plays out straightforwardly enough, with you finding the key to the office amongst the debris in the triplets’ bedroom, and all the materials needed to play back the tapes being consolidated within the security room itself. It’s all so clearly laid out and accessible, you might figure you don’t really need to confer with every other NPC before solving this part of the puzzle on your own. But that’d be a big mistake: Your next mission [after informing Brian of your findings] is to find someone who might remember your cameraman Spandau’s phone number, since neither you or Brian happen to have it handy. This ultimately requires you to talk to one of your actresses who can be found sunbathing by the pool, who complains about “lesbian flings getting kind of old.” (She still lets you fuck her with your vibrator (🔊), in spite of that.) Unfortunately, if you had neglected to talk to her prior to this phase of the quest, she is improperly flagged as not being intractable anymore at this point; meaning you can’t engage her in conversation, or get the necessary info from her needed to proceed. And thus, your adventure unceremoniously ends in a situation where a first-time player is likely left without any clue as to what to do / what they might’ve done wrong. This easy-to-trigger game-breaking bug appears in the literal first twenty minutes of the game, and might indicate a terrifying precedent for the next seven to eight hours to come.

Luckily, I didn’t encounter any other instances of improper flagging that stopped me similarly dead in my tracks, and couldn’t find anyone online who ran into further issues to this effect either. Instead, the recurring issue I bumped up against were NPC conversations occasionally breaking mid-discussion; where clicking on dialogue options yielded no effect, I couldn’t exit out of conversations to get back to controlling Lula, and one instance where an NPC got stuck repeating the same line ad infinitum (🔊) that I couldn’t escape from. This issue remained fairly consistent from the beginning of the game to the very end, and always reared its head just when I felt I was past it. I think the problem here has something to do with scenarios where the developers didn’t expect you to try certain combinations of items with particular NPCs, as there’s no contingency / fallback in the scripting that would allow you to simply get kicked back out of the conversation window? I guess that one might be on me for thinking I was being funny by seeing what every NPC in the game had to say about Lula’s dildo she brought from home… except for the fact there were absolutely instances in which I talked to NPCs empty-handed, and still managed to break their conversations completely. So maybe this whole feature – one that is central to the core of the game, mind you – is just held together by spaghetti code, and liable to break if you so much as look at it funny? Save early, save often.

Even if you should manage to get through conversations without anything breaking (disregarding minor visual issues with wonky camera placement and objects obscuring your view), that still just means that you’ll have to endure these dialogues as they were intended. The first thing I’ll have to note here is the localization of the script from German to English (at least, in playing the English-language version of the game), and the associated recording of English voiceover to match it all: I’d wager the translation process was undertaken in such a way that the team (or individual) responsible had no idea what lines were meant to connect to each other in conversations — likely not having been provided anything in the way of a full script for the game, and instead left to translate directly from plaintext files containing each individual character’s list of lines. This also means that the actors brought on to voice the characters probably had no context for what lines of dialogue they’d be responding to in a given exchange, and no sense for what their motivations / tone should be. The end result is hours of voiceover that all feels completely stilted — often with inappropriate mid-sentence pauses, corresponding to moments where dialogue in the game has to break its lengthier on-screen text boxes down into multiple successive chunks. At its worst, this results in torturously extended deliveries that have to constantly stop dead in their tracks while the game itself catches up, where you can really sense that the actors have no idea what they’re about to say next from line to line. At its best, it simply results in jokes having their comedic timing ruined, or instances where even you as the player lose track of conversations. I might have “best” and “worst” mixed up here?

These issues are further compounded by the fact that the translation work is fundamentally sub-par, and that entire lines of dialogue make absolutely no sense / feel completely disconnected from the conversations they occur during. It often comes across as attempts at non-sequitur humor, where you can never be sure if a character is deliberately being obtuse or just delivering a line that got garbled in the translation. Occasionally, it’s clear to see that Lula is accidentally being made to read other characters’ lines, which only serves to further derail these conversations. This is before we even get into the tendency of dialogue during cutscenes to overlap over each other due to mistiming (where subtitles aren’t even provided for clarity), and occasions where the game defaults to German-language voiceover in lieu of the English localization covering certain lines. The whole experience borders on surrealism: An ironic fate considering that an entire level within the game centers around a horribly misguided parody of David Lynch, which accuses his style of surrealist filmmaking of being the result of brain damage from excessive drug use. (Never mind the fact that he’s abstained from drugs since the 1970s after buying into Transcendental Meditation.)^[19] It’s not that I think the shoddy localization process here butchered what would’ve otherwise been a brilliant and witty script in its original German: I’d bet it was already dealing in pretty lacklustre writing from the very start. But when it’s made to pass through such a crooked lens as to distort it to the point of complete and utter nonsense – making it genuinely hard to follow what’s happening in any given scene – it really does affect your ability to parse and enjoy the dialogue for whatever its original intentions were.

Unfortunately, no character suffers quite as greatly for this mishandled localization as Lula herself: The character whose high-heel boots you’re made to put yourself in, and whose actress was given the unenviable task of trying to perform within the constraints of such a poor translation. On paper, the archetype she’s meant to convey is the “not-so-dumb blonde” — a woman who everyone seems to underestimate due to her appearance and profession, who manages to shock and surprise them all by actually being quite clever / easily able to outsmart them. It’s a fun type of character to inhabit in an adventure game, where you get to use your sex appeal and the power of assumption to outfox everyone standing in your way — living vicariously through your confident character all the while. But in actual execution within Lula 3D’s localization, Lula unfortunately comes across every bit the original and unflattering archetype of the “dumb blonde” she’s meant to subvert: Utterly clueless in conversation, made to mispronounce every other word, and where the random facts she’s able to recite by textbook definition (such as the historical / scientific origins of tomatoes, complex mathematics, and fourth-wall breaking explanations of game programming) come across as her clumsily reading some off-screen cue card on subjects she has no real understanding of. It makes for some truly difficult listening as a player, where you can see how far from the intended delivery Lula’s actress is straying. And that’s when she’s bothering to even read her lines as written, instead of substituting words and changing entire sentences around so that they don’t match up with the in-game subtitles at all; which, of course, only contributes further to the inability to follow conversations and make sense of the plot.

I still have a few more points I want to make about Lula 3D’s dialogue, but I’m gonna stop here for now and address the rest of them later: They’ll make more sense with the context of plot developments that occur over the course the game’s story, which we have to actually start summating at this point. (If not now, when?) While I’m at it, I’m also going to give away most of the puzzle solutions, so that we can get an idea for what kind of “logic” the game expects you to employ. So, spoiler warning if you for some reason intend to play Lula 3D for yourself, I guess? I’ve never really given “spoiler warnings” before in these reviews. I assume that if you’re reading 20,000+ word articles about old video games that most people hate, you probably don’t care about having things spoiled for you. Perhaps you’ve already played Lula 3D. Maybe you’re reading this so that you never have to! But if you’re reading to determine whether or not you actually want to play it? Let me just come right out and say that I don’t think you should. Surely, you have better things to do with your time — better games you could be playing, at the very least. Anyway, let’s get on with it.

Lula’s pursuit of the triplets / kidnappers first takes her to the streets of San Francisco, as a matchbook left behind at the scene of the crime points her in the direction of a seedy strip joint known as the ‘Wild Chicken Club.’ Unfortunately, she can’t just walk into the place even under the guise of a paying customer, as they have a strict “male clientele only” policy. And so, your goal turns to establishing rapport with a pair of female employees on the outside, so that you might be able to pose as one of them and gain entry. In the process of doing so, you’ll need to enter into an apartment complex that is initially locked, which only seems to open up after exhausting every last line of dialogue across every NPC in the area — with absolutely no indication given as to who or what is responsible for activating this flag, and no indication given when you do so. This somehow leads to a series of events in which you steal black licorice from a homeless man, have a distiller use said licorice to make a bottle of booze for you, and use said booze to convince a drunkard photographer to let you borrow his black wig and a key to Spandau’s apartment. After feeding some cats, you find another key that opens Spandau’s locker, containing a missing tape from the kidnapping and directly implicating him in the crime. Doing all this finally allows you access to the club, where your half-assed disguise is enough to get past a self-proclaimed “real idiot” guarding the back door and further fool the staff inside… Never mind the fact that Lula’s face can be seen on every poster and television screen within said club.

From here, you have to pick up on a subtle hint when the club’s staff mockingly (?) tells you to go clean the customers’ cups. What this is actually means is spiking the bartender’s drink with hot sauce so he gets sick and walks away, giving you a window of time to push a tea warmer into his sink; so that when you ask him to clean a cup for you, he burns his hand and distracts a security guard, allowing you access to the upstairs area of the club. Here, you can sneakily listen in on a meeting between Spandau and his employer Stanley, where you discover that they’re intending to interrogate a woman for the location of some valuable goods. It’s also at this point that the game tosses you into a couple of “stealth” scenarios, where you have to hide from Stanley and his men, or otherwise get shot to death and cue a ‘Game Over’ screen. These entail walking into any of the adjacent rooms, at which point the baddies immediately walk right past you and let you get back to work. Splinter Cell this is not. After this, you unlock the door to a dominatrix’s room, where Lula immediately recognizes a man tied to a rack (just from seeing his backside, mind you) as being a senator. After asserting your own dominance over the dom, you take over for her and knock the senator out with a cast iron pan, allowing you to undo his handcuffs and use them on the last security guard blocking your exit.

You next find yourself at a pit stop en route to Las Vegas, where you realize that your pursuers are holed up at an adjacent motel. Before you can deal with them though, you have to subject yourself to the agonizingly drawn out / strangely acted / downright incoherent rantings of a gas station employee, who you can eventually gather is dealing with his wife leaving him for their gardener. This eventually leads Lula to try and comfort the poor sap by treating him to a strip tease, which ultimately goes off the rails when you make the mistake of calling your naked body a “Garden of Eden.” This inexplicably results in his running away mumbling something about fertilizer, and dropping a switchblade for you to pick up. You can use this to puncture the tires on the criminals’ van, but not without being noticed by a goon who draws a gun on you. Which leads us to the first of several in Lula 3D‘s incredibly clumsy Time Crisis-inspired action sequences: A first-person minigame in which you either toss an infinite supply of knives or fire a handgun at enemies ducking in and out of cover, as you similarly hide from incoming fire behind your own surroundings.

The big issue is, your enemies don’t seem to actually be vulnerable until they’ve finished their firing animations, and it’s hard to gauge how much time you actually have to get a hit in before they disappear from sight again. You wind up waiting so long for your targets to pop their heads out, you’re liable to get impatient and break from cover too early, which inevitably results in your taking damage from it. So it becomes a frustrating exercise in guessing when the right times to hide and shoot are, where failure is punished by your view becoming hazier as your health decreases. Add to this a shaky crosshair that makes your shots whiff more often than not, and the complications that come from later facing multiple shooters simultaneously who operate on different timing cycles, and the end result is a truly half-baked and unpleasant addition to the game. At the very least, you’re given infinite retries, albeit presented on a “try again” screen that erroneously retains its German-language text (“Ja” and “Nein”). And your reward for clearing this first minigame is getting to meet my favorite character in the game: A redhead named Gina (frequently mispronounced as “Gene-er” by Lula’s voice actress), who was just about to steal your car after holding up a diner. Rather than finding herself scared or annoyed by having a revolver waved in her face, Lula seems immediately smitten by this hardened criminal, which I read as a commitment to the series’ continuity: The player character from The Sexy Empire was also an armed robber, if you’ll recall, and went on to help Lula fulfill her dreams. So it makes perfect sense here that Lula finds something attractive / familiar in Gina straight away, and offers to help her out as they both flee the scene.

Unfortunately, it’s not long before you have to engage in another shooting minigame, this time squaring off against a pair of cops who run you off the road. As I just mentioned, having to deal with more than one enemy at once in these segments is a real pain in the ass, and this instance proves a perfect demonstration of the problems therein. Without so much as covering fire from Gina, you’re left to single-handedly dispatch the cops with a handgun taking six-round magazines — presumably shooting them dead before driving off again. The complete lack of hesitation on Lula’s part to kill cops may come as a surprise to some players, I’d imagine. But at a point in time where Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas was the top-selling game in North America the year prior to Lula 3D’s release^[20] (though I guess Grand Theft Auto: Vice City would’ve been more contemporaneous to Lula 3D’s actual development timeline), I can’t really imagine this character trait shocking folk to their core. At least not the sort of consumers who would be playing Lula 3D in the first place. Your reward for passing the action sequence here is continuing to chat up Gina during your ride to Las Vegas, ending with a passionate kiss before Lula drops her off in town. Luckily, this isn’t the last we get to see of Gina, and we’ll soon return to the Thelma & Louise dynamic being developed here — a truly inspired addition to the game’s road trip premise, and by far the most compelling plot thread that Lula 3D’s story has to offer.

The game’s Las Vegas section takes place not on its iconic strip of casinos and resort hotels, but instead within the dingy back alleys of a more typical Nevada city. (“This isn’t the Las Vegas you see on postcards.”) While the decision by the developers to set the action here was most likely a practical one – their not wanting to invest the resources into attempting to render Las Vegas’ flashiest setting – it plays as an interesting twist on player expectations nonetheless. If I were to give Lula 3D a deeper read than it probably warrants: These sorts of run-down towns and seedy locales are clearly familiar to Lula, and probably more in line with what she’s comfortable with. The people she tends to sympathize with and gravitate toward are those who come from poorer circumstance (same as she once did), and she’s more than willing to step away from the lavish lifestyle she’s attained for the chance to mingle again among the common clay. Of course, this layer to Lula’s character may be purely speculative on my part, since I’m not particularly convinced the writers really put too much thought into her character beyond “blonde bimbo goes on an adventure.” But isn’t it more fun to pretend that there was at least some degree of narrative and thematic ambition to Lula 3D?

Back to the summary: Lula manages to track down the woman being targeted by the criminals, only to discover she’s elderly and incapable of hearing her doorbell ring. To get her attention, you have to engage in a minigame where you toss tomatoes at her window; where you hold down the mouse to charge the strength of your throw, and aim while accounting for fall-off over distance. Luckily, this isn’t a particularly challenging activity, but we’ll see if the developers ramp up the difficulty the next time you engage with it. Getting the aged woman’s attention reveals the full extent of her hearing loss, as you struggle through an extended bit where she comically mishears everything Lula tries to shout to her from the street below. Once you convince her to toss her your keys and let you in, your first order of business should be to find her hearing aid, which turns out to be inside her refrigerator. (If you get stuck trying to find it, a book you might find while exploring the attic is conveniently titled “It’s In The Fridge.”) This finally enables you to establish clear communication with Mrs. Schreiber, as the game immediately makes you regret having done so: Her dialogue takes you down an excruciating seven minute exposition dump, delivered in far more words than necessary / as slowly as you’d imagine coming from a voice actor doing a bad elderly woman impression.

This brings me to another one of my points about Lula 3D’s dialogue: It routinely runs way too long, considering just how little most characters have to say of actual substance. Most of this length can be attributed to drawn-out set-ups for tortured punchlines; where the writers were clearly aiming for laugh-a-minute character exchanges, but just wind up coming across as far too wordy for their own good. (Trust me: I know all about that.) Clearly, the writers were unfamiliar with the theory of brevity being the soul of wit. Never mind the fact that the localization process thoroughly sabotages most of the deliveries and plays on words here: Even in the rare instances where a joke makes sense, it is almost immediately deflated by characters asking seemingly sincere follow-up questions that bring into question whether or not these were actually intended as jokes in the first place. And even when the writers aren’t attempting to be funny – such as in the case of Mrs. Schreiber’s long-winded backstory – we’re still dealing with an issue of no character being able to concisely / coherently get their point across. Past a certain point, Lula 3D would’ve been better served by purely utilitarian dialogue — characters only telling you essential information, with as little “personality” attached as is possible. Sure, that’d be absolutely antithetical to my own adventure game philosophy of building memorable supporting characters, but Lula 3D is already failing that test at this point.

To sum up what Mrs. Schreiber has to say, and finally reveal the kidnappers’ plot: Mrs. Schreiber was formerly married to a man named Josh Dekker — a groundskeeper for the well-to-do Marginy family in New Orleans. Josh is also the father to the triplets, who took them on frequent road trips during their youth. It turns out though that he had something of an ulterior motive in all this traveling: At one point, the triplets all had their own “luck dolls,” which their father took from them and hid across three of the locations they went to visit. Within the dolls are assumed to be clues pointing to a potentially lucrative treasure: A collection of “pure gold Kama Sutra figurines,” which a Monsieur Marginy had evidently stashed away in their family crypt after stealing them from a museum — a job which Stanley and Spandau are implied to have been involved in. At some point, Josh had discovered this treasure, and intended to fence it in order to support his family. But with his wife refusing to “finance [their] existence with stolen goods and live in fear,” Josh was left to leave the treasure hidden away, with the notes in the dolls presumably providing the directions to its location should his family ever have need of it. This is good foresight on his part, as Josh eventually bears witness to Stanley and Spandau killing Monsieur Marginy, likely having failed in an attempt to grill their former partner for the location of their loot. Josh disappears shortly thereafter, presumably gotten to by Stanley as well. But he evidently never gave up the location of the figurines, thereby explaining Stanley’s plan to kidnap the triplets and interrogate Mrs. Schreiber once more for whatever knowledge they may hold.

From here, Lula’s goal is to find the dolls before Stanley’s men, so that she can trade them for the safety of the triplets. Luckily, Mrs. Schreiber’s home houses clues to at least two of the locations: Framed photos of Mount Rushmore and a Western town, which seem to direct attention to the hiding spots within. Your next order of business is to take the photos to a nearby photographer – a Mr. Wong – in order to examine them closer. Unfortunately, his doors are locked, and he only accepts visitor appointments by telephone. Getting the phone number means grilling Mrs. Schreiber for the info; which at first seems to suggest you’ll have to work out an elaborate number puzzle, centered around a convoluted memory trick based on the letters of Mr. Wong’s name. (“The second digit subtracted from the third gives you the first digit, the fourth digit times the second gives the fifth, and all the others come from adding up the first four digits, and the fourth digit is seven.”) Fortunately, this winds up being something of a red herring: The actual solution is just to exhaust Mrs. Schreiber’s dialogue until she remembers the number on her own, which might honestly take longer to sit through than the process of simply working out the puzzle for yourself. This ultimately enables you to enter Mr. Wong’s establishment, where it turns out that his vision is too far gone to be of any assistance. (Mercifully, the stereotypical humor around his Asian ethnicity is kept to a minimum here, and the jokes instead center around how old he is.) You wind up using his glasses as a magnifying glass to work out that the first doll is hidden inside the nose of the monument to Thomas Jefferson, and return to Mrs. Schreiber with the intention of taking her to safety before you leave.

It’s here where one of Stanley’s goons manages to get the drop on you, pointing a pistol at your head. Luckily, rather than having to engage in some sort of fisticuffs sequence – originally a planned type of minigame for inclusion in the game, which was ultimately scrapped during development – Gina saves the day by pointing her own revolver at the baddy; before getting quickly disarmed, and leaving Lula to chase the man down with weapon in hand. This sequence plays out in a very hastily assembled cutscene, where the goon escapes in a black van… which, by the time you make it downstairs with party in tow, still appears to be parked behind you as you drive off. My guess here is that you were originally intended to chase after the van in a driving minigame (originally advertised as “Hot pursuits with lots of rubber on the asphalt – and elsewhere”), representing another feature that got scrapped somewhere along the line during development.***  Which reminds me: I reckon it’s about time we addressed the issue of cut content in Lula 3D, and how the game attempts to fill the holes left behind by repurposing leftover assets that would’ve otherwise gone to waste.

It’s my theory that the first-person shooting sections were a last-minute replacement for the fighting minigame, which probably proved too unwieldy or unfun in their implementation. Maybe they existed simultaneously within the game at some point in time, and the developers ultimately decided to just go with one of them — a sort of “lesser of two evils” situation? There are also confrontations that appear to have been outright cut rather than replaced, where pulling a gun or throwing knives seemed too drastic an action for Lula to take against certain characters she would’ve otherwise just slapped around. In those cases, they probably just reworked existing dialogue and rearranged objectives as a makeshift patchwork. This may account for certain conversations and questlines that seem to end / resolve especially abruptly, as well as a number of uniquely-modeled characters being hastily relegated to background roles; such as a goon made to stand guard outside of the apartment complex in the San Francisco level, who was probably originally meant to be an obstacle in the way of your unlocking the door (rather than it silently unlocking at a random point in the quest progression). But there’s a more significant cut to the game that would’ve necessitated even more in the way of story and quest restructuring.

Among Lula 3D’s advertised selling points between 2003 and 2005 was the promise of “Twelve luxuriously-styled main locations with over twenty additional scenes.” Let’s assume the “additional scenes” here are meant to refer to interior cells within these twelve “main locations,” and not get too hung up on how many of those there are. So, out of a promised twelve, the game ultimately only delivers on seven, as far as uniquely situated / navigable scenes are concerned; with the most apparent cut (from what is shown in promotional screenshots) being a level taking place in New Orleans. However, the work they did in rendering this environment wouldn’t go entirely to waste, as its facades are recycled for a section of the game we’ll dive into later — one which doesn’t let you walk around within the space, but is as recognizable as New Orleans as it is absolutely nonsensical in its implementation. I can think of at least one more fully-realized location that has its inclusion relegated to background detail, but it’s another one that I’m gonna save for when it shows up in the story. For a likely less significant cut that I can cover here: There’s another club adjacent to the Wild Chicken (‘The Foxy Club’) that seems like you were meant to enter it at some point, going so far as to place a guard behind an eye-slot door who bars your entry. I’d bet you originally had to overcome him as an obstacle in order to gain access to this underground club, where you’d probably have picked up some quest-intended items. On that note: There are a ton of junk items you can pick up during the game (mostly within Lula’s mansion) that serve no actual purpose, and which all suddenly disappear from your inventory somewhere along the line, as if they were originally tied to possible solutions to quests.

To quickly cover a number of other features that were initially advertised and ultimately unimplemented: Lula was originally made to be able to switch between different outfits, as seen in screenshots that show her wearing alternate catsuit get-ups. The decision to scrap the costume changes probably stems from complications in the game keeping track of what outfit Lula might be wearing between scenes, or her new character model proving less flexible to work with than they may have originally hoped. All that remains of this feature in the final product is the section in San Francisco where you wear the black wig, which is enough on its own to cause loading issues as the game transitions between cutscenes and gameplay while it’s equipped. Then there’s the matter of the free camera you were meant to be able to fly around during erotic scenes, as well as a “doggy cam” tied to your canine companion Dusty. If I haven’t yet noted the fact that Dusty follows you wherever you go in the game, it’s because he’s contributed nothing to the story thus far, likely stemming from mechanics built around him being dropped at a certain point. I imagine he was originally intended to be controllable in some capacity, and used to navigate areas that Lula herself couldn’t enter into — maybe even able to fetch items for her. As for why you can’t move the camera around while watching the sexier cutscenes: It’s obvious that there would be certain viewing angles that would break the “illusion” of their animations, and so the developers realized they were better off just controlling what you saw in them.

All this cut content begs a question: If Lula 3D was given two or three additional years in development [spanning its delays], then what the hell did the developers actually spend that time doing, if not finding ways to actually implement all this content into the final product? And the only conclusion I can come to is that they spent that time doing absolutely nothing. Probably not for lack of want to improve on their game – wishing they could pack it as full of content as possible, and updating the graphics to be more contemporary – but more likely due to the publisher determining that the game was “good enough” in its unfinished form, and proceeding to spend those additional years trying and failing to secure its distribution deal. CDV probably determined at a point they had sunk enough money into Lula 3D’s development, realizing that it was probably going to fail to deliver a return on their investment, especially as they struggled to find anyone actually willing to help in selling it. Why continue to fund development during that period of time, if the end result of that additional work (and money spent) might not even see the light of day? The end result is a build of the game that probably saw work on it stop abruptly in early 2003, serving as a sort of snapshot of a moment in time for the development process. All we can do is use our own makeshift magnifying glass to inspect said snapshot, discern what was captured within the frame, and speculate as to what fell outside the camera’s lens.

With the new objective of tracking down the dolls, Lula 3D finally starts to pick up a bit of speed. After dropping Mrs. Schreiber off at the airport (off-screen), your next destination is Mount Rushmore. Luckily, it seems to be in its off-season for tourism, as the only NPCs you’ll find in the area [excluding Gina] are a couple having sex on a park bench and a lone kiosk employee. This employee goes by the name ‘Brad Pidd’ – one of many characters in the game that would seem to parody real-world celebrities – who is curiously characterized as an over-the-top gay man complete with a gold penis medallion. (I would bet he was originally intended as a parody of a European celebrity, and simply had his name changed in localization.) Curiously, the gas station attendant from earlier alluded to Brad Pidd as “a former actor,” and as the gardener that his wife left him for? But here he is, making it very clear he’s a “confirmed bachelor,” so to speak. Naturally, this means that he’s immune to Lula’s feminine charms, and openly hostile throughout your dialogue with him. You have to convince him to give you quarters so that you can operate a coin-operated binocular; which involves pulling Dusty’s dog tag off his collar and dropping it into a tip jar, in an attempt to trick Brad into thinking you dropped in a half-dollar coin. From here, you have to figure out that the way to retrieve the doll from the nose of Thomas Jefferson’s monument is to launch Dusty into it using a makeshift catapult — a ridiculous solution that is spelled out for you by the aforementioned couple having sex nearby.

Rather than use something like an elastic piece of underwear to build your launcher (something that would at least make “cartoon logic” sense, and play into the game’s naughty aesthetic), you have to talk to Brad again and specifically ask him for a crossbow; leading to a confusing conversation in which you might assume he’s being sarcastic about being a member of the “First Mount Rushmore Shooting Club,” but which turns out to be a completely genuine admission on his part? Either way, the conversation ends with him refusing to help you out, and Lula proceeding to call him a “gay bug.” This is likely where you’d have had to beat Brad up in a fight in a previous iteration of the game, in order to force him to hand over his crossbow. As it stands, you just wind up using your knife to force open the lock to the trunk of his car, where the crossbow is yours to pick up and take. From there, it’s a matter of mounting it on a broken set of binoculars, and seeing the developers recycle the tomato-tossing minigame in hilariously half-baked fashion: By launching Dusty, you get to watch as he splatters into a cloud of red viscera every time he collides with the monument / the ground, which might possibly be an oversight where the devs simply forget to swap out the tomato splatter effect. Either way, this take on the minigame absolutely blows, as it takes way too much trial and error to figure out how high above your mark you need to aim in order to hit the nose way off in the distance — where the fog effects render the details of the monument completely invisible while you’re initially attempting to line up your shots.

After collecting the doll and finding a coded message hidden within it, Lula confers with Gina to guess at what it means, and convinces her to show your photo of the Western town to Brad (who hates you at this point) to see if he recognizes the location. A very curious detail here is the fact that Gina complains aloud about how she hates “Western crap” (😢), and yet, she still seems to carry a single-action revolver straight out of the 1800s as her weapon of choice? The vintage of her firearm is confirmed as you make your way to that Western town in Colorado Springs, where director Dave Lymph (personally, I’d have gone with “Limp” if we had to commit to this bit) is shooting a hybrid Western / science-fiction movie that seems to heavily feature the same models of vintage revolver. Evidently, the triplets had worked with Dave recently, where they spent their time on set reminiscing about how their father once took them to this very same town — confirming that you’re in the right location. This stretch of the game is particularly brutal in terms of endless dialogue and drawn-out punchlines; as Dave himself never stops talking about himself and his film ideas, while members of the cast and crew have nothing but endless complaints about their director to burden you with. And yet, you’ll need to endure and exhaust every last line of it in order to advance your quest, before Lula is able to notice sounds of distress coming from behind the locked door of a nearby church.

What follows is a frustratingly inflexible series of events, in which it’s spelled out for you nice and early that you’ll need to pick up a “battery screwdriver” in order to bypass that lock. And yet, you can’t actually pick up the tool when you first find it — made to wait until you check the locked door again, as Lula seems compelled to verify that she really does need the screwdriver for it. And even after doing so, you still have to charge the thing behind the counter of the on-set saloon, just for an additional bit of busywork. Doing all this finally enables you to bust down the doors, and discover… Dave “fucking Gina’s brains out.” A curious development, as a conversation you have with Gina prior to the pair disappearing seems to indicate that she believes film directors to all engage in Satanic rituals and animal sacrifice between producing movies, which Lula all but confirms to her. Unless that whole conversation was meant to play out in a sarcastic / playful tone of voice? It’s impossible to say for sure. In any event, Dave gives you the keys to his trailer so that you can water his plants for him, where you’ll find an actor and actress from the movie about to have sex with each other. Again, this development is curious; as when you talk to them prior to this moment, the game goes out of its way to point out how much they utterly despise each other. Not only do they appear to put aside their differences for the sake of satiating horniness, but they also let Lula join in for a threesome, leading to the only instance in the game of Lula having on-screen sex with a man… which is also the only scene that necessitates a distracting censor bar.

The next bit of quest progression is poorly explained by the game, but I think I’ve managed to make sense of it: Lula grabs a rifle from Dave’s trailer post-coitus (demonstrating very clumsy handling in the process), and ushers Gina over to stand in a specific spot in front of a store. From here, Lula aims the rifle at the church, shoots a large bell at the top of it, and causes it to come crashing down; at which point Dave’s monkey Jackson climbs on it, and grabs the doll. I think what’s happening here is that the photo – which you barely get to see for yourself in any sort of detail – depicts the triplets’ father standing and pointing in the direction of the bell (where he hid the doll), and so Lula uses Gina as a sort of indicator as to what direction she fires the gun? Again, the game makes no effort to explain what’s happening here, and so Lula figures it out herself and makes it all happen through cutscenes. I’m honestly surprised they didn’t think to have you fire the gun yourself in the first-person mode, to make it at least slightly interactive. From here, you grab the doll from the monkey, in a one-sided conversation scene which was clearly inserted in place of some other minigame where you probably had to fight the monkey for it. And then the most half-assed cutscene in the whole game plays out; where cops show up on the scene threatening Lula and Gina, and the duo get out of getting shot / arrested by having sex with them… which is only shown to you as a quickly thrown-together static image that still reads “10 Minuten später…” (“10 minutes later”) in German, cobbled together from Patti Pain character art that the developers must’ve had lying around.

I can only guess as to what sort of scene was originally intended here — whether it was another fully-rendered sex animation, or some minigame where you beat up the cops. But this shoddy replacement scene really goes to show how rushed the game’s development must’ve been past a certain point. Which tidily segues into the next scene, and perhaps the most tragic bit of cut content that we can piece together: Immediately prior to the cops showing up, one of the triplets manages to escape from captivity, and contact Lula by phone. Lula instructs her to get to the town of Wet Rock, where she and Gina will head to next and meet up with her. What follows plays out entirely in cutscene, as Lula returns to the place where her life was forever changed: A fully 3D-rendered version of the town from The Sexy Empire, which you’re given no chance to explore or appreciate in all its 2000s-era detail. Say what you will about that original game, but if you were coming into Lula 3D as a long-time fan of the franchise, getting to explore Wet Rock on foot would’ve been an awesome bit of nostalgia! I can only imagine what sort of hijinks Lula might get up to here, between revisiting the motel owner and proprietors of the local shops — maybe even returning to her old job at the local strip joint, in order to make some quick cash? Hell, why not shoot a quick porno, and sell it to the seedy distributor who gave her a start in the industry? But nope: All you get to do is quickly fly through it in cutscene, while non-subtitled dialogue between you and Chrissy (the escaped triplet) overlaps over itself to the point of being completely unintelligible. What a missed opportunity.

There is at least one nice touch toward the end of this frustrating cutscene: Lula and Gina get to have a brief sex scene with each other in their motel room, which I think canonizes the fact that what they have is more than just a fling. This is likely the same motel room where Lula first bed her partner in The Sexy Empire, and set into motion the events that would lead to her becoming a household name [within the universe of her game]. I think that by bringing Gina here and consummating their budding relationship in this place, Lula is effectively saying that she sees her as being as important to her as that protagonist of the first game — the man she went on to marry. I, for one, love this for Lula: As paper-thin as Gina’s characterization may be in the final product, I think she’s meant to pair perfectly with Lula, as someone who reminds her of where she came from and what it means to take chances in life — to leave the comfort of a lavish lifestyle, and get back to being your authentic self with someone who loves you for it. The perfect ending to Lula 3D would be Lula quitting her production company (presumably handing the reins off to Brian), hopping back in her car with Gina, and riding off into the sunset; toward a future filled with hot sex and exciting adventures. Sadly, that’s not the ending that we actually get. But we’re actually getting pretty close to the game’s conclusion now, so we’ll finally be crossing that bridge soon enough.

The homages to previous Wieland games don’t stop just yet, as the next (and last) stop on your adventure is the so-called ‘Beauty Farm’: An exclusive spa and plastic surgery center, where Lula believes that both the last doll and remaining triplets are being held. And as a nod to Bazooka Sue (or at least, what I like to believe is), the Beauty Farm here is modeled after the Bates family house from Psycho — a location also appearing in that previous game, and where its narrative climax similarly appears to take place. After a simple puzzle where you fix a fuse box and trick a motion-detector to open the doors to the Beauty Farm, you’ll find that its interior here is quite different from Norma Bates’ dusty old home. A conversation with a desk clerk indicates that the business has been open for years, and that the triplets’ mother used to visit them regularly, to the point where the receptionist is actually able to recognize Chrissy from those days. Naturally, this conversation goes into a ton of unnecessary detail — backstory that isn’t particularly funny or interesting, which makes it difficult to pick out the single pertinent clue / bit of information that it’s intended to provide: Josh apparently liked to go swimming while his wife was having her appointments.

Getting hold of the last doll means visiting the Beauty Farm’s pool area, where Lula can go swimming and masturbate while taking a shower — still keeping her leather boots on in both instances, of course. You can also talk to a hoity toity baroness who still believes that the United States are a British colony, who assumes that Lula is a member of the staff and mocks her wardrobe. Lula naturally takes a disliking to this lady, and if the game’s writers has any sense of ambition for the story; they’d use it as an opportunity for Lula to reflect on the egocentrism of the upper class, realize that she’s on the trajectory toward becoming like them, and maybe decide that she’d rather give up her riches and live a life on the road with her hot girlfriend. Of course, that’s not the direction they decided to take it in, and my brilliant pitches for a seventeen year-old game are a little too late to take into consideration. Anyway, you have to unhook the baroness’ bra in order to distract a nearby maintenance worker, so that you can steal his screwdriver and use it to unlock a locker containing the last doll. At this point, you read the last hidden note to Gina, and discover that the secret message written across the three notes simply reads “SEXISGOOD,” meaning that this whole subplot has been a complete waste of time! Maybe it wasn’t at some point in development: Maybe it originally led you to the game’s intended final location, where you’d discover the loot from the museum heist and have to bring it to Stanley and his men? We may never know.

You’re made to suspect that the remaining triplets might be in captivity upstairs, and so you bring Gina and Chrissy along to check it out. What you discover is initially confused by a shift to Dusty’s perspective (something that hasn’t been established up until this point, due to cutting the doggycam feature), where he perceives an operating room as a mad scientist’s lab complete with bloody walls and a man in a giant test tube. After Dusty runs away though, you see the room for the standard operating room it really is, and find that Spandau has disguised himself as the Beauty Farm’s surgeon. Apparently, he and Stanley deliberately let Chrissy escape earlier, so that she would inadvertently lure Lula to this location and give the baddies a chance to capture her. Again, this doesn’t make sense in this iteration of the game’s story; where your investigation into Josh’s clues are what lead you to here, and where the villains are unaware of the fact that the last doll was being hidden downstairs. Regardless, their plan here has clearly gone off without a hitch, and your party is evidently knocked out with chloroform and strapped to operating tables — presumably prepped for torture and interrogation by Spandau. Which brings us to the game’s final act, played out as a nightmare in Lula’s mind. And can you guess what real world location her dream appears to occur within?

Welcome to New Orleans… or, at the very least, the assets for it that CDV’s team had produced intending for it to be an explorable location, now repurposed for a final series of first-person shooting minigames. As you’re taken from one shooting gallery to the next – cast against a hallucinogenic skybox composed of faces you’ve encountered throughout the game – you’ll recognize Louisiana iconography including the likes of voodoo shops and the St. Louis cemetery, before boarding an airboat and steering down a swampy bayou. Never mind the fact that the decision to set Lula’s nightmare here is something that the game wasn’t able to hint at prior (save for the single mention of New Orleans by Mrs. Schreiber earlier): A lot of hard work was put into these models and textures, and the developers would’ve been crushed if they didn’t find some way to put them to use. It’s unfortunate then that they choose them as the setting for some of the worst first-person shooting ever committed to software, as you must endure five back-to-back sequences of increasingly frustrating difficulty. Now on top of putting down the goons with guns, you also have to avoid shooting standees of innocent characters the likes of Mrs. Schreiber and Mr. Wong, or risk failing / having to restart the encounter. By the third shooting gallery, you also have to figure out for yourself that you’re meant to shoot down a standee of a skeleton [in addition to two gun-toting enemies], which gets its own health bar and must be hit multiple times before the game lets you progress.

Which brings us to the fifth and final scene in this vignette: A shootout against Stanley, Spandau, and one of their additional goons (apparently named Mike); who are seen aboard a larger boat off in the distance, and who are barely visible from your vantage point. The combination of all three of them laying down suppressing fire on you makes this encounter particularly unbearable, as your windows of opportunity to fire back are as uncertain as they are short-lived. By the fifth time I had to retry this shootout – struggling to maintain steady aim and a non-blurry screen, all while being shouted at in untranslated German – I started trying to figure out a way to make myself invincible in this section using CheatEngine. No dice, unfortunately, as whatever variable the developers used to track Lula’s health (divided into eight points across four hearts on the HUD) wasn’t amenable to being picked up by the program. So eventually, I just committed myself to having to wait behind cover for minutes on end; waiting for what felt like possible opportunities to shoot at just one of the three targets, before ducking back behind cover and waiting again. Three more attempts / ten minutes later, and I finally managed to clear this godforsaken minigame, and see Lula 3D’s ending in all its glory.

Hard cut from the end of the nightmare to Lula’s Beverly Hills mansion, where various characters you met during the course of the game are all attending a sexy party. The camera settles in on a scene of Lula, Gina, and the triplets sitting at an outdoor dining table; where one of the triplets asks what happened to Stanley and his goons. Without going into any detail about how Lula and her friends actually managed to escape from their predicament (save for a vague allusion to Dusty having somehow saved the day), it’s revealed that they’ve all been arrested and charged for their crimes. Lest you worry about Lula and Gina’s own crimes coming back to bite them, Lula reveals that she’s either bribed or blackmailed the senator from the Wild Chicken into making the charges against them disappear, as he’s revealed to also be in attendance at the party. Lula also comes bearing gifts for the people at the table: A boxed present for Gina that goes unopened within the cutscene, and replicas of the museum loot for the triplets. At some point off-screen, I guess Lula turned the original relics back over to the museum from which they were stolen, since she felt it was the right thing to do. She also mentions having bought a new collar for Dusty, and calls for her faithful hound to come to her. On his way over, he falls into a pool, and everyone has a laugh about it. Hard cut back to the game’s title screen. The end.

It’s hard to overstate just how shitty a pay-off this ending is to the events of the game; between its failure to address the details of your escape, how briefly the whole cutscene runs (roughly two minutes), and the matter of Gina’s continuing role in Lula’s life being given no attention. I can partially forgive the first two points there if I choose to believe that the game’s original final act in New Orleans probably would’ve come paired with its own cutscenes, which would’ve likely preceded this one and shown the details of Lula’s triumph over Stanley and Spandau. I mean, that doesn’t excuse the developers not even attempting to cobble so much as a brief transitional cutscene together from existing animations / dialogue, in order to bridge the time and space between Lula’s captivity and the celebratory party. I mean, it’s not like they had multiple years to convince their publishers that they should at least get one more crack at creating a half-decent ending to their game, right? Or maybe they did try, and were ultimately told “nope” by a board of uncaring money men. That’s all gonna have to remain speculative for now. But I don’t think there’s any excuse I’ll accept for that last point I mentioned: Not using this ending to pay focus to Lula and Gina’s relationship, which should’ve been the obvious choice for a note to end the game on from the very start of development. Rather than linger on a not particularly funny shot of a dog falling into a pool as the final shot of your cinema-inspired story, maybe we could’ve seen Lula and Gina share one last on-screen kiss in the style of a classic Hollywood movie? Hell, you could even end on them having sex, in keeping with the spirit of the game. This shit writes itself!

Look, I realize that the “ride into the sunset” style ending for Lula 3D that I’ve suggested / imagined in my head was never gonna happen here, and accept that the game was always gonna end with the status quo of Lula’s comfortable life remaining unchanged. But I’d at least appreciate it being left on a hopeful note implying that Gina’s gonna stick around for a while longer, before inevitably disappearing between that moment and whatever planned sequel they may have had in mind. And I’m not just compelled here by the fact that we’re dealing with a bisexual couple, and that I’m inclined to invest myself in queer couplings appearing in games: I just think that Lula and Gina’s romance is the one thread in the game that might actually appeal to players, and that it deserves some sort of pay-off as part of the game’s ending. It’d have been such an easy way to send the crowd home happy; by just confirming that after spending the better part of seven hours watching their love blossom, the two are gonna be trying to make this thing work long-term. Sure, we can all assume this much from the fact that Gina’s seen sitting at that table in the final scene, but the way it’s played here leaves us without a solid emotional pay-off to the time we’ve invested in it. It’s honestly incredible that the developers didn’t even accidentally work this angle by going the route of an ending sex scene between the two, just intending to end their adult game on a titilating note.

So, that’s more or less everything that happens in Lula 3D. Any design criticisms we may want to levy directly against the developers have to be weighed against the fact that they weren’t given the time or budget to complete their vision for it, and the knowledge that it was left to sit on a shelf for two or three years gathering dust as the market around it rapidly evolved. Lula 3D managing to so much as see the light of day is something of a miracle in itself, given the possibility that CDV might never have found a partner willing to distribute it for them — the potential for the publisher to have cut their losses and scrapped the whole project, if they had been made to wait much longer. But we still have to try and evaluate it from the perspective of a “completed” retail product — something that folk would’ve been made to pay money for between 2005 and 2006. Do I believe that most consumers would’ve been happy with their purchase when all was said and done, oblivious or not to the circumstances of its development? Probably not, I reckon! Especially not if they were buying it looking to enjoy something erotic, as the game absolutely fails to deliver in that capacity. Which leaves us with folk who may have been looking for a half-decent 3D adventure game, who either accepted or appreciated the idea of it being somewhat saucy. It’s here where we have to return to the three key factors of adventure game design I established earlier, and determine how Lula 3D measures up to them.

Judging the game’s writing between its story and dialogue: I can’t speak to exactly how well the script holds up in its original German. I have to imagine though that it still suffers from issues of cut content, and probably reads as similarly stilted to the English release when it comes to matters of being reworked to accommodate those changes having been made. And if I were to guess as to how the plot developments and attempts at telling jokes might play in their original language, I still can’t imagine much of them making sense or being particularly funny: I’m just not convinced that the story that attempted to be told here is a particularly compelling one, or that its humor matches with the audience the game was intended for. With regards to the underlying plot, it’s clear they were attempting to mash up a bunch of genre movie cliches (between road trip flicks, classic film noir, vintage adventure serials, and boner comedies); which is hardly a unique concept, but one that it’s entirely possible to weave some sort of cohesive narrative from. But the different elements in Lula 3D feel too disconnected from each other — too incongruous to match together into anything truly cohesive. At times, it feels like the game puts one plotline on pause to pursue another, expecting you to forget about rescuing the triplets while you focus on collecting the dolls and unearthing lost treasures. They’d have been better off just focusing on one or two film genres to send up, and really exploring how inserting a protagonist like Lula into the mix would shake up the established formula. Rather than try to combine Thelma & Louise with Touch of Evil, Indiana Jones, and American Pie all at once; just hone in one of those premises, and play up how Lula’s approach to adventuring would turn a conventional narrative on its head.

Honing in on the comedy: So many of the game’s gags are simply allusions to celebrity names, which are intended to be funny purely owing to their referential nature — the same level of jokecraft as the infamous Seltzer-Friedberg comedy movies from the mid-aughts (Date Movie, Meet the Spartans, et cetera). When the game attempts meta commentary on how convoluted adventure game scenarios can be, it just reads as mocking the players for engaging with the game in the first place — like we’re being told that the game is meant to be poorly designed, and that we’re fools to expect anything more of it. Lula 3D really should’ve just stuck to its double entendres and the contrast of Lula’s personality against folk around her, where the comedy could flow from the way her bubbly / flirtatious personality endures in the face of increasing stakes and dangerous scenarios. And while they were at it, they probably could’ve afforded to cut every conversation tree down to about half its length, and done without all the long-winded monologues establishing characters who ultimately play such insignificant roles in the story. It feels like those over-long backstories are meant to be jokes in and of themselves – playing on a subversion of player expectation that they’ll actually count for something in the broader narrative – but if that’s the case, it’s a well they draw from too many times. Better off just embracing the fact that it’s a raunchy comedy in the same way that Leisure Suit Larry successfully pulled off so long ago, and accept that they weren’t going to be appealing to any higher-brow crowd than that.

Moving on to the matter of compelling characters: For a game which attempts to “flesh out” so much of its cast with elaborate histories and archetypal personalities, it’s incredible how few members of Lula 3D’s cast actually manage to linger in memory. This probably owes a lot to the fact that only a small handful of characters wind up traveling with you from scene to scene, or impacting the story significantly during their altogether brief time within the game. But even still, it should be entirely possible for a character in a “walk-on role” capacity to show up for one dialogue exchange and still leave a lasting impression; assuming they are cast effectively, and given something significant to say or do. In the case of Lula 3D, almost every character you meet just winds up feeling static — relegated to the one spot they’re made to occupy, providing only minor assistance or resistance, and fading from view as quickly as they’ve exhausted their usefulness. The lack of direction given to the voice actors probably didn’t help in this regard, where perhaps a particularly inspired / hammy performance may have been what was needed to make these characters leap out from the screen? Brad Pidd probably comes the closest to standing out from the rest of the pack, but is still held back by his passive role standing behind a kiosk and providing precious little in the way of direct impact on your quest.

And then there’s the fact that save for Lula, Gina, and Mrs. Schreiber; almost every female character in the game is relegated to pure set-dressing — given nothing of interest to say, and not made to impact the plot in any significant capacity. Their purpose in life is to provide unimpressive eye candy, maybe fawn over Lula for a second, and then get back to walking around in their half-naked daze. As a result, they all just wind up blending together into a vaguely sexy amalgam in the back of your mind, where any of their intended discernible differences melt away completely. Again, I have to note how Wieland managed to make every female character in The Sexy Empire clearly stand out from one another, even as none of them are given dialogue: Their wardrobe and expressions were enough to make an impression — a standard that Lula 3D’s primitive 3D renders couldn’t rise to. As mentioned, Gina is just about the only character in the game that you might actually come to care about, for the fact that she’s introduced in such a unique way and provides Lula with someone to play off of. But even though she’s the character I keep coming back to as a stand-out example, I have to concede that she’s still largely undeveloped: She doesn’t really contribute anything to the story that couldn’t have been accomplished without her, and she’s not given nearly enough dialogue to define her character beyond “tough girl with gun, potential love interest.” For all my pining to see her relationship with Lula further developed, everything I imagine about how the two of them would suit each other really is just imagination on my part.

Which brings us to the subject of Lula 3D’s adventure game logic, and whether or not its puzzle solutions are intuitive. Given the game’s seeming disdain for conventional lock-opening, combining items in sensible ways, and keeping you abreast of key information you’d need to actually solve problems for yourself; you might assume that I’d tear into the game for being far too challenging in its expectations of players. But no, it’s actually the complete opposite: Lula 3D effectively solves every puzzle for you, and simply relies on you to exhaust interactions so that you can be clearly instructed as to what minimum level of involvement you’re actually made to play. Half the time, you may not even realize you’re in the middle of finding a solution to some sort of obstacle, before Lula just winds up taking care of it herself over the course of a cutscene! The game may joke several times about you having to solve coded messages and arranging correct sequences of numbers, but it never once has you actually have to participate in it. The only real difficulty you may run into is the sheer amount of back-and-forth traveling you’ll have to undertake, and the endless dialogue you have to endure. Everything else just feels automated to the extent that you barely feel like you’re participating in the game, much less having to wrack your brain as to how to overcome challenges. And whenever there’s an opportunity for Lula to find some way to avoid conflict – a staple of classic adventure games starring non-combative protagonists – the game just winds up tossing you into a clumsy shooter segment instead; as if to say blunt stupidity and ruthless aggression are all you need.

And so, it’d appear that Lula 3D fails to deliver on any of the factors I established as being essential to a competent adventure game. In fact, I believe I went so far as to say that “if any one of these three factors should fail catastrophically in their implementation, they take the whole game down with them.” So, that’s it then: Lula 3D has to rate as a complete failure, with no hope at presenting any sort of redemptive feature that’d save it from my utter contempt. I mean, I’ve only spent tens of thousands of words so far completely eviscerating it, and making it clear there’s nothing to love about it, right? I’d have to be a goddamn hack to suddenly attempt to hand-wave away everything I’ve said about it so far, and try to close this review on some sort of positive note! Well, uhh… as it turns out, I’m totally about to try and do that. Whoops.

Make no mistake: Lula 3D truly is a terrible adventure title, and not a particularly erotic adult game either. If you’re looking at it to either challenge your puzzle-solving skills or reach some sort of climax, you’re gonna be disappointed in either regard. But if you’re just looking for something on the lighter side of video game narratives – utterly unafraid to indulge in its own goofiness, and playfully teasing you all the while – you could certainly do worse than Lula. At the very least, it won’t frustrate you too often with unguessable solutions to its obstacles, and you’ll always feel like you’re moving forward rather than constantly stopping and stalling. There’s something to be said for an entry-level adventure game that holds your hand and leads you along at a leisurely pace, where there’s always a character or book cover around that’ll tell you exactly what you need to do at any given impasse. The constant changes in scenery are to be appreciated as well, as each new level feels lovingly rendered and uniquely detailed (for as antiquated as they may have felt in terms of then-contemporary rendering techniques). And for a potential player who hasn’t spoiled themselves by reading everything that happens in the game ahead of time, Lula 3D is certainly guaranteed to surprise them with its frequent twists and turns. The most frustrating aspect of the game they’re liable to have to put up with are its technical shortcomings, and the chance that the application can lock up and lose them a potential hour of progress if they’re not remembering to save frequently. That, and the abrupt ending maybe leading to feelings of having wasted their precious time. But maybe its showcase of “Bouncin’ Boobs Technology” is impressive enough to make up for all of that?

Oh man! I haven’t addressed that selling point on the game’s cover yet, have I? So, there’s a bright pink bubble on the box art that indicates it as “Featuring Bouncin’ Boobs Technology” — reminiscent of a similar label used to advertise Shin Megami Tensei: Lucifer’s Call as “Featuring Dante from the Devil May Cry™ Series” that’s gone on to become something of a meme. It’s just such a goofy thing to put front and center on a game’s cover, even as it surely manages to grab your attention. As for what this technology entails? It’s evidently meant to refer to the process of motion-capturing used as reference for the game’s animations. Truth be told, the jiggle physics on display in Lula 3D are honestly nowhere near as impressive as the likes of a Dead or Alive (or a Street Fighter V, for that matter), and so the advertising claim honestly rings a little hollow. As it turns out, the game doesn’t feature much in the way of physics anywhere else either; where running over sloped surfaces and steep drops really demonstrate how unpredictable gravity can be in Lula’s world.

This is usually the part in my reviews where I play armchair game producer, and list the changes I would personally make to a game… But I feel like I’ve already pitched about a dozen aspects by this point that I’d have improved on before I put Lula 3D out on the market, if I were in control of such a thing. And really, most of the fixes I’d argue for here are surely ones the developers themselves already considered, but ultimately found themselves barred from contributing past a certain point — when CDV pulled the plug on further development, and told them their job was done. It feels especially pointless to say something like “there should have been a few more levels to explore,” when we already know that the team had several such stages planned and ready to be populated. I suppose I could suggest cutting the combat sequences entirely and replacing them with more in the way of janky cutscenes, for as lateral a move that might wind up being? The point I’m trying to make here is, Lula 3D is the way it is because its publishers kept it from being the best game that it could be: They approved its intended design, left the developers to their work, and eventually caught a case of cold feet that led to them stopping work on it long before it was finished. And sure, maybe that “intended design” might’ve still suffered from many of the same issues that the product we got does; between clumsy story-telling, unengaging adventure hooks, and whatever other technical shortcomings may have proven irremediable. But at least it’d have been able to tell the story it originally sought to tell, offer up more gameplay variety, and probably been allowed to tighten up its graphics some.

All that being said, I do have a more “radical” change I’d have been likely to suggest toward the beginning of the game’s development: Let Carsten Wieland make his 2D adventure game. Whatever vision he had for the original ‘Wild Highways’ iteration of the game’s design, the dude would’ve surely poured his heart and soul into realizing it as best he could — worked tirelessly to produce every art asset a development team could call for, and contributed his insights from his ten years in the games industry by that point. The whole project would’ve likely cost a fraction of what it took to produce a 3D game, and had the added benefit of its stylized hand-drawn graphics aging far better compared to 2000s-era 3D. Honestly, it’d have probably been an easier game to secure distribution for as well, since all the moral scolds would’ve still been focusing on the emergence of more “realistic” sex simulation software at the time. There’s also the chance that a Lula adventure game in the classic 2D point-and-click style might have actually garnered a fair bit of attention from adventure game enthusiasts, who’d have been eager to see a modern game in that traditional style. I’m trying to think of any actual downsides to having gone down this route [versus the 3D direction they chose], but nothing really comes to mind?

At the end of the day, Lula 3D serves as a testament to publisher second-guessing: Having denied a legacy franchise’s original creator the opportunity to develop the game they wanted to make, CDV instead decided to “modernize” Lula in a way that was far more risky in terms of potential quality and market reach. By the time they likely realized their error in judgment, it was already too late — recognizing the challenge of actually distributing their game, and surely noticing that what they held in their hands at that moment wasn’t coming together as they’d hoped. And so, they stopped development on the game where it stood, knowing full well that it wasn’t gonna be warmly received in its half-finished form. But by that point, they had already sunk too much money into it, and were just desperate to find some way to sell it and recoup as much of that investment as they could manage. While the process of finding that elusive distribution deal wound up dragging on for years, they did nothing in the interim to make their product more appealing to potential partners, or to ensure that consumers who patiently waited on it would be satisfied when it finally came to launch. Lula 3D’s fate on release was utterly predictable, completely preventable, and altogether tragic. And worst of all? Every bad decision CDV made here would’ve made perfect sense from a business perspective; between betting on 3D, attempting to corner a niche in the market, and ultimately cutting costs on a dead-end project. Game production can feel like a game of blackjack: Even if your cards seem promising, there’s always the chance that the dealer has you beat from the start. At the very least, CDV didn’t double down on their losing hand, and wind up going home completely broke.

For all the bad luck its development endured, Lula 3D isn’t the worst 3D adventure game of all time. Far from it, honestly: It’s mostly playable, demonstrates some measure of ambition, and has an odd charm to it that can’t be entirely denied. It’s a miracle that the team responsible were able to take what they had and stitch it together last-minute into something even resembling a completed narrative, and their ingenuity in doing so should be applauded. That certainly doesn’t mean that you have to enjoy the game, but it at least warrants a bit of respect for the trials that its developers (and even its publisher, to an extent) had to endure. As such, I just can’t bring myself to hate it; despite how tedious stretches of it may well be, and how frequently it misses its marks. I dunno, folks: While I’m playing it, I can’t help but envision what it was meant to be, and I reckon I’m left partially conflating those day-dreams with the actual final product? Clearly, that’s not good enough for me to actually go ahead and recommend that anyone actually play Lula 3D for themselves. Not unless you – like me – have come to grow an odd attachment to its buxom blonde lead, and feel obligated to walk the digital mile in her thigh-high boots. Because if there’s one thing that’s been consistent about the Lula franchise from its start, it’s the fact that the poor gal has always deserved better than the games she got to feature in. All we can do is to come along on her bumpy ride, and keep our eyes on that horizon line as she drives her car off a cliff.

** I should note an obvious exception to this “rule” in the case of adventure games that see you entirely removed from contact with other characters. There’s something to be said for something like a horror-themed adventure, where the goal of the design is to make you feel isolated and alone in some nightmarish setting. So clearly, this set of criteria isn’t intended as some “one size fits all” approach to judging every game in the genre, and is more meant to apply to archetypical titles — the sort of mould that Lula 3D clearly patterns itself off of. Honestly? This whole invention is something I just came up with for the article because I thought it’d help me better focus my criticisms, and because it makes it sound like I have some sort of clue what I’m talking about when it comes to the genre. Please don’t tell anyone that I’m secretly a hack fraud.

*** Driving minigames being cut from the game would also account for how awkwardly-constructed the shootout with the police is [in the previous pit stop section of the game]. The cutscene that precedes it is particularly clumsy – dealing with a poor implementation of distance fog that obscures most of what’s happening within its shots – and seems like a hastily-produced replacement for a sequence in which you’d be the one to ram the cop car off the road. That, and the fact that immediately getting into a firefight with them seems like a really bad idea on Lula’s part — a crime that would surely lead to more intense pursuit by the police, and probably see them ready to shoot you on sight later in the game?

“Man, Lula, When Are You Ever Going to Learn to Straighten Up?”

Lula 3D has proven especially difficult for me to track down any recorded sales numbers on. Sure, we can safely assume that its digital distribution model in North America wouldn’t have amounted to much of anything; between Lula’s relative obscurity in country, a near-complete lack of marketing / promotion for its release, and how hidden away the webpage you would’ve had to order it off of was. But that doesn’t do much to tell us how many members of the German audience – the market which had made her a success in the first place – were eagerly anticipating Lula’s return. All we can do on that end is pore over CDV’s financial reports between 2005 and 2006, which are conveniently provided in both German and English-language statements. The single most telling document among them is their Q2 report for 2006, published September 1st of that year: Included is a page-long statement to shareholders / investors, where CDV are compelled to explain why their financials for the year thus far record nearly half the sales they had managed within the same period of time a year prior. It leads by admitting that “An extraordinary accumulation of product publication postponements, combined with poorer than anticipated sales for key products, have resulted in much lower sales for the second quarter than originally planned for this period,” before singling out key titles Glory of the Roman Empire and Cossacks II: Battle for Europe as underperformers.^[21] Seeing as Lula 3D isn’t named in this report [or any others], that’d seem to point to sales expectations for it never being on the same level as CDV’s other flagship franchises, and that it likely did little to make up for flagging sales across the board for the publisher.

Despite the low-key nature of its release, plenty of games news sites still picked up Lula 3D for review. You get the impression that many of them saw it as easy prey — something assuredly bad that they could eviscerate in their articles, and hoped would grab readers’ attention with the promise of screenshots of  nude ladies. For those who may have clicked on Eurogamer’s review hoping to see that Bouncin’ Boobs Technology in action, writer Ellie Gibson immediately takes to chiding that audience: “The Lula 3D box […] informs you exactly what type of game it is before you’ve even opened said box – an “erotic” adventure aimed squarely at 12 year old boys. The problem is that the box doesn’t also tell you that Lula 3D looks and plays like it was developed by a 12 year old boy, on a 12 year old PC, at least 12 years ago. Nor does it warn that every minute spent attempting to play the game will make you feel like you’ve just lost 12 years of your life.”^[22] As if that wasn’t brutal enough a takedown, Ellie returns to the box again toward the end of her review, before scoring the game as a 2 out of 10: “You’ll see a warning message which reads: ‘CAUTION: intense erotic scenes may lead to CHOKING, SWEATING and RAPID HEART BEAT.’ No one could argue with this as a general statement of fact, but with regard to Lula 3D, the words RAPID BANGING OF HEAD AGAINST MONITOR would be more appropriate. Avoid like the clap.”

Jack Allin would award Lula 3D one and a half stars out of five on behalf of AdventureGamers.com. While their review is willing to admit to Lula’s carrying a “sassy, whimsical charm that helps you overlook her usually terrible jokes,” Jack is also quick to point out how the localization leaves much to be desired, and the fact that “the game design in Lula 3D proves to be equally lousy” to its “poor writing.”^[23] In evaluating the gratuitous nudity on display, Allin had this to say: “The game’s 3D engine is anything but cutting edge, and while the background graphics can be reasonably attractive, the word ‘lifelike’ will never come to mind where the ridiculously-endowed character models are concerned. A serious case of the jaggies certainly doesn’t help, especially when the game’s main selling feature is its curves. Throw in all sorts of clipping problems and you can pretty much kiss any last vestige of the titillation factor goodbye.”

We go now to Paul Kautz for 4Players.de to continue on this (roughly translated) graphical teardown: “The age of the 3D engine can be observed particularly well in the roughly hewn levels, the popping-in of graphical details, the stumpy animations; and above all else, in the character models seemingly carved out by a chainsaw. Except for Lula, all characters seem to consist of a few dozen polygons, with grotesque flat faces and laughable facial expressions.”^[24] Their 36%-scoring review is one of the few to acknowledge Lula 3D’s troubled development — going so far as to present a claim that the team responsible for its development was actually shut down completely prior to its release (something I couldn’t confirm myself). But even when considering this context, Paul is still merciless in his criticism: “I can get used to the trial and error puzzles, the screwed up inventory, and the many bugs; from the massive graphic errors, to the mediocre collision detection, to puzzles breaking down — thanks to which you’ll often have to restart a scene. […] You can’t deny the game a certain trash charm, and for 20 euros I’ve certainly complained worse. But Lula 3D is still not an adventure that you could seriously recommend to anyone. At least not a person you like.”

The most positive contemporary review I could find for Lula 3D comes to us from AdventureArchiv.com (missing the “e” in its URL), and a writer known only as ‘André.’ They begin their piece with an acknowledgement that “a number of sequences were simply left out [of Lula 3D], so that the game at hand is now available as an ‘economy’ version,” before encouraging us to “rejoice in the fact that Lula has now been released at all, albeit in a somewhat watered-down form.”^[25]  You may be surprised to hear that the game’s erotic elements were actually a mark against the game in André’s eyes — not due to a case of personal prudishness, but because he felt they were a “superfluous” distraction from the underlying adventure game structure. In concluding their review, they confess to the following: “Many players will resent the rather revealing character design and the questionable, redundant sex scenes as well as partial nutty and annoying dialogues and allusions and the missing political correctness. Without all this, the game would have been definitely more fun. But if one ignores all this circumstances generously, the bottom line is a trashy, but nevertheless nice adventure game for sweltry summer nights with relaxing, because mostly very easy puzzles, a giant game environment and not necessarily top notch but nevertheless very appealing graphics. Overall I had a lot of fun with this game. It’s worth the money and therefore it gets from me [an] actually very unexpected 70%.” I’ll always enjoy highlighting these more generous reviews of poorly-received games, as it speaks to the fact that every game has the potential to entertain / impress someone out there.

Even with a small handful of reviews willing to admit that Lula 3D wasn’t completely without merit, the overwhelming critical consensus would forever seal its fate in infamy. Between those who called it a contender for “the worst adventure game of all time,” and those who took it a step further in decrying it as “one of the worst games of all time” full stop, Lula 3D appeared to have finished the mission that Wet Attack had started: Killing any franchise potential for the brand / character, and putting an end to Lula’s sexy adventures… at least, you would think it did. Incredibly, there’s still a couple Lula games left for us to cover here! Sadly though, both of them have long since seen the servers that hosted them go offline, which makes them completely unavailable for us to play. But I’m going to do my best to cover them here regardless, based on what few descriptions I can find of their gameplay.

The first is Lula Strip Poker: A Java-driven mobile game produced by Elkware, released in 2004 to promote “the star of Lula 3D” (according to ad copy tracked down by StickOfJoy.com for their article on “The History of Lula”).^[26]** Elkware’s whole business revolved around producing these sorts of commissioned advergames for 2000s-era feature phones; usually on behalf of corporate brands, occasionally for television and film properties, and sometimes to promote more substantial games appearing on consoles and PCs. From its title alone, you can probably imagine exactly what this game would’ve looked like and what it would’ve entailed: Some variant on poker where winning hands are rewarded by Lula [and her gal pal Sheila] taking their clothes off, as scaled down to fit a screen less than 240 pixels tall. (No word on if their boots still stay on.) Now, you can sometimes find .JAR files containing these games on shady repository sites, but Lula Strip Poker seems to have dodged preservation on any of them. I could only find a single review of it on the archives of a mobile news-focused site known as ‘HandyPlex’, where the reviewer claims that it’s “actually a nice poker game, just way too short” — awarding it a ‘Satisfactory’ 61% score.^[27] We’ll just have to take their word for it, I suppose.

Lula’s final video game appearance came in 2014, with the release of Lula Online: A browser game developed and published by a ‘Lula Online GmbH,’ seemingly formed to acquire the Lula license after CDV’s dissolution several years prior. (More on that subject in just a bit, as we’ll get into some of CDV’s history post-Lula 3D.) I reckon that Lula Online was developed with the success of Facebook’s browser-based offerings in mind (the likes of Farmville and Mafia Wars), during the short-lived era before this style of “idle game” really came into its own within the App Store / Google Play landscape. From a certain perspective, Lula Online could even be argued as being a return to Lula’s roots: A business management simulation where you run a camgirl operation, hiring on a fleet of ladies who customers will pay to watch them undress on live stream. You put these profits towards keeping your employees paid, improving production quality, and ultimately expanding your operations. All the while, Lula would appear across the game’s tooltips and interface, relegated to another one of her supporting roles. Of course, it’s not the classic Wieland Lula design that we’ve come to know and love by this point: All the art assets on display here seem to aim for a “modern age” comic book sort of style, with a distinctive shine / glossy look to everything. While a return to 2D is certainly a step up from the likes of Lula 3D, it all remains utterly charmless in my eyes compared to what Wieland produced back in his 1998 game — where every lovely lady seemed full of life, and able to convey an entire personality through a single still image. By comparison, Lula Online’s interchangeable camgirls all have a mannequin-esque look to them, while Lula herself barely reads as the same character we’ve grown accustomed to. If the game had been given any other title, you’d just as readily assume that the developers had created their own generic blonde from scratch to serve as their mascot.

Despite releasing as a free-to-play game in a proclaimed “Beta” state, Lula Online appeared to have a bunch of monetization hooks sunk into it from the very start. Needless to say, it’s the sort of transparently profit-driven design that immediately puts a savvy player off — especially in the context of a game that is still billing itself as incomplete / subject to change. From everything I can gather, Lula Online’s launch wasn’t picked up on by any of the major games news sites, and it never attracted anything significant in the way of a playerbase. Those few who may have given it a chance seemed put off by the lack of depth and the insidious business model around it, and didn’t stick around for very long. On top of all that, it was a game built in Adobe Flash, at a time where the format was starting to seriously decline in popularity — on the verge of being discontinued, even. Bearing all this in mind, it should come as no surprise that developer support for Lula Online fizzled out quickly, and that it ultimately shut down its service in 2018. It never even managed to get past its beta phase, for whatever the hell that’s worth. And so, it’s here where the story of Lula finally came to a proper end: Not with a bang, but with a whimper. If Lula 3D had remained the last installment in the franchise, we could at least point to it as a spectacular example of “going out guns blazing,” instead of having to watch as Lula was bled dry by a half-baked browser game.

With Lula buried and put to rest, it’s time to check back in on the company responsible for having made her a household name, and the man who first imagined her. We’ll start with CDV Software, who we last saw facing financial difficulties around the time of Lula 3D‘s release. The good news is, they were largely able to bounce back from that, and continued in their operations producing / publishing games primarily for the German games market. They were even able to expand their operations into the UK, when they opened an office to be headed by a former 505 Games and THQ executive [David Walker].^[28] Things were looking up for CDV headed into the next decade… until they had to take SouthPeak Interactive to court in 2008, never received settlement money they were owed, wound up filing for bankruptcy, and ultimately dissolved in 2010. While this obviously has nothing to do with Lula 3D past a certain point, it’s still a story I’ve gotta share here, for the fact that I don’t know where the hell else I’d find an excuse to tell it.

Prior to getting sued, SouthPeak had to come to acquire the company Gamecock Media Group: A publisher formed from the ashes of the infamous Gathering of Developers, whose operations lasted the grand total of a year [between 2007 and 2008]. You may know of them for a stunt they pulled during the 2007 Spike Video Game Awards, in which their employees rushed the stage to promote the studio during what was supposed to be Ken Levine’s acceptance speech for Bioshock‘s winning the ‘Game of the Year’ award. We could go on about Gamecock’s industry antics here (we will one day, when we get to covering their 2008 title Legendary), but what’s important to this particular story is the fact that they had promised to deliver seven games to CDV for distribution in Europe, which the German company had paid a seven-million dollar advance for the collective rights to.^[29] But when Gamecock went on to be acquired by SouthPeak, their new owners immediately moved to dissolve the company, and assumed ownership of their pending software catalogue.^[30] In the process of this corporate shake-up, CDV failed to receive four of their due titles prior to an originally agreed-upon delivery date — a window that would’ve allowed them to distribute said games during the 2008 holiday season.^[29b] With Gamecock no longer existing as a privately-owned corporate entity, CDV were left to sue SouthPeak in their stead, seeking “breach of contract” recompense for the games they weren’t able to deliver on. This suit took a year to resolve, and was determined in favor of CDV (in the case of three of the four titles); entitling CDV to pursue a further copyright infringement suit.

See, SouthPeak had done something very stupid while they were already dealing with that first lawsuit: Under their own banner, they had gone ahead and published several of the very same games that CDV was claiming belonged to them — including Dementium: The Ward, Hail to the Chimp, Mushroom Men: Rise of the Fungi, Pirates vs. Ninjas Dodgeball, and the infamous Velvet Assassin.^[31] This opened the door allowing CDV to claim that the published games in contention were under their legal copyright, which SouthPeak were knowingly infringing on. SouthPeak would again lose in court, and be ordered to pay an undisclosed sum to CDV as settlement, as well as cover the legal fees they had accrued as result of these suits. Only, SouthPeak didn’t have that kind of money on hand: They were already in the hole financially owing to their own legal costs / previous settlements owed to CDV, and were on the fast-track to going out of business (which they eventually did in 2013). This, in turn, left CDV’s coffers empty, and ultimately led to them having to file for insolvency / shutter the company effective April 2010.^[32] In effect, SouthPeak’s actions had led to the dissolution of no less than three games publishers (including themselves), and brought a collective thirty-eight years of established industry reputation to a bitter end.

With all that out of the way, let’s get back to what you’ve all been waiting for: Carsten Wieland, and his continued adventures in digital smut. I’m not sure I fully conveyed earlier just how trashy Redfire Software was — how truly pornographic their games were willing to get. I somehow didn’t even mention 2001’s release of Erotica Island; the premise of which sees your character (a rich playboy by the on-the-nose name of Reggie Rich) crashing his plane onto a tropical island, and proceeding to have sex with every last one of the female locals in order to get a discount on the only boat ride out of town. But see, the catch is, every character is rendered in the absolute most primitive 3D imaginable, while also attempting to chase after an anime-inspired style at the same time. Needless to say, Wieland had no direct hand in this one, as it goes on to make Wet Attack‘s graphics from two years prior look like a contemporary CGI masterpiece by comparison. On top of all that, it’s also one of the slowest, stupidest, and most tedious point-and-click adventures I’ve ever sampled. A sure-fire candidate for its own article on here, if I ever decide to cover more adults-only games on the Bad Game Hall of Fame.

Luckily for Redfire, Erotica Island isn’t indicative of the style of the rest of their output. (At least, not entirely.) We already mentioned Wieland returning to his 2D roots in envisioning the likes of Inside Chessie, Ibiza Babewatch, and Patti Pain’s Bondage Poker; as well as the earlier entries in his Airline 69 series. These are the Redfire titles that do the best job of continuing the legacy of The Sexy Empire, between iterating his hand-drawn erotica and providing more accessible / focused gameplay experiences. Airline 69 (alternatively titled Casablanca 1942) in particular feels something like the direct successor to Lula in terms of presentation and premise, even as it sets itself distinctly apart with 1940s theming: It centers on an Allied pilot by the name of Wayne whose plane is shot down over Casablanca, where he discovers that he had been carrying a secret agent stowaway by the name of Chou-Chou. (Would you believe me if I told you that she’s a stacked blonde?) Your goal is to find a way to make money by means of trading goods and information – eventually earning enough to start your own airline company – all while keeping your new gal pal “satisfied” by means of a handful of included minigames. Evidently, it would go on to prove one of Redfire’s greatest hits, and even nab itself an award as the ‘Best Erotic PC Game’ of 2003 as declared at Venus Fair (an annual ceremony in Germany celebrating the adult industry).^[33]

Aside from committing his pen to a pair of cartoonier titles featuring less in the way of his trademark style of babes (Caveman Zac and Chicken Farm) though, that’s just about a wrap on Wieland’s 2D output for Redfire. The only other title of potential note here is Dick Sucks: Terror in Titfield — an action-platformer starring a sentient penis. Ridiculous as its premise may be, there’s really not much else to be said about it. The rest of Redfire’s software catalogue, then, winds up being split across three distinct categories: First, there were games built around full-motion video of actual porn actresses; the likes of Bitch Train: Führers Fötzchen (a WWII-themed train simulator with unfortunate Nazi overtones), Watch Me in my House (a possibly Sims-inspired voyuer game), and an Airline 69 spin-off with the subtitle Casablanca Porno Poker (ditching the series’ original aesthetic / gameplay completely, in favor of strip poker with live-action actresses). These tied nicely into Redfire’s side business selling straight-up porn movies — their operations under the label Redfire Cinema, as part of a partnership with an established production company in Herzog Video. This was the purpose of their RedfireHard.com domain, which offered Herzog’s DVDs (as well as Redfire’s games) as digital downloads. Frankly, I’d be shocked if this didn’t turn out to be Redfire’s most profitable operation: Forgoing the costs of traditional game development, leveraging an outside studio to produce / sell video content to them at a discount, and reaping potentially perpetual profits from digital sales. Still, this didn’t keep Redfire from continuing to develop games centered around artist-rendered graphics. It just meant that they felt compelled to streamline their production process a bit on that end — find ways to do it on the cheap.

Which brings us to category number two: 3D genre games leveraging recyclable gameplay formulas / engines. Take the trio of Castle Knatterfels: Curse of the Zombie Krauts, FAQ Dodgers, and Wardoves: Secret Weapon of World War I,*** for example. Where Castle Knatterfells sees a photographer mowing down Nazi zombies to protect his models, FAQ Dodgers presents itself as a sci-fi themed sex romp, and Wardoves pits a trench soldier against waves of weaponized birds; all three games are fundamentally similar in their design, being first-person shooters played against scrolling 2D backgrounds. Then there’s the Babes & Balls trilogy, which began by providing 3D simulations of Xtreme Beach Soccer and Xtreme Beach Volleyball (naturally), where the catch is that the female athletes are all rendered in the nude. What’s funny about these two titles (besides the fact they were produced to shamelessly cash in on Dead or Alive Xtreme’s success) is the fact that they both feature anime-inspired cover art, despite dropping that style as soon as you start the actual game. And then there’s the curious case of Babes & Balls Vol. 3: Gotcha Babes X-treme — an abysmal first-person paintball shooter featuring topless player models, which further treats you to unlockable full-motion videos of strippers in paintball gear. This one ranks right up there with the likes of Extreme Paintbrawl, in terms of truly terrible first-person shooters [that coincidentally share a paintball theme]. Stick another pin in this one as a game we’ll potentially revisit on here.

Which brings us to our third category for Redfire Software games: 3D genre games featuring a bare minimum of actual gameplay, which were most likely produced as cheaply as humanly possible. These games are where Redfire’s thesis / mission statement about “hardcore gamers [having] just as much right to top quality as the mainstream gamers” gets thrown out the window. Here you’ll find the likes of Castle Knatterfels‘ sequel subtitled 3DD Strip Poker, representing the fourth strip poker game in their catalogue. Or how about their Puzzle Hustle trilogy, which has you putting lewd sliding puzzles into place? If that sounds absolutely insipid to you, try on Fanzar – Schlong of the Jungle Vol.1: Tic Tac Fuck for size, which is – you guessed it – just a game of tic-tac-toe with boobs in it. Color me surprised that this one never got a “Volume 2.” And for the true intellectual, there’s Sudoku Bondage: Tied Up & Bound, which sees you solving sudoku puzzles in order to reveal 3D-rendered girls in bondage. (I told you Wieland had another BDSM game in him!) But if there’s such a thing as a “highlight” within this category, it might well be Drunken Lil’ Bitch – Session 1: Bottles & Buttholes — alternatively condensed as Drunk Lil’ Bitch: A take on Atari’s Kaboom! (or perhaps more accurately, PlayAround’s Beat ‘Em & Eat ‘Em) where you position a nude brunette across the bottom of the screen in order to catch bottles of booze in her asshole.

“Honestly! Men are such bizarre creatures!”
Photo of Carsten Wieland, borrowed from
the Brushpark Watercolors website.

I can’t imagine that Carsten Wieland was particularly satisfied with putting out this sort of garbage past a certain point. I mean, I could be wrong: Maybe this was his vision for the future of adult games all along? There are at least two things I can attest to for certain during this period: In 2004, Wieland would establish Grasland Productions as a new two-man studio (along with Michael Piegrass), in order to supplement Redfire’s productions as well as develop further non-pornographic games. None of these non-porn titles seemed particularly ambitious, mind you: Titles such as Texas Hold’em Poker, Galileo Family Quiz, and Bowl X-treme should tell you all you need to know about their contents. And where a game by the name of Pyro Tycoon might sound exciting at first – conjuring visions of a business management sim centered around committing arson and collecting on insurance claims – it’s a disappointment to discover that it’s just a game where you create and detonate your own fireworks. Oh, and as for that second fact I can attest to? In what is easily the most tragic twist in this whole sordid tale; Wieland eventually got tired of his own 2D style, pivoted completely to 3D modeling, and never seemed to look back — at least for the remainder of his game development career.

Rather than continuing to hand-draw his lovely ladies in charming detail, Wieland realized it was far easier to just tweak prefab 3D character models in Poser, and proceed to churn out an endless stream of identical-looking women. While this almost certainly streamlined the process of creating assets for his games – shortening his timelines and cutting down on production costs – it was more like “the beginning of the end” than “the dawn of a new era.” It seems like Wieland had just a couple of game ideas left in him to work out, and got them out of system between 2008 and 2011: The Heirs to St. Pauli: The Reeperbahn Game represented his last attempt at Lula-esque “adult entertainment business sim” game, as you operate a fictional night club in Hamburg’s real-life red-light district district. Then came Wieland’s return to point-and-click adventure games with Robin Hood: The Secrets of Sherwood Forest — a title so unremarkable, it continues to be completely buried in search results by Microids’ similarly-named strategy game Robin Hood: The Legend of Sherwood released eight years prior to it. And in what appears to be his final game, Wieland banked on the adventure genre once more, bringing us 2011’s The Rockin’ Dead: A music-themed adventure centered around a three-piece female rock band by the name of ‘Deadly Lullabyes,’ in which you take control of their frontwoman Alyssa; where you’ll find yourself booked to play a show at an eerie castle, eventually have to rescue her bandmates, and ultimately put on a show for an audience of skeletons and zombies. That last game’s unique selling point was the fact it could be played in anaglyph 3D with a pair of old-fashioned red-and-blue tinted glasses, which I’m sure is a fun treat for those of you who aren’t stereoblind.

Let’s not mince words here: None of these games look very good, graphically speaking. I mean, they also don’t appear to be particularly compelling in terms of gameplay either, but I’m still just hung up on how visually unappealing they are. What I like to call “The Poser Style” sticks out across every uncanny character and canned animation, which isn’t helped by the fact that the pre-baked lighting on Wieland’s pre-rendered 3D models makes them stand out against every one of his flatly-lit backgrounds. If the move to 3D was Wieland’s way of trying to “keep up with modern graphics” in the games industry, that decision could not have been any more ill-advised. Neither of his adventure game efforts seemed to make much of an impact on the market (St. Pauli may have been moderately successful within its niche), and ultimately seemed to discourage Wieland from pursuing game development any further. Redfire Software’s websites would go offline in 2011, with what appears to be little in the way of notice given to their customers. They had intended to release a Faq Dodgers sequel by the name ‘Doom of the Space Zombies,’ as well as a second Chessie Moon game to be titled ‘Boobs4Brain’ (which would’ve contained a suite of adult-themed IQ puzzle games), but it appears that neither of these materialized before the company had folded. Grasland Productions would quietly close a short while later, with The Rockin’ Dead serving as their final release. Talk about going out on a high note.

Wieland denotes 2011 on his portfolio as the year he ended his careers in both ‘Computer Games Design’ and ‘CGI Graphics’ production — the latter of which represented his 3D-rendered contributions to print media and advertising. Reading his brief descriptions of these phases in his life, we actually get an explanation from the man himself as to why he had abandoned his traditional style: “From 2005 onwards I became increasingly concerned with computer-generated graphics. At some point, drawing was no longer enough for the increasingly complex PC games, and the plasticity of the display has always fascinated me.”^[34] You’ll note something else odd about the year 2011 with regards to his portfolio: It was also the year he marked the end of his work in “Advertising, Web-Design, [and] Video-Production.” If we might extrapolate a bit from this, 2011 seems to be the year Wieland decided to drop everything to do with digital technology, and completely change the directory of his art and his life. Between 2010 and 2015, he seemed hyper-fixated for a while on anaglyph 3D photography. (That’d explain The Rockin’ Dead‘s 3D glasses gimmick.) He was working on assembling what was planned to be “the largest 3D portrait collection in the world” in 2012 – which would’ve been called ‘The Beautiful Pott-People in 3D’ – until he “ultimately had to give up the project for health reasons” at an undisclosed point. He seemed to isolate himself for a short while at this point — spending time “caught in the house during a blizzard in Detroit with outside temperatures down to -35°C,” privately drawing paintings which he referred to as the first time he had “drawn seriously for years.” And then, a moment of inspiration:

“After about 60 computer games in almost 20 years and a daily workload of 14-16 hours, I was finally and completely out of breath in 2011. […] I had to admit to myself that I was at the end of my strength and had to pull the emergency brake.

[…] I first looked for a ‘normal’ job and did a little drawing on the side. However, the desire to bring a bit of color into the game quickly arose. So I first made a few attempts with acrylic paint, but had to realize that this is not my medium. I had some money left over and used it to buy a Schmincke watercolor set. The best decision I’ve made in a long time. 🙂” ~ Carsten Wieland^[1c]

So, yeah: Having left the games industry, Wieland has spent the better part of the past seven years focusing on producing watercolor paintings. And surprise surprise: He’s great at it. So great, in fact, that he leads both in-person and online workshops on how to master the craft. But if one-on-one teaching isn’t your cup of tea, or you can’t afford to attend; you can alternatively follow his ‘Free Watercolor Tutorials’ website, or watch his lessons available on his YouTube channel. Really, Wieland just seems to want to get the word out there about how beautiful the medium is, and to encourage folk to give it a try for themselves — whatever their point of entry / station in life might be. Knowing how dedicated he is to this current craft, I honestly find it a little frustrating that every mention of him online (as they relate to the Lula series) still just identifies him as “an erotic illustrator,” and seems to call it a day after that. Because Wieland’s work has always spanned so many themes and mediums, and the fact that he chose to focus on adult games for a decade’s time shouldn’t be the single experience that defines him in perpetuity. If his contributions to watercolor are the legacy he wants to leave behind, I wish him well in his personal mission, and happily dedicate this paragraph to giving him free promotion.

“An unknown masterpiece by Carsten!”
Photo of Carsten Wieland, borrowed from Wieland’s online portfolio.

I’ve gotta be real with y’all here: I’m genuinely super stoked for Carsten Wieland — for the fact he had this late-life revelation, and got the hell out of a games industry that was slowly killing him. I’m not saying that from some shitty, snarky perspective of “thank god he stopped torturing us with his bad games” or anything dismissive along those lines: The dude had genuine talent as a character and concept designer, and I believe he had the potential in him to produce something that could’ve been truly great / hugely successful. I’m just honestly glad that he found something new to be passionate about – appears to be doing very well at it by all accounts – and seems to be way happier for having done so. Wieland has earned a peaceful life making the kind of art he wants to make, and passing his wisdom onto students looking to learn the craft. And to those who would hound him about making “one last Lula game” or whatever else: Please consider not doing that? If the dude ever wants to, he can do it when he feels like doing it, and take his sweet time doing so. But if he never does, that’ll be his choice, and we should all respect it.

Of course, there’s always the chance that Lula could be revived once more, and be taken completely out of Wieland’s hands again in the process. The current owners of the IP appear to be Toplitz Productions, who authorized The Sexy Empire to be sold on GOG. At any point, they could theoretically either task a studio with developing a new entry for them, or sell the property to some prospective buyer looking to produce it themselves. Maybe enough time has passed by now and the state of the industry has changed sufficiently, to where a new Lula game could be as explicit and nasty as it wants to be without concern of causing controversy? They may even go so far as to actually show a penis on screen! Of course, the issue here isn’t whether or not somebody could make a new Lula game, and more a question of if they should? Naturally, I feel the answer here is pretty obvious: Probably not, unless Wieland is directly and willingly involved in its production. If the purpose of a late sequel or modern-day reboot would be to finally let Wieland continue / end the series on his own terms, then more power to it I say! But if the only intention is to bank on nostalgia, while at the same time cutting out the man who created Lula in the first place? The developers in that theoretical scenario could fuck right off, then.

Honestly, I think that Lula has more than earned her retirement at this point. I like to imagine her settling in at that “small Caribbean island called Anquilla” that Redfire suggested she had once vacationed at — hanging out at the bar of “the Beach Resort Hotel,” and “looking well rested.” And sitting right by her side is Gina: Still her partner in crime, and also her wife of seventeen years. When they’re not sipping on Mai Tais and fucking each others brains out, they’re robbing rich tourists just for the fun of it. That’s the happy ending Lula deserves. Oh, and Bazooka Sue’s there too, because why the hell not? If Carsten Wieland can manage to find his bliss, then all the ladies he created should be able to find it for themselves too.

** I would point out that this ‘Stick of Joy’ website typically traffics in pretty trashy fare: Listicles highlighting the likes of “The Best Overwatch Hentai & Porn Parodies in VR,” flanked by dozens of banner ads for porn site subscriptions and Instagram models. But for what it’s worth, their writer seems to put a lot of passion into these occasional historical retrospective articles, and does their due diligence in chronicling oft-ignored entries to the adult games scene? I honestly hesitated for a moment to link to such a skeezy site – one that could be mistaken at a glance as being composed entirely of bot-generated posts – but ultimately had to concede that they did some genuinely good work here with their Lula article. It just goes to demonstrate the state of websites that attempt to specialize in this facet of the games industry, and how they need to present themselves in order to generate essential traffic. It’s a big part of why I felt so compelled to pen my own article on this particular subject matter: To demonstrate that adult games are worthy of preservation, and to be considered with at least some degree of seriousness.

*** Surprisingly, Wardoves: Secret Weapon of World War I isn’t an adult game, which makes it the odd duck out in Redfire Software’s catalogue. I have to wonder if they briefly considered expanding their repertoire into non-adult games, in the same way that New Generation Software dabbled in both markets?

[1] (🇩🇪) ^{b c} Wieland, Carsten. “Ein Langer Weg Zum Aquarellmalen…” Brushpark-Watercolors. April 12, 2016. Web.
[2] (🇩🇪) Szameitat, Thorsten. “Preview: Bazuka Sue.” Amiga Games, Issue 2. Computec Verlag. November 1992. Print. (Scan available)
[3] (🇩🇪) Wieland, Carsten. “Portfolio: Bazooka Sue.” Grasland Production. Page archived March 13th, 2010. Web. (Archived)
[4] (🇩🇪) ^b Wieland, Carsten. “Portfolio: WET – The Sexy Empire.” Grasland Production. Page archived March 13th, 2010. Web. (Archived)
[5] (🇩🇪) “Cebit Home: Mehr Ulk-Erotik bel CDV.” MCV, Issue 36. Computec. September 4, 1998. Print. (Scan available)
[6] (🇩🇪) Wieland, Carsten. “Portfolio: WET ATTACK feat. LULA.” Grasland Production. Page archived March 13th, 2010. Web. (Archived)
[7] (🇩🇪) “Aus der Redaktion: Blondinen Bevorzugt.” PC Joker, Issue 79. Joker Verlag. August 1999. Print. (Scan available)
[8] (🇩🇪) “Genremix: Wet Attack: The Empire Cums Back.” PC Joker, Issue 77. Joker Verlag. June 1999. Print. (Scan available)
[9] (🇸🇰) ‘Korgull.’ “Erotická Akční Adventura Lula 3D.” Games.cz. April 26, 2002. Web.
[10] (🇸🇰) Chrappa, Juraj. “Lula 3D – adventure s nádychom erotiky.” SME Tech. October 29, 2002. Web.
[11] (🇩🇪) Mangelsdorf, Mathias. “Lula 3D – Preview.” Adventure Corner. September 18, 2003. Web.
[12] (🇩🇪) “Produkte — Lula 3D.” NuClearVision.de. Page archived October 31, 2004. Web. (Archived)
[13] Ng, Stephen. “CDV: E3 2004 Booth Report.” IGN. May 18, 2004. Web.
[14] (🇷🇺) ^{b c} Vershinin, Alexander. “Новости: Слияние двух Лул.” Game.EXE, Issue 70. Computerra. October, 2003. Print. (Scan available)
[15] “Lula 3D Interview.” GamersHell.com. Page archived January 2005. Web. (Archived)
[16] “Lula 3D: Sexy adventures with the PC’s one and only erotic star.” GamesIndustry.biz. November 23, 2005. Web.
[17] “CDV’s Lula 3D — Too Hot for Retail!” GamesIndustry.biz. January 19, 2006. Web.
[18] “CDV’s Lula 3D — Ready for Download.” GamesIndustry.biz. April 18, 2006. Web.
[19] “NPD: $9.9 billion worth of console games sold in 2004.” GameSpot. January 18, 2005. Web.
[20] Lynch, David. Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity. TarcherPerigee, 2007. Print.
[21] “Q2 Report 2006.” CDV Software Entertainment. September 1, 2006. Web.
[22] Gibson, Ellie. “Lula 3D.” Eurogamer. January 20, 2006. Web.
[23] Allin, Jack. “Review for Lula 3D.” AdventureGamers.com. January 25, 2008. Web.
[24] (🇩🇪) Kautz, Paul. “Review: Lula 3D.” 4Players.de. July 11, 2005. Web.
[25] ‘André.’ “Lula 3D – Review.” AdventureArchiv.com. July 11, 2005. Web. (Archived, ironically enough)
[26] ‘Erik.’ “The History of Lula – The Erotic Video Games Franchise.” StickOfJoy.com. August 30, 2020. Web.
[27] (🇩🇪) “Handy Games — Lula Strip Poker.” HandyPlex.de. Page archived September 28, 2009. Web. (Archived)
[28] Martin, Matt. “cdv Software opens UK office.” GamesIndustry.biz. July 22, 2008. Web.
[29] ^b “Curtain falls on CDV vs SouthPeak saga.” MCV/DEVELOP. December 2, 2009. Web.
[30] Alexander, Leigh. “Gamecock, G.O.D. Veterans Form Devolver Digital.” Game Developer (formerly Gamasutra). June 25, 2009. Web.
[31] Graft, Kris. “CDV Wins Latest Legal Battle Against SouthPeak.” Game Developer (formerly Gamasutra). February 23, 2010. Web.
[32] Elliot, Phil. “cdv names Southpeak as reason for insolvency.” GamesIndustry.biz. April 15, 2010. Web.
[33] Connelly, Tim. “Private and Americans Win Big at Venus Fair.” AVN. October 22, 2003. Web.
[34] (🇩🇪) Wieland, Carsten. “About Me.” Wieland FineArt. Page accessed September 15, 2022. Web.