Strip Poker Professional rev. B

Poker without cards — just a calculator and boredom. Strip Poker Professional is exactly what you'd imagine when someone says "this game will be a hit at every party": an older guy sitting alone in front of his monitor playing poker with digital women, stripping them down one piece at a time. Year 1995, MS-DOS, back when the internet didn't exist, and this kind of entertainment had its appeal for some.

You're playing poker against four opponents sitting around a virtual table. The goal is simple — win their money and then their clothes. Mechanically, it's classic poker: you get cards, place bets, draw new ones, and winning combinations decide the hand. Nothing fancy, just poker like anyone who's ever seen a casino or a gambling movie would know. The computer plays by fixed patterns — these aren't opponents with personality, more like compliant automatons.

The graphics are what a guy in 1995 expected from a computer that cost him a thousand bucks — outfits in a 256-color palette, animations like pictures in a flipbook you flip with your finger. Sound is basically nonexistent. Playing itself is exhausting because you have no reason to care about poker or the game — you're just chasing the content that's supposed to be the fun, but you experience it in three mouse clicks and then just think you should be somewhere else.

What's interesting is mainly its period value. Strip Poker had its time when a personal computer in your home was still a rarity and every game was taken as at least a curiosity. This type of software — gambling plus sex appeal — belongs to the early days of PC gaming, before everything became professionalized and megacorporations took control of the industry. Aged badly? Brutally. The graphics look like an experiment in digitizing a photo through a fax machine, and the atmosphere is at best a blotchy cabaret show without the comedy.

Today you play it for nostalgia, not fun. If you want to remember what the nineties looked like on the border of decency and technical failure — go for it. Otherwise, it's not a game that'll entertain you even if you were twenty.