Ragdoll Rumble

A best-of-three duel between two robots on the Magma Gauntlet: two stone banks, a bridge between them that rides up and down, a high bridge over it, and lava under everything. The robots are ragdolls driven by muscles, so nothing is an animation — the stick names a direction and the weapon arm reaches for it. Every twelve seconds the lava shows a tell and two seconds later rises far enough to swallow the low bridge. Play it against the CPU on three levels, or with a second person on the same screen or keyboard.

Damage is the speed of the weapon at the point of contact, relative to the part it touched, above a graze threshold — a head takes one and a half times a chest, a limb about half. A round is won by knockout, by the lava, or on health when the sixty-second clock runs out. Against the CPU the score is 100 a round won, the damage you dealt and 300 for the match, times one, two or three for Easy, Medium or Hard, at a twentieth of a coin a point. Two players on one screen pays nothing.

The cabinet pays 0.05 coins per point of score, before the daily cap described on the arcade page.

Push the stick part of the way. Past a third of its travel sideways it walks you; under that it only aims, so you can swing through somebody without stepping into their reach. The heavy swing is the biggest hit in the game and the easiest to read: the weapon glows while it charges, and Hard backs off from it — spend it on an opponent who is stunned, or standing on the low bridge as the lava comes up.

That is the 4th-highest of the 5 rates in use, shared with 3 other cabinets. The rates are not arbitrary: a cabinet with a natural ceiling pays more per point than one you can play forever, because the second kind can be farmed by playing longer and the first can only be farmed by playing better.

The tempo is a design parameter rather than decoration. A cabinet is allowed its own BPM and nothing else about its music, because tempo is the one musical thing a game has an opinion about — a game played in bursts wants a different pulse from one played in a held breath. At 140 this is at the fast end of the arcade.

Payouts are computed on the server, not in your browser — a balance the page holds is a balance a player can edit. The first 500 coins a day come at full rate and everything after that at a fifth.

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