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When I think about it I haven’t played strip poker in quite a few years. Granted, that was in the real world, but it is certainly a very fun pastime. Extremely few poker games have been released this year, and even less strip poker games. Recreating the tension and excitement of real-world strip poker is difficult, so it was with curiosity I installed Video Strip Poker.
The concept of strip poker is actually very simple, if you know the rules of poker that is. Two or more people play together (each starting with $300), trying to get the best hand. When playing you can get one pair, two pairs, three of a kind, straight (five following cards of different colors), flush (five not following cards of the same color), full house (three of a kind and one pair), four of a kind, and straight flush (five following cards of the same color). Royal straight flush and poker has been excluded.
When one of the players reaches $0 he or she has to take off one piece of clothing, which gives her an additional $300. Each time your opponent does this you’re rewarded with a sequence of her stripping, which obviously gets better the farther you get. This continues until, well, your opponent is naked. Of course, since this is a game only containing only females you can basically just sit there for as long as you want, without taking off any clothes at all. Also, if you only get lousy cards you can simply restart the match and get all your money back. Isn’t life grand?
The girls that are by default available are (quoted from the game):
I must say that reading “NEW! Polish girls!” on the cover made me somewhat worried, but I must say that each of them qualify as being more-or-less hot. There are plenty of cheap strip poker games featuring even cheaper looking females, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here.
When installed the game contains five different girls, who do their best to differ from the others. Recently an additional opponent was added to the official website, and hopefully Torquemda Games will continue to do this in the future. Since the game uses video sequences to portray the girls you do get some sense of realism, because the camera tends to focus on the more important parts of the body. However, even though the video is of a reasonably high resolution it does tend to get repetitive, and clips don’t change very fluidly. In my opinion the best would be if the entire match was like one constant stream of video, but unless you do some very nice real-time rendering that solution wouldn’t look great.
The music included in the game didn’t impress me too much. Especially one of the tracks remind me of old fashioned elevator music, but when you’re watching one of the girls’ strip-video the music changes to more of a disco / dance beat. You can of course just mute the game’s music and turn on your favorite mp3 player before you start the game, but then it’ll be up to you to find music suitable for such a game (Nelly – Hot in Here, perhaps?).
One of the somewhat impressive features of Video Strip Poker is the fact that the interface works really well. Choosing an opponent is done simply by clicking on her, and when you get into the match you don’t have much to get confused by. On the bottom left of the screen you have the Bet, Drop, Raise, Draw, Check, and Wait buttons. Those who have played a bit of poker before should instantly be comfortable with these. On the bottom of the screen you have the actual cards, and to make it easier on newer players the game automatically grays out the cards that you should remove. This way you can focus on what’s important in the game, without always having to worry about “hand-management”. This option can easily be turned off, if you feel like playing it the normal way.
Some of the opponents are more difficult to play with, and since each of the girls wear a normal number of clothes it should take some time to “finish” them. Additionally you can download skins from the official website that change the background image and the interface of the game. There are currently only two available to download, but I’m sure some will like them better than the default skin. There isn’t a whole lot of replay value once you’ve seen 'it all’, and neither can you play with multiple opponents at a time. It would’ve been nice if the developers could’ve included simply more features to play around with, but it does help that an additional opponent has been releases (122mb). A multiplayer mode would also have been interesting, perhaps through webcam, or by making both players take turns with the mouse.
As a small digression, some of you may have seen the animation capabilities that Nvidia are showing off with their upcoming Geforce FX card. Perhaps in the future we’ll have some exceptionally good looking real-time rendered vixens to play with, that respond fluidly to what happens in the game.
To be a somewhat outdated game Video Strip Poker works, by fulfilling what you want from that kind of a game. The girls are good looking (maybe not models, but sufficiently attractive), and the interface works so well that pretty much anyone who have a moderate idea of how poker works should be able to play the game.
