Geisha
for Amiga (OCS/ECS)
Also available for: PC (DOS)

Geisha1.jpg
Mr Creosote:
Company: Coktel Vision
Year: 1990
Genre: Puzzle, Adventure, Action
Theme: Mystery / Adult
Language: Francais, English, Deutsch, Espanol
Licence: Commercial
Views: 11765
Review by Mr Creosote (2017-06-10)
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After the big success (?) of Emmanuelle, fans (?) could hardly wait for more. So here we have Geisha. A game designed to make the audience appreciate the predecessor even more.

How is that possible? Well, from start to finish, Geisha is a mess. Its plot? Laughable: a mad scientist turns young beautiful women into robot sex slaves and now he has kidnapped your girlfriend. Right, of course! Luckily, the villain has made a number of enemies in Japan's underworld, so if you (literally) play your cards right, you may get some support stopping him.

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Playing cards? Geisha turns out to be a collection of mini games. In a nightclub, you play Mastermind in order to have your hologram fondled by a badly pixelized naked woman. How that helps in the quest to save your girlfriend remains unclear. In any case, it is an almost impossibly hard challenge, as you have to guess five instead of the usual four and you cannot use the standard technique of repeating numbers. Should you be lucky, you are rewarded by an animation of that woman sensously (?) stroking the hologram's back.

Fortunately, the difficulty level drops from there. Some badass assassins threaten to kill you unless you beat them in a simplistic card game (?). Another naked woman offers her diving talents to collect black pearls while you shoot (?) fish. You do strip rock paper scissors and a sliding puzzle (guess what kind of picture).

Now, I would love to write that all of these elements are held together by the formal Adventure part, though that would be a lie. Some Adventure-like static screens exist in the game, though at best, they could be described as framing the rest. Things are still not given any meaningful context.

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As far as gameplay goes, the short Aventure sections actually make things worse. You constantly have to do things which are only retroactively motivated. Take the very beginning. You can take one photo of a part of the scene. The obvious target, given the subject matter, would be the naked girl posing in the centre. Well, good luck finishing the game then, because at the very end, you will need a different picture. Though of course, the game will let you play on until that very point.

The next Adventure task is no better: you have to collect a scenery item for no apparent reason. You only have one shot before it disappears forever. You can play on without it, but you will inevitably get stuck much later. Adding insult to injury, this items has the exact size of one pixel and (if I hadn't just played it myself, I wouldn't believe it) that pixel has the exact same colour as the surrounding background! So a mouseover trigger is the only way to even know of its existence.

Even compared to the conversation maze gameplay of the predecessor, this is a clear step down the quality scale. Geisha is an assembly of disjointed parts which never come together and which are absolutely no fun individually. It is only appropriate that the game's losing screen is probably what most effort has been put into.

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