I was supposed to spend last weekend working on my entry for the second Experimental Gameplay Competition, but instead I spent almost the entire time addicted to Toribash.

Toribash is a “turn-based fighting game”, which doesn’t make much sense when you think of it from the angle of traditional fighting games like the Street Fighter or Tekken series, but makes perfect sense when you think of it in terms of shootfighting, or Brazillian jiu-jitsu; fighting styles that focus on wrapping yourself around your opponent and breaking him in half. In single player mode, you fight against a dummy, plan out every 10 seconds of moves in advance by tweaking your character’s joints to either contract, expand, relax or stiffen, watch it unfold, then plan out the next 10 seconds. It doesn’t sound all that impressive, and the graphics are super-bare-bones, but once you watch a few replays, and especially after the first time you (probably accidentally) pop the dummy’s torso in half with your legs, you’ll be hooked. In fact, when you’re starting out, the “happy accidents” are the best part of the game; when you try to do a flash kick, miss with it, but end up tumbling through the air and come down hard enough to knock the dummy’s head off.

The community aspect is twofold; first, you can save replays of your most ridiculously impressive moves to share with other people, and second, the game also has a multiplayer mode. Multiplayer works exactly like the single-player except, naturally, you’re fighting against another person instead of the dummy, you have only a few seconds to setup your next move, and on some servers you are immediately disqualified if any part of your body besides your hands or feet touch the ground. This means that, even if your opponent sends your head flying far into the air, as long as the rest of your body can pin him before it lands then it’s all good.

The best part is that the entire game, multiplayer and all, is completely free. What are you waiting for??

Here is my proudest moment, here is something completely ridiculous I did by accident, and here is my head texture, so I will look proper should we ever meet in the field of battle!! (save replays to your “replay” directory and use the replay menu option to view them, and save head textures to your “heads” directory. You can even make your own head!)

This entry was posted on Monday, August 28th, 2006 at 10:27 pm and is filed under video games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.