#slayers x

The Ultimate... Shooter?? Bros

yes, that one crossover has been expanded and now ig this is basically au

better quality lower ⬇️ ⬇️ ⬇️

Sgt. Hatred - Not Important (Hatred)

Brock - Duke Nukem (Duke Nukem 3D/Duke Nukem Forever)

Hank - Zane Lofton (Slayers X: Terminal Aftermath: Vengance of the Slayer)

Dean - Albert Wesker (Resident Evil series; he was less fitting by appearance but I picked him cuz it's literally Dude's litter)

Rusty - Postal Dude (Postal 4)

Henchman 21 - Postal Dude (Postal III)

Dr. Orpheus - Caleb Blood (Blood)

This game is transcendent. On the surface it trades as a tongue-in-cheek revival of low-budget 90s FPS smashed through a membrane of the Geocities-era DIY aesthetic that Hypnospace Outlaw was built upon. It's an alright shooter as they go - functional and fun enough on a mechanical level, at least as far as the committment to making the ugliest, most visually cluttered game will allow it to go. But deep down, Slayers X is about a middle-aged guy who used to imagine himself a tech-god teenage edgelord, unable to voice his disappointment at the mundane drudgery of adulthood, revisiting a piece of very personal art that his younger self was never able to make real. It draws you back to your adolescence when the potential of the world seemed to be somewhat limitless and no-one ever imagined that their most likely destination was to become one of millions of faces in a crowd of boring white-collar nobodies.

We see all versions of Zane: the outwardly obnoxious, juvenile child, and the lonely teenager grieving the death of his mother. We see the tired, disillusioned single parent who hasn't matured much, but dedicates a special corner of this game to his infant son. We see a man who cannot forget the greatest years of his life, even if the greatness of those years existed only in his head and on the internet. But, importantly, we see a man who hasn't entirely lost the energy and passion of his youth, and is willing to put the time and effort into finishing a work of art that captured a snapshot of the entirety of his person at a specific and definitive point in his existence.

I think of all the ideas I had in my teens and early 20s that never went anywhere - the half finished scripts, books, songs - that I scrapped because I thought they weren't good enough. The pieces of self-expression lost forever because I got a new computer or deleted a file I didn't think I needed. If I had them all here in front of me now I would have an album of media cataloguing who I was at those moments in a way no photo could ever do justice. A collection of things that would be worse than I remember and better than I remember, that would show me how far I've come, and how far I've strayed. I have memories of those times, of the excitement and confusion and chaos and joy, but nothing material to connect me to those memories. If Zane had finished and published this game at the time, would it have garnered attention? Would he have met a community of designers? Would he have worked on another, applied for training as a designer, worked at a development studio, created something more definitive? Could he have been at the forefront of a creative revolution alongside 90s legends such as John Romero and Tim Cain? This game suggests to me that he thinks he could have. It suggests to me that as he got older made bad choices, or safe choices, or just different choices.

And therein lies the most devastating part of Slayers X - the part that I think most adult humans can relate to. You'll always remember the moments when you felt on top of the world, and the moments of potential lost because of feelings you didn't chase, or feelings you did that didn't work out. Things passed you by, sometimes because you didn't realise they were there, and sometimes because you didn't think they were important. But as you get older you forget the pain and the fear and the emotional instability, and some part of you that you cannot ever be aware of at the time becomes clear. There was a spark there. A spark that drove you to go out and see people and watch bands and movies that you didn't know where going to be great or suck, to talk to strangers and become friends or enemies with people you'll never see again, to walk an hour home along dark streets at 3am because you couldn't afford a taxi from the bar. A spark that made some people love you and some people hate you. Time and the demands of life have worn down its edges and homogenised you; it has sapped your energy and diminished your ambitions. You are still capable of new, exciting ideas, but you talk yourself out of them without even considering them because you don't have time, or you value different things now. But that spark...that uncertainty...the terrifying exhiliration of a future unknown. It was there once, so raw and firey and flawed and desperate to be unleashed.