Mash Buttons Until Death

Date:

2010

Contributors:

Mike Daly

Download:

/downloads/games/mabud_100204.zip

So one of my co-workers was very excited about the release of Aliens vs Predator and wanted to get other people around the office interested. Since a lot of people in the office like Smash Bros, he decided to claim that AVP was just like Smash Bros because both consist of randomly mashing buttons until things died and paper rock scissors.

This, of course, is an absurd claim – neither Smash Bros or AVP feature paper rock scissors as a significant component of the gameplay, and trivializing their mechanics down to button mashing and things getting defeated could just as accurately describe 95% of all video games ever created. AVP is a first person shooter; it plays nothing at all like Smash Bros.

Anyway, to demonstrate my point, I threw together a game in about an hour that demonstrated what a game would actually be like if the entire description was just "you mash buttons until things die" which contained a paper rock scissors mechanic. If there was a taxonomy of video games, this game would be a distant ancestor of Smash Bros and AVP. Actually, it would be more like the brother of their ancestor that didn’t survive to reproduction due to natural selection.

Let me be clear on this; this game sucks. It may be the worst game I’ve ever created. I’m really just posting it here so I can look like I’m doing stuff with my free time. Maybe I can justify it as an art game in that it demonstrates how the strategy of the PRS mechanics is really just an illusion and makes no difference for the end user’s experience. I think the most value the game has is that if someone is knocking one of your favorite games by trivializing it down to a button masher, you can say something like "button masher? no THIS is a button masher" then make them play this game and they will never critisize your other game again.

This is a 3 player game where each player uses an Xbox 360 controller (best controller ever, by the way). The X, A, and B buttons fire Blue, Green, and Red lazers respectively Each player can only face one other player at a time and can swap what player they face using the triggers. Once you fire a lazer of a particular color, you change to that color. Lazers only damage opponents if their current color is the appropriate vulnerable color as dictated by the paper rock scissors style color triangle. Once you get hit with 100 lazers you die and can no longer shoot lazers. Last player standing wins.

Fun Facts:

• If you press X, B, or A on the keyboard, all players fire the corresponding lazer at once
• I spent about 2 hours creating this game start to finish
• It shows
• Don’t waste your time playing this game