#soap panic

The nerds among you who love unlicensed NES games might recognize Soap Panic as the Japanese version of Bubble Bath Babes, one of three racy (and rare) Panesian releases featuring disrobed 8-bit ladies.

If you were pervy enough to seriously research the titles, reading articles like, say, this in-depth piece at NES Player, you'll know that while both Soap Panic and Bubble Bath Babes feature identical puzzle mechanics, the women featured in the games are different!

While graphics for the girls in Bubble Bath Babes and Soap Panic are available online, because the most commonly available ROM floating around for the latter is incomplete, anyone who's peeked at the game or tried to rip the female portraits found several of the images corrupted, showing up as a glitched silhouette.

ROM hacker Dave Augusta, though, created a patch that's restored all but one of the pictures. He's released it with the hope that someone will eventually dump the complete game for preservation purposes:

"I have provided this patch mainly as an alert to the ROM-dumping community that their work with this particular game is not yet finished; this patch is only a partial repair, and until someone successfully dumps the full 96kb ROM, we shall probably never have a complete version.

Until then, the viewer may consider this partial fix to be something like an archaeologist’s reconstruction of a famous artifact–if there were such a thing as a branch of archaeology devoted to schlocky old video games."

You can download the IPS patch at ROMhacking.net.