Verbatim Championship

[davidn]

DXN

Like a fair few other people seem to have, I got this link from ravenworks this morning and got more interested in it than I ever expected.

It's a Flash game which seems to be the result of the unusual marriage between a media company's website and the Japanese love of robots beating each other up - you create a little walking thing/arachnoid monstrosity by selecting three styles of USB device as they scroll past, then smacking the Confirm button when it rearranges them into a look you want, and you're off - you can fight your newly born solid state storage robot against other creations from all over the world, like a visual Barcode Battler.

I find it spectacular just how far over the top they've gone with this - this was made as a little distraction on a corporate website, and has all sorts of statistics and rankings along with it. And replays! You can replay how any past fight went. Not to mention that this is Flash - do you remember how spectacular the original Playstation looked when it was first around in 1995? This easily looks post-PS, and it's in a browser - the same thing that at that time was wheezing and puffing away at hauling a 25KB JPG through its dialup connection.

DXN is showing a bit of promise now after being useless at the start. It's surprisingly addictive just to watch how they fight.

Comments

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

I can't figure out why it's so easy to get attached to these things... their bodies are so bizarre, and their building blocks so unnatural, that there's barely anything to empathize with... and as creators we have so little actual input in deciding what they look like (and what little control we have is deliberately made more difficult by that roulette system), and yet I am immensely proud of my little spider thingy, and everyone else I've seen playing this seems to have the same reaction... I guess they're a blank enough slate that we can project any identity we want onto them, and they're all uniquely-configured enough that they really feel individual?

[davidn]

I do feel oddly attached to the one that I made (enough to refer to it by "name") - and didn't want to start with a different one when I was on my laptop. And you're right that that's strange, because there's so little decisive input you have into creating them - nevertheless, because each of them seems to look so different, there's that feeling that even though your choices were random at best, it's still something that you were responsible for.

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

There's some metaphor about procreation in there somewhere!

[davidn]

I was thinking exactly the same as I typed it! Even though you don't actually decide on any of its features explicitly it's still the result of choices you've made, and is unique enough to feel like it's your own.

[tamakun.livejournal.com]

There's something very ... bio-organic about the music, too. It feels random yet patterned enough to feel just as random as the creatures, themselves.

I just went through another fight, and there's something definitely "tribal" about the music. It's kinda appealing to my primal fighting sense. How bizarre.