YMMV / Callahan's Crosstime Saloon

• Harsher in Hindsight: about midway through Lady Slings the Booze, which was published in 1992, the characters are discussing a terrorist plot involving nuclear bombs. The possibility of the homemade bombs being at or under the World Trade Center in New York City is strongly debunked by the main character, because knocking down the WTC would "only impress people who live within sight of the World Trade Center." Not only did the first bombing of the WTC take place the very next year and was covered extensively by US news media, but nine years later, 9/11 happened, as the entire world watched in horror and irrevocably changed politics and US culture for decades.
• Awesome Music:
  • A couple music tracks in the game are songs performed by Spider himself, and several have Amos Garrett playing guitar.
  • The Saloon has also inspired at least one Filk Song.
• No Problem with Licensed Games: The game is actually really good, successfully preserving much of the books' wit and surreal humor, and being designed by former Sierra writer and designer Josh Mandel. Spider himself wrote a foreword about how faithful it was for the game's hintbook.
• Squick:
  • Erin, who's at the physical age of one years old but has had the entire Internet downloaded into her brain, goes around lining up future sexual partners for when she's 16. She's actually heard to utter the words, "I'm going to start fucking when I'm sixteen, would you like to take a number? I can work you into the single digits if you hurry."
  • Ralph, a talking German Shepherd, occasionally has sex with human women.
  • The regulars at Callahan's are an open bunch, but Spider kind of has this thing about just mentioning characters' sex lives that can seem a little too open. Like in Callahan's Con where Jake describes a merman who's barely in the book, then just out of the blue says "he doesn't have a tail, but he gets a lot of it." Also, Nikola Tesla appears in two of the books and in describing him, both times it's pointed out very clearly that he was NOT a virgin at the time of his "death." That sorta kinda fit in the spinoff set in the bordello run by Callahan's wife, but it still seems like a really weird thing to just toss out there.
• Tear Jerker: "The Law of Conservation of Pain".

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