Robot Claw

For christmas, I purchased the following for myself from ebay:

You read that correctly – a barcode battler!

Now in the unlikely event you are not familiar with this magical device, it is an electronic game with a barcode scanner built in. The idea is that barcodes can be converted into powerful combatants that fight each other to see who is strongest. The thing was introduced in Japan in 1991, and brought to the US in 1993. It disappeared from stores almost immediately…

Here’s shots of two of the included cards, and a screenshot of the action:

You can see, in the shot, that my warrior ‘Chip Chopper’ (on the left) seems woefully outmatched by ‘Fruit Juicer’ on the right. I had valiantly fought through the entire 25 combatants of ‘Era 1’ to get this far, but would soon concede that I had no hope of further victory.

Therein lies the problem with the system. Although it is far more sophisticated than I ever expected (it even has a savefile!), it relies on randomness to a fault. Battles are simple affairs, but at almost all times you are hopelessly outmatched by the opponent, and victory is determined solely by the roll of the dice. My ‘winning strategy’ was to repeatedly use the item ‘Rocket Gun’ – which gave me a one-turn boost to my attack strength –  and then hope I could 1-hit KO the opponent before he fought back. Victory rewarded a meagre increase in stats that made clearing Era 1 easier as I proceeded, but the opponents of Era 2 (and there are five Eras) were so much stronger than Era 1 it seems the game is designed around using barcodes other than those included to continue.

But the problem with this is that there is no diagnostic mode. Certain barcodes only work at very particular times, and there is no mechanism where you can just scan some random barcode (such as from a box of cereal) and have the game identify it as a warrior, or item, or spell etc. So I may have a barcode that is a health item for instance, but the game will only ever accept it during the tiny interval when health items can be used. This is dumb and frustrating, and very, very poor design (not the least because the manual states many barcodes “will have no effect at all”).

But, consider:
1) I have wanted one of these things for over 15 years,
2) It cost me $6 plus shipping on ebay, AND it was factory sealed, and
3) I spent perhaps 4 hours playing with it the other day, and even if I never use it again already count it as a prized possession!

So in other words, this was easily in the upper echelon of (self-purchased) Christmas loot 🙂

To answer your question about how I could identify my opponents? Well since the system itself has no text ability, it provides codes that must be cross-referenced to the manual. Yes it’s laughable, but hey, this was 1991!

< Dynamic names!

Cross one thing of my “List of amazing items I have to get around to tracking down and buying one of these days” lists…