Play Girls

Play Girls
Developer: HOT-B Publisher: HOT-B Platform: Arcade (Taito L-System) Released internationally: 1992 This game has unused graphics.

Oh dear, I do believe I have the vapors. This page contains content that is not safe for work or other locations with the potential for personal embarrassment. Such as: Full frontal nudity.

To do: Find out if the nude graphics can be enabled in-game somehow (either by something user-accessible like a service switch, or else patching a flag somewhere in ROM?) Find out if graphics for elements that would be needed in addition to the tilemap in order to display full-frontal versions of the images (i.e. pubic hair) exist somewhere in the ROM (which could suggest whether such a mode exists, or was scrapped after creating the graphics but before assembling the ROM).

Unused Graphics

The game's backdrops are images of women wearing lingerie and swimwear, obscured in various ways but gradually revealed as the levels progress. However, viewing tilemap VRAM in an emulator (i.e. by pressing F4 in MAME) reveals that the underlying bitmaps that the game builds its image variations on top of, actually include fully-rendered nudity in (nearly) every image, despite the most-revealed version of each image accessible during gameplay still always having something overlaid on top (usually clothing), preventing any of that nudity from ever actually appearing on-screen.

The following table includes a rip of each level's underlying bitmap, a screenshot of the level's image in the most fully-revealed state viewable during normal gameplay, and a (very rough) mockup of what a final image could look like, made by overlaying the bitmap above the final image (since the bitmaps are all missing any elements that would require colors outside of the skin palette, such as hair and eyes, but the affected pixels are typically left transparent, allowing these elements to 'show through' when overlaid on variations that do appear in-game).

	VRAM view	Most exposed view in-game	Mockup of fully-revealed view	Comments
Level 1				The woman's pubic hair is 'missing' from the tilemap (in the same way as other elements that don't share the skin palette, such as her head hair, and her eyes), which suggests that a separate graphic of it would have been used to complete that part of the image if a fully-nude version of the image were to be displayed in-engine. (It's not currently known whether such a graphic actually exists in the ROM.) In this mockup, it's simply left transparent, causing the bikini bottom to show through incorrectly.
Level 2				Again, it's not clear exactly what other graphical overlays would have been removed and added for a theoretical 'final' version of the image; it's likely it would fit less awkwardly than in this mockup.
Level 3				This is the only image to not include any nudity in its underlying bitmap.
Level 4
Level 5
Title Screen				This is the only instance of nudity being obscured merely by UI elements, rather than an overlaid illustration of clothing. (It's not currently known whether graphics for the obscured fingernails and hair exist in the ROM.)