Original Release: Panesian, 1990, NES
The strip poker games common to computers of the late 80s/early 90s get a (unauthorized) NES representative with this title from pixel smut peddlers Hacker International/Panesian
Peek-A-Boo Poker (NES, Panesian, 1990)
Where to Buy: eBay
How to Emulate: coming soon!
Review by: Master-B
As strip poker games go, Panesian’s Peek-A-Boo is actually one of the more playable I’ve encountered. Aside from a slow deal of new cards at the start of every hand, it zips along and is reasonably well-designed. You see the face of your opponent, who will alternate between laughing and getting angry at the circumstances. And it doesn’t really require an insane amount of money to get to the peep shots. Also decent looking and has decent music to boot.
It does cut some corners, though. It moves fast because it’s really sort of an enhanced video poker as the opponent never draws new cards, they just stick with their starting hand. And their reactions don’t really play much into strategy, they’ll laugh at you if they’re playing absolutely anything and only get mad or show any other emotion if they’re about to fold.
From experimenting with save states, the AI appears to be extremely rudimentary as well. Basically, if it’s holding a pair or better it plays balls to the wall. If not, it seems to make random decisions each time about raising or folding. The aggressiveness of its raising doesn’t seem to correlate much with the quality of its hand, but it’ll always keep raising some amount if it’s holding at least a pair.
Still, the predictability and the low limits allows you to get to the pixel cheesecake quickly if that’s what you came for. You begin each game by selecting a salaciously-named opponent. You start the game with a bankroll of $500, and for every $1000 you win you get one of the GIFs (though the first one is just an introduction, they don’t start with the actual peek-a-boo until you hit $2000). At $5000 you get the full monty and are returned to the character selection screen. Given that the CPU will happily throw in around $300 anytime it’s holding even just a pair of low cards, it doesn’t always take very long to reach each of these benchmarks. However, there’s absolutely no sort of save or password function or what have you.
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