Teenage Queen
In general, there are two types of strip poker games: those with photos and those with anime-style drawings. Teenage Queen is different, featuring instead artful and highly remarkable graphics by Jocelyn Valais, who may have been inspired by Milo Manara.
It is obvious that she designed them on an Amiga. They used 30–32 colors (she did not utilize extra halfbrite mode, which would have added the same 32 colors in half the luminiscence), the full Amiga range; besides, since a PAL display has 256 lines, the height would be reduced by 22% on the actual display, while on an Atari ST or PC (or an NTSC Amiga) it would be stretched by 20%. With some of the graphics, there is little difference, but with some you notice that they were meant to be height reduced, the anatomy looks slightly distorted if they are stretched. That also means that she probably really designed them on-screen, not on paper, as was not uncommon in those days.
For the Atari ST the graphics had to be reduced to 16 colors, and some suffered under the abovementioned distortion. Otherwise there is little difference. An amusing detail is that three different pics were used for stage #8, one on the Amiga, one on the ST and CPC, and one on the PC.
The restrictions of the PC were even greater. VGA was already out, but too rare to even have been added as an option. So EGA it was, but these conversions are among the best graphics ever created for EGA. CGA was supported too, here the game ran in hi-res (640×200) in orange and black (if you choose CGA with a VGA adapter, it will be orange and cyan and look rather strange; the same bug that affects John Shemitz's Othello). Interesting enough this mode featured at least one piece of art not present in any other version:
Another aspect that fell prey to the PC's restrictions was sound.
There was not all that much, some music, an occasional giggle, or the
question Voulez-vous jouer avec moi?
All this has been
removed, fortunately we are not plagued with noise from the PC speaker
(though, actually, digitized speech can be done well that way, as
Mach 3 and
Artworx' Strip Poker III have proven).
The restrictions of the Amstrad CPC were the greatest, not only is the CPC palette smaller than the EGA palette, the horizontal resolution in 16-color mode (mode 0) is only 160 instead of 320. The graphics still look good, and Teenage Queen has been nominated sexiest strip poker on the CPC (closely followed by Logipresse's).
Gameplay, unfortunately, is the weakest spot of Teenage Queen. I have never played against such a boring virtual opponent as in this game. That is a pity; those excellent graphics would have deserved better. But alas, it was not to be; the only other game Jocelyn Valais ever was invoilved in, Mystical, suffered under comparable shortcomings.
