Released in 1996 for the DOS, Timeslaughter is a fighting game made by the largely comedic Bloodlust Software, made partly to make fun of the surge of violent fighting games that followed Mortal Kombat.
Scientist William Spade is very close to completing a fully functional time machine, but has little time to celebrate when four members of a race of time-worshipping demons known as the Takar pay him a visit. Staine, the Dreg, the Surgeon, and the Butcher torture Spade within an inch of his life after he refuses to surrender the time machine before its completion. After losing both arms and his left eye, Spade manages to activate the time machine with his nose, sending the Takar back to where they came from, but causes a huge rip in the timestream in the process due to prematurely activating the machine.
As a result, combatants from unique time periods are zapped randomly from place to place, each with their own reason to fight - none of them knowing where they will go next. Spade rebuilds his body, renaming himself Portal, and is now more than ready to defend himself from anyone who might be warped to his plane of existence — including the Takar.
Under the frankly ugly graphics, the core of Timeslaughter is surprisingly good if you consider it was made by just two people. A shareware Fighting Game offering multiparallax backgrounds, 3D floors, a ton of digitized speech, blood that stayed on the ground, visible damage on the fighters, several levels of difficulty and speed... and was also quite smooth to play, wasn't really something you saw all days on DOS in the mid 1990s, unless you were dealing with the official conversions of Super Street Fighter II Turbo and the earlier episodes of Mortal Kombat.
A sequel was in the making but, due to Real Life schedules of the authors, it's unlikely it will ever see the light.
This game provides examples of
- Affectionate Parody:
- Of violent Mortal Kombat clones.
- The characters are parodies of fighting game stereotypes and cliches. Aside from the Ug example below, Spice makes fun of busty female characters wearing little amounts of clothing, and Savage is a meaner version of Boisterous Bruiser characters like Zangief. Mojumbo, Pierre, Chi, and Lazarus are parodies of fighters whose personas and abilities are based on stereotypical views of their ethnicity. These characters types were common in Street Fighter II and it's many knockoffs.
- Bloody Hilarious: The game tries to be as silly with its gore as possible.
- Captain Ethnic: Everyone with an identifiable ethnicity is a horrible stereotype of said ethnic group.
- Cluster F-Bomb: The victory quotes are all very heavy on the profanity.
- Creator Cameo: One of the creator's avatars is in the background in Asylum's level.
- Dracula: Vlad III is a playable character, mixing both his status as "the Impaler" and his identity as Dracula.
- Eye Scream: one of the most infamous moments of the game, from the intro: Spade gets an eye removed with a drill. Even with the game's amateurish graphics, it's painful to look as it sounds.
- Expy: Ug is based on Time Killers' Thugg. Aside from their similar names, they both discover fire in their backstories.
- Fartillery: Mojumbo.
- Finishing Move: Slaughter moves, which more likely than not completely dismember the opponent.
- Fish out of Temporal Water: The entire cast. Most endings show that they are unable to return to their original time, and how they adapt to the new situation. The results are, like the rest of the game, Bloody Hilarious.
- Funny Background Event: Portal's time machine keeps drawing in different people (and... things) during his fight.
- Gorn
- Handicapped Badass:
- Jinsoku is blind, but you'd rarely notice considering how well he fights.
- Buddy. Just... Buddy. He's a hidden character, but his Tardwagon charge is easily one of the most powerful moves in the game.
- Head Swap: Hidden characters Buddy and Ravage are just bad sprite edits of Ug and Savage, with new heads and a few differencies in the moveset.
- Hollywood Tourette's: Savage. Or atleast that's what he says.
- Idiot Savant: Ug the caveman isn't very bright. That's why he lets his club do the talking.
- Names to Run Away from Really Fast: Savage.
- Optional Boss: If you finish all fights with the Slaughter move, and never use continues, you'll fight Staine before Portal.
- Overdrawn At The Bloodbank: There WILL be a carpet of bloodstains on the floor by the end of any given round.
- Power Born of Madness: Asylum can't even use his arms, and yet he's capable of killing people far stronger than he would normally be.
- Shout-Out:
- A group of demons who torture a man so badly he's lost his sanity by the end of it.
- The title of the game is a clear nod to Time Killers, and the story of both games involves fighters taken from several points in time against their will (although the reasons for the happening are different).
- Split Personality: One moment Asylum's acting like Peewee Herman, the next he's Adolf Hitler.
