Girlfriend Construction Set

Created in 1989 and distributed as shareware without a compulsory registration, Girlfriend Construction Set is what can be considered a hybridized version of Alter Ego- instead of focusing on the creation of your own personal human being and interacting with him/her, the game allows you to create a series of girlfriends and date them, in the means of improving your personal status. The central goal of the game is to make a perfect girlfriend (or at least, perfect according to the game's standards) that you are desirable enough to date, to be granted entrance to THE BIG PARTY.

There are two main factors of Girlfriend Construction Set that need to be used to achieve the eventual goal: management and actual gameplay, both of which are held in equal focus. The management aspects include the creation (and dumping) of your girlfriends, and deciding where to date them. Creating a girlfriend is perhaps more complicated than necessary- the player (I'll assume male as that is what is assumed in the game) chooses between 10 attributes, a possible score of 0-10 for each. The limit of how many points he can spend is dependant on his own personal status. This process generally takes some time of playing around to get a result you are pleased with. This is also the only time you'll see graphics- 11 crude drawings of cartoony women and a few inanimate objects representing possible activities.
After a little tinkering, and the eventual creation of your virtual girlfriend, she completely leaves your control, and all factors of her behaviour, and other NPC characters in relation to her is determined by the values entered. This leaves you free to chose one of many venues for a date (at this point most will be inaccessible), and start a dating sequence.
The dates themselves are fairly reminiscent of scenarios from Alter Ego, or more generally, mimic a "choose your own adventure". Entirely text based, the game provides a few preset scenarios for a date. The influence of large period of time you spent producing the stats is shown in a 5-6 word sentence at the bottom, showing your girlfriends personal reaction to the scenario. These sequences are the game's greatest flaw.
Despite showing several interesting scenes, consistently paved with erotic overtones, they offer little to no interactivity. Choosing amusing outcomes to scenarios gives no rewards at all, for example, punching the waiter for spilling soup on your girlfriends blouse does not end in your girlfriend joining the fray, or being ejected, or anything amusing like that- if the outcome damages the continuity of the scenario, the player is simply ejected from the date, and status points are lost. If however it doesn't, the date continues on its merry way with no influence of the prior actions, but points are lost anyway. Indeed, most dates degrade to finding the sequence with as few errors as possible, and repeat it over and over. Although you can have a few chuckles at some of the possibilities, the end result is somewhat unsatisfying.
The other major gripe is the limited influence your hard-earned work in adding and distributing all those skill points has on the game. A general increase in statistics gives some extra portions to dates, mostly sexually oriented, but spending several hours of repeating a sequence to improve your girlfriends body type (if you can find out what that type is) simply changes a single line response from "That girl is really fat" to "She's not that bad looking".