The extraordinary Rudebox
The following article contains a great deal of wrong and is probably not safe for work. You have been warned.
A party at the cave last Saturday night saw Fat Conan and friends flicking through some retro titles on the old X-Box looking for something to rekindle those memories of yore. It was pretty successful too, with people enjoying games of “Rampart”, “Q*Bert“ and “Missile command”. However, what generated more interest (and more frustration) were some of the titles spotted along the way that intrigued us with their bawdy names and disappointed us with their refusal to work on the box’s MAME port.
On Sunday, freshly hung-over and yellow tongued, Fat Conan and I sat down (or rather I sat and he squatted with haunches quivering in ever-alert battle-readiness) and had a look at getting those titillating games running on the PC (for curiosity’s sake of course). We succeeded and never before have we so wished we’d failed.
The Japanese can always be relied upon for bringing a little bit of creepy to even the most mundane of activities. So is the case with our first entry “Pachinko Sexy Reaction” from Sammy: publishers of the bizarre, but brilliant, Guilty Gear series of fighting games.
The first stop on this quick tour of the more odd and disturbing games MAME has to offer, is probably also the most tasteful (if you can believe that) with its simple premise of “play Pachinko for animé booby reward”. Pachinko, for those who’ve not encountered it before, is basically pinball without the flappers. The player buys metal balls to feed into the machine in the hope of winning more metal balls. This version of the game, while entirely electronic, simulates that experience accurately; albeit with more explosions and nudity than one might expect.
Game-play is simple: press button A repeatedly. That’s about it. If you’re feeling adventurous you could try moving the joystick around, but for the most part this seems pretty redundant. Meanwhile, the story is somewhat opaque (mainly as it’s conveyed in a language of which I have no understanding and partly because I find it difficult to visualise any obvious connection between ball-bearings and breasts), but seems to involve women that either hate or love that you’re playing the game, invariably stripping-off regardless of their feelings so long as you continue to press A and feed credits into the machine.
Somewhat surprisingly, it’s actually reasonably well presented considering its content, certainly it’s a few thousand times more refined than the next offering on the list. Say hello, and quickly goodbye, to “Poker Ladies”.
“Poker Ladies” is a strip poker arcade cabinet (which raises the question of where on God’s Earth you’d put such a machine) that features terrible graphics, laughable sound effects and a little bit of bestiality. You can’t make this stuff up.
While the poker aspect of the game works pretty much as you’d expect, the strip part is where the “action” really happens. Each “female” opponent has three levels of nakedness: first clothed; then topless and lastly naked and being in some way molested by the player. The more hands you win, the further you proceed through the levels. The third level is by far the strangest thing I’ve seen in a while: bashing button A triggers a rather pathetic animation of your opponent involved in some form of devious act,. These acts range from her being groped by disembodied hands to having her nipple licked by a snake. Again, you can’t make this stuff up.
What really makes this one special however, are not the seedy animations or the crappy graphics, but the sound effects. The game uses digitised speech frequently and its quality is beyond poor. It’s one thing to see a woman getting a little reptile action in a poker game, but having her slurring on like the Elephant man while she’s at it is something else altogether. Here’s a little sample of what I mean: the “you lose” phrase that’s played after every losing hand. Thanks, Mitchell (who apparently own the copyright) for allowing me to find out what it’d be like to play poker against a lobotomised hooker.
Scraping the very bottom of the barrel reveals the last in this trio of “erotic” classics. This one lacks the both the sophistication and charm of the previous two, which were themselves both charmless and degenerate. This one’s a horror. Ladies and Gentlemen “Miss World ‘96 – Nude”.
So what is it? At its core it’s essentially a “Qix” clone that reveals a photograph of a naked woman as regions of the screen are claimed. When I first saw the game I had assumed that it was a home-brew effort; perhaps written by someone alone in their bedsit, cobbling together function definitions and data-structures between alternating periods of masturbation and sobbing. Sadly however, this looks like it was a genuine arcade machine, which once again begs the question of where all these pseudo-porn arcades reside.
In an innovative (and by innovative I mean inexplicable) twist on the “Qix” formula the makers added a bar at the top of the screen that is divided into two zones, one blue, one red. A marker on the bar shows your current level. Exactly what this indicates and what criteria define your current level are a mystery. The bar’s marker and its proportion of red to blue fluctuate as the game is played. The only consistent aspect of this indicator (at least as far as Fat Conan and I could tell) is that when your marker enters the red zone an animation pops up showing a girls face transforming into that of a werewolf with the phrase “turning…” printed beneath it. At this point the naked lady in the background is replaced with some Clive Barker-esque demonic figure and the soundtrack replaced with some throbbing (and equally horrible) techno beats.
A quick rummage around the interweb reveals that this game isn’t (to everyone’s surprise) an official license of the Miss World brand; a fact the organisers of the competition seemed a little miffed about at the time. Who can blame them? For all the criticism you could ladle on the Miss. World contest, it’s not once left me wanting to scrub my skin with AJAX. Sure, it’s made me think: “Shouldn’t we really move beyond these sorts of outmoded, shallow and arguably sexist forms of entertainment” but it’s never made me want to shave away my corneas with a narrow gauge cheese grater. That’s more than can be said of this nightmare inducing namesake.
So there you have it; three of the most bizarre takes on erotica I’ve seen and all compatible with MAME for those of you who can’t resist trying it for yourselves. If you enjoy a little masochism then these are some of the less dangerous ways of humiliating and degrading yourself, if not then for God’s sake avoid them like the plague.
“Pachinko Sexy Reaction”, “Poker Ladies” & “Miss World ‘96 – Nude” overall score: Fat Conan and I are off to pawn our eyes/10