Saturday, January 2, 2021

Game On 05/90

Cover
Scantily-clad feminine robots were quite the thing during the eighties, popularized by the Japanese artist Hajime Sorayama's detailed illustrations of gynoids. 1989 saw the release of Blue Angel 69 (geddit?), a puzzle game that contained loads of chrome erotica clearly inspired by Sorayama's work. The game's C64 version was created by members of X-Ample Architectures who also worked on several titles released on CP Verlag's diskmags. It's no wonder then, that the subject matter also made it onto one of their diskmag covers.

The connection is tenuous at best, but the artwork is related to one of this issue's games: In Alien you play a female engineer who has to fight a worm infestation on an alien planet. However, in the game she's not a robot and she's not dressed as if she just got out of bed. I guess some false advertising was taken into account to sell some more copies based on the cover alone.

The artist did a good job reproducing the chrome style, though, and avoided any serious anatomical blunders, compared to previous efforts. Her left arm looks a bit longer than her right. But it's not an actual human anyway, thus unusual proportions could be on purpose.

The background is a bit of a hellscape and seems to be on fire permanently. The environment in Alien is more like a futuristic city and less like a sky texture from Doom. This is probably again a case where the artist only got a rough description of the game and just did their own thing.