Geisha

Before there was Engrish, there were the French, always ready and willing to take us on voyages to phantasmatic places like unwoonted Tokyo City on a victorious vehicle. But badly translated blurbs aside, Geisha is a very interesting game.

Geisha is usually categorized as an adventure game. This is only partly correct. It is actually a series of puzzle and arcade minigames connected with a story in an indeed adventure-like manner. The following list is taken from the only walkthrough that exists for Geisha and may not be 100% correct There appear to be seven episodes:

1. Seduce: A simple adventure-type puzzle.
2. Caress: Master Mind.
3. Erotic Fight: A card game.
4. Submit: Arcade.
5. Undress: Rock-Scissors-Paper.
6. Penetration: Arcade again, then a sliding tile puzzle.
7. Cum: Adventure finale.

Of course, the whole game seems to be a metaphor for an erotic encounter, and the solution of the final puzzle involves bringing a male and female cricket together…Geisha is probably one of the most unabashedly erotic games that ever have been.

Technical Tidbits

A few of the more uncommon technical aspects of Geisha.

1. Geisha supported Hercules graphics. This is not very astonishing, but still noteworthy.
2. The Atari and PC versions, though labeled seperately, actually contained the same disk. Most of the content of the game is in three data files, and then there is an executable and a few batch files for the PC, and an executable for the Atari. The Amiga version had to be seperate, since the Amiga had a slightly different disk format.
3. Apart from AdLib and the good old PC speaker, Geisha supports the Intersound MDO interface. This was a simple DAC like the Covox Speech Thing and the Disney Sound Source, but less sophisticated than the latter. It was just the resistors that make up the DAC itself, and a simple one-transistor amplifier. You could purchase it directly from Coktel Vision, and I guess the only games that supported it were a few Coktel Vision games. You can see the layout and a box shot, both unfortunately very small, on Jean-Marc Gossart's website.

Similar Games

If you're fascinated with Japanese culture, try The Cosmology of Kyoto (which is actually a Japanese game), Sword of the Samurai, or maybe The Last Ninja and Karateka. Otherwise, try Muriel Tramis' other games, like Emmanuelle.

Links and Reviews

• Walkthrough with Screenshots
• TheLegacy
• The game's high originality and wacky plot might interest some gamers, Home of the Underdogs thinks:

  Puzzles are as weird as you can get, with many arcade sequences that are obvious metaphors of carnal acts. The game is extremely difficult due to the fact that it is not always obvious which item you can pick up, and the puzzles require very warped mind that most gamers don't have. Worse, you can get irrevocably stuck if you forget to pick up or use certain items in previous scenes, making it a tiresome save-and-restore affair.

• A Japanese review with some screenshots.