Gale Force

There are sites out there that you just wish were updated more regularly: for me, Fantasy Feeder is one of these. A UK (I think) fat admirer website devoted to fantasies of feeding and weight gain (for both sexes, actually, though I tend to steer away from the fotos of bulging guy guts), FanFeeder is definitely an online respite for those of us who like to dream of food and fat. Among the treats offered on the site: an fDiets Plan page where you can figure out how many calories you theoretically would require to reach the weight you wanna hit (not sure I fully accept its basic foundations, but it's still a fun tool to play with), a pair of stories and some photo e-cards that you can send someone by way of encouragement, members' pics and a web board, a Flash cartoon about a gluttonous super-sized femme named Helen that I've been waiting for ages to see continued, plus the ever-popular "Fatten Your Feedee," a JavaScript game I remember playing when it was on an earlier site.

I recnetly tried playing it again. The basic idea of the game is to feed your cartoon girlfriend Gale, a modest plumper who we first see wearing tidy businesswear, 'til she either becomes grandly fat or ditches you for either mismanaging your money and/or not paying attention to her health and happiness. The game works on a week-by-week schedule: with a regularly replenished salary, you're required to buy food, clothes and pay for activities that'll both give our gal exercise and keep her happy. We have no idea what Gale does when you're not around: basically, the only comments she makes are about the quality and quantity of the food you’re offering on a weekly basis. Per the game's hints page, you don't wanna overdo it on the caloric intake – or Gale's health'll plummet. As a fantasy feeder, you need to keep track of four basic elements: money, health and happiness scales, and, of course, Gale's weight.

When I tried playing the game most recently, I found that I was generally able to get Gale to gain about four pounds a week. I mainly kept to inexpensive activities (as tempting and caloric as it is to take Gale out to dinner and a movie every night, doing so only trashes your bank account) and was able to get my heroine from 150 up to 227 pounds. At that point, the ingrate ditched me for busting my budget.

Every twenty pounds or so, two images of Gale are replaced by graphics reflecting our heroine’s new weight. (The illos are your prime reward for keeping the game going, and they're decently cartoonish.) Occasionally, too, our gal needs to buy clothing that's a notch larger than her old size (from "L" to "XL" to "XXL" and so forth); if you don't get fresh clothes, the activities available for you become much more limited. At times, special windows open that give you the opportunity to increase Gale's health or happiness, though when I played this time, I didn't get any. Perhaps it was my inept playing, but it seemed like some of the game's elements weren't working as well as they once did.

Still, you've gotta admire the mind that went to the effort of concocting this silly divertisement (just the act of doing all the growing Gale graphics is plenty time-consuming, let alone calculating the rest of the elements that you need to keep things movin'). I'd love to see the proprietors of Fantasy Feeder spruce this game up. There've been other weight gain games on the Internet – some, like "Feed the Model," are done more out of contempt for bulimia culture than from love of size – but Gale remains my personal favorite. Even if she is inclined to dump me every time I bounce a personal check. . .