Shorty Da Pimp: Aliens Stole My Hoe!
Shorty Da Pimp claims to be a demo of an upcoming 30-level masterpiece. In its distributed form, Shorty consists of five levels (only two of them actual platformer maps), all lifted verbatim from Nebula. There may be a few new items and monsters scattered around, but the background tiles and geometry are unchanged.
That’s sensible enough, for a designer’s first game; you take the provided gameware, and you alter it just enough to make it your own. That’s part of the learning process. It’s how everyone I know codes HTML. You’d expect the designer to keep the game private, and only release something he was proud to call his own, but hey. Youthful indiscretion and enthusiasm, right?
For the protagonist, C.H. strayed a bit further and sampled the character sprite from id Software’s Commandeer Keen. So… okay, in 1994 that must have taken some serious work. The guy was willing to spend that much time ripping and tweaking a highly recognizable character sprite, but he wasn’t willing to design his own background tiles or even level maps? At least the guy knows what he wants when he sees it.
At this point it would be easy to shrug Shorty off as random clutter. But then comes the twist: a sprite edit has turned Keen’s helmet into an afro, and given him a good shot of melanin. According to the story, aliens have “done stole [Shorty's] Hoe. And i’m countin’ on ya to get my hoe back.” Furthermore, due to a malevolent alien power, whenever Shorty gets injured he turns pale and screams “I’m white!”
if i get my a#$ beat i’ll stay white 4 eva.. now i’m countin’ on ya to guide me safely through da aliens crib.. and bring my hoe back to me, and keep me BLACK!
A more noble mission I have yet to hear.
So there we have it. Nebula, plus a sprite edit of Billy Blaze. And yet the framework takes the game on a weird tangent to the left, across what probably should be a tired line of racial comedy but which in context is just inappropriate enough to be inexplicably charming.
