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Breakey Elevates Key Wrestling To Artform
Jesse writes "My local games store has been running tournaments for one of the stranger non-video games to come out recently. Breakey is a 'collectable key game' made by Upper Deck. That's right - collect keys and compete with your friends to see who has the stongest key! This is accomplished by inserting two plastic keys into each other, and twisting until someone's key breaks. That person loses. Oh, and the winner keeps all the broken keys." Unsurprisingly, it appears that critics such as online comic Full Frontal Nerdity are already poking fun at the concept.
Don't you see, this is BRILLIANT!
The problem with other "collectable" games is that after a period of time, you have collected everything that's been put out. So, as a game maker, you have to keep coming up with new things to be collected, as well as making the old things. That means your inventory keeps growing, and your costs keep going up.
With this idea, you keep making the same old things, and as the players keep playing, they USE UP their old things, and thus have to buy NEW things, but you don't have to come up with any new ideas!
BRILLIANT! ABSOLUTELY BRILLIANT!
(/me removes tongue from cheek)
Unless, of course, the consumers you are targeting have a longer than 5 second attention span, or any ability to remember, communicate, or discern.
Pesky consumers.
www.eFax.com are spammers
I think this would be a more interesting game if you could make your own keys. Geeks around the world would be doing huge amounts of materials research trying to devise the better key. Something useful might actually come out of it.
This reminds me of an old British kids game, conkers, except that conkers is played with a cheap and readily available resource -- horse chestnuts. H2G2 has an entry on it here. Ah, but even a game like this can face significant legal pressures (you don't have to be GTA). Why, conkers have even been hit with performance enhancing scandal!
This sounds like a really stupid way to waste money. I'm glad my son is still too little to want this crap.
Anyone willing to confess to buying these and provide an opinion?
Seriously, thats all it is, only I would guess the 'battles' don't last as long as they do in conkers (or whatever its called if it has a different name in north america)
I know as geeks we're supposed to like stuff like this, but paying money to play conkers??
In high school we played what we called the spoon game. You take a regular white plastic spoon and bend down the last .5-1 inch of the handle. You would then lever up the handle and let it come smashing down on the bowl of your competitors spoon (which they are holding by the handle). Goal of the game: break off the entire bowl of your opponents spoon... be careful not to break your own when levering back for a shot.
Reminds me of the pencil fights we used to have on the bus going to and from elementary school. I wrote with a lot a half-pencils back in those days...until I started buying those huge 1/2 inch diameter pencils!
Since I'm from North America (USA, specifically), I feel qualified to give the current similar games. We break the wishbones of turkeys and chickens to see who ends up with the bigger piece. Around Easter, we also play Conkers with the ends of hard-boiled Easter eggs (hint: the narrow end is stronger ;) ).
All versions of the game seem to be very permanent. I'm not sure what a collection of broken keys gets you since you clearly can't reuse them as spoils of war. Plus, you can break your own keys.
There's a lot of this collectible stuff going around. I've recently (and stupidly) bought Beanz (from Australia, now in USA). They're fun if you have a racing track, though. And that silly three-ball on a string yo-yo contraption that reminds you that cats chase string, too.
One collectible that has proven to be very fun is Top Trumps (from the UK, now in USA). Limited play, but requires you know your cards to win this variant of "War." Simple enough for most ages to comprehend.
is it anything like breaking the wishbone of a chicken? as i seem to recall from my childhood, whoever used the least force when pulling on it, tended to end up with the bigger piece. hence, neither person would really pull on it and it never breaks...
Whoever came up with this idea is a genius. As long as kids stay interested, you have an endless stream of revenue since the whole point of buying your product is to go out and destroy it (and then of course, buy more). The only real danger is that kids will get bored or run out of money, and go back to breaking each other's pencils like they used to do when I rode the bus.
Use Ctrl-C instead of ESC in Vim!
Unless they start producing these things in the shape of imaginary animals, this concept will dry up and blow away a few hours from now. Kids like pokemon because of the creature angle. If you were to replace the creatues with, say, all of the US presidents, leaving everything else the same, the pokemon phenomenon would have been a non-event.
..." comment: When I first read that, I thought we were talking about crypto keys. You know, collect keys, see who's is stronger, etc. Now *that* I could dig:
... Oops, I guess I should have waited until it evolved into an AES Charizard."
Also, since I *know* at least half of the slashdot crowd initially read the headline the same way I did, I'll be the first to make the obvious "When I first read that
"Hey honey, went down to the comic store and bought some new BreaKey cards. I have a good feeling about this new 256-bit DES Charmander key I got. Let's battle!
/* Pleurez, pleurez, mes yeux, et fondez vous en eau! La moitie de ma vie a mis l'autre au tombeau. - Corneille */
Is that I have very little Idea exactly what this is, no pricing, no info on game play, nothing. all because the annoying breakey website is nothing but a holder for some browser plugin that I don't have installed. I assume its flash or somesuch.
Don't you just love that proliferation of un-user friendly, un-usable websites? -
less corporate whoring == better non-game
non-games that will always be more fun than corporate alternatives:
pencil breaks
the twisted straw flicking game
folded-paper football
there's also the hand-slapping thing ('fingertips' or some such shit)... but it seemed there shoulda been some sorta scoring based on difficulty.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
Is there an Uber Key? The Holy Grail of Keys? The one that cannot be destroyed?
Please don't give them ideas. Next thing you know they'll be selling your kids different colored pencils with no graphite just for breaking (kinda defeats the purpose of a pencil), super fat straws for flicking, and pre-folded paper footballs for extremely high prices.
It's like sex, except I'm having it!
It's called the "You Shall Not Passkey". :)
...come up with this crap? Somewhere in the world, someone took home a paycheck because they created a game where you break pieces of plastic. I can't figure out if this person is brilliant or a complete idiot.
It must be Thursday... I never could get the hang of Thursdays.
I know you can already buy the football sets. They're plastic footballs in the shape of the folded paper ones and come with goal posts. Kind of lame. The whole point was that you could start up a game of it anytime by tearing a sheet of notebook paper out and folding it up.
Yeah! The game I've been waiting for! I've always wondered: "Me, is there a game that fulfills my need to break things, and then keep the broken pieces of that thing?" and I've always had to answer "No, Me, there isn't, you will just have to continue buying and breaking plastic silverware."
I hope this spawns a whole new genre of pointless games:
__Breakey: Crowbar Vs. Car__
__Breakey: Baseball Bat Vs. Seedy Convenience Store Window__
__Breakey: Install New Drivers Vs. Stable System___
__Breakey: Ethnic Slur Vs. Your Nose__
and finally:
__Breakey: Slashdot Reader Vs. Serious Human Relationship__
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
I Am Not A Materials Scientist... but doesn't plastic's structure take permenent damage from deformation on this level? Even the strongest plastic key takes damage from each other key it destroys, so eventually it too will die.
Thus, there is no strongest plastic key; they will all be destroyed in short order. In fact, while you might superstitiously keep your "superkey" that broke 20 others, statistically speaking the ideal strategy (in terms of maximal wins) is to use a key precisely once and throw it away. Your superkey is more and more likely to break on each try.
If I'm wrong please correct me, or if you know the terminology please let me know.
This is perhaps the single most pointless fad ever, and elitist comments to the contrary, I would expect that the general public, even the young kids general public, is too smart to be interested in this as more then a passing fad.
There were a couple of loud "barkers" hawking the game and lots of loud music. Their "booth" consisted of a platform for the reps to stand on, a loud sound system, and 3 huge vats of these keys, which were free. The way they generated interest was that they gave away prizes for people who won a certain number of "battles".
Being 34 and taller than most of the others in the crowd, I had a interesting perspective on the buzz that was generated. IMHO, the kids were there to see what all the fuss was about, and a few stayed trying to win a prize. Mostly however, kids stood there sort of confused and in disbelief at the lameness of the "game".
B.
I saw the whole Breakey concept shown off at Origins last year. The response was pretty much unanimous: This is a game?
I watched them demonstrate the things for about 15 minutes. Each time they enticed someone to try it out, it was the same. Insert keys, twist, something breaks. The demonstrater looks as the confused customer with a self-contented look on his face. The customer almost always replies (whether he won or not), "What am I missing? That's not fun."
To it's credit, there really is a little more to it than just that, or at least, there supposedly will be. The creators promise that you'll be able to use your key online to compete for prizes. No specific date stated: Last July it was "any day now," and it still is to this day. Expect to see it happen sometime after the release of Duke Nukem Forever.
Happiness is relative, Based upon the way we live.
They were handing these out at one of the CONs I went to last year.
I have to say, to a person, we couldn't figure out WHY anyone would want to pay money to play this game, when the first thing you'd do it to try and destroy 'em.
I'm actually surprised they're still out there trying to pedal these things to the market.
... in society today.
.0005 second event, boxes and boxes and boxes and boxes of this crap are being assembled and dispersed all over the planet. Offensive by-products of the process required to provide this .0005 seconds of happiness to a lost soul will continue to pollute the planet for years afterwards.
Plastic is -not- cheap to produce. It may only cost Mankind a few seconds of careless industry, but it costs Nature an extremely longer stretch of time to deal with this substance.
For the sake of a
Okay, so you've got the stryofoam coffee cup and these things in one hand, and a big steaming pile of shit in the other hand, and you have to eat one handful or your family gets it.
You decide, what hand do you eat from?
{I'd pick shit. I'd be sick, but at least I'd get over it.}
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Jeezus, I've been doing this for years every Thanksgiving. You take the wishbone from the turkey, each grab an end and pull. At least it is free (you already bought the turkey), you get a nice dinner with it, and the winner gets a wish for their trouble.
I'll take the bird anytime.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
If it ever became popular (don't hold your breath) I wouldn't be surprised that people would start making metals ones painted to look like the plastic ones or make them out of super hard plastics. Just think, a plastic key arms race and neighborhoods full of kids with massive forearms.
Maybe even websites claiming to know the cheat codes for them. "To get god mode with your key..."
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
...is probably somewhat close to what these might end up actually being used for.
I can see these as "convention novelties" wherein the people in attendance are each given one/some, and a prize is given to the person who collects the most losing keys. Convention running people are often fond of games/thingees that invite interactions (especially in narrower industries).
I could see this working, but the keys themselves would have to be very cheap - and would have to be available in logo'ed form.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
I actually thought this was a parody but the Upperdeck logo in the corner made me wonder. Imagine my surprise when I actually found the press release.
... Or maybe I just didn't want to believe it...
You know, identify the strongest M&M in the bag, then mail it back to the M&M/Mars company for breeding purposes.
4096 bits. Bring it on
qntm.org
If you beat someone in Magic: The Gathering, you should be able to take their deck and tear is up in front of them. That would be killer. :-)
Reminds me of POGs... or Crazy Bones... or just about any other useless piece of cardboard/plastic that companies charge $10 for and get rich for a few months off of.
Obviously a gateway drug leading up to a Fabrege egg habit.
The middle mind speaks!
First, there was pencilfighting. That was a game where you take turns whacking each other's pencils with your own pencil until only one pencil emerged victorious.
Then, there was Spork, which was exactly the same thing, but with plastic sporks, and the object was to knock off all four of your opponent's tines before he broke off all four of yours.
Both of these are played by schoolchildren out of total boredom, with materials that they already don't care about and get for free.
I can't see anyone shelling out money to twist ONCE and see whose broke. This is the stupidest thing ever, and I sincerely hope that this devours the money of stupid investors and redistributes it into a landfill.
It sure is a good time-waster though.
My store received a bag of 100 in a promo kit. One key in the bag would break every other key.....that is, until someone came up with the idea of taking an (unbroken but weak key) and putting glue in it to strengthen it. You can guess the rest. The glued key would break the uber key. I suspect it would come down to whoever could come up with the best, untraceable cheat.
I am having trouble imagining any store that can actually make money from this stuff and yes, I remember the POG craze of '95.
-The Anonymous Bastard from Hell-
Yeah, this met with a huge tidal wave of malaise at GenCon West in Anaheim. They had these huge TV screens pimping it and everything. I saw *2* kids playing using the free keys they were giving the entire time. Upper Deck was the least visited booth at the show.
Netjak.com independent reviews of domestic & import video ga
I can see it now.
Player1> "Kwikset, I call you!"
Player2> "Masterlock, I call you!"
It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men. -Frederick Douglass