From everyone's favorite chillax country, Uruguay, comes a game that will be for many young boys and girls, their first experience with a videogame. Produced by Batovi Studio in Montevideo, this game manifests basic joys of button mashing and combo-stringing with the deformed anime-esque pixel people we've come to know and wield. The game takes the old formula of Final Fight or Double Dragon of beating up a seemingly endless torrent of opponents with a few buttons, including the layered health bars that have different colors for greater amounts of health correlating to shinier layers. The doldrums of that genre, the repetition of the punching and the stretched out reward schedule, are fixed somewhat in this game with a more diverse array of inputs and the ability to do mid-air combos that really lay into opponents, instead of having to wait for their temporarily invulnerable bodies to rise again for a few more centimeters of health chipping.
What's most notable about this little gem is that it's being deployed for the XO operating system used by the infamous $100 laptops distributed via the One Laptop Per Child program. I really believe in stuff like this, these younger generations are like gasoline soaked tinder waiting for a spark of informatic flame to explode their minds into transcendence, or at least less paco usage. The initial reaction of many sensible people is that it isn't a good thing to be giving kids stuff like this, better to leave Don Hopkins to his porting of SimCity on that OS, but I say, why not both? I probably intuited just as much math from watching Mario increment coins against the decrementing clock and feeling the slow inertia of his pacing as I did from playing Seasame Street edutainment. I remember when one of my money management clients told me about his non-profit and I suggested he show these kid's Kenta Cho's Torus Trooper, I really believed in that. I also suggested he show them the McDonald's game. Satirical tycoon game + triptastic shmup + 3rd world children = future. I think this game does a pretty good job of serving the right-brain role as well.
Speaking broadly about the future of OLPC, games, and education, I have to say the path of least resistance seems to be in using Flash. But that assumes there's WiMax everywhere, which might not even be desirable considering the unknown safety hazards of bathing in WiFi radiation all the time for years. To paraphrase Braid, this feels like an acceptable start.
