Weirdo Stuff: Wacky games from Japan Vol. 1 : Poker Ladies

Japan is cool.

Ah, Poker Ladies. The pinnacle in perverted Japanese videogames. Sure, there are newer, more outrageous games out there like Boonga Boonga http://www.sixsixfive.com/229.html but for my money, Poker Ladies stands above them all. The sheer strangeness of the payoffs puts it in a class all its own.

Poker Ladies is just that. It's video poker, but instead of money you play for ladies. The more you earn, the more they reveal. There are nine poker ladies to play for, and each has three stages of undress culminating in an "interactive mode" where you titillate them by pressing the deal button rapidly.

The game sets you up for success. You hardly ever lose a hand. I guess they figure we poor videogame guys need all the help we can get. So it's pretty easy to breeze through the girls. Sigh, if it were only so easy. The further into the game you progress the more you notice things are starting to get weird.

Who doesn't like pixelated boobies? There are a million different boobie games to come out of Japan, but what really sets this one apart are the truly bizarre interactive modes.

Disembodied hands groping boobies. This says quite a bit about Japanese culture. The male prefers to be nearly invisible, acting upon, rather than with, the female. The videogame is a perfect medium for this.

The final WTF?! moment is where another set of bodyless hands squirts stuff out of a syringe onto a girl's butt. The game progression parallels one's descent into perversion. It's a metaphor for the deterioration of the psyche as one delves further into the nether regions of the mind. Either that or the makers had a sense of humor.