Vish Reviews People: Angus Cheng
15-9-15
By: Vishal Nanda
This is a blog where I will be reviewing humans. According to wikipedia, humans outnumber restaurants, books, and even the sum total of all films ever made. This has never been done before, so it will be learning process for me as well as for you.
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Beginning with Angus Cheng. The only Eurasian I've ever known to hire pornstars for voice acting in a video game.
He's a 27 year old Hong Kong resident, a self-employed indie game developer and self-professed jerk. He has developed and published video games with titles like Get Rich or Die Gaming, Get Rich or Die Gaming 2: Rock Bottom, The Fantastic Fivesome, Tokyo Hosto, and the recently released- Phoney Girlfriend (along with its sister game Phoney Boyfriend).
He describes Phoney Girlfriend as a 'virtual dating app.'
"Basically you normally see a character in front of you, and then you talk to them, and then you buy them...stuff...(shrugs) I haven't played too many of them."
"I know vaguely about them." He says. "There's a few really big ones. There's one called Love Plus and it's made by Konami. They made Metal Gear Solid and Love Plus."
Apparently the whole reason he wanted to make these games is because he was searching them on GooglePlay and found them to be "Amazingly bad."
"I wanted to see, what's the closest thing to porn you can get on GooglePlay. So I just searched up girlfriend apps. But I noticed that they are really bad, but they are getting huge downloads. So if I can make a good one, it's gonna get huge downloads, and maybe even bigger than all these guys."
But why are there huge downloads for these girlfriend apps that are close to pornographic, if they are of such poor quality?
"Yeah I...think...I just. I think there is a lot of lonely people out there."
"And they want girlfriends. And maybe they want porn as well."
Except his game isn't really pornographic. The most graphic it gets is the rare bikini photo. Instead Phoney Girlfriend is a sort of chatbot. The game looks like a WhatsApp style messenger, and you are interacting with a woman through it (or a man in the case of Phoney Boyfriend). The choices of what to say are selected from a menu and the responses are pre-scripted.
Aren't we all limited by our conversational options? Whittled away at by habit and societal expectations? Angus was close to something here, I could feel it in his hands. Courtship devoid of tangible consequences. Virtual love and real loneliness.
But what about the porn stars he had promised to tell me of?
Phoney Girlfriend was not Angus's first foray into the virtual companion genre.
Previously he had made The Fantastic Fivesome. The opening of the game sets up the Kafkaesque premise. A handrawn cartoon of a doctor informs the player: 'You have one week to live. The only cure is for you to have a fivesome with four beautiful women.' The player must date different types of women, and attempt to convince them to have a fivesome with him.
I asked what kind of porn actresses he had canvassed.
"There's a range, like A to Z grade. As long as they were somewhat known, and had a certain amount of Twitter followers."
He wanted them both for their voice acting skills but they also had to promote the game on their social media accounts.
"It didn't have any effect actually."
Apparently the problem was the platform. Not everyone had Xbox's, and if they did they would have to then go to the console, turn it on, and buy the game. Pornstar Twitter followers were not so inclined to this process.
He berated himself: "That was the stupidest thing. That was so dumb- I'm like 'nobody knows their voices'. So the whole experiment...actually that game really took off and did pretty well. It was really stupid. And that's one of the problems of doing things on your own. You have an idea and you just think 'that's the best idea ever, I'm going to do it."
"There's actually a twist at the end of the game." He tells me.
Spoiler alert.
"It turns out you are actually a girl and by fivesome you didn't mean a sexual fivesome, actually a fivesome means you play a DotA tournament with four other people...and that's called a fivesome."
Which is clearly, a twist, as shown by the reactions of famed YouTube game reviewers KSIOlajidebt.
Skip to 9:15 for the reveal.
In the end it seems the The Fantastic Fivesome is really a satirical commentary on male fantasies.
"No, I just really wanted to troll everyone who played the game. I thought it was funny."
I clarified about whether people paid money for this experience. They did.
Both these games can be found on the Apple App store. He has another one called 'Messenger' coming up. It's partly about working as a day trader in an investment bank, picking ridiculous stocks and putting up with your insane boss and coke addicted co-workers.
Finally I had enough information to rate Angus as a human being. I have to give him two stars for chutzpah, but deduct one for plugging Konami. His business partner's name is Hubert, which is star worthy. Angus even offered me a coffee whilst I was there, and he did it in a witty way. It was polite and really made me rethink how to offer someone a beverage.
I declined because I was afraid it would give me the shits.
4/5 Stars
Angus can be found on Twitter @BallerIndustries or at ballerindustries.com
He is definitely worth taking a look at.
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Comments
Freddy Ma
I give Angus 13.37 stars
15 September 2015