Original Release: VCA Interactive, 1996, PC
Some of the big names of the mid-90s porn industry star in this bizarre game about ball-busting alien invaders forcing you to shoot them and solve awful puzzles
Asstroids (PC, VCA Interactive, 1996)
Where to Buy: eBay
Review by: Master-B
VCA Interactive was a short-lived PC game branch of VCA Pictures, one of the bigger porn outfits of the 1970s-1990s pre-internet years. So some of its big stars of the time, such as Ron Jeremy and Asia Carrera, lend their unique talents to Asstroids despite its rather chintzy low-budget design.
It’s a … I guess target-shooting game interspersed with puzzles? I’m honestly not sure exactly what genre to put this in. It’s really just kinda a cobbled-together collection of mini-games and puzzles with video clips in between them.
The story is that Asia Carrera, hilariously hamming it up as some sort of Battletoads Dark Queen femdom character, somehow uses advanced space slut technology to prevent all men on Earth from cooming. You’re some sort of doomed space marine sent to set things right by invading … her ship I guess? Some kind of space warehouse?
Anyway, the first bit of the game is a very simple target shooter. Porn star ladies pop out with guns, shoot them before they shoot you. Male porn stars also occasionally pop out, despite the game’s instructions they seem to be hapless captives and aren’t supposed to be shot, but there doesn’t seem to be any consequence if they are. This segment is extremely easy, almost to the point of being impossible to lose unless you just sit there, but I did appreciate how the targets go immediately into their death animation very smoothly when you shoot them.
The next bit is a puzzle that involves figuring out a combination lock, with the only hint being “watch the light as you turn the knobs.” The two seemingly obvious possibilities, trying numbers until the light changes while on them or only turning a dial when the light is aligned with it, seem to do absolutely nothing. So, congratulations Asstroids designers, you stumped me in a way that even Myst and The 7th Guest couldn’t.
Fortunately, all the game’s video files are just sitting on the disc in .MOV format, so you can just watch them whenever you want. They filmed quite a few hardcore clips for this game, which tend to be roughly four minutes in length but are pretty good quality for the time. I’m uploading the non-spicy stuff to Rumble as the overacting can be really funny at times.
While the game portion isn’t at all worth playing, it is an odd look into the sort of ’90s porn parody videos moving into the gaming space (even though this has pretty much nothing to do with Asteroids).
Videos
Explore the cosmos with Ron Jeremy
Storming the Satellite O’ Love?
The Women of Asstroids
Busty Brittany (aka Brittany O’Neil)