Toribash - 5/20 hours

It's astonishing how much I take my body for granted. I don't have the best one out there, but after five hours of Toribash I am convinced that it is a freakin' miracle of nature.

The way Toribash works is that you are a bubble-figure with a simplified musculature. You've got a neck and abs, and two each of pecs, shoulders, elbows, wrists, glutes, hips, knees, and ankles, and these can have one of four motions - contract, expand, relax, or hold. And you also have chest and lumbar joints that can relax or hold or rotate left or right. The idea is that you select states for your various muscles to move your character and if you do it at the right angle, and with sufficient force, you will damage your opponent. Matches are scored based on how much damage is done, though if your character's body hits the ground, it's a disqualification and you automatically lose.

This setup allows for almost endless variations when it comes to hand-to-hand combat. There is nothing so scripted as special moves, or even basic attacks. Whether you punch or kick or dodge is based entirely on whether you can clench and unclench the requisite muscles in time. Unfortunately, as an absolute novice, my answer to that question is always "no." My "fighting style," such as it is, consists mainly of trying to fall on top of the enemy, rather than underneath them.

That's true even when I'm up against the training dummy. In these practice battles, the game has no time limit and I can carefully plot every single movement down to the tiniest nuance, and I still can't manage anything as elegant as "a move." Hell, I can barely stay upright. When I switched over to the parkour mod (Toribash is a free-to-play game with mods, possibly the only one in history), I could not manage to take even one single step. That's when I became acutely aware of the miracle of the human body. I could barely manage to navigate the game's 28,561 different modes of movement (and "manage" is being generous here), but my brain handles my infinitely more complex real-world body and doesn't even bother to intrude on my consciousness most of the time.

The funny thing, though, is that people can get good at Toribash. The fight I saw in spectator mode, between experienced players, were still wildly chaotic and usually wound up with both characters on the ground, but I could see reactions, saves, and counters. There was method to the madness. And the more generic replays you can watch from the setup menu are even better. I imagine they were meticulously assembled in practice mode, because no one has that kind of reaction time, but given enough time, experts could make the Toribash puppets dance like the most elegant movie martial arts choreography. I imagine that it takes both a deep knowledge of the game's mechanics, which I won't have time to achieve, and a steady patience for small details, which I'm inclined to save for more important things.

Still, that's the dream. To use a powerful tool to work mighty and improbable deeds. I'm never going to get there, but if I apply myself as hard as I can, maybe I'll one day be able to walk across a room without falling on my ass.