There is no Arcade Flyer update this month because after posting 300 flyers a month since April I'm just plain burnt out. Stay tuned in January when the regular updates resume. Happy Holidays everyone!

Looking back over the past year I realized I had written over forty different AFAS features and that I was feeling a little burnt out myself. Poring over the hundreds of flyers documented, you come to realize that not every flyer has artwork worth posting and often times the really good ones contain absolutely no information about the game itself. So in a Flyer Art Solidarity pact with Dan, I too am taking a flyer hiatus until the new year.

Don't forget that TAFA is going to be selling off a large portion on their collection at the beginning of next year for a paltry $1 a piece. So, while you're waiting for AFAS to return next you, be sure to peruse The Arcade Flyer Archive site and see if there's any of them you might want to take home with you. My bet is that you'll at least find one.

Death Smiles was released in the middle of October 2007 by Cave. The title is a side scrolling shooter that features girls with magical powers and the ability to fly. The whole game has a macabre atmosphere with traditional gothic horror trappings such as pumpkins, witches, bats, familiars, worms etc. The game is controlled with a joystick and three buttons: One button shoots left, one shoots right and the other throws a bomb. A lock-on guided missile attack is also accessible by hitting a combo. Your regular attacks mostly consist of shooting electrical rays at your enemies or jabbing them with your demon scissors or sword. Seeing as it has just come out there's not much more I can say about the game having not really played it (you can see a clip of it here) , but the real fun comes in the form of the flyer, or at least the back of it.

The thing that attracted me to this flyer in the first place was the girl in white. While I was in Japan, I became obsessed with the "Gothic Lolita" girls that I saw hanging around Harajuku. For those of you not in the know, Gothic Lolita is a fashion trend that consists of gals dressed in overly frilly, Victorian doll-like outfits. And these are no thrown together outfits either. Each one is meticulously put together with matching shoes, aprons, tiny hats, bonnets and sometimes even wigs. It was quite an amazing thing to see them walking down the street on a Wednesday afternoon in all their finery with their parasols out to protect their delicate skin.

So, needless to say, one glance at the flyer and I was hooked. Then finding out more about the game and it's gothic horror style play I became more interested. Spooky things have always fascinated me and I am a huge fan of survival horror and Castlevania type games dating back to Ghouls and Ghosts and beyond. So there we were two reasons for me to love the game. So I clicked through to the page that contained the back of the flyer and I was completely sold.

On the back there is a little game that you can put together that shows the back of a girl's lower half in stockings and panties. You attach a petti-coat and a skirt to the girls body and then set up little tokens of some graves and jack o' lantern's. Then, according to the drawn instructions (I can't read the written ones as they are in Japanese - is anyone wants to translate, feel free!) you inexplicably blow on the tokens, sending them and the hapless girl's skirt into the air revealing her panties. (They really need to make a version of this with Kratos or perhaps Dante) I'm not really sure how you actually score the points, but does it really matter? Now I guess we know why Death smiles.

You can click here to get the full sized version from TAFA.

Long before you could control a man eating shark in Jaws:Unleashed, there was Shark Attack. Released in 1981 by GPi, Shark Attack had you playing the role of a great white shark on the rampage. Points were earned by dodging scuba diver's spear gun attacks and then eating the divers. In addition to a joystick, there were buttons used to control the game that were labeled "thrust", which would cause you to speed up and "munch" which would let you eat the diver. It was the first game to use "Quadraphonic" sound and sound effects were done with a cassette player inside the machine that screamed bloody murder every time you ate a diver.

GPi was famous for their flyers which always seemed to depict a girl in her panties and plenty of sexual innuendo in the text. The panties were usually printed with the catchphrase "Keep your eye on Gpi". In this case, the panties say "Bite my Bait" while the the flyer tells us to "Thrust and Munch". This all over top an extreme close-up butt shot next to the phrase "The bottom line is profit you can trust", another popular GPi catchphrase. Pictured here is actually the back of the flyer, make the jump to see the front and catch that swinging chick in her bikini. Flynn De Marco

S.A.M.I.:
This week we go WAY back in video game history to 1970 when old fashioned mechanical games were first starting to evolve into video games. S.A.M.I. or Surface to Air Missile Interceptor utilized a relatively simple system of lights and mirrors to create it's video effects.

Using a joystick, the player would launch "missiles" from a small plastic tank contained behind the game's screen. The tank was housed on a 3D plastic landscape and the "missiles" were projected on to the game glass from below using a mirror and so gave them a holographic look. You tracked the projectiles using a cross-hair which was just little light that blipped across the screen. Your points were kept by a pinball like scoring system of rotating number wheels. The sales sheet that came with the game pointed out amazing features such as: Realistic Video Targets, Solid State Sound, Adjustable Hit Zone and Precision Projection System.

It doesn't sound like it was loads of fun, but Midway did everything they could to sell this game, even resorting to the sexually suggestive headline "Ohh...that S.A.M.I. He just never stops putting out." Just to push the point even more, we are treated to an ejaculatory pile of coins that seems to be spewing forth forth from S.A.M.I.'s general "crotch" area and it looks like that lovely lady is giving him a little hand help.

It's amazing that in the 60's and 70's all one needed to do to suggest "future" and "space age" was to throw a silver lame' catsuit on someone. It's a fashion trend that sadly didn't catch on. Flynn De Marco