Sep. 11, 2007 - Issue #621: Sex in The City 07
Infinite Lives
Press up, up, left, up, A, A, B to undo her bra!
This year, though, finds me far from home and without a handy Internet connection for lazy cribbing. Hanging around my buddy’s place, enjoying the surplus booze from a Cold Lake party, coming up with material means digging deep into the resources at hand: a carton of old NES cartridges and a short stack of late-’80s tips n’ tricks magazines.
Leafing through Top Secret Passwords to find anything sexy or even remotely sexual (unless you count all those Freudian lazer guns) is pure futility; the raciness we take for granted in our fabulous world of J-cup kung-fu vixens playing beach volleyball simply didn’t exist under Nintendo’s one-party rule. I mean, in the NES version of Double Dragon we didn’t even get the legendary panty shot that made the arcade game worth a quarter. My search for sex and/or sexiness is reduced to finding any depiction of any female whatsoever.
A tiny little portrait in one corner of a screenshot from Magic of Scheherazade barely counts, and “Thank you, Isfa. You have defeated the great demon GORAGORA, the pure evil” doesn’t do much for me as pillow talk. A bit better is a head-and-shoulders shot of Breathless Mahoney from the Dick Tracy game, an oddly pug-faced Madonna-analogue showing two whole pixels of cleavage; the onscreen options—INTERROGATE / ARREST—and the make-’em-talk spotlight give the whole thing a kind of kinky roleplay vibe. The hottest, though, is foxy mermaid Annie from The Goonies II, imprisoned totally naked in her padlocked aquarium, arms snuggled coquettishly over her amphibious bosom, declaring simply “I LOVE YOU, MIKEY.”
In the hierarchy of wank material, this ranks far below the Sears
catalogue. But if finding titillation in the G-rated NES era was difficult
(well, if you liked girls, anyway), finding an actual, ass-kicking female
character of any sort was impossible. From World 1-1 to Adventure Island, the
universe of videogames was a nonstop sausage party. But a screenshot down in
the bottom corner of page 79 shows the moment when that started to change,
with an unmistakably female—nice curves, flowing hair, sassy one-piece
swimsuit—figure launching plasma orbs of death: the one and only Samus
Aran.
If you weren’t an adolescent boy at the time, it’ll be difficult
for you too imagine just what a mind-blowing revelation “Samus is a
chick!” was. You played through hours and hours and hours of Metroid,
alien-zapping and boss-battling with your power-armored bounty hunter, and
when all the power-ups had been gathered and Mother Brain blown to
smithereens you got the big reveal: helmet doffed, suit peeled off, your
“man” stands there, feminine and sassy. Even when you knew it was
coming—and “Samus is a chick” was common knowledge on the
’80s schoolyard—that moment was just, like “No
waaaaay!” Everyone then entered the not-so-secret “Justin
Bailey” code to play the game with Samus in unarmored mode, just for
the incredible novelty of seeing a female character in action.
Nowadays, you almost wouldn’t bother to ship a game without some kind
of T&A angle; serious people use the phrase “breast physics”
without irony. Female leads are common—and if they tend heavily, if not
exclusively, toward an adolescent bondage-fantasy aesthetic, well… is
“fetish pinup ninja” not an improvement on “kidnapped
girlfriend?” I’ll take it over the sexless battlegrounds of the
8-bit era; as a former adolescent boy, I have to say that the ability to
angle the camera to look down your character’s shirt is infinitely
preferable to sitting in some basement rumpus room, arguing with a buddy over
whether four pixels glimpsed for a split-second were or were not
“panties.” V
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