Take three girls dressed in skimpy French maid uniforms, a geek with a video camera and do a spot of filming; usually the result would be fetish porn, but in this particular case we instead end up looking at an Xbox 360 Live Indie game that the developer has christened Maids With Balloons… so now it even sounds like fetish porn!
The game itself is actually three mini games, a simple gallery shooter where maid Cali launches balloons at seagulls and tries to avoid avian faecal matter, a version of Frogger (okay, it’s actually a version of Freeway from the Atari 2600 and my retro gaming knickers are showing) which sees maid Erica avoiding oncoming traffic for helium-filled rubber and maid Pixie gets herself catapulted skywards from a trampoline borne by the other girls in grand Circus Atari tradition to grab even more latex, all the while scaring away poop-laden gulls. Each is rather simple fare (the game rather than the girl) but they’re all surprisingly fun to play if a little repetitive after time.
Graphics are a mixture of stock photos and textures, overlaid with crudely-drawn enemies and digital stills of the girls animated as though Terry Gilliam had decided to do fetish porn, all accompanied by encouraging sound bites as balloons are collected or birds given the push. The controls are reasonable throughout if a little slow-moving at times, especially around the fourth or fifth wave of each game when the pace has stepped up significantly. The acting in the video clips book-ending each game is amusingly bad and reminiscent of FMV “classics” such as Night Trap, although the camera work here is a considerably more ropey. One particular video to watch out for is played only when quitting the preview as the girls pout about nobody wanting to play with them; it’s the first time i’ve ever seen a game try emotional blackmail like that!
Maids With Balloons is at best average as a collection of mini games and the presentation rather variable, but it does at least offer some giggles (not all of them from the maids themselves) and refuses utterly to take itself seriously. Remember, just 80 MS points will keep three French maids from pouting sulkily at you, but make sure you’ve got an excuse ready for when friends or family notice the download on your 360′s hard drive. And for goodness sake don’t let them Google “maids with balloons” or they might find the fetish clips gallery i located that has one of the girls (maid Pixie, under the abbreviation PXE) from the game in it!
