Vixen, by Martech, was released for a number of 8 and 16-bit home computer platforms in 1988, and it proved to be somewhat controversial. Mainly because the game used glamour model Corinne Russell as both reference for the lead character, and to plaster all over the packaging and marketing for the game, which upset a lot of vocal, prudish people in the UK, leading to calls for it to be banned. Retailer Boots even refused to stock the game unless Martech changed the game’s packaging…

Honestly: the 1980s were the last gasp of the puritanical, deluded “moralists” who complained about everything that was even slightly ‘adult’ and available to buy or rent in public, be they horror films or scantily-clad women in video games… And while I can understand complaints about a woman being sexualised as being valid, that really wasn’t the case with Vixen. Ms. Russell was actually being employed to do a bit of modelling and acting – with her clothes on. It was simply because she was better known at the time for getting her breasts out in national tabloid newspapers that the vocal moral minority got upset… And the perception among these idiots was that all games were for children, that Ms. Russell was a “porn” model, and therefore two and two make four… Thank goodness, then, that those kind of people have mostly died out in this day and age! But anyway: back to the game… Ahem.

So Vixen is a side-scrolling platform game in which you play a woman who runs from left to right, jumping, whipping, and collecting gems. Creatures come at her from all directions and must be whipped to death before they touch her. Gaps in the landscape must be jumped and not fallen into – otherwise it’s instant death. And she turns into a fox during the bonus stages, where she can collect gems for… reasons. And there’s really not much else to it…

The animation of the ‘Vixen‘ girl (and fox) is good, but is only partially successful. I’m not 100% sure, but it looks like the artists used frame by frame video footage of the model running, jumping and whipping as reference for their animation (ie. rotoscoping), but the movement looks badly-acted, which you’d expect from a non-actor. So the movement looks hokey in places. The jump animation in particular looks fake, compared to, say, the running strides and whipping. The falling into water animation is particularly bad… Overall, the graphics in the ST version are pretty poor. They’re gaudy; they’re not that well-designed, and the scrolling of the backgrounds and movement of the creatures is jerky.

Vixen is a pretty poor game overall. You’d have thought that Martech would have at least done something half decent with the source material, considering all the controversy, but they didn’t. The people who created Vixen made some unfortunate creative decisions that ultimately resulted in below-par, repetitive gameplay.

More: Vixen on Wikipedia