Strangest Game Idea Ever ?

Hello fellow gamers:

This one might interest you.

A few years back, I read of a hand-held craze in Japan that involved linked hand-held units and the game was based on the fighting genre as follows...

Gamers took the barcode labels off various products and scanned them into their handheld device which calculated some form of monster, in terms of stats, and the two gamers "fought" based on what their barcode monsters could do.

As the story goes, supermarket owners all across Japan were horrified to learn that apparently, one particular brand of food had a label which generated an extremely strong monster stat, and gamers all over were ripping the labels off the cans WITHOUT buying them !!

Not sure if this was called "Barcode Monsters" or not, but you have to admit the concept is both clever and strange.

Robert

Barcode Battlers. I think it was a particular brand of canned soup that genrated that monster.

I believe they test marketed the battler here, but I don't think it did well by itself. Some time after I originally heard about it, I saw it released officially as a Power Rangers game. I'm not sure if it had the same functionality since they used specific Power Rangers cards to generate your fighters. Bandai is company that makes the barcode battler system. I think they do the Power Ranger toys as well.

I'm not sure if the Monster Rancher games for the playstation was an offshoot of the same idea, but it is quite similar. Instead of bar codes, you inserted CDs (music, Playstation games or otherwise) and the game generates your monster from there.

hehe yeah I remember that thingie! We never had any of those in Sweden, but we heard about the "riots" in Japan :)

Cheers

QRS

I saw a commercial for this yesterday on USA. They showed kids runnnig thru the grocery store scanning barcodes to make stronger fighters. Look kinda cool (if you're into fighting games).

Oh man, I wish I was a grocrey store manager at a place where that was happening regularly.

I would plant some fake barcodes that when scanned would implant a virus in all their monsters making them very weak and eventually die. muhahahah! :twisted:

Hello PermaFrostRick:

A truly outrageous idea. Id take it one step better and have the barcode designed in such a way that the character generated randomly turns into a totally weak character at the worst possible moments.

Robert

I just caught the commercial the other day, too. This is a better implementation over the old swiping method. And it's non-destructive, too. No bare cans on the shelves ;)

The linking part reminds me of the original Digimon game/toy/keychains.

Rick ,

I wouldn't have your ' Grocery-Store ' approach . I'd make good use of my base-ball bat ( with nails ) , and probably illegal SPAS-12 Assault rifle , and let those mother-f***er modern-day roleplayers who rules the roost .

And I'd also dis-own my ' XP's ' just for spite.....and try to locate Gary Gygax , so I can kill him too....


AL ( Founder of the A.R.S )

Commercials are back.. Saw one just the other day.

Looks "interesting."

in Australia we have a game like that called Skannerz.
scan barcodes, create monsters, fight them! or so the ad assured me, it was wrong.
scan barcodes get pixelated blobs, have no one to battle against cause no one else buys these crap ideas.
the product is dying a lonely death in the back shelves of K-Mart, along with the Crush Gear toys.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by gregoaaa

in Australia we have a game like that called Skannerz.
scan barcodes, create monsters, fight them! or so the ad assured me, it was wrong.
scan barcodes get pixelated blobs, have no one to battle against cause no one else buys these crap ideas.
the product is dying a lonely death in the back shelves of K-Mart, along with the Crush Gear toys.

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That's the name i remember....i've heard of the "Barcode Battlers" before but this is the only one i remember actually seeing in America

scannerz was crap. Like Tomagatchi[sic] but even more worthless.

Apparently this brand is still alive and well, i just saw an update, where apparently you plug collectable monster discs into the outside of a ball and then the monsters (apparently) do battle inside this opaque death ball.
This toy may fly if it were cheap, but its pretty expensive, and seems about as good an idea as those crappy Megaman NT Battle Network toys.
I wish toy companies would give their money to Jakks Pacific to make more nice Plug-N-Play Games titles, some of them are really good.

In summary, Scannerz is alive and well down under, our toy companies are stupid.