Dear reader, as I’m sure you’re aware from the vast number of games I’ve covered on this site to date, I am certainly not averse to a naughty game or two.
For a lot of the time these days, these are Japanese in origin (though the western-developed eroge and nukige scene has grown considerably since several large digital platforms opened themselves up to 18+ content), and people have become a lot more willing to openly talk about them. “Back in the day”, though, erotic games were a relatively unusual sight — and when they did come up, they often tended to be talked about in a rather dismissive way by the press of the period, particularly here in the UK. Some things never change, eh?
They did exist, though, and one that I’ve only recently got around to trying for the first time is Artworx’s Centerfold Squares (aka Centrefold Squares in Europe, because British English), a 1988 release for Amiga, Atari ST and MS-DOS PC. Because I am an Atari boy, today’s exploration will be focusing on the ST version, but all three versions are broadly pretty similar.
If the name Artworx is familiar to fellow retro home computer gaming enthusiasts out there, it’s because they were no strangers to making naughty games for various platforms. Probably their most famous was simply called Strip Poker, and was available for all manner of classic home computers, including both Atari 8-bit and ST.
This was by no means the only string to their bow, mind — on the Atari 8-bit in particular, they put out a wide variety of games, many of which were suitable for all ages. But they were noteworthy for being one of the few developers quite happy to put out “adult” games without any sort of shame; titles like Strip Poker and Centerfold Squares were treated just like any other entry in their catalogue. They just happened to have naked ladies in them.
In Centerfold Squares, there’s no narrative setup or anything — it’s just a game designed for you to boot up and play when you fancy a bit of simple, straightforward entertainment that happens to include some sexy pics.
Upon loading the game, you’re prompted to pick from 11 different female opponents, broadly arranged into “below average”, “average” and “above average” ability. Unfortunately you can’t preview your opponents from this screen; getting a taste of who they are requires clicking on them and, on platforms where you’re playing from floppy disk, a short loading break before you get a small preview image of their face and their three measurements. No attempt is made to give them any sort of text-based “personality” through dialogue or anything.
Clicking on your prospective opponent’s face from this screen starts the game proper, and clicking anywhere else on the screen returns to the opponent’s selection menu. Both of these things prompt a short load from disk — slightly cumbersome by modern standards, but nothing unusual for a game of the era.
Once the game begins, you’re presented with a grid of rectangles of various shapes and sizes, each bearing a number. A selection of these are randomly eliminated to reveal part of the full image of your opponent, and then one begins flashing. From here, the overall match begins, with your ultimate aim being to remove all the rectangles and reveal the full image, while your opponent attempts to return rectangles to the board and completely cover the image.
The number of rectangles and their numerical values is partly determined by the “strength” of your opponent that you pick from the initial menu; “average” and “above average” opponents have more rectangles with higher numbers than the “below average” opponents, and within the three categories there are further subdivisions of difficulty such as “poor” and “excellent”. It’s a shame there’s no means of selecting opponent and difficulty level independently, but this is a fairly small nitpick in the grand scheme of things.
Once a rectangle has been selected automatically — you can’t pick and choose which bits of the image will be revealed first, and you can bet your bippy that nipples and ’80s hairy muffs will be left for last — you’re thrown into the “game” part of Centerfold Squares, which is known as “Double-Up”.
Double-Up is actually a variation on the classic game Reversi, Othello, Renegade or whatever you care to call it. (Yes, I know there are technically some minor distinctions between them, but they’re basically the same game at heart.)
For the unfamiliar, this is an abstract board game in which players take it in turns to place chips of their colour on a grid-based board. Each player must place their chip somewhere that creates a flanking arrangement horizontally, vertically or diagonally; in other words, there must be one piece of the current player’s colour on either side of one or more of the opponent’s pieces. Assuming this is a legal move, the opponent’s pieces are then “flipped” to the current player’s colour, and play continues back and forth in this way.
The difference between Double-Up and regular Reverthellogade is that you don’t play until the board is full or neither player can make any more moves. Instead, each game plays to a target number of chips: once a complete round of play has completed and one player has the target number of chips or more, scores are calculated and whoever has the highest score wins the game. If that’s you, you reveal what lies beneath the rectangle on the picture screen; if it’s your opponent, a rectangle gets covered up.
You’ll note that “score” is a distinct concept from “number of chips on the board”. Unlike in regular Renothversi, victory isn’t attained simply by having the most chips on the board at the end of the game. Rather, you score and lose points in various ways over the course of the game: additional points are scored by capturing randomly positioned green squares on the board, while points are lost for capturing red squares. On top of that, you lose a single point from your total any time you attempt to make an illegal move, and you can move twice if you capture a randomly occurring yellow square on your turn.
What this means in practice is that you need to keep an eye on your opponent’s moves and the exact squares they’re in control of, because it’s entirely possible that you can bring about the end of the game by capturing enough chips, but your opponent will win on points. This is, as you can probably imagine, inordinately frustrating when it happens, but paying attention to the state of the board allows you to mitigate the possibility of it happening somewhat. It’s an interesting twist on the usual formula and, when combined with the “play to a goal” structure, means that individual games in the complete match are quick and snappy, rarely getting bogged down with strategic analysis paralysis.
There’s another little twist, too: at any point during the game, either you or your opponent can choose to forego your turn in favour of taking a Chance. When you do this, you’ll draw one of several different possibilities that include gaining or losing 20 points or even immediately winning or losing the game. Thus a player who is very far behind and believes themselves unlikely to win may feel it worth taking a gamble on a Chance draw — there’s always a 5% chance that they will immediately win the game, regardless of score, but a considerably greater chance that nothing will happen at all and they will have effectively wasted a turn.
It’s a simple concept, but an effective and well-implemented one, with the various opponents varying quite wildly in their skill level. The fact it’s a competitive affair makes it feel like you’re playing “against” your chosen girl, too, which gives the game as a whole slightly more of a feeling of personality as opposed to some sort of solo puzzle that gradually reveals a nudey pic as a reward.
Reviews of the game on its original release — those that have been preserved, anyway — were actually surprisingly positive for the most part. American Commodore magazine Ahoy!’s AmigaUser dubbed it “a spicy blend of serious strategising and lighthearted titillation” in its review, noting that “the drawings, though undeniably explicit, are certainly not gross; the subject matter is similar to what readers of Playboy and other leading men’s magazines see each month.”
Reviewer Arnie Katz went on to compare the game favourably to Artworx’s previous adult game, the aforementioned Strip Poker, and noted that the tasteful nudes of the game were a stark contrast to “past affronts to common decency like Custer’s Revenge“. He also said that “Centerfold Squares is everything one could expect from an adult computer game. It is pretty, sexy, and fun to play.”
Elsewhere, in a 1991 article chronicling the history of adult computer games, again penned by Arnie Katz but this time in the magazine VideoGames & Computer Entertainment, Centerfold Squares was singled out as an example of home computers being “finally [able to] generate the complex images needed to depict romance and sexuality”.
Conversely, German publication Power Play gave the PC version of Centerfold Squares a score of 6%, describing it as (paraphrased from the German) “naked nonsense” and “as exciting as a Bundestag debate” — though they did only expend approximately 50 words on their review, so perhaps take that with a pinch of salt. And you thought low-effort reviews were exclusively a product of the Internet age!
It’s Katz’s comments on Centerfold Squares and the surrounding culture of adult games in the late ’80s that are probably the most interesting to read today, because it’s obvious he had a certain amount of faith that it was possible for computer and video games to provide meaningful, worthwhile experiences for adults, though he also realistically noted that prior attempts at adults-only material — such as the aforementioned Custer’s Revenge and its equally bad taste stablemates on Mystique’s “Swedish Erotica” label for Atari 2600 — had encountered problems both with distribution and poor sales figures.
He did attribute this partly to hardware limitations, however, noting that while the Atari 2600 was incapable of creating something truly “sexy”, the 16-bit machines, with their ability to display relatively high-resolution graphics (by the standards of the time) with decent colour depth allowed for a much greater feeling of involvement in the whole scenario. Certainly a far cry from Mystique’s games, which felt childish at best, brashly and deliberately offensive at worst.
“By all means, let games have sex and violence appropriate to theme and interpretation,” Katz wrote. “Both are part of life and, therefore, have a legitimate place in electronic gaming. But it would be a mistake for electronic gaming to wallow in so-called adult content while neglecting to upgrade the sophistication, depth and intellectual content of those games. It is such games, adult in the sweeping meaning of the term, that have the power to enthral mature participants in the hobby.”
Katz’s ultimate conclusion was that “adult” games didn’t necessarily need to be hyper-violent or overtly sexual — he specifically cites Maxis’ SimCity and HAL Laboratory’s Vegas Dream as good examples of genuinely adult games that don’t include either element — but rather that they need to provide an experience that is meaningful and somewhat cerebral for the more mature gamer. Violence and/or sex can be layered atop that, of course, but essentially, if you want to capture the hearts of adults, you need to capture their minds too.
You can probably argue either way as to whether Centerfold Squares achieves that or not — for my money, the “Double-Up” side of things provides a surprisingly compelling and mentally stimulating experience, with the decent quality digitised pictures acting as a solid reward — but it should be plain to see that, while largely forgotten today, the game was a noteworthy step forward in interactive adult entertainment that took things well beyond giggling at pixelated penises and puerile, offensive gameplay concepts.
I won’t lie, I primarily booted up Centerfold Squares because I was just curious to see what a pervy game from 1988 looked like. But I came away genuinely quite impressed — and definitely likely to return for further play sessions in the future.
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