Playing Cover Girl Strip Poker is a stark reminder of what passed for adult entertainment on early nineties home computers. You bet virtual cash in standard five-card draw, hoping your digitized opponent loses enough money to strip down to raw 256-color pixels.
Five-card draw with a strict payout limit
The core card game inside Cover Girl Strip Poker is absolute standard fare. You start with a $2,500 bankroll and sit across from one of eight digitized real-life models, including Maria Whittaker and Amanda Godden. Bets top out at $999 per round, and the interface lets you swap cards and place wagers using simple point-and-click controls.
Playing the MS-DOS game yields few surprises in the early hands. The card engine behaves predictably at first, letting you win a few pots and trim away the initial layers of clothing. Then the artificial intelligence hits a wall. Modern players and historic reviews alike note that after a short winning streak, the AI's luck shifts drastically, turning late-game hands into a math problem designed to keep the final images locked away.
digitized models and short frame sequences
In 1991, fitting high-resolution photos onto standard floppy disks was a genuine hurdle. Developer Emotional Pictures solved this by squeezing 160x128 4-bit headerless grayscale images into 256-color VGA palettes. Four of the eight opponents feature multi-frame video snippets during their strip sequences, offering a half-dozen frames of movement that pass for animated footage.
The developer even included a dedicated zoom feature for the nude scenes. Clicking it does not reveal additional clarity. Instead, it magnifies the heavy compression, leaving you staring at giant blocky pixels on your screen. At least the main menu lets you toggle opponent commentary on or off without crashing.
How Cover Girl Strip Poker landed with critics
When gaming magazines covered Cover Girl Strip Poker upon release, the reactions were rarely kind. European publications battered the presentation across all platforms. Commodore Format handed the C64 port a dismal 32%, pointing out the weak visual conversion and missing joystick support while admitting the basic poker held up. Over on the Amiga side, Amiga Computing gave it a 34% score, while Datormagazin settled on 50% in their May 1992 issue.
- Language options on startup: English, Danish, Swedish, French, German, Italian
- Toggleable text comments from opponents during betting hands
- Eight selectable opponents from contemporary European modeling work
- Headerless 4-bit images zoomed via built-in visual multiplier
The studio behind the game was standard budget operation trickery. Emotional Pictures was actually a front for Danish outfit InterActive Vision A/S, who even tucked their InteractiVision logo directly inside the game's font file. Regional censors took issue with the title, forcing partial name changes to Cover Girl Poker across several European territories before CD-ROM releases brought the original name back.
Low stakes for modern screens
Nobody comes to this title expecting a deep card simulation. The poker engine is rudimentary, the rubber-band AI difficulty is infuriating, and the reward graphics are pure early-nineties pixel mush. It exists entirely as an odd quirk of softcore PC gaming history from 1991, preserved mostly for how clumsy the whole package feels to modern eyes.
You can play Cover Girl Strip Poker online free in your browser right now with no setup required. Launch the cards, mute the text taunts, and see how many hands you can win before the software decides you are not allowed to take another chip.