Some games I played in 2024: Maiden Cops
I continue to be zonked out of my gourd, and the insistence of Northern Ireland sporting unpleasantly hot weather really isn’t helping matters. I would love to be writing or drawing or doing any number of things, but in these circumstances I gravitate towards whatever quick-fix distraction feels even mildly productive… which is a long-winded way of saying the sprites section updated with a bunch of guff:
We’ve got Arvoesine; Bomberman ’93, GB and Quest; Bubble Bobble Double; Bubsy in Fractured Furry Tales; Double Dragon Gaiden; Drake & The Wizards 2; Elevator Action Old & New; Fast Food Rampage; The Flintstones (GB); Frogger 2 (XBLA); The Itchy & Scratchy Game; Neutopia II; Rampage (Lynx); Shamisen Brothers; Snoopy Tennis; Street Fighter (PCE); Strikey Sisters; and Toryumon.
Which ties into today’s ramble: a game I picked up for the sole purpose of ripping its sprites, but The Spriters Resource has obliged with a temporary removal on request of its devs until it gets its full release on all platforms. I figure it’s good manners to do the same as well. I’ll then proceed to befoul those good manners by being disparaging towards the game in the ensuing ramble, and for that I apologise!
So, Maiden Cops! Pal ShaolinTurtle is a big fan of beat-em-ups, and is a man of strong opinions, feeling the need to experience every entry in the genre and find what merit it has, if any. He streamed this on Discord, and I couldn’t help but be a catty sally towards it the entire time… but he chose to reserve judgment ’til he beat the game, so I picked it up to get a taste for myself.
Well, it’s Final Fight. Not to a T, but close enough! It’s got the three character archetypes, it’s got the same weapons, and practically the same scale for its sprites, environments, wave placement, etc. The busty cowgirl is essentially Mike Haggar, able to carry enemies by the neck and perform German suplexes and spinning piledrivers with them, while one of the others takes Cody’s trait of getting extra weapon versatility the others lack.
It goes a step further and includes fare like running, blocking, dodge rolls, and three separate special moves, fuelled by a special metre that fills by landing hits or collecting items. There’s also stages where you ride on motorbikes, which aren’t terribly good but people keep trying to make them work.
Full disclosure, I only played to stage 4 (out of 7) because I hit a glitch that rendered my save file irreparably screwed. Apparently losing all your lives before a screen transition means the game doesn’t load the “continue?” prompt, so you’re effectively soft-locked — it persists even when you reload your save, so there goes all your progress…! I chose to refund the game because I figured I’d gotten all I could out of it: I’d ripped its sprites, and I’d pretty much seen all its gameplay had to offer.
All things considered, it’s fine. If you like Final Fight or Streets of Rage, you’ll be right at home with Maiden Cops. It doesn’t rock the foundations of the genre, but it’s familiar enough with the tropes (or it’s using an engine that did all the heavy lifting) that it makes a decent effort, especially for a three-man dev team (with a squadron of artists). One could argue it makes a better showing than big names like Double Dragon IV or the 2020 Battletoads — I just found it a bit sauceless, personally, or even passionless.
My beef with the game is far more petty, and perhaps more illuminating than you’d prefer on how I peruse the internet: for an “adult” brawler with pervy anime sensibilities, it’s awfully bloody milquetoast.
It’s “adult” in the sense that, yes, it’s pervy. All the characters are busty and wear very little clothing. Every animation is guaranteed to have some metric of jiggle physics. Yet it all feels very plain, as if none of this is fuelled by passion or legitimate interest, but just ticking a checklist of what anime nerds are into.
It is notable for being a sprite-based game with selectable outfits… and perhaps a reminder of why you rarely see that: Unless it’s a hi-res fighting game, there’s just not enough real estate on these girls to tell the difference! The likes of Priscilla’s qipao or secretary outfit work well, but when the point is showing as much skin as possible, you have to squint to tell the difference between their microscopic school uniforms and their swimwear…! It doesn’t help that their default cop outfits are so unappealing it’s an incentive to unlock anything different as soon as possible.
I might just be prejudiced against the “monster girl” aesthetic, which feels like furry for cowards. All the ladies have some sort of tail, wings, horns, claws, animal ears, or tiny decorative feature to fit the bill… but it’s so minute, ancillary, or superfluous that it’s so easy to gloss over. Your average Vtuber has a more exotic design than any of these girls!
It doesn’t help that the characters seen in stage backdrops are detestably generic, often completely swagless anime boys on dates with bland seemingly human girls, so it can’t even commit to everyone having ‘monster’ traits. What’s worse is that one random background character is immediately more charming than the entire rest of the cast on account of one simple thing: outrageous boob physics!
ragey0: i detest these completely swagless male characters
Pulsie: ME TOO
Pulsie: They may as well just have made it a women-only world instead of stuffing these lameass dudes in here
ragey0: If they did that it’d result in a huge swathe of fans thinking “oh there must be a conspiracy for why there’s only women” and imagine some nonsense caste system where the men are kept enslaved or some bollocks
ragey0: it’s almost like being on the outskirts of horny circles exposes you to really dodgy people, who knew
I wisecrack about checklists, but that’s genuinely what the sex appeal in the sprites comes across like. Everything feels strangely clinical and by-the-numbers, from how everyone exposes skin in the exact same way, to the extremely pedestrian manner jiggle physics are animated.
I may be ace, but I am a sucker for stupid proportions and wobbly anatomy, and nothing in this game inspires or excites. It knows these things sell, but doesn’t understand the hows or whys. I can’t believe I’m calling the motion of fatty tissue an art, but sometimes it takes seeing a truly artless depiction for you to realise when it’s done right.
A while back I joked that my unspoken new years resolution was to be “so cringe on main that strangers and loved ones are embarrassed to know me,” as might be evident by some of my activities in recent years. It is freeing to be candid, even if it’s often the source of unexpected introductions down the line. “So you’re the fucker who wrote 5000 words about pixel tiddy!”
I don’t like being negative about games! I think the healthiest thing people can do when it comes to media is to acknowledge when it simply isn’t for them — and in this case, it’s clear the developer’s interests and mine don’t quite mesh.
Which stinks, because in theory this should be something I’m into — I like beat-em-ups, I like monster girls, and I respect a game that’s upfront and candid about what it wants to be, which in this case is anime horniness.
It’s just a tepid amount of anime horniness, is my complaint? Pal Ray summed it up best in saying, “it’s well made and polished, but there’s no love in it.” I look at Maiden Cops and I want to heckle them and scream “YOU FUCKING COWARDS“.
Your average fighting game cast has more titillation than this. I’ve seen hornier games on Steam, with characters that are this close to naked and wobbling all over the place, putting their spanking kink front and centre or whatever their niche is.
They’re very overt in what they want to be, what audience they’re gunning for, and the interests of the creator. I find I’ve been using the term “freak shit” a lot lately, but I use it earnestly and positively — I want it to be messed up! It should be bigger and louder and more outrageous! If you can’t make a better beat-em-up, at least make a hornier one!
I might be outing myself in saying I consider Tribal Hunter to be pretty middle-of-the-road, but it at least acts sufficiently on the crap it wants to. Kings of Hell delivers a precision strike of over-the-top leather daddy energy, revelling in big cunty furries showing bulge.
Maiden Cops‘ aesthetic just feels like a mid-90s OVA that nobody but the most underserved niche are interested in, and even they’re just making do ’til something better comes along. It’s no Jungle de Ikou!, is what I’m saying; fans of that nonsense have been eating off it for decades now.
At this point I’m clearly just pining for things that aren’t there, like more interesting world-building. Monster girls aside, there’s nothing to establish this as an interesting or out-of-the-ordinary setting — the police cars look the same, the locales are typical brawler fare, and things play out exactly like you’d expect in a lighthearted girl-centric anime game.
It aspires to be Final Fight with monster girls, and that’s fine; I respect setting attainable goals! I just think, man, the talent behind this could produce something so much spicier if they put to their minds to it, in whatever definition you prefer to read that.
Anyway, that’s more than anyone cared to read about how a horny video game is too basic for my tastes. I’m hoping there’s somebody out there who respects the game in all the ways I can’t! That person may not wish to interact with me though, they’d hurl if they saw the horny games I’d want to make.
