Samantha Fox Strip Poker (1986 Martech Games Ltd)
Disassembly
Introduction
I genuinely can’t remember where this came from. It didn’t feel like the kind of thing I’d have asked for, and I certainly didn’t buy it. My best guess is a magazine cover tape — Your Sinclair or Crash would occasionally slip something like this on there, presumably on the basis that teenage boys read computer magazines and this would shift copies. The 80’s had a very different idea of what was appropriate for all ages.
Regardless, it was around the house. I played the poker. I was terrible at poker. In retrospect, that’s probably for the best.
The game itself is more interesting than its reputation suggests. There’s a genuinely solid five-card draw poker engine in there, a two-channel music player that does a reasonable job of the limitations of the Spectrum beeper, and the six reveal backgrounds use a neat compressed format to squeeze everything into 48K alongside the rest of the game.
It’s not one I’d have put on my GILTD (Games-I’d-Like-To-Disassemble) list unprompted, but having spent time with the code, it’s been an interesting one to pick apart.
