Credit: Slime SoftBack 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.
Credit: Slime SoftIn 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
