CAL III

~ CAL III ~

Birdy Soft / NEC Avenue

Super CD-ROM

1994

What you experience here is more of an "adventure" than the straightforward sequence of confrontations in CAL II. Rather than simply walking a path and meeting up with girls in ridiculous situations, you tour a variety of places and, well, just keep on picking from the available options. Unlike its predecessor, CAL III isn't littered with choices that lead to undesirable conclusions. In fact, it wasn't until very late in the adventure that, upon answering a sphinx's questions incorrectly, I finally suffered a Game Over. There may be others (a battle with a goofy Hydra being one potential spot of doom), but I've never encountered them.

There's seldom any reason for caution when making your selections since the chances of blundering into a Game Over are so low. It's nice not having to endure the frustration of replaying segments just to reach a decisive question again, but now there's even less reason to pay attention to what's actually going on. But then, there just isn't much going on in this game anyway.

You'll run into a variety of characters, from scheming deities to Alice (in Wonderland), but very little happens aside from lengthy discussions, most of which take place as you look at boring, redundant desert backdrops.

Occasionally, something genuinely funny happens, but most of the time, I find myself struggling just to stay awake. CAL III is incredibly short and quite uneventful, and contrary to what most players likely would expect, it doesn't present much "erotic" material at all.