video games

By Crisilee DeBacker

Don’t try to contact Will Sanders, Andrew Depoy or Canyon Smith on Tuesday nights at 10 p.m., because they will be working hard to win $5,000 in scholarship money. How? A not-so-little online game called “Hearthstone.”

Based on the hit game, “World of Warcraft,” it is an online fantasy card game with minions, spells and heroes.

“You have a hero that has thirty health and your opponent has a hero…and the first one to get their opponent’s [hero] down to zero wins the game,” Sanders said, describing the basic premise of the game. Depoy and Smith were familiar with the game, having played it before, so when Sanders approached them with a proposition of them teaming up for the Hearthstone Championship Tour, they agreed.

A screenshot from the game. Photo provided by playhearthstone.com.

The basic guidelines of the tournament are as follows: there must be three people per team, and teams are randomly matched to play against each other once a week for a span of seven weeks. The teams that accumulate a minimum of five wins and two losses by the end of the seven weeks will move on to the regional playoffs, around 15 teams of the original 300, and the top teams of playoffs in each region (North, South, East, or West) will be given the opportunity to play in the finals, traveling to a yet-to-be-determined location—most likely California, since that is where the finals were held last year.

Now, five weeks in to the seven-week tournament, they have a record of four wins and one loss. They have already played matches against Purdue and Michigan that seven to eight thousand people tuned in to watch over the livestream.

“I had no idea it was this big of a tournament,” Depoy said. Although playing for thousands of people seems like it would put the pressure on, Sanders, Depoy and Smith have not let it get to them yet.

“It feels the same, but we have a webcam shot onto us,” Sanders said. “You’re just thinking about, ‘oh, the whole time they’re just talking about how bad some of our plays are,’” he said regarding the commentators of the streamed matches.

They have two more matches left, and if they win one, they will officially move forward in the tournament. Although this is an online game, there is still a lot of ways to prepare.

“Deck building is super important,” Sanders said. Each team brings four decks and is able to choose what cards are in each deck. Once a team wins with one deck, that deck cannot be used again.

“If you have one bad deck, that holds everything back,” Sanders said. “There’s a lot of…strategizing that goes into that.”

When deck building, the team has to take into account what they think their opponents will bring, so they want to pick cards that are hard to beat. It is more of a strategy game than anything else, so preparation is an important factor.

The grand prize of the tournament is $5,000 in scholarship money per team member, but there are smaller cash prizes for the other finalists, the last being $500 for eighth place.

“Going to California for free and getting five hundred bucks doesn’t sound too bad,” Depoy said.

This is a list of the strangest games I have ever personally played. I realize there may be weirder games out there, and please share them in the comments below!

Toribash

The concept of Toribash is one that does not sound too strange. Essentially Toribash is a game where you are trying to fight your enemy in a martial arts battle to victory. The catch is that you have to choose what muscles you want to move, and you have access to every muscle in your body. This means in order to fight you must choose if you want to extend, contract or hold a muscle and things get really weird really fast. For example I could start by choosing to contract my hip and extend my knee and that would essentially more or less be a kicking action. The problem is more often than not you can’t figure out how to get things to work. Instead you make your character flail around like an idiot trying to hit your opponent. It typically ends with you falling on your face and simultaneously kicking the back of your head. It’s a lot of fun and is free so you should definitely try it out. But be warned: if you play online, get ready to lose because there are some weirdos in this world who actually know how to work this impossible game. Hint: Adding jetpacks to the game makes it infinitely more fun.

Earthbound (Mother 2)

In all fairness this game is a work of art and fans everywhere can’t stop talking about it. However, this doesn’t mean it isn’t absolutely out of this world in its levels of weirdness. You start on a journey as a kid named Ness and you have to fight a super-powered fly, erase giant pencil statues, defeat an evil cult that wants to paint the entire world blue, and even fight an evil pile of puke. (which sounds gross, but to be quite honest while playing the game you don’t even think that much about it.) And these are only the beginning. It sounds crazy and nonsensical, but everyone who finishes the game is in awe of its beauty.

Noby Noby Boy

I don’t really know how I stumbled across this hidden gem. The whole point of the game is to eat everything on the screen, and that’s pretty much the extent of it. You start off as a small worm that is only big enough to eat things such as small plants and then once you eat enough small plants you grow big enough to eat things like skateboards, and then you can move on to people and you finally grow large enough that you can eat entire skyscrapers. That’s pretty much the extent of the game, there’s no real purpose. After you quit the game, your score is uploaded online and it helps grow the entire noby noby boys community worm as a whole. The goal is to play everyday as a new worm so that you can continue to grow the community worm so large that it reaches new planets. When I stopped playing about 3 years ago the entire community had reached the planet mars. I did a quick google search and found out that the community has currently reached the planet Uranus. This game has been going on since 2009, so players from all over the world have spent the last 6 years trying to reach every planet. Will they ever reach the final planet Neptune? I can only hope so.

Goat Simulator

Chances are you have heard of the game goat simulator. It’s received quite a bit of attention since its release last year, and yes, it is exactly what it sounds like. I have never felt more like a goat then when I have played this game. The whole game was made essentially as a joke. There are numerous bugs and glitches in it and that’s okay because the developers didn’t want to make a nice polished game. The whole point of the game is to be buggy. Essentially you run around as a goat and grab stuff with your tongue. You can do many different things such as call aliens and go to space. Make it rain goats. Get a cool goat jetpack and many other strange things. The coolest part are the variety of characters in the game. You can be a giraffe goat, an ostrich goat and as of recently, you can even be a microwave goat–just a microwave with 2 legs. Seriously this game’s weird, but I love it.

.Detuned

Alright we made it to the top weirdest game that I have ever played. Almost no one I’ve talked to has ever heard of this game and I really wish I could say that I don’t know it either. I originally got it because the title description made it sound like I could make my own music. Instead I sat staring at a screen with the most confused look I have ever had in my life. I also couldn’t get rid of that confused look for the next 3 weeks. I went to school and people were like “Joel what’s wrong with your face?” I couldn’t answer them though because the game had broken my ability to do anything.

Essentially in .Detuned you play your favorite songs in the background and control a man who sits in a chair. You can make the man do things like walk around the chair, cough and adjust his sleeves. Sorry was that too normal for you? Well you can also do things like turn your head into a balloon, an elephant or various other things. And all the while weird smiley square people are staring at you and cheering you on. You don’t have the option to move away from the chair, you must stay in its vicinity the whole time. As you play more and more you discover different buttons perform different actions. Why do I want to preform all these actions you may ask? That’s the best part. The whole point of the game is actually to make a music video based around your character sitting in the chair. There’s no way to beat the game, you just experiment until you don’t want to experiment anymore. You quickly find out all the cool creative ways to make a music video of a man and a chair. Still confused? You can watch the video below if it helps, but chances are it will confuse you even more.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLDanQvMw04

By Joel Bradley

Tag: video games

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