Women in games are, generally speaking, made to be pleasing to the eye. They're perfectly formed pretty-faced beauties. But game makers haven't always had the necessary tools to create such impossible visions of lovely. Back in the day, coders and artists tried their hardest to make sexy using nothing but a cripplingly limited colour palette and a bunch of hard-edged pixels. Some did an admirable job, others made images that were nothing short of terrifying. Obviously for the purposes of cruel humour, this article is entirely about the latter category. Behold the horror...

Warning! This article contains imagery of a sexual nature that some may find laughable and/or completely piss poor.

Annaconda

Of course she's sad. Her arms look like a mouse's staircase and she has blood leaking blood from her eye.

Barbarian II


Clue: the one without eyes is made of pixels.

Bunny Jagd


This is from a German developer called A&S Soft. You'll get to know their distinctive visual style pretty well while perusing this list. Apparently the aim of Bunny Jagd - an 'interactive fiction' for the Commodore 64 - is to find the most beautiful girl in the world. We assume that the above is not her.

Cover Girl Strip Poker

Fair enough most people playing a strip poker game aren't looking at the faces, but still...

Dallax: Sex and Crime in Southfork


Another classic from A&S Soft. We're not sure what's happening here exactly, but it looks like the Thing from Fantastic Four is about to commit an act of indecency.

Dr Foster


It doesn't matter that this resides on the very lowest tier of erotic, we're still obliged to cover the exposed 'breasts'. Silly really. But don’t worry, you're not missing anything. Unlike the breasts, which are missing their nipples.

Elvira II


This one's good. Not terrifying at all. We only kept it on the list because the sexy stare of the bouffant-helmeted goth seductress on the box caught our eye. We realised that we don't have anything like enough pictures of bouffant-helmeted goth seductresses modestly showing off their collection of evil pumpkin heads on the site. So that was kind of the motivation for including it. Hope you don't mind.

Emanuelle


Back in 1989 nobody really posed the 'are games art?' question. We don't know why.

F****** Fiona


We're holding out for an HD remake of this one, but nothing announced yet. We'll keep you posted.

Galdregon's Domain

If you were making a fantasy game with warriors and swords and helmets back in the 80s, Arnie Schwarzenegger was *the* archetypal image to shamelessly plagiarise. As for the women... any old vision of hag would do as long as she was terrifyingly muscular, had an exposed rear-end and could crush a magical orb of lightning with her bare hands.

Hollywood Poker

The yellow face and saggy tit look. Not exactly the most desirable opponent for a sneaky round of strip - sorry, *Hollywood* - poker. The Spectrum version opted to give the reclining in-game lady abomination a healthy grey skin colour:

At least, we guess, her skin matches her bra and panties. Colour coordination and all that. We think we preferred this one with her clothes on, though...

The above image is so 80s the only thing missing is Michael J Fox.

Keep going! Sex and strip start with 'S'...