30 | Game Designer(?) | Arcade Lover | KOF Hippie™ | Ascended & Unhinged Sonic Fan | Sudden Onset Touhou Fan (it's terminal)


beatmania Song Of The Day
cohost.org/5keysongoftheday

ArnoldArmadillo
@ArnoldArmadillo

Pussy: Love Story from Titanic was developed for the ZX Spectrum in 2000 by Fatality, a cracktro/demo group based out of Belarus. Taking inspiration from a certain blockbuster film that was popular around the time, Pussy tells the story of the poor artist "Leonardo" and the upper-class "Kate" (represented by Trunks and Android 18 from Dragon Ball Z, respectively), who fall in love with each other on the ill-fated RMS Titanic.

Apparently, what this translates to on the Spectrum is a clone of Tengen's 1991 Game Gear offering, Magical Puzzle Popils, an excellent little puzzle-platformer in which a young boy must rescue a princess several times from slimes and other obstacles with only the power of his fists, made by the designer of Bubble Bobble, Fukio Mitsuji/"MTJ". To my knowledge, Popils has never seen an official rerelease in any form, meaning your only real choices these days are to buy a second-hand cartridge, play it via emulation, or to play Pussy if you specifically own a Spectrum. (There also exist PC Engine and NES prototypes but neither have been dumped, to my knowledge.)


Pussy is not an exact clone of Popils, as it is missing about half of the levels and the built-in stage editor, and it also progresses in a more linear manner than Popils, meaning you cannot replay stages after you have completed them (unless, of course, you have the passwords on hand). However, the game does try to make up for these shortcomings by featuring completely original action stages that appear every few rounds, cutscenes that roughly tell the story of the film it's unofficially based on through digitised, dithered screencaps, and a password system. This all adds up to one of the most impressive-looking and sounding games on the Spectrum, and also one of the longest to load from cassette; apparently this takes over 90 minutes to load on real hardware.

One other noticeable feature of this game is just how much it takes from other sources; I've already mentioned the Titanic/Popils/Dragon Ball Z connections, but the soundtrack is a smorgasbord of remixes of pop culture themes and other video game music, e.g. the cantina theme from Star Wars and the overworld songs from Super Mario World and Land, to name a few. My favorite bit of thievery, however, has to be the elderly Kate sprite in the game's ending, which is taken from the dire Eek! The Cat game for the SNES, of all games.

(Also, for those wondering about the title, there's actually almost nothing of the sort to be seen. Even the game's recap of the "draw me like one of your French girls" scene doesn't really show much below the collarbone.)


You must log in to comment.