I don’t know about that. Looking at the footage, there are so many things wrong with Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties that I would be hard-pressed to find a game in a similar vein worse than it. Here are just some of the things that stick out:
-A low level of interactivity. Just Some Guy mentioned Dragon’s Lair as probably the first and most famous of interactive movies. The only problem is that Plumbers is nothing like Dragon’s Lair. If it was, it might have had some redeeming qualities (not likely, though) or at least be more entertaining. In Dragon’s Lair, you have to very quickly press a certain direction on a joystick or an action button many times in each scene to make the story progress, making it more of a game. In Plumbers, you just make decisions between two or three paths at certain times during the story, making it more like a Choose Your Own Adventure book. And the times between these choices are often quite long- it takes a good 15 minutes or so for the first decision to come up. I imagine there are some forms of entertainment like this that are actually fun, but Plumbers isn’t one of them.
-Extremely poor production values. Other than the opening, there is no full-motion video anywhere in the game- the entire game is a series of still photographs with sound over them. At one point, what appears to be a mistake by one of the actors is kept in. If it had been entirely FMV, again there might be something to it (though I doubt it), but given the poor production values and the lack of interactivity, this seems like something someone could slap together in a few hours in Flash or Powerpoint and put online for free, not a $50 game for a high-end, $700 system.
-An uncertainty as to who is the target audience. Given the opening cinematic and the equivalent of an R rating the game has (and contrary to what the Nerd says, there is no discrepancy between “suitable for 18 and over” and “guidance suggested for 17 and under”), you would think this was a game for men and that the reward for playing well would be to see the heroine naked, perhaps a comedy porn adventure in the style of Leisure Suit Larry. In actuality, there’s more male nudity in the game than there is female nudity, and the nudity itself is in the very first scene (not only that, it’s censored and requires a code to see unblocked, and even doing this causes a disclaimer to appear saying to close your eyes until the music ends if you don’t want to see it). Later on, if you ask the heroine to take her clothes off for her lecherous boss, you are chided by the narrator, and are instead rewarded if the heroine sticks it to her boss instead. This, combined with the fact that a female narrator then comes in, beats up the male narrator, and complains as to what’s happened to the heroine so far gives it a bit of a feminist lean and almost makes it seem like it may be intended for a female audience- until the male narrator comes back in and kills the female narrator. Who is this game meant for? Men? Women? Adults? Not adults? It’s hard to tell.
-A nonsensical plot. This doesn’t sound like a bad thing- there’s nothing wrong with a little absurd humor every now and then- but the thing is that this isn’t humorous, only absurd. Even going over the basic plot in my head and it doesn’t make sense: A man wants to meet a woman because his mother wants grandkids. Meanwhile, a woman wants to meet a man because her father heard what the mother said for some reason. The man goes to an office for some reason while the woman is propositioned by her boss to take her clothes off for a promotion. She declines but instead almost agrees to an Indecent Proposal-style deal until the man intervenes and they end up together. The end. Compared to that, “a floating samurai head must defeat an alien” sounds like freakin’ Shakespeare. (This doesn’t count the events that are probably meant to be absurd and humorous, such as the non-Hollywood ending in which instead of getting together, the woman admits she wants to be a nun and the man admits he has a disease- when the main parts of your story overshadow the ones that are meant to be intentionally silly in terms of weirdness- like, say, for example, a dream sequence involving race cars and a poorly-cut-out panda- something is horribly wrong.)