Color Dreams' strangest game (and they made quite a few strange games) was Menace Beach, created in 1990. No other CD game quite combines bad graphics and embarassing gameplay, not to mention questionable moralty, quite as well as this game does.

Anyway, Menace Beach stars some kind of skater dude who's on a quest to rescue his girlfriend. So, he hops on his skateboard and goes through a few cities, a lot of sewers, and the occaisonal seaside vista to get to wherever she's being held.

I should mention that Color Dreams re-used basically the exact same game engine for several of their games (this one, Operation Secret Storm, Secret Scout, Castle of Deceit on the Bunch Games label, and maybe more). This means that these games were basically all the same - they had lame-ass fighting action with really shitty graphics and the whole thing played like it was going to crash at any moment if you did something wrong.

But wait, get this - while you're going through the levels, you get to see your girlfriend tied up every now and then, and - check this out - as you go through the game, more and more of her clothes "rot" off, revealing a bikini eventually.

Not that I don't like this, but what kind of design decision was this? The only thing I can think of is that demure programmer Vance Kozik, knew that his game was not going to challenge Super Mario Bros. 3's place in the platform gaming charts, and decided to add a little "skin" so's that players would have a reason to continue playing through the game. This was enough for Game Players' magazine to say that the game was "unsuitable for children", believe it or not (obviously, they've never seen Hot Slots).

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