The Slarti and Stash Space Saga consists of three stages, all of which are terrible. Really, really terrible. It's rather hard to understand how truly awful it is, so to try and give you more of an idea I am proud to present what I call: The Dark Prince "The Slarti and Stash Space Saga" Saga, and I'll start with from the beginning.
After the relatively nice start screen, complete with an irritating flicker and a suspiciously familiar looking scrolling landscape, we get straight into the game. Stage one sees us flying through space avoiding asteroids. Quite why outer space has blue branch thingies on each side and why the asteroids only travel vertically are never explained but I didn't really think to ask because I was too busy having my eyes ripped out by the jerky scroller. The controls are hideous, not only do they choke if you press fire or a diagonal, but the ship moves too slowly to actually get a chance to dodge the asteroids that plummet down the screen towards you. Thankfully this isn't a problem as you can happily sail through the level by moving to the far right and staying there whilst doing something more productive with your time, like slowly sand-papering your elbows off.
Stage two starts with a decent enough premise: Shoot through a moving border, kill the big baddie who creeps down the screen and avoid the smaller whizzy things. While you are blessed with the ability to shoot things, it doesn't actually help. The whizzy things aren't affected by your bullets and move much faster than your ship, making them impossible to destroy and impossible to avoid, providing you with a rich sensation of irritation. To make matters worse, the border sometimes lets bullets fly happily through it and sometimes isn't even destroyed by the bullets. Most interestingly of all, despite the explanation text telling you that you need a headshot, you don't have to even fire a single bullet. The stage ends once the baddie has progressed a certain amount down the screen, regardless of how many hits you get in. Nothing says quality like the main goal of the level being totally irrelevant.
Finally we reach stage three, a grossly simplified sort of weaponless Hawkeye with extraordinarily broken parallax, the usual disastrous controls and a nice collection of bugs. Aside from the enemies being so lethal that they can kill you twice in one hit, their movement gets stuffed up when you move making them truly unique. it doesn't take too long to get used to, but it's the simple sort of bug that should never be there in the first place. Once you get the hang of the jump though, which like every other control in the game doesn't like more than one input at once, it's easy enough to get through it, if you can be bothered that is.
Surely there are some good points though, right? Sadly not. The sound is fairly empty, the music is very bland and samey and even that gets broken when the stages are loading. Quite why each stage needs to be loaded separately when they could all happily fit in memory is beyond me, but I'm sure there's a logical reason for this. The graphics range from God-awful to "clearly stolen from somewhere else", it's fairly easy to tell which are which, even though the ripped graphics have been broken as well. But it's the overall feeling of hatred towards you, the player, that is most worrying. The vibe you get when playing is that you should be damn grateful that you were lucky enough to be allowed to play this game and any complaint you have about it is totally unjustified.
Ignoring all the "hate propaganda", all the self praise and all the spelling mistakes which seem to make up most of the presentation of this test of patience, this is a well coded and interesting game. And by "well coded and interesting" I actually meant "horribly, horribly flawed, boring and totally ugly trash heap of a". The sheer amount of problems both technical and gamewise, and the fact that with a little playtesting almost all of them could have been ironed out, combined with the inexplicable smugness of how brilliant this game thinks it is, makes this the most unlikeable mess I have ever played.
Editors note: this game contains images and text of an adult nature and covers various subjects that might be offensive to some more sensitive readers - please do not download this game if you feel that you are likely to be offended by such things. |