Fans of boyfriends and strange iPhone chat games may recall Boyfriend Maker, the sometimes hilarious, sometimes genuinely creepy virtual companion app that was released last year for iOS before being summarily pulled from the iTunes App Store.
Developer 36You has brought the game back to Apple devices, albeit with some notable changes. It’s now called Boyfriend Plus, and it seems to contain far less of the saucy, sometimes downright creepy language that was in the original version of the game. As documented at the Boyfriend Maker Tumblr, this had the digital guy calling the user a bitch, regularly making drug references, and even making violent allusions to sex with underage girls.)
I haven’t had much time to mess with the new version of the app but Keith Andrew over at Pocket Gamer has put it through its paces, and reports that the game now has far less racy talk, and that there are new systems in place to curtail the sorts of sexy questions that caused trouble before. (You can see those in the copious warning windows above, which popped up at the very start of the game.) If you use foul language in chat, your boyfriend will lose his energy to chat further, and it’s possible to report undesired content to the game’s makers.
While the virtual boyfriend is really a product of the SimSimi chat AI that the game uses, I do like the idea that this virtual boyfriend is a real person who, as it turned out, was a real creep, and now the developers are acting like a concerned parent, sitting in the room and forcing him to behave. It’s not clear yet just how cleaned-up the new version is, or whether some errant strangeness still exists at the margins, but I’m sure we’ll see some interesting results over the next few days. To see for yourself, you can check out Boyfriend Plus for free on the iTunes App Store.
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