Bachelor Party for the Atari 2600
I went shopping this weekend and stumbled upon a rather rare game from the adult game maker, Mystique, titled "Bachelor Party." While I'm more acquainted with the controversial "Custer's Revenge," "Bachelor Party" had piqued my curiosity, so I gladly added it to my collection. The game is essentially a paddle-based "brick breaker" game, akin to Breakout, but with a substantial dose of adult humor—well, by 1982 graphics standards, at least.
Instead of controlling a paddle to bounce a ball into bricks, you manipulate the "Spanish fly" to invigorate a man as he rebounds off a multi-colored wall of women. The graphics are primitive, making it difficult to discern what everything is exactly. The guy vaguely looks like a guy, and the women, well, they look somewhat woman-ish. If you stare at them long enough, they start to resemble the Aliens from the "Alien" movie franchise, or perhaps the ones from "Aliens" (not to be confused with the creatures in "Ali3ns"). That would have made for a more interesting brick-breaking game.
As for the "Spanish fly," it appears to be two rectangles with a line sticking out of it, oddly resembling a poorly crafted sandwich. Strangely, the more I thought about this shoddy sandwich, the hungrier I became, prompting me to pause the game and make myself a sandwich. I'm pretty sure that's not the intended effect of Spanish Fly, but it got me thinking.
This game could have been a perfect tie-in with the sub chain Blimpie (or, as it was known in my hometown, Blimpie Base). Picture this: you play as a daring delivery boy, collecting poorly made sandwiches and delivering them to the hungry women waiting in line. What a missed opportunity, Blimpie, what a missed opportunity.
The gameplay itself is quite fast-paced, and the poorly made sandwich serves as an inadequate control piece for directing the man into the women. The hit zone is situated at the front of the sandwich, near the extruded sandwich meat, and it's not entirely clear where you should aim to bounce the man into the women. Once he breaks through the initial line of women, he gains tremendous speed, and the horizontal game layout offers limited space for maneuvering as he ricochets off the walls. In most cases, success feels more like luck than skill as I attempted to return him to the eager arms of his next, ahem, "customer."
Bachelor Party is a silly game that in today’s world barely qualifies as “adult”. The gameplay is not solid, the premise is shaky (one guy at a bachelor party??), it doesn’t have anything to do with the Tom Hanks movie and its graphics are questionable. But the game has two things going for it, the audio is pretty decent, with constant sound and feedback for just about everything, and the game’s questionable graphics and silly premise will give you a few laughs. Sadly, that is not enough to make up for the game’s shortcomings and because of that, I can only give Bachelor Party 1 out 5 stars.
