Something extremely nice to accompany your end-of-the-day-spliff: Sumotori Dreams is a small
demoscene
game created by Peter Sotesz for the Breakpoint 2007's 96kb game competition. Where it
took first place.
After playing it a bit you'll totally understand why.
The outset is pretty simple: two robots (or rather "dolls made out of cubes") meet in a sumo ring for
a
wicked infight. The one who touches ground first looses the match. You can play it against the
computer,
where winning is pretty difficult, but the real fun is to do it against a friend on the same
keyboard. Your range
of moves is pretty limited, most of the time you just push and shove your
opponent around a bit, hoping he
will fall down before you do. Controlling the robot is rather tricky,
each of your movements nudges it more
off-balance as it already is.
watch and laugh along to this ultra-funny demo movie!
The great part of Sumotori is its
physics
engine which is simply a
masterpiece.
The robots are in
constant autonomous
motion,
desperately trying to keep
standing
upright. Which is challenge
number
one, since the dudes are either
completely stoned, totally
drunk or
both.
So a usual fight will only take
some
seconds, just by
trying to
move yourself
you're ultimately
doomed for a nice crash
into
the
breakable walls surrounding the
ring.
And here the real niceness begins:
after
the fight ends the opponents
will try to
stand up again by
themselves. Watching
them is like
watching an ultra-cool
slapstick
movie: they'll stagger, slip,
stumble
over a piece of wall and crash
down
again. Keep this scene running for
a while, if one robot manages to
stand
upright (well, kind of) he'll
watch the
other guy performing
some stunts and
laugh a nasty
robo-laugh from time to
time to
applaud the coolest moves.
All this happens along to some ultra-funky music and you can simply laugh yourself out of your chair
within a
few minutes. There's also a "Hidden Mode" in the game, just shoot between the right-most
slats to destroy the
near corner wall on the title screen to see what it does...
Big respect and thanks to Peter Sotesz for bringing on this revolutionary piece of 96kB-code. Just
THE thing
guaranteed to cheer you up - anytime.
