Harddrive-By: Slayers X: Terminal Aftermath: The VenGance of the Slayer
This game should be in a museum. It is a nearly perfect time capsule of turn-of-the-century teenage angst for a very specific kind of teenager.
Slayers X is an attempt and apparently successful one for a 35-year-old Millennial to finish writing a game mod he started back when he was fifteen.
Something Generation X doesn’t really get at a bone-deep level is that at one time we were the cool big brother. The Gen Xer was the guy with a couple of black belts and said it was ‘no big deal, just work at long enough,’ he was the guy who had mastered suicidal tricks on bicycles and now claimed the whole thing was kind of retarded. The Gen Xer was the guy who had the confidence to look cool in a long black trench coat. He owned a truck, a motorcycle, and guns. And he was the guy who knew how to hack back when hacking was nearly a superpower.
The hacking thing was mostly Hollywood trying to latch on to what it thought was the next big thing. They could make it look cool, but their efforts fell apart if you knew anything at all about coding or even operating a keyboard.
None of that mattered if you were 15 and had just seen The Matrix and let’s be clear, that ain’t me but I get it.
Zane set out to make the game he was trying to write when he was sixteen. In Slayers X, he captures the world of the fifteen-year-old fantasy version of himself and what that kid thought was cool… Sorry… What that kid thought was so radical and awesome it would make you hurl.
So, the game starts in the X Slayers secret dojo and hacking parlor, (The Steel Sewer) with a terrible 1999 CGI cut scene of Zane, his Sensei and maybe Dad Mikey, and his not-quite high school girlfriend Steffanie. They are practicing the recently invented martial art of Hack Blood. The Steel Sewer is everything a mid-teens boy would have thought was rad in 2000. It has arcade games, an armory, a comic book starring himself, you get the idea.
His not-quite girlfriend Steffanie gets called into work at a local burger joint called Sloppos, just before the city of Boise is attacked. Mikey tells Zane to not follow him into Hack Blood battle because he’s not strong enough yet. One minute later and a mortally wounded Mikey has changed his mind and entrusts Zane with the S-Blade (which honestly wasn’t that good of a weapon). Zane who is a famous CEO (of what we never discover) finds out that his Mom has been killed in the shitty two-unit apartment where they live. He vows to “revenge her.”
The funny part is that Zane stays in character even online. He never swears on Twitter and he never swears in the game either. That is not to say this game is at all clean. Slayers X has a teenager’s love of scatological humor throughout. Lots and lots and lots of poop jokes. The Zane in the game sounds for all the world like Beavis.
Anyway, he will “revenge her” with the power of Hack Blood.
Hack Blood is so powerful it can make you throw 1990s glowing anime power balls but it mostly makes the S blade glow when it’s in its powered-up state. You collect it by killing Psykos, (I have to be careful to get the misspellings right). The Psykos’ leader is Zane’s Evil pothead Boomer stepfather, Mevin Raniels. No, I didn’t spell that wrong either, Slayers X has a high school sophomore’s grasp of spelling in a pre-Grammarly world. Turd is spelled with an E, glass shards are glass sharts, it just keeps going on like that and Mevin Raniels is exactly the kind of pseudo name a kid would put on his detested 40-year-old stepfather.
Everything is tinted green because, you know, The Matrix. Zane starts with two cheesy guns akimbo and one of them is always sideways. Then you get the game’s shotgun, the Glass Blaster (you have to break a lot of windows in-game to load it), Explosive Sewage Launcher (a sludge gun that attracts rats who are your friends), Rapid Mutilator (machine gun with enough kick to get you airborne), Missile Launcher, And the Hack Blood Talisman (more beam weapon than BFG but it’s still good).
Zane discovers that his now former stepdad is the leader of the Psykos and sets out to the Boise Potato Festival for the final battle. This is a game that both agrees and disagrees with Carmack’s view that a story in a game is like a story in porn, expected but not important. The story is more of a shit post than an actual narrative.
The story is tied to another game, Hypno-Space Outlaw that I haven’t played yet but as it turns out is in my Steam Library, so I probably did this in the wrong order.
The Music is great by the way, the game’s cover art is a deliberate shout-out to Limp Bizkit’s Significant Other, (a censored Walmart copy that only a teen could buy).
The graphics are terrible and great at the same time. It looks like a bad Build engine mod but it was made with Unity. When you first start playing it, you’re absolutely convinced that it’s going to break any second, but it doesn’t. For that matter, you’re convinced the guns won’t hit what they’re aiming at, but they do, and the enemies are likely to damage you without an attack state or any kind of hint you’ve just taken damage aside from half your health suddenly vanishing. But again everything works fine. This game is meant to look unpolished and yet the polish is there beneath the surface.
This game is “bad” deliberately done well.
I’m kind of impressed by the effort that went into making it what it is. While it doesn’t speak to me I get why it would touch something in a guy who was in his mid-teens when the towers fell.
If you are the market for this game then you already know it.
