But I have been enough of a tease already. Soap Panic, attack! Get down to the nitty gritty!

(Click to Make Larger) These cartridge scans come from my copy. As you can see, the writing on the blue front cover is in Japanese.

(Click to Make Larger) On the back of the black cartridge, Hacker's name is branded into the plastic. The yellow label says "FOR SALE and USE IN JAPAN ONLY."

The following are pictures taken from eBay, Hong Kong seller: toysonlinehk, of the much rarer and complete form of Soap Panic. A complete Soap Panic is estimated to be worth about $300 outside of Japan. The provocative female models on the cover and manual are the same that grace the cover of Bubble Bath Babes.

But what is this Panic all about? If you have ever played Bubble Bath Babes on an emulator, or Mermaids of Atlantis before, you have experienced the core gameplay. In fact, for Mermaids, the most notable changes wes the inclusion of a bikini and fish fins on the naked girl at the bottom, and a sappy story involving imaginary "merpeople" and "glow worms" which replaced the scenes of naked sluts bathing their unmentionables.

Read the Review for Mermaids of Atlantis

If you have not had the chance yet to play any of these games, this is essentially a puzzle game that replaces Tetris blocks with four kinds of combined colorful bubbles. In very much the same way you play any of the games in the Bust A Move series, you match and fashion like color bubbles together as they slowly rise from the bottom of the screen to the top. Matching four same colored bubbles results in bubbles of that color being eliminated.

I should mention there has been some controversy as to the origin of these bubbles. One common theory supports the claim that the minute positioning of the cute naked girl's bottom with the proximity of the flow source of colorful bubbles indicates that these bubbles are, in fact, the result of her letting out gas underwater. Continuously. Non-stop. How a woman could have so much flatulence stored up inside of her, and why this would be sexy to a group of Asian men developers, and to everyone else, is hard to say.

However, I have my own theory. Maybe the game was once The Lawrence Welk Show turned to puzzle game extraordinaire, to attract the old folks, with previously Welk himself as the body laying provacatively at the bottom of the screen instead? Perhaps blowing a tuba? Orchestrating a black man to tap dance? Throwing rocks at at dancing black man? No wait, anyone who cared about Lawrence Welk was in six feet into the ground by the time this game was made, so it couldn't be that.

Oh, who's kidding. Honestly, I thought they were fart bubbles, too. Fine by me, Hacker. Ass bubbles I will take any day over alien tentacled perverts in outer space.

Ppppffffffff bubbles aside, an adult videogame does not have to make this much sense. If I ever paid $400 for a bad sixteen-year-old porn game, my libido would be so shrunk already that the Walt Disney company would have to hire Rick Moranis to make a movie about it. The farts, they ruin nothing because a penis pump couldn't even begin to revive that kind of lost money. Enough talk of the funny-looking part of the male anatomy, let us look at the similarities between the NES and Famicom versions before we discuss the differences.

Bubble Bath Babes	Soap Panic

You can see for yourself that all of the menus, game screens, not to mention the "victory" announcements, are completely identical. Besides the change in names on the title screen, the only other difference is incidentally a huge one--Soap Panic has different stripping gals than the troupe featured in Bubble Bath Babes. And that's a big thing! In essence, in this one essence, that is what makes Soap Panic worth tracking down and playing just as much as BBB (you know, if you are into this sort of thing to begin with, and you are if you are reading this). It also does not hurt any that the chicks in Soap Panic are nicer looking than the shampooing skanks found in BBB. For this reason, if one owned all three of the Panesians, it would be in that person's interests to also track down a copy of Soap Panic for their collections, too, for it is the only one that has a meaningful variation between the Famicom and NES versions.

That's right, it's on.

Indeed, they are twins in every possible way except for the hidden ugly birthmarks, or cut scenes, after winning two consecutive rounds. You can almost hear the bouncing of the boobs signifying that they are near, like fleshy ringing bells. Like all good things there is some work involved for you to be rewarded with the packaged goodies, though. Here is how you play so you can see the ta-ta's.

The menu of options in Soap Panic will look similar to the one in Tetris. It'll ask you to choose the background music and if you want to play type A or type B. Type A is. I will be focusing primarily on the first type, as it is the one that is more fun and the one you'll probably be playing it more.

In type A, your objective will be to match the rising bubbles of the same color at the top. You can revolve a string of bubbles using the A or B buttons. Four matched bubbles will cause them to pop and disappear. If you do not align strings new bubbles with older ones, empty bubbles will form, taking up precious gameplay space. They can be removed by clearing away the bubbles that lay on top or by steering color bubbles to occupy the empty space. After every 200 bubbles are popped, you will move on to the next sub-stage. After getting through two consecutive sub-stages, you get to see a cut scene of a bath babe.

Yes, it's hard. Not as hard and mind-numbing as Hot Slots, but still damn hard. Your brain will have to battle your thing if you want to see the good stuff. Luckily the game gives you three continues (not enough), so if you lose, you can begin again on the same stage you were on.

Sparkling bubbles are randomly placed in the game. If you place them with similar colored bubbles, these special bubbles can switch to any color and take those bubbles out.

Bubbles containing letters will appear from time to time. Apparently the gas bubbles are also magical, and you will have to collect and spell the word MAGIC. Once you do, you can then harness the power of the magical fart bubbles to clear empty bubbles by pushing B and down on the D-pad together. Holy Christ.

There are a couple of tricks that I discovered to make the challenge a litte more doable. Typical of puzzle games, if you pause the game, the active custer of bubbles disappears so you cannot cheat and plan out your next move. To get around this, right before the current rising bubbles settles, immediately pause. On the lower right of the screen displays the next segment of bubbles. You can plan your strategy at your pace, since the game field is still visible when paused.

Another trick deals with those magical fart bubbles I talked about earlier. You can save one without using it right away, while collecting pieces for more. This is really helpful to build those up until you must need them.

Once you get to sub-stage X-6, things keep up pace real quick. To slow down rising bubbles, move the D-pad constantly in horizontal path, back and forth, across the screen.

The trick to end all tricks is the hardest to perform. To be honest, I was only able to do it once, and I do not know exactly all the steps I took to do it. There is a way for a current custer of bubbles to be moved off the playing field and into the blue border. The bubbles will then appear at the bottom again, and you can make it go around again for as many times as you like. (Strange numbers and patterns make an appearance in this glitch, as is pointed to on the picture above.)

If you can master the faster pace in later stages, you too can see for yourself a bathing beauty. How do you know when to get the lotion? When the screen reads "Good." There are six sub-stages in each of the four stages, one girl per stage, and three stripping sequences for every girl. (I'm bad at math, you figure it out.) At the start of each new stage, the difficulty starts over anew.

And now for the moment you have been waiting for: the girls! Below for your enjoyment is not only the girls of Soap Panic, but also the women of Bubble Bath Babes. I did all the work, you reap the benefits of my insanity.

[...to come shortly.]

Garbled-looking emulated babes are hot! Leaves it up to the old imagination.

It was fun, but let's face it, you came for the animated women, not to read anything. After the horseplay in bed, how to break it off? There are 50 ways to leave your Nintendo.

1. "I've got work tomorrow, Sudsy Suzy."
2. "At first I thought it was cute that you could fart out pink bubbles, Tub Tina, but now the bubbles are really starting to stink up the place."
3. Make suicide pack with fellow collectors who paid over $400 to buy this game.

   If you closely followed the third method, I don't think you will be needing the other fourty seven. For everyone else, click here to see the super secret Soap Panic cut scene (Flash required) that is only accessible at the finale of the game. This is about the sexiest thing you will ever see in your miserable, sex-deprived lives.

   Thank you, Hacker International. You were there for all of those lonely nights.

And a special thanks to you, leggy pillow. Many a moon-lit night you allowed me a place of solace for my head to rest upon your plush skirt lap. With you and my Nintendo adult videogames, I will be playing with power for many years to come.

Or until I find a real girlfriend and find healthy shame in myself.

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-All pictures and scans copyright NESplayer.com unless otherwise noted
-Photographs of game in complete form taken from eBay seller, toysonlinehk