Redux Revisited: the Sequel

Syncromesh Slaughter II: Spine Muncher is possibly the only title in the history of PC gaming to have been announced by its publisher before a development team had even been assembled, much less written a single line of code. That’s just how semi-independent Australian distributor Blind Drunk likes to do things.

So imagine my surprise when I woke up one morning and found - via Twitter, Facebook and the time-honoured tradition of random idiots shouting in the street - that Syncromesh Slaughter II had suddenly been released and the whole world was madly in love with the damn thing.

“I just don’t understand how this is possible,” I told the Boots as I strapped them on for a day of pounding pavement in self-righteous outrage. “Less than a month ago, William Liability and I were rolling around in the gutter, and he told me how he couldn’t get a team together to make Syncromesh Slaughter II, even though he promised hypothetically said team all the tax-free alcopops they could drink!”

“A masterpiece of imagination and gameplay,” said a gaming blog that did nothing but list other gaming blogs that in turn listed scores from actual game review sites.

I slammed up the roller-door to the alley outside the magazine’s old offices, where I now lived - the offices I mean, I didn’t live in the alley except on particularly rugged Saturday nights, well, Sunday mornings really… where was I?

“98% and contender for game of the year!” said another games site, the one with the zany graffiti-style masthead that took up fully half the page.

“The application Browser has unexpectedly quit,” said Android, so I angrily shoved my phone back in my pocket and headed for my rich friend Silver’s place. He was guaranteed to already have a copy. Of the game, that is. Not Chrome for Android smartphones. He was an iPhone 4 guy, through and through.

“Oh dude!” cried Silver, wrenching open his front door on some preternatural whim. I stood there with fist raised. “It is just the most amazing game ever!”

We rushed up the double-wide corridor and into the double-sized front bedroom that Silver didn’t even need to sublet he was so goddamn rich. His PC was a shrine to technology, with a 30” monitor and everything.

I narrowed my eyes at what the monitor was displaying.

“But this…” I said. “This is just Syncromesh Slaughter.”

“No no,” said Silver. “It’s the sequel, it’s all new. It’s fantastic!”

I looked again. Harder this time. There were differences. The HUD was yellow now, instead of blue. And when I leant in and pressed the ESC key, a pause menu popped up, and someone had rather inexpertly Photoshopped a “2” onto the game logo.

“It really is a brilliant piece of work,” said a familiar, somewhat adenoidal voice. I turned. Slumped on one of Silver’s designer beanbags was my crazy ex-third flatmate Victor Ninox. He was drinking an alcopop, a purple one. He waved the bottle at the monitor.

“It’s amazing,” he said. “Like, so many games just go off on a wild tangent for their sequels. But this is both innovative and restrained.”

I clutched at my head.

“That’s because it’s the SAME GAME!” I may have screamed. “I mean, look at this!” I grabbed the box that Silver had actually torn open in his eagerness to install the game. The “2” on the box was just a sticker, and not even one of those nice shiny stickers, just like a cheap, matte sticker. It wasn’t even four-colour. It was just red.

The boys seemed unimpressed as I peeled off the sticker, turning the box back into a vanilla copy of Syncromesh Slaughter. “See?!” I demanded.

“But look at the in-game interface,” said Silver. “There’s a two there and everything.”

“Let me guess,” I said, “you had to patch the game before you could play it.”

“Sure, but every game is like that these days.”

I stopped and took a deep breath.

“Are you guys seriously saying to me that you can’t see that William Liability, CEO and head lint-removal technician for known fraudsters Blind Drunk has fooled you into spending $100 on a four year-old game, and all it cost him was a bunch of stickers and a rented update server?”

“Correction,” said Silver importantly. “It was $150, because this is the digitally special edition.”

“Digitally special?”

“I get patch server priority, and also this pewter figurine of the Death Hound from the second act.”

I looked at the little dog he was holding out.

“That’s the lame Scotty dog with the high lead content from that knock-off version of Monopoly that Liability did 300 hours Community Service for trying to sell to Victorian primary schools,” I said. “He has forty thousand of those things in his garage.”

“Haters gonna hate,” said Vic, and folded his flabby arms. Silver nodded sagely, and sat back down to play through the sewer level all over again. It’s probably also worth pointing out that Silver had said the original Syncromesh Slaughter was “kind of overrated”.

At that moment, Silver’s iPhone 4 let out a girlish peal of laughter, which was his notification alert. Vic’s Nokia went beep. My phone went “The application Twitter has unexpectedly quit.”

“OMG!” said Silver, and yes, he really said “Oh Em Gee”. “Liability just tweeted that Syncromesh Slaughter 2: Spine Muncher has sold 432,000 copies in the first 24 hours!”

“Oh I’m sick of this,” I spluttered, and stalked home to play StarCraft II.