Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator, announced last week with an extraordinary trailer, largely does what it says on the can. “The information is in the title,” says his description of Steam, blatantly written by developer Xalavier Nelson Jr. “There are discolored meat products derived from alien and human bodies, and I’m sure you’ll buy and sell them.” That’s it, then. But in a surprising exclusive, I can also reveal to you that SWOTS is currently compatible with Xbox Kinect (2010) as a control peripheral, making it the latest Kinect game.
It is not clear why this is so, as Space Warlord Organ Trading is a management game. Partly inspired by Market Crashers, a game developed for the Nintendo 3DS StreetPass system, it revolves around short, intense game rounds, each representing a day of trading in an organ market driven by Space Warlords requirements. It plays through a green-on-black user interface that hurts the eyes, but is still pretty green, which looks like an annoying sci-fi version of an 80s stock trading terminal. again, it can be controlled with an outdated motion tracking system. Fortunately, it also supports mice and keyboards.
There are currently 31 organs in the game, though Nelson says this is scalable and can change “if I finally get up at night and decide, once and for all, that teeth are actually an organ.” The current list of interiors includes human parts known as hearts and pancreas, but also strange foreign organs that interact in difficult ways if you keep them together. Everything is much less bloody than it seems, though it’s still impossible to describe the game’s aesthetic without using the word “throbbing”.
One of the lords of space warfare is a dog named Chad Shakespeare. Nelson told me about several others, but it only seemed to me quite late in the interview that he was potentially doing a bit about the space warlords that supposedly existed in our reality, without breaking the kayfabe for a moment. Honestly, it’s pretty hard to talk about this game without it looking like I invented it. But to be fair, it seems right up my street.
Probably all this is to be expected of Nelson, a man of relentless enthusiasm, who believes in driving a concept until his wheels fall off. He is developing and publishing SWOT as Strange Scaffold, under which he continues to work at An Airport For Aliens Currently Run By Dogs. For this project, Nelson has hired work from Ben Chandler of the point-and-click studio Wadjet Eye, pixel artist Julian Minamata, composer RJ Lake, artist Judith McCroary and virtual reality developer Sam Chiet , famed Desktop Goose, which is apparently responsible for the Kinect Thing.
SWOTS will be with us on Steam at an unspecified point in 2021, when you can buy and sell all the organs you want, as well as, in Nelson’s words, “make Microsoft’s hardware dream of starting an organ come true out of the air and moving it with his hands ”.
Outreach: Xalavier Nelson Jr. has written for Rock Paper Shotgun on many occasions and is a good friend of Ghoastus.