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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!
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!
Fear not. There is going to be plenty of trendy, crappy stuff that your son will want when he is old enough.
-prator
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 */
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?
The nice thing about it is that it prepares kids for the future. When their disposable income increases, they will inevitably get involved in BreaKomputer. This is where you and your friends spend obscene amounts of money on the latest PC hardware. Whoever has the fastest framerate on UT wins. Then Doom3 is released, rendering the slowest PC in the group unusable, forcing it to be replaced with even faster hardware. This person is then declared the new winner.
This process repeats endlessly until Bill Gates and Michael Dell rule the world (one takes the northern hemisphere, the other the southern).
Except Antarctia - this is where all Linux users and penguins are forced to live.
Beauty is in the eye of the beerholder.