The click of the spin button is just a cheap plastic sound from my laptop speakers but the bikini top sliding down that anime girl’s shoulder? That’s the real jackpot. HALC Summer 2011 Special. It’s a slot machine where the payout isn’t coins, it’s pages of a hentai gallery. You press Go, the reels do their thing, and points trickle in. I’m a voice acting nut, right, so I’m sitting here giving every girl a different breathy little gasp in my head when her picture unlocks. The art’s got that glossy, sun-bleached summer look, the kind where the tan lines are almost a character themselves. The moans I’m imagining are better than anything actually in the game, because there’s no voice work at all. Missed opportunity.

The mechanics are braindead. You just accumulate points and the pictures get spicier. One minute you’re looking at a shy girl in a frilly two-piece, next thing you know she’s lost the top and is giving a look that’s pure melted popsicle. I got stuck on this one image of a silver-haired girl, back arched, the strings of her bikini digging in just so. The game doesn’t care about strategy, it’s just a delivery system for jpgs. I wish the pictures were bigger, or that you could zoom. The interface is a clunky flash-era mess that I’m weirdly nostalgic for.

It’s a slot machine that dispenses softcore anime filth dressed in summer heat. The sound design is nothing but repetitive casino chimes that I muted after thirty seconds to focus on the real audio, the wet slap of waves on a beach I was playing on my phone. A whole tangent about wave sounds. The game is just a button. You press it. A bikini falls off. Sometimes that’s the whole damn point.