Long before COC2 and probably even COC1, to say nothing of BOTM which only premiered last year, there was a time when a "sex game" was just a crappy Flash animation where you'd play Solitaire or Memory for a few minutes, and if you won you'd be rewarded with a picture of a naked girl. They were pretty awful, and as a budding pervert who also spent my free time gaming, I really couldn't ever dream of crossing the streams in a way that would even vaguely tickle my fancy. You could have decent porn attached to a crappy game, or a decent game with crappy porn attached to it, but there was no hope you'd ever find anything actually GOOD.
And then, along came
Fleshcult.
An amazing text-based game which actually represented the physiological and psychological mechanisms of arousal in a mechanically satisfying fashion, one that actually scratches the itch in the gamer's brain which wants to micromanage numbers and try to maximize the effectiveness of your choices, all while the game's flavor text actually turns you on (or at least it did me, and I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one)...Fleshcult was the first inkling that I ever got that a "sex game" could actually work, and satisfy both of my interests equally well at the same time.
Apparently the game has recently been re-released through Steam, but prior to that happening, it existed on a website of its own, and that website was supported by ads. You could choose to pay $5 one time to create a paid account, which would never get ads again...but I never did this, because as far as I was concerned, the ads were a feature of the game, not a bug. The game has only three illustrations in it, one of which is a background with tiny stone bas-reliefs that only a Benedictine monk who just hit puberty could have gotten wood from looking at. So as much as the game text could turn me on...I'm a guy, I'm mostly wired to respond first to visual stimulus, and secondarily to constructs of my own imagination, such as the visualization of a scene described in text. Having ads for chatlines and porn sites all over the sides of the game screen gave me a constant stream of low-level erotic stimulus on the shallow visual level, which combined with the text to get my juices flowing far harder than
just a smutty paragraph or
just a couple nudie pics could accomplish on their own.
Anyway, my profile pic is a cropped thumbnail taken from a screenshot of one of those ads. I have hundreds of them, since I knew they were fleeting and irreplaceable glimpses of a product I couldn't afford to purchase, so snatching the freely-circulated advertisements and saving them was a way to ensure my memories of this transient experience could be revisited later. This one might not be my very favorite, but it's a special case, because it's the only case where I think I actually managed to find a video of the same girl on Pornhub or somewhere of that ilk, years later and with no apparent connection to where the source originally appeared. I don't know for sure if it's the same girl, but at the very least it's a similar outfit, and it was close enough to blow my mind when I first discovered it. So this is the one specific screenshot thumbnail that means the most to me, out of that entire collection, and I figured it'd make a good avatar for here.