Original Release: Ent Ent Ltd, 1983, Arcade
A maze-chase game that adds interactive sex scenes and occasional side scrolling levels to spice things up.
Swinging Singles (Arcade, Ent Ent, 1983)
Where to Buy: eBay
How to Emulate: Arcade Emulation Guide
Review by: Master-B
Swinging Singles starts out as pretty much a Lock N’ Chase knockoff, just swap out the swinging doors for a gun and some perv content. The initial goal is to pick up every pellet on the mean streets, while avoiding a frantic cop who doesn’t seem to know or care where you are.
Though the cop is clearly mentally deficient, he’s still dangerous as he’s very fast and the narrow streets afford you little opportunity to avoid him when he’s in your vicinity. That, and your car’s movement is sticky making it oddly hard to turn corners. It would be kind of rough if you didn’t have a gun that just straight up 187’s the guy when hit. While that doesn’t take him out of commission, it does send him back to his spawn point and seems to never run out of ammo.
Alright, so the goal of all this is to make it to some house of ill repute in the upper left corner. The attract mode calls it the “Orgy House” but once in-game it starts being referred to as “Oozy House” … sounds like some big time bait-and-switch to me. If I can digress for just a second, what little flavor text the game has also seems to have a weird fascination with “oozing” such that I’m not sure what the designer’s deal was.
Anyway, the Lock n’ Chase bit is just the first part of a series of two alternating levels. The second bit is an extremely basic platformer that is even easier to deal with than the first bit, once you realize that enemies will continually spawn at one particular point on each floor. You grab a key to enter a series of doors, each with some finely drawn two-frame animation of the ol’ flagrante delicto, and the only real challenge here is that you get a pretty tight time limit to bring each key to each door.
Do this four times and you get a little of the ol’ Interactive Ramming with a lucky pixel gal. I’m not sure if the game just abruptly ends after this, or she didn’t care for my joystick technique, but you only get a few seconds and then it’s time to start over with another quarter.
From a one-off Japanese developer (Ent Ent) that seems to have never appeared again after this, the most interesting thing about Swinging Singles is that they bothered to translate and localize it for a US release. There were plenty of “adult” games in Japanese arcades in the 80s and 90s, but they generally didn’t have a planned Westernization as in most places they would either be illegal or the Moral Majority would quickly rally to have them thrown out. I’m curious as to how many were made for the US and where they wound up, but couldn’t really dig up any good info on that. The Japanese version, apparently called Utamaro, has a much better looking title screen.
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