As a cool individual, I do know all the pieces there’s to find out about medicine and drug paraphernalia, akin to bongs and what have you ever. In reality, you’ll usually discover me hanging out with my fellow dope-fiends in a what we within the enterprise name a ‘drugs hole’, the place we take weed, cocaine, and the remainder of the forms of medicine that there are. “Hey, quit hoggin’ all the drugs!” is a phrase you’ll usually hear me say as I wrestle over a silver platter of that candy, candy sugar with a dozen Vice columnists, sending plumes of that good sherbert flying all over the place.
“Drugs are my absolute favourite,” I’d later declare as I pat my swollen tummy, which by this level could be stuffed with a sizzling stew of unlawful narcotics, however no sooner have I completed my sentence do I instantly drop lifeless. Dead of medication. The Vice columnists, who I naively thought have been my buddies, scatter into the partitions like counterculture cockroaches. And so my physique rots there on the ground, alone within the medicine gap, till I’m only a skeleton and the coroner can solely establish me by my marijuana leaf ankle bracelets. Instead of a corpse, my grieving mom has to bury an outdated model that they’ve wearing my uncle’s pyjamas. I don’t sound so cool now, do I? Not very cool in any respect. Don’t do medicine.
Sorry for scaring you all, however I’m legally required to preface this overview with an sufficient warning concerning the very actual risks of doing medicine. In reality I’m alive and nicely, and the one time I’ve ever tried a drug was when a pal let me have a go of a few of his prescription ritalin and I spent your entire afternoon organising the contacts record on my cellphone and rearranging all of the furnishings in my bed room so it pointed the opposite means.
The Pusher is an early entry drug empire simulator about making and promoting totally different sorts of narcotic. Whether consciously or not, it harkens again to these pre-internet, viral games that your cousin would provide you with on a floppy disk labelled ‘WEED.EXE’, or a Flash game uploaded to Newgrounds in 2003 by a consumer referred to as xXx-BongLoRD-420-xXx.
In The Pusher, you’ve obtained a Breaking Bad impressed camper van that may be outfitted with numerous items of furnishings and scientific tools. None of them do something simply but aside from the lab desk, which helps you to mix chemical substances to create your very personal drug, which you’ll be able to then title and promote to individuals. My first try at manufacturing a drug was a mixture of chlorine and vinegar, a heady and possibly deadly concoction I referred to as ‘Goose’ and offered in huge portions to an undiscerning buyer base, who I can solely guess have been utilizing it to scrub their home windows.
Selling medicine within the game works precisely as I believe it does in actual life. You click on a button to go “into the city”, which everybody is aware of is the place the place all of the drug offers occur, at which level you’re introduced with a sequence of potential consumers. Each one formally declares their full, authorized title and the way a lot money they’re carrying, and requests a really exact quantity of actually any drug you’ve obtained. Uppers, downers, outies, innies, your clients don’t care in the event that they’re getting El Chapo’s personal reserve or some crushed up Boots multivitamins, so long as they get precisely 31 grams of it.
As a aspect notice, it’s very satisfying to have a buyer ask for an quantity of medication precisely equal to what you’ve obtained left in your stock, so that you just’ve obtained no leftover grams making your large field of medication look untidy. It’s a Marie Kondo-esque feeling that I hope actual drug sellers additionally get to take pleasure in generally.
You set the value with every sale, as a result of on this actuality individuals purchase huge portions of latest medicine they’ve by no means heard of, and whose results are unknown, at costs they haven’t already agreed upon. Ask for an excessive amount of and so they’ll storm off and accuse you of “profiteering”, which is an adorably naive factor to say to anyone who manufactures and sells medicine for revenue. Too low and, nicely, you gained’t make a lot cash. The actual quantity to cost every purchaser, I’ve found, is 90 % of what’s of their pockets. It’s not a really complicated financial system then, however there’s a status ranking that will get whittled down with every missed sale, or boosted by sure forms of drug deal.
Your consumers have private preferences in terms of the results of the drug they’re taking, and promoting them the drug with their favorite impact earns you extra status, which helps you to purchase rarer components and (in a future replace) unlock abilities. Some of those preferences make sense, akin to wanting a drug that provides them a ‘good feeling’. Others are ridiculous. The chlorine-vinegar powder I’d cooked up causes ‘fear’, for instance, which might be to be anticipated from a drug that smells like a just lately disinfected chip store. One fear-loving buyer, presumably upon experiencing a debilitating wave of chemically induced terror, thanked me for creating such a beautiful drug and promised to recollect me, and the way the horror-powder I’d offered him made him really feel so desperately afraid. Truly, I’m a prepare dinner worthy of Walter White himself.
I offered all the Goose in about ten minutes, which ought to have killed half of my buyer base and ended the game, however didn’t. After that there’s nothing else to do. There’s about as a lot game right here as xXx-BongLoRD-420-xXx may’ve bashed out in a weekend, and a lot of the content material continues to be tied up within the vibrant creativeness of its developer, akin to the power to rent cooks and sellers to automate a number of the processes, and whisk up higher high quality medicine utilizing numerous bits of lab tools, all of which seem like fancy ice cream makers.
Notably absent from the roadmap, nonetheless, is any possibility to show away from the narcotics enterprise completely, and to set off on a path of redemption in the direction of the best drug recognized to man, Jesus Christ, who’s “higher” than Cheech or Chong or that stoned skateboarding canine I noticed on a t-shirt as soon as, as a result of he lives means up in heaven with God. Amen.
And don’t do medicine.
