Click to fight Hurtmerchant the First.
My Brute is a simple online fighting game from Motion Twin, the self-described “leading provider of online games for the French-speaking public.” Being neither French-speaking nor public, I had never heard of them before writer and game designer Chuck Wendig (Hunter: The Vigil) waggled his Monkeyfinger in front of my face. That’s the name of his brute character in the game.
Mine is Hurtmerchant. Or Hurt-Merchant. I had trouble logging back in as the first guy (be sure to put a password on the brute you make), so I made the second, and then the first started working again. So now I have two pain peddlers around to serve you. All of my teller windows are open, except instead of bank tellers, they are staffed with dudes with knives. Or staves. (Seriously, go look.)
Click to fight Hurt-Merchant.
To play, you must click on one of my brutes and then type in a name. That’s it. The fighting is automatic, and you can fight a couple or so times per day. All free, all free of benefit or consequence. The gameplay is bare-bones — the equivalent of rolling dice against each other, except the computer rolls the dice for you and animates the results. You’ll gain experience for every fight won or lost, and I’ll apparently gain bennies of some sort if you join by clicking on my links here and becoming my pupil. So do that, if that sounds like fun to you.
Once your character is made, the only decision put before you, the player, seems to be which foes you will fight. Except… that’s not really the game is it? The game is actually what I’m doing right now — recruiting others to join the game by clicking on my characters, and thereby earning my character bonuses, which make him more likely to win the dice-race to victory in the arena. (I think.)
So if this meta-game is actually the game, what do we call the layer of play below that, with the cartoon fighting and the knives and the bombs? The sub-game? A pastime? I don’t know if it matters, really, as long as your cartoon combatant becomes my pupil and I earn the experience points necessary to beat Monkeyfinger just one time.
Hurtmerchant getting absolutely pwned.
“Resolution mechanic”?
Josh Roby got me into this via the story-games forum. I really have no idea why I keep playing it. I don’t even watch the fighting animations any more, and yet every day, I click on other people’s brutes, put up with the constant page errors, and watch my experience bar crawl upwards.
A few tips: always fight people with a few more HP than you. The character generation is fully random, as is the assignment of weapons and pets (as far as I can tell), but characters get upgrades all at the same time. Therefore, brutes with more HP tend to have less stuff, and over small differences, the lower-HP character will tend to have the advantage. Also: if you get the spiked flail or a bear, you will always win. Always.