Original Release: D3 Publisher, 2005, PS2
They let the guy who made Hong Kong ’97 take the director’s seat for another game, and his vision for the 128-bit era was a clumsy beat-em-up that references an obscure fetish / Yakuza films and incorporates clothing damage.
The Mini-Skirt Police (PS2, D3 Publisher, 2005)
Where to Buy: ebay
How to Emulate: PS2 Emulation Guide
Review by: Master-B
You pick up all sorts of interesting bits of cultural knowledge as a student of gaming. For example, did you know there is an obscure genre of Japanese fetish porn that centers around police women in miniskirts? The basic theme is that one or several inappropriately uniformed officers brawls their way through a bunch of gangsters like they’re in a beat-em-up game; from there, it can go in a few different directions, but it seems that most commonly the policewomen get captured by the gangsters and have very rude things done to them. I blame Blaze from Streets of Rage for all this.
Anyway, this seems to be the basis for the otherwise inexplicable The Mini Skirt Police. However, D3 is a classy publisher and deals only in wholesome cheesecake, so there will be no molestations or even nudity here.
It’s only available in Japanese, and I don’t speak Japanese, but the general atmosphere is that of a cheesy yakuza crime picture. It plays like a much more janky and cheap version of Sega’s Yakuza to boot. Our police heroine high-kicks and wiggles her butt while crawling as she takes on a bunch of cloned enemies, no doubt on a quest to deliver Great Justice. While you start out facing standard gangsters, as the game wears on you gradually discover some sort of fiendish gang of bondage gimps is behind everything.
The gameplay and level of effort is godawful even by D3 standards. All you have is one stiff punch combo; no blocking, no dodging. The trick to the game is to line up with the enemies properly before executing it, avoid any walls you might hit instead, and try to time it to preemptively hit them before they charge into you with a punch. The game is so cheap that they didn’t even bother with a “being hit” animation for enemies, they just stand there stiffly as you lock them up with combos. Ostensibly you can sneak, but enemies seem to auto-sense you when you come within a certain range of them. I think the crawling option was just put in there to watch Miss Police wiggle her butt.
Anyway, the big gimmick is clothing damage. For about each 1/4 of damage you take to your life bar on each level, some of Miss Police’s clothes explode in a shower of confetti until she’s eventually down to her blue underthings. Amusingly, each of these explosions is actually a small benefit to you as the enemy responsible will get very pleased with himself and stop to clap and ogle until you start wailing on him again.
To get an idea of what you’re dealing with here, this is one of those games that D3 put on CD to save money. It’s about 330 MB in size; a typical modest PS2 DVD game is more like 1.5 to 2 GB, or 5x-6x the size of this.
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