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Slime Master (X68000) review

"Slime Master stars a lovely blonde lass with perky breasts. Since the developers failed to give her a name, I'll call her Pamela. She's a shy one, requiring not one but two bedroom visits before getting naked."

Back in 1986, I created a straightforward adventure game called Cave of Mystery. It wasn't a particularly good game, but it did feature full-screen, four-color bitmap images, each drawn and saved with a special paint program that I had designed. These images were then loaded and displayed as needed by Cave of Mystery's core program, thus bypassing early MS-DOS BASIC's incompetent drawing routines.

I always envied the Commodore version of BASIC, with its impressive refresh rates and relative ease of use. As we all know*, the gaming-friendly Commodore begat the even more gaming-friendly Amiga, and the Amiga's Japanese cousin was a dandy powerhouse known as the X68000.

* If you didn't know, now you do!

When I purchased my X68000 twenty years later, it came with a slew of doujin software. One disc that caught my eye was Slime Master, created by three horny Japanese men collectively known as Slime Soft. Due to the X68000's pedigree, I was surprised to discover that their game used the same technique as Cave of Mystery; each screen of this dungeoncrawler is assembled from a set of scanned artwork. This brought back nostalgic memories of gaming's early days, when development was an infant art and small studios could produce world-changing hits. Slime Master was no more world-changing than Cave of Mystery, but I could understand the designers' passion nonetheless.

Slime Master stars a lovely blonde lass with perky breasts. Since the developers failed to give her a name, I'll call her Pamela. She's a shy one, requiring not one but two bedroom visits before getting naked. Pamela's lack of virtue was rewarded in that I actually completed the game just to see how far she would go.

SPOILER: Not particularly far.

Slime Soft was clearly inspired by Dragon Knight 2, and for good reason. Dragon Knight 2 mixed dungeoncrawling and stat-based battles with sexy monster-girls, a perfect combination for number fetishists.

In Slime Master, the sexy monster-girls have been replaced with toddlers.

In Slime Master, the labyrinthine dungeon has been replaced with a straight line.

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Thrice the player shall walk to the end of Slime Master's corridor, fighting the same toddler monsters each time, and thrice the player shall walk back through that same brown corridor to the exit, in hopes of receiving warrior princess nookie.

That's really not much of a quest. One doesn't need a degree in ludology to know that repeated enemies, repeated scenery, and A "DUNGEONCRAWLER" THAT CONSISTS OF WALKING BACK AND FORTH IN A STRAIGHT LINE makes for a poor game. Even though Slime Master used the same graphical technique as Cave of Mystery, it couldn't compete in terms of design and variety. I bring up my own game for two reasons:

1) My dad threw out all of our 5.25" floppy disks, so this is the only record that Cave of Mystery ever existed.

2) The combined efforts of three horny gamers were surpassed by that of a single nine-year-old.

Even so, I'm disappointed that the planned sequel Slime Master 2 was nixed. Who knows how far Pamela would have gone?

//Zig

Staff review by Zigfried (June 12, 2010)

Zigfried likes writing about whales and angry seamen, and often does so at the local pub.

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	zippdementia posted June 13, 2010: Pamela looks a little bit like a girl I met at a party a couple nights ago. Another killer review, Zig.
	Genj posted June 13, 2010: Well this game looks disturbing.
	aschultz posted June 15, 2010: I am amused more by the frustration felt as you realize a game you wrote has more depth than something that people actually paid for than by the various editorial tricks. It mirrors my groaning on realizing that, and seeing a list of game programmers, many 16 year olds were writing stuff. Then when I turned 16, with much greater resources, I was still stuck in BASIC or hacking away at some game from several years ago. This would make an awesome blog entry, but when you review a game about something horribly linear with bad graphics, it only goes so far, so it won't make RotW. To beat up an over-used cliche, you can polish criticism of a turd so much, but it still only criticises turds, which people generally have pretty fixed opinions about. We know where we are with turds. You didn't have much to work with, so as a review, this is a bit unambitious. Still, I'm glad it's there. As a memoir, it made me remember all the goofy stuff I tried & made me go lock myself somewhere and write a bit about the good/bad old days. Writing reviews should be about more than "I liked this game" but unfortunately there's not enough game here to blend a review with relevant generalizations. I'm glad that didn't stop you from writing/sharing something fun. P.S. whatever you wrote had nothing on my text adventure, text adventure/RPG, or the one RPG that eventually ran out of memory but would've ROCKED if we'd gotten 128K in our Apple earlier. You can't prove me wrong, either, because my disks got destroyed, too. Maybe it would've had graphics if Apple Basic didn't suck for that.

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