Over at Eurogamer, Dave McCarthy has ventured where many gamers fear to tread with his feature 'The Bluffer's Guide To Hentai Games', which talks about the wonder of English-language 'erotic Japanese PC games' from a European perspective.

As handily explained: "There's... a wide range of play mechanics, from simple dating games, where you've got to impress the girls enough to get them into compromising positions, to choose-your-own adventure style flowchart games, where you simply have to make choices at key moments to propel the sexual narrative along." It's actually good to see acceptable English language explanations of what is a pretty interesting, often badly explained gaming subgenre.

Further coverage of that very same genre has recently been taken up by Sexy Videogameland, the blog of Paste/Escapist contributor Leigh Alexander, and she looks at this conundrum: "How, then, does a Hentai game come to be bestowed with gravitas?" It then gets into Kana: Little Sister, which is all kinds of taboo, and the game does deal with oddly emotionally mature themes (the death of a family member, and coping with that), somewhat apart from the sexually mature parts within it. But as Leigh notes: "Dealing with such poignant concepts-- the lifelike vulnerability of your ill little sister, the burden of a family who may soon lose its innocent-- seems just a little bit twisted, actually."