Adult Games #7

Strip Fighter II (1993)
By: Games Express  Genre: Maze  Players: 1-5  Difficulty: Medium
Featured Version: NEC PC Engine / TurboGrafx-16  First Day Score: 388,100
Also Available For: X68000

It was only a few weeks past that I finally got around to looking at Street Fighter II properly here at Red Parsley, and not before time. It is of course a true classic which, as mentioned in its review, had an enormous influence on pretty much every other developer around at the time, and soon they were busy releasing similar-looking fighting games of their own. Unsurprisingly, these varied in quality a great deal and even included direct rip-offs and spoofs. Ticking all these boxes is Strip Fighter II. There is no Strip Fighter I - it was named purely to riff on Capcom's most popular and successful instalment in the long-running series, and it does this by injecting a bit of sauciness into proceedings (as if it wasn't obvious from the name!). So, after the worryingly-pornographic content of the last 'adult' game I looked at here, we're back in more familiar territory for this PC Engine release it seems, and that's fine by me.

Ooof! Got caught checking out the ass...

It's not as if this particular genre isn't already filled with pervy stuff anyway. The Street Fighter series itself has its fair share of panty-flashes and revealing costumes, as does SNK's King of Fighters series along with some oversized swinging boobies (*coughMaicough*) and then there are characters whose very reason to exist is seemingly to titillate. More recently we have had the Dead Or Alive series which is even worse. Just in case the boobs there, as wobbly as freshly made jellies, and the many, many skimpy outfits didn't make it obvious enough, the games are so blatantly pervy that Tecmo launched a spin-off series of 'beach volley' games featuring the characters prancing around in bikinis, doing girly stuff in various provocative positions while you get to ogle (and even zoom in on) their 'areas of interest'. Good heavens!

Power Boob Charge - engage!

Saucy fighting games are hardly a new concept then, so I wasn't exactly expecting to be shocked by this effort from Games Express, and that proved to be the case. There really isn't a great deal to it actually. You get to choose from six fighters, all female of course, and then you fight them all in best of three round contests (including yourself in a mirror match) one at a time until all have been bested. Then the game simply sends you back to the title screen without so much as a credits roll. Oops, guess I should've given a spoiler alert for that but never mind, too late now. Suffice to say, it isn't a very long or in-depth game. Aside from the Arcade Mode, there's an options screen, and also a Vs mode, enabling you and a friend to... umm... fight to see each other naked. Well, each other's characters at least, but that's about it.

You don't see this sauciness on the easier difficulties...

Talking of naked, I expect you are wondering what sort of skin you can expect to see while playing. If so, you may be surprised at the answer. You might've noticed from the screenshots that most of the fighters have revealing outfits to varying degrees, and there's even the odd boob popping out, but the main nudity comes at the end of each round. Well, each round in which you are victorious anyway. The first against each opponent sees you treated to larger-then-screen-sized image of a lovely lady in her undies or swimwear, while a second victory will award you with a repeat of the same picture minus whichever meagre garments were previously covering the lady's hot-spots. The odd thing is, as aesthetically pleasing as these ladies undoubtedly are, they appear otherwise unrelated to the game.

A Blanka-style attack renders me... purple...

What this means is, if at the start of the game you spend some time looking through all the characters to find the one you most want to see naked, you're wasting your time! I'm not sure who the nudie girlies are really - just random models or strippers or something I suppose - and they look pleasant enough too, I guess. It's not a bad looking game overall actually, in still images at least. Some of the backgrounds are quite nice (I've selected the best ones here) and the characters are a varied bunch, but the animation is patchy and the frame-rate is a little rough. The presentation is pretty basic though, and the audio isn't great for me. Some of the effects are okay but the music is quite poor and very repetitive - there aren't even different tunes for each character - but all this could be irrelevant if the game plays well.

Mirror Match! Are these ladies... scissoring?

Unfortunately, it does not. The six characters each have a handful of SFII-esque special moves which aren't too tough to perform, but the controls are very poor. As with Capcom's game, there are three punch and three kick buttons, but there seems to be precious little difference between them other than which is required for some of the special moves. Most of the characters have a cheap move or two as well, allowing them to win any match easily. Worse than that is the clunky movement and rather sluggish, unresponsive nature of the controls which turns the short, basic, unoriginal game into a bit of a pointless mess. Which, let's be honest, is what we all expected. Aside from the nude ladies, this SFII is simply a very poor example of its genre, and no amount of 16-bit boobs and (censored) nether regions will make up for that.

RKS Score: 3/10

Gameplay Video: Here's a look at some of the game including (*warning!*) some of the boobies which have apparently somehow slipped past YT's censors, courtesy of YouTube user 'CanalPirataNamek'.