SABRINA (ZX SPECTRUM)

The topic of today’s article? Smut, plain and simple. The ever-popular combination of sex and violence comes to the ZX Spectrum with Spanish developer Genesis Soft’s 1989 breast-em-up (and that ain’t a Freudian slip) Sabrina!

Here’s Sabrina’s loading screen, and in the interests of keeping the site relatively family-friendly VGJunk’s unofficial site mascot Satan Goat is pulling double duty as a censor bar. I reckon the breasts on the poster in the background are fine because the nipples are just one pixel, but that’s not the case with Sabrina herself. Let’s just say she should probably go up a bra size or two, because she’s spilling out of the one she’s wearing now.
Aside from that, I rather like this title screen. Sure, Sabrina might have the shoulders of a rugby forward, but apart from that it’s pretty good. A nicely detailed face and a background showing a charming Mediterranean town, all captured in black and white so you’re not subjected to the Spectrum’s occasionally retina-searing range of colours.
As well as this… engaging image, Sabrina’s title screen also features some digitised speech! That’s always impressive to hear coming out of a ZX Spectrum. Okay, maybe not always impressive, because I think Sabrina has the worst digitised speech I’ve ever heard in a computer game. I had to listen to it a dozen times before I realised it was saying “Genesis Soft presenta Sabrina,” because it sounds like Stephen Hawking being slowly fed into a rusty woodchipper.

It turns out that the eponymous Sabrina is not a character created for the game and she is, in fact, based on a real person. Specifically, you’re playing as Italian beauty pageant winner turned pop star Sabrina Salerno. As she was an Italian pop star in the mid to late eighties, I’m sure you can imagine the kind of poppy-funky-dancey music she was releasing, and it seems she was mostly famous for the raunchiness of her music videos. I watched a few of them as research for this article, and that was definitely one of the more, ahem, invigorating research sessions I’ve ever done for the site. You probably couldn’t get away with watching them (or doing a Google image search for Sabrina) at work, let’s put it that way. As you can see from the game’s cover, Sabrina also came with a cassette of Sabrina’s music, including her hits “Boys” (sample lyrics: “boy, boys, boys, get ready for my love”) and “Hot Girl,” as well as a cover of Prince’s “Kiss.” I listened to that version of Kiss, too. I wouldn’t recommend it.

Obviously, if you’re making a game about an Italo-disco singer known for her sex appeal, there’s only one possible genre for it: the side-scrolling beat-em-up. Hang on, really? Not some kind of music management sim or even a “make a music video” type thing? I can understand it not being a rhythm-action game, because the Spectrum’s ability to output bearable music is outdone by a squeaky dog toy tied to a pneumatic drill, but a beat-em-up? Oh well, time to start beating people up, I guess.
That’s Sabrina on the left of the screen, (and also twice at the bottom of the screen, which is perpetually emblazoned with the enormous status bar common to Spectrum games,) and she’s ready to move from left to right across a series of single-screen areas. There’s no scrolling backgrounds in this one, folks, just a series of individual screens. When I say “go from left to right,” I mean it, because that’s really all Sabrina can do. She can’t even jump and it does feel weird to be playing a brawler with no jumping in it at all. Just like in real life, I kept trying to do flying kicks when I very much did not have the capacity to pull off flying kicks.

This being a beat-em-up, naturally there are people for Sabrina to, you know, beat up. For the first half of the game, it’s mostly a repeating cycle of these three enemies. There’s a skinny woman on the right and a less-skinny woman on the left, and they’re presumably out to destroy Sabrina in a fit of outraged moral fervour. Just behind Sabrina is a knife-wielding maniac. You’d think he’d be the most dangerous of the three, but all of the enemies attack in the same manner: they walk into Sabrina and drain a bit of her health, while also causing Sabrina to be frozen in place while bright colours flash punishingly around the edge of the screen and a noise that sounds like a robot with diarrhoea not quite making it to the bathroom in time plays.
So, what moves does Sabrina have at her disposal to deal with these threats? Well, she has three attacks. She can slap at head height, she can kick at shin height – and that does look like it would be quite painful – and she can also do this.

That’s right, she can inflate her boobs and use them to batter people into submission. You’d have to pay certain specialist websites cold hard cash to get video footage of that kind of thing, but with Sabrina on the ZX Spectrum you can experience the effect in all it’s blocky, low-colour glory. It’s a move that’s destined to join Haggar’s spinning lariat and Axel’s Grand Upper in the pantheon of all-time classic beat-em-up attacks, I’m sure.

As you move forward, you’ll quickly realise that there’s a rock-paper-scissors – well, rock-paper-boobs, anyway – relationship between Sabrina’s moves and the enemies that are vulnerable to them. For instance, the knifemen can be knocked aside by a single blow from Sabrina’s ample charms, but the women are unfazed by her breasts and must be either kicked or slapped, depending on the type of woman. It’s an interesting take on the usual beat-em-up gameplay, I suppose, and it gives the action the feel of a memory-matching game rather than a brutal slugfest. I did begin to rue the fact that Sabrina’s boobs didn’t work on everyone, though, because they’ve got the greatest range and the fastest activation of all her attacks.

Then there’s the real danger that Sabrina faces during her adventure: high explosives. Most of the screens beyond the first two or three have a cartoon bomb laying on the floor – in the screenshot above, you can see it just in front of the purple door – and if Sabrina doesn’t get over to them quickly enough, they explode. If they do detonate, it’s an instant game over no matter how many lives you have, so obviously getting rid of the bombs is your top priority. To remove them, you have to punt the bomb off the screen by standing near it and using Sabrina’s kick attack – not part of most bomb disposal manuals, but it works for Sabrina as she has absolutely zero compassion for any innocent bystanders that may be harmed when she hoofs ten pounds of semtex at them.

Getting rid of the bombs isn’t as easy as I’ve made it sound, actually. Part of the problem is the position you have to take to kick the bomb: you’d think you’d want to be next to it, so that when Sabrina kicks the animation clearly shows her foot swinging and making contact with the bomb. That is not the case; you have to be standing right on top of it, maybe even slightly beyond it, in order to successfully kick the bloody thing. The is made more difficult by the frequency with which the bombs are placed directly under open windows, windows from which people will drop flowerpots onto Sabrina’s tousled head. Taking damage freezes you in place for what feels like a thousand agonising years, (actually about two seconds,) during which time the bomb’s countdown is still ticking away. This game isn’t exactly portraying Sabrina in the best light, is it? Not when everyone’s out to murder her for some unexplained reason. Maybe they foresaw that she’d end up recording Blondie's “Call Me” as a duet with Sam Fox in 2010 and were desperate to prevent this grim future from coming to pass.

That’s the general flow of Sabrina, then. You walk onto each new screen, check for bombs and if there is a bomb you rush over it and try to kick it away before it explodes, all while trying to remember which of your attacks are effective against each foe. And trying to remember which key you’d mapped to each attack, in my case. But it is any fun? Sadly, it really isn’t. The hit detection is sloppy enough that enemies you’re sure you should have defeated manage to sneak through, the fact that you’re paralysed by every successful enemy attack quickly becomes frustrating and when a bomb does explode, being kicked back to the title screen doesn’t exactly compel you to reach for the “new game” button. That said, there’s something I find quite charming about Sabrina. Maybe it’s that it took its ridiculous premise and not-very-videogame-appropriate heroine and ran with it, and the boob attack is so dumb it wraps around to being funny. The graphics aren’t bad for a Spectrum game, either, with some nice backgrounds and sprites that are a lot clearer in motion than they seem in these screenshots.

After twenty or so screen of this nonsense, Sabrina comes face-to-face with a lady that I’m going to generously call a boss. Standing here in this desolate alley, the only outcome can be a furious martial arts battle the likes of which Hong Kong cinema can only dream of. Are you ready to see these two mighty warriors locked in mortal combat?

I’m at a loss for words. Nothing I can come up with seems adequate to describe whatever this is. Two shop mannequins trapped in a giant blender? Mechanical soft-shoe dancers caught in a violent electrical storm? No, this fight simply is, and our human minds are ill-equipped to comprehend it. That’s what I kept telling myself when I couldn’t figure out what was going on here, anyway. As far as I can see, the only way to beat this woman is to make sure you start with multiple lives, get right up next to her and start wildly flailing on your attack buttons. With a little luck, she’ll be defeated before Sabrina runs out of lives. Any good will I had towards Sabrina by this point was quickly swept away by this awful, incomprehensible boss battle, so it is with a truly heavy heart that I must inform you it’s time to go through the game again.

That’s right, the boss was merely the half-way point. After flipping the tape over, the second half of Sabrina is revealed, and it looks like this. The gameplay is the same, but the graphics and setting have changed. The cartoon bombs are sticks of dynamite now, the levels have more of a “city centre” feel and there are different enemies. For instance, Sabrina is being chased by a crucifix-waving priest. Maybe he saw Sabrina thrashing around during the boss fight and came to the perfectly reasonable conclusion that she requires an exorcism. You can defeat the priest by whacking him with Sabrina’s boobs, and with that in mind I’m going to flip-flop again and say that Sabrina is actually kinda great.

As I say, the graphics might be a bit different, but the gameplay hasn’t changed any. It definitely hasn’t suddenly become interesting or anything, not even with the addition of the roaming priests and the punk-rock ladies you can see at the left of the screen. I do like their sprites, though. Where’s my beat-em-up about punk rock women with mohawks and switchblades clearing up the city streets? Hmm. They say you should be the change you want to see in the world, so I suppose I’d better learn how to make a beat-em-up.

Here’s an indication of just how loosely Sabrina was holding my attention: I wandered onto this screen and the first thing that sprang into my mind was “‘ayuntamiento’ is Spanish for ‘town hall’” followed by several minutes spent pondering the mysteries of the human mind as this piece of vocab from my GCSE Spanish lessons popped into my head fifteen years later.

“An old woman, a priest and Sabrina Salerno walk into a sex shop...” sounds like the start of an extremely filthy joke. It's a shame I can’t pop into the sex shop, I can’t believe Sabrina’s morally-upstanding potential murderers would follow me in there and I could get a bit of a break.

The second half of the game ends the same way as the first, with an identical boss battle against the flailing woman. At least these battles are over quickly. In fact. the entire game is over quickly: once you've had a bit of practise, you can beat the whole thing in less than ten minutes.

That’s it, the game’s over, and we’re presented with the cryptic message “llegaste al plato.” Obviously my GCSE Spanish lessons weren’t as comprehensive as I thought, because I originally through it was trying to tell me something about acquiring a plate. Then I looked it up and realised it’s probably supposed to say “llegaste al plató” (with accent) which means “You arrived at the set” (as in movie set). That makes a lot more sense, and it gives some indication of what Sabrina was actually trying to accomplish in this game. It doesn’t explain why everyone wanted her dead, though. Her musical output by 1989 wasn’t that bad. There’s also a mysterious code number provided, but I couldn’t figure out what it was for. And why the hell should I? What am I, Hercule Poirot? Someone else can put in the legwork to figure that one out, because I’ve definitely had enough of Sabrina by this point.
So that’s Sabrina, a game so European and trashy I’m surprised it wasn’t presented by Antoine de Caunes. Hold on a minute, just let me check… yep, Sabrina did appear on Eurotrash. Of course she did. If she hadn’t, I would’ve had to find someone who owns a hat so I could eat it.

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PIPI & BIBIS / WHOOPEE! (ARCADE)

I've been to some strange alternate worlds during all my years of videogaming, but today's might be the most bizarre parallel universe of them all: a world where you have to destroy computers to see pictures of naked women! Madness, utter madness. It's Toaplan's 1991 arcade bombs-n-boobs-em-up Pipi and Bibis, also known as Whoopee!

It might actually be called Pipi and Bibi's, complete with possessive apostrophe, but it's hard to tell. Whatever the correct title, I assume that Pipi and Bibi(s) are the names of the two playable characters, seen here standing under the game's extremely colourful logo. Also on the logo, up in the top right, is what I can only see as a tiny, armless, mechanical George Washington, his eyes bulging with righteous patriotic fervour.

Rather than deigning to explain the setting of the game or the goals of its protagonists in a clear, concise manner, Pipi and Bibis instead briefly scrolls through this comic strip which only serves to raise further questions. Why do all the characters look like designs rejected from the Muppets for being "too nightmarish?" What's with the ballerinas? Why has that man pulled down his underwear, and when he says "me too!" what is he hoping will happen to him? Actually, let's leave that one as a mystery. It can't possibly be anything pleasant. And I know I go on about the sinister greasepainted menace that is clowns a lot, but that clown in the top-middle panel is the most grotesque example I've seen for a while. The smirk on his hideous fleshy lips as he ogles a woman's ankles is going to stay with me for an uncomfortably long time.

Getting straight into it, Pipi and Bibis is a series of single-screen missions to avoid the enemies and fulfil your goals of computer destruction. You walk Pipi around the the screen, visiting each of the computer terminals so that you can plant a bomb next to them. Pipi has just accomplished this with his first target - you can see him standing nearby, with his blue suit and his face like a cartoon witch carved from an apple. There's no jump button in this one, so the only way to get between floors is to either take the elevators or walk up and down the staircases. In short, Pipi and Bibis is heavily inspired by Taito's arcade classic Elevator Action, filtered through the bold spritework of Toaplan's own Snow Bros. I'd be surprised if many of the staff that created Snow Bros. didn't also work on Pipi and Bibis. I'm also getting a Bonanza Bros. vibe from Pipi and Bibis, especially with the chequerboard backgrounds and techno-jazz soundtrack.

When you rig the explosives to the final computer on each stage, a countdown begins and Pipi must dash for the exit before the bombs explode, destroying the building and killing everyone inside, be they mad professor types with heads like a surly baked bean or a depressed-looking mafiosi. It's an explosion of such total destructive power that I can't help but feel that specifically targeting each computer was a waste of time, Pipi.
The real trick is making sure you rig the computer nearest to the exit last, giving you plenty of time to escape. This did not occur to me until I was several stages into the game. I am not an intelligent man.

Stage one complete, and my reward is a picture of a woman's feet. I was going to say she's wearing shoes, but on closer inspection I think they're extremely worn socks with massive holes on the heels. They also look like Fruit Pastille ice lollies. You can Google it for a comparison if you like but trust me, they really do.

Back to the action in stage two, which is the same as stage one but with a different layout. Blow up the computers, don't touch the enemies because they have coated themselves in a fast-acting neurotoxin that will immediately kill Pipi on contact. That's why the bad guys look so weird, they're all evolved from poisonous rainforest tree-frogs (I assume). To help in dealing with this villainous menace, Pipi has a weapon at his disposal, which you can see pictured in action above. It's a sort of laser beam / whip arrangement that stretches out in front of you when you hold down the fire button. It temporarily paralyses the enemies on contact, allowing you to walk past them unharmed. However, if you keep someone trapped in the beam for a while, they eventually slide off the floor and drop down onto the next solid level below. That's what's happening to this scientist, and his weird response of "resigned floppiness" is typical of all enemies caught in Pipi's beam. I think it might just make people really, really apathetic, sapping their will to do anything until they become liquid and dribble down to the floor below. If you manage to slide an enemy off the very bottom level, they're temporarily removed from the stage, although they will return via the doors in the background once they've recovered their get-up-and-go.

The Apathy Beam is an interesting method of defence, although it does have its drawbacks: for starters, it only works on one enemy at a time, so there's often situations where you're trying to keep multiple enemies stunned without making much progress because they recover so fast. The biggest issue, however, is that because the enemies fall down there's a tendency for them to all end up bunched together on the lowest platform - meaning the Apathy Beam is a weapon that you end up not wanting to use because it's only going to make things more difficult for you later, like landscaping your garden with hand grenades.

Here is a picture of a skirt. I though it would be a long, long time before I saw a videogame skirt uglier than the ones in Barbie: Fashion Pack Games but well, here we are.

This is the kind of thing I meant, it's a regular Potato-Faced Henchmen Convention at the bottom of that elevator. Luckily, all is not lost - if you make Pipi dash out of an elevator before the doors have opened all they way, he'll slide out feet-first and knock over any enemies in his path as he does so. It's up to you whether you shout "safe!" every time you do this, but that would be my recommendation.

It turns out there's a lady attached to those random articles of clothing! Here she is in all her marble-eyed, big-chinned grandeur, a wry smile on the lips of a mouth too small for eating food larger than rice grains. Well, she looks happy enough to be here, I suppose. Thanks for stopping by, miss.

I'm going to set a new upper limit on the Sarcastotron when I say "gee, I'm sure Toaplan received all the legal clearances necessary to include Disney character Jessica Rabbit in their weird porny arcade game. Mickey Mouse shook hands with the CEO of Toaplan and everything."

So, yeah, cartoon nudity. Clear four stages and as a "special" "treat" you're allowed a few moments to savour the pixellated flesh tableau before you. I have censored this picture for your own moral well-being, but in the original, Too-Hot-For VGJunk version you can see her Pipi and her Bibis, the whole shebang. Thanks, Toaplan? I suppose it could have been worse - at least she seems, if not pleased to be there exactly, then at least gently amused, even with Pipi and Bibi crawling all over her.

From here, Pipi and Bibis repeats the same pattern of clear a stage, see some clothes, clear a few more stages and see a naked woman, spread over several themed worlds. The theme of world two is the circus, which adds a few new twists. Trampolines are the major one: because Pipi can't jump, the trampolines allow him to move vertically, and holding the joystick left or right makes him land on the nearest available platform. The trampolines are interesting addition, because they make planning your route through the stage that little bit more engaging, although it can be annoying when you're using them and an enemy climbs aboard too because sometimes you can't adjust your trajectory and death becomes inescapable. On the other hand, if you zap an enemy while it's on a trampoline, it will automatically fall all the way off the screen, which can buy you some breathing space.

The other thing you get in the circus is clowns, in two different flavours - the pink ones, and the blue ones that look like someone drank a crate of Night Nurse and tried to draw Krusty the Clown. The blue clowns take a lot longer to succumb to the effect of the Apathy Ray than the red ones and are thus more dangerous, presumably because they have made more blood sacrifices to their foul red-nosed gods.

As you can see, it doesn't take long for Pipi and Bibis to get hectic, with the legions of the clown army gaining support from trampolining cats. Knowing what most cats' reaction to being placed on a trampoline would be, I suspect they will feel nothing but relief when Pipi zaps them into whatever holding dimension lurks just off the bottom of the screen.

From behind the wall of this reality, she awakens: Bishoub-Animerroth, the Wide-Eyed Despoiler! Her loyal and remorseless Kooky Klown Kultists have paved the way for her return to our plane of existence, the stars are correctly aligned and soon she will feast on the souls on man and maybe a hastily-prepared slice of toast that if she's running late! Ia! Ia! Bishoub-Animerroth!
As a matter of public safety, I feel I should point out that despite what Pipi and Bibis may imply, clowns cannot be killed by simple dynamite unless it has first been anointed with the tears of a saint.

World three, and Pipi plies his computer-detonating trade beneath the bright lights of the big city. What better way to encapsulate the bustling energy of a major metropolis than with a swimmer enemy who breaststrokes along the floor at you? Oh, what's that you say, there are thousands of better ways than a swimmer? Correct. I think I'm just grumpy about the swimmer because he cost me so many lives, swimming into my ankles at speeds highly impressive considering they're being reached by a man dragging himself along the concrete on his stomach.

Let's get this out of the way right now: if you are a foot fetishist with a side-kink for low-resolution graphics then, yes, Pipi and Bibis is the game for you. A website I just made up - I mean, I really hope I just made it up anyway - called PixelHosieryXXX.net awarded it five blurry stockings out of five.

Who's that at the bottom of the screen? Why, I believe it's Andy Serkis, doing his motion capture work for the next Planet of the Apes movie. I'm going over there to get his autograph!

It seems that Mr. Serkis does not appreciate being bothered while he's working.
This is the closest Pipi and Bibis gets to a boss battle, and it's odd that they went to the effort of making this unusually large, buttock-flashing enemy and then only used him in one of the game's thirty or so stages, but it's preferable to having these guys popping up in every stage. He's standing right on the exit, but it's easy enough to lure him to one side of his enclosure and then quickly run around the top to the opposite end before he can pull his underpants back up.

The next set of stages are casino-themed, in as much as anything packed with terrified-looking cats, punk rockers and trampolines can be casino-themed. Really, get a good look at those cats. They definitely do not want to be involved in this madness, and I'm beginning to sympathise with them. While Pipi and Bibis is a game that's solid in theory and mechanics, and quite fun to play during the earlier stages, as it wears on the difficulty increases in a way that makes the gameplay less and less fun. It's not the extra challenge that's the problem, it's that said challenge comes from situations where you can see death coming but can't avoid it, usually when trampolines are involved, or from having to wait around so long for the enemies to align that you start running out of time.

There's just a bit too much going on at any given time, I think. It might just be my ageing synapses struggling to keep up, although if Pipi was a more nimble character I think I'd be having more fun. It's certainly not a bad game, it just feels as though the latter half of the game was put together with less care and attention than it required in order to be unequivocally good. It's almost as though the development staff were distracted by something else while they were making these stages, but I can't imagine what that could have been.

Maybe they were worried about this poor girl's malformed shoulders. No wonder she's half-naked, she must have a hell of a time finding tops that fit.

It's off to the track for the next set of stages, where Pipi and Bibis' usual dangers are compounded by the gangs of roaming Formula 1 cars. They're kind of adorable, all squashed up like that. These stages also provide another entry in the seemingly endless list of slightly altered Marlboro logos in videogames. Looks like Toaplan were more frightened of Philip Morris' lawyers than Disney's.

Ah, grey socks, the very height of eroticism. I really hope that image pans up and reveals a granddad in a cardigan, smoking a pipe.

It's refreshing that Pipi and Bibis didn't go with the usual forest / ice / lava world designs, and overall the graphics are very nice. The characters are weird, sure, but they're weird in a way that gives them some character. It's ironic that the "sexy" pictures are much less well-rendered than the rest of the game - you saw that girl's shoulders, right? - but it's a good job it worked out that way because you spend a lot more time looking at the in-game graphics than the pin-ups.

Okay, confession time: I have no idea where this final set of stages is supposed to be taking place. Inside a clock, but a clock with no hands and half of another, identical clock face sticking out of the side? A clock full of Kinnikuman clones dressed as ballerinas and floating doorways that dispense very confused cats?

Wherever the hell it's supposed to be ninety percent of it is built from trampolines, making it by far the least enjoyable of the worlds. It's just not fun when agency is taken away from the player, endlessly bouncing back and forth without a moment's peace to electrocute a dog with your Apathy Ray. Oh well, it's almost over now.

Madam, you seem confused about the purpose of a bra.

With all the stages complete, and with no final boss or special event to mark the end of the game, Pipi and Bibis is over. All the girls you've previous seen scroll by and show you their boobs one last time, a twelve-gun salute if you're willing to make a comparison between guns and breasts. The girls all pose for a photograph, seemingly the best of friends but possibly as a support group of women who have had weird, tiny men crawling over their bodies. Katie Holmes and Nicole Kidman have been offered a lifetime membership.

Then Andy Serkis reappears and shows everyone his bumhole, because Pipi and Bibis is nothing if not classy.
My closing thoughts on Pipi and Bibis / Whoopee!, then: the very concept of erotic arcade games remains unfathomably bizarre to me. Even if you can somehow get yourself revved up over nude spritework, why would you want to do so in a public place like an arcade? Is that what gets you off, you pervert? Okay, so Pipi and Bibis appears to be aiming for a more playful tone with its grot, a kind of jokey seaside-postcard nudity rather than "porn" but still, it seems like including nudity in your game at all is just going to limit the amount of arcade operators who pick it up.
As for the actual gameplay, I think I've said it all already. It's mostly fun, until you get towards the end - then it's only fun during the occasional moments that the wandering bad guys aren't taking up the most annoying positions possible and you're not forced onto a trampoline. It looks nice, the music is decent and the Apathy Ray is an interesting concept, but in the end it's hard to recommend Pipi and Bibis over other single-screen games like Bubble Bobble or even Diet Go Go. Give it a try if you like those kind of games, if not just play the first couple of worlds and then stop.

Remember, kids: Winners Don't Use Drugs. They look at naked cartoons instead.

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DANCING EYES

Dancing Eyes? Aww, that sounds nice, right? WRONG. Oh, to be as young and innocent as you are. I'm not young and innocent though, and that's because I've played Dancing Eyes.

Bear with me as I go off on a tangent. This is Qix:

You might well have played Qix, but if not, the basic concept is that you control a little cursor who moves around, drawing a line behind him. If you make a rectangle with your line, the rectangle gets filled in. Fill in a certain percentage of the play area and you win, let your line get touched by an enemy and you die. A simple concept that you're probably familiar with from one game or another. The reason I mention it is that Dancing Eyes is a lot like Qix, in that you have to draw a line to make rectangles that then disappear.
It's not that simple, though. Over in Glorious Japan, someone took a look at the Qix formula and decided, in their infinite wisdom, that something was missing. That something was creepy, voyeuristic sex appeal.

Any game that prompts you to select a girl at the beginning should worry you. I guess "You have the power, like a depraved and lustful god, to undress these girls and leer at their badly-animated polygonal forms from your unassailable throne in a dingy arcade. Select a girl to be your target!" was too long to fit on the screen.
Okay, here we go, girl selected.

For some unfathomable reason, she's a military officer standing in a car park full of tanks. I'm going to called her Corporal Susan. Corporal Susan here has some problems. One is that her uniform has been marked with a grid pattern, something which will surely incur the wrath of her superiors should they see it. Secondly, and most worrying, she has a tiny monkey crawling all over her.
The monkey is you: you can see said monkey in the bottom left of the screenshot above. As this lecherous monkey, your goal is to make this poor soldier's clothes fall off by drawing a line around the rectangles marked on said clothes. Surround a panel with your monkey trail, and that panel falls away, revealing the tender flesh beneath.

Get down from there, monkey! Once you've removed all the panels, the girls is left in her skivvies, shamed and tormented by a monkey with no reason to exist other than to humiliate army officers. Then you're "treated" to a "show time" mode, where you can move the camera around and zoom in on the girl. You know, if you're into that sort of thing.

I know what you're thinking: she looks like she belongs in an early Playstation game. That's because Dancing Eyes runs on Namco's System 11 hardware, which is based on the Playstation and also brought to life such (significantly less rubbish) titles as Tekken and Soul Blade. The more you know, and all that. So, Dancing Eyes is was made by Namco. That's Namco who are now Namco Bandai, makers of toys for such innocent fare as Teen Titans and Ben 10. It's a bit like finding out Tomy once made novelty sex toys.

"No Touch", huh? Seems appropriate. And that's all there is to Dancing Eyes, really: fill in all the squares and move on to the next stage. It's not quite that simple, as there are enemies and power-ups to complicate matters, but really it's just you and a whole bunch of targets to pick from. There are three choices in each stage and about twelve stages, and you can get knotted if you think I'm going through all those. Instead, here's a selection of the most interesting one, and don't worry - it's not all lechery and a hollow feeling of shame.

Here's a rocker-type girl. Most importantly of all, she's wearing a Soul Edge/Blade shirt. Soul Blade was released in the same year as Dancing Eyes (1996). I would unironically like to own that t-shirt. Well, not that exact one, it's had a monkey ripping holes in it. In that shot, you can also see some of the enemies that will kill you if they touch you. One the left there's a white rabbit, the natural predator of monkeys in the wild. Up on the top right is a small green mouse. Screw you, mouse.

Ignore the girl, the background is much more interesting here. It's a poster with a picture what I assume is the development team above the phrase "The Innocent Darkside", which is a nickname for schizophrenic knight Siegfried from the Soul Blade series. Above that is what looks like Greek but is actually the word "PHELIOS" written in the Symbol font (here's an article about a secret message in Silent Hill 2 that uses the same system). Phelios is the name of an arcade shooter developed by, you guessed it, Namco. A sad fact but a true one: the backgrounds in Dancing Eyes are more interesting that the actual game.

Stage three, and what the hell is that?

"Get me the fuck out of here, you clown!"

Oh, Alice in Wonderland was trapped in a pile of leaves. Well, that makes sense. As you can see, not every stage in the game is a flimsy excuse to see a girl in their pants, and it's these slightly more bizarre stages that save Dancing Eyes from being a complete bust. And speaking of bizarre...

MILK POWER. It's an abbreviation, the full sentence reads "You just drank some MILK laced with POWERful hallucinogens."

Here is a mermaid who seems pretty relaxed about being eaten by a giant fish. She's made her peace with the world.

Just look at that snake's face. He's so pleased about eating a barbarian he just can't contain himself. He's imagining the looks on the faces of his freinds down at the snake pub when he tells them about the size of the barbarian he just ate. Barry Adder is going to be so jealous!

One for the ladies as the barbarian breaks free of his serpentine prison and, judging by his facial expression, stubs his toe on a rock.

Creepy twins trapped in a tree stump. What is it with blonde kids getting trapped in foliage in this game?

What the hell is that thing?

Oh no, it's seen us!

OH JESUS FUCK.

AARRRGGHHHHH.

Another one for the ladies, although his waistline might cause some envy. Look at that hourglass figure! Dita von Teese would be proud of that. And then you look closer and realise he's wearing a nappy.

Sure, it's a girl in her underwear, but look in the background: there's a picture of Taki from Soul Edge. Note to games developers: don't put things in the background of your game that makes people wish they were playing a different game.

Now we find the nest of the lesser-known Wasp Woman. Her life cycle is curious - she grows to maturity in a a hollow shell shaped like a wasp larva until she is ready to hatch, when a tiiiiiny monkey sneaks into the nest and slowly eats away at the shell.

The monkey's reward for performing this task? Not being stung to death by a giant Wasp Lady and a ten-pound Waterstones gift voucher.

Sticking with the creepy-crawly theme, a sexy slug girl. I sure hope the internet doesn't find out about this... what? They already have? Oh. Oh dear.

And here's what I can only describe as hardcore alien-on-human sex. Well. Honestly, I'm stumped. What can you say about this situation except what the fuck, man?

At least she seems to be enjoying herself. Of course, these aliens probably have acess to sophisticated mind-control devices, so I wouldn't put too much store in her facial expressions.

Here's another alien. That's not his head: that's his helmet that lets him breathe Earth's atmosphere. Your task is to remove said helmet, exposing him to conditions that prove fatal to members of his race.

Explosive decompression has never been so portrayed so disturbingly. You're one sick little monkey bastard.

The final stage is a man with a pineapple for a head, which just about sums everything up nicely.
And that's Dancing Eyes, or at least as much of it as I can bring myself to play through and discuss. Gameplay-wise, it's on the poor side of average; the mechnics of the game have been done better before, but if you try and avoid the "undress a girl" stages in favour of the weirder ones, it's just about tolerable.

The thing that baffles me about Dancing Eyes is the purpose of the "sexy" elements. As you can clearly see, the graphics fall a long way short of erotic. They're not even the slightest bit titillating, so why would you include them? Dancing Eyes would be a perfectly respectable game without the creepyness, so why not just stick with the wacky stages? Maybe I'm overestimating the kind of person who would choose to sit down in an arcade and put money into this machine, all for a brief glimpse of some badly-rendered polygons that may or may not represent breasts. As an arcade owner, why would you even have pornographic games in your arcade? Surely the sight (however uncommon it may be) of a salaryman furiously abusing himself while hunched over a Strip Mahjong or Pocket Gal machine would put you off forever.
Look, what I'm saying is Dancing Eyes is horrible. Don't play it. Even without the pointless nudity, it'd still be rubbish. Go and play Qix instead, or, I dunno, go and get some fresh air or something. I've suffered through this so you don't have to, and the least you could do is go and have a walk in the park or something.