Krayzie Bone & Ice Cube's Verdict: Get your mind right, foo!
Mark Ryan's Verdict: I got your back, man. I... got your back.
My Verdict: I used to see a girl who lived like this. Maybe she's not gobbling the latnium johnson these days 'cos I would have rated the game worse years ago.
Game Information
Game Type: Inform
Author Info: Actually, I'm hoping they'll see their review up on this site and let me know who they are and why they aren't entering this year's comp.
Other Games By This Author: None known
Download Link: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/slackerx.z5
The Review...
So there I was... trying to pass the time by looking busy until the new Green Day album was "officially" released so I could start the rants on my personal site off without certain people -- hotly damnable, quick-to-judge sociopathic & terminally professional projectors of lawlessness -- presuming I downloaded it off Napster whilst I claimed to have phone sex with girls who thought I was the aforementioned band's lead singer when, suddenly, I decided to peruse the GMD archive and download Slacker X.
Well, hell. This abomination of good taste puts my copyright-infringing ass to shame. It inhales deeply on a fat jaybird, holds it for effect and exhales it all over my freshly washed linen, after which it loudly states, "You pussy! You don't have the faintest idea what a fog of debauchery is really like!"
I'll sum up the plot for the snobbish text adventure veteran who only plays XYZZY-nominated games and the like, as it's possible this one may have slipped under the radar: in Slacker X you're satisfying a pack of one-dimensional NPCs by appealing to their basest of passions. Drugs, pills, eye drops and the like. Girls won't have anything to do with you -- because you're a slacker!! -- so save the repressed sexual perversion for Stiffy Makane or MST Presents: Stiffy Makane. Most objects the game refers to are not actually coded, which provides some challenging anti-puzzles as the player has no idea what is really important and what is not. And frankly, this hobby isn't going to hit the big time until we start setting events in timer for realistic ovulation and coding up the yak like they did in Worlds Apart. So Slacker X doesn't exactly advance the hobby from a purely technical standpoint.
What it's got going for it is a fair bit of style. Not enough
to make this a recommendable game, let's not get ridiculous here, but the guys that wrote
the game have something they can build on. Presuming you're not some limey git on a 300
baud modem paying for download time it's possible for some of the jokes to get a slight
grin. (If you are a limey git paying for download time, then I should state that there
appears to be something between your teeth. Good luck with that.) What Slacker X
ultimately gives you is a window to a few souls you'd probably rather not look through. As
Green Day said in their October 4th, 2000 release "Minority"
March 31st, 1994 release "Dookie", "I want to be a minority / I
don't need your authority / Down with the moral majority!" "Am I just
paranoid? Or am I stoned?"
Really, though, the chief question you leave with after finishing it is not "when is the next episode coming out," "did Barbara come repeatedly with a deeply fulfilling screams" or "what the fuck was that all about, anyway" but instead -- it took three people to write this?
Simple Rating: 2.5 / 10
Complicated Rating:
Story: 4.5 / 10
Writing: 4 / 10
Playability: 2 / 10 (somebody shoot me)
Puzzle Quality: 1 / 10
Parser Responsiveness: 1 / 10 (riiiiiiiight....)