Something brilliant happened in TABS the other day. TABS stands for Totally Accurate Battle Simulator, and it’s a complete joy. You hover above a landscape, whack down a bunch of units, and then watch as your units smash into the enemy’s units. Hilarity, as they say, ensues.
I was on the city-ish map. Streets and buildings, a Greek vibe, domes and sunbleached plaster. I had decided to splurge on a bunch of very cheap melee units and one bigger, more expensive melee unit to bring up the rear. I think it was a knight. The knight has a sword and shield, and as I sat back and watched the chaos unfold, I realised something was missing. Where was my sword-and-shield guy? Where was the guy I’d spent all my money on?
This picture tells the story:
There are two reasons this moment worked so well, I think. TABS is a game that encourages glitches and surprising physics fails. Its characters are sometimes alarmingly human in their animation, but with that comes the sort of pratfalls that the alarmingly human are wont to perform. So that’s the first reason: this sort of malarkey is encouraged.