Review: Dragon Ball Z – Ultimate Tenkaichi (PS3)

Meet lose/lose, one of those darling indie games that everyone fawns over. You know, asks challenging questions, upends prior gaming standards, etc. Except this one has bite: every alien you shoot down deletes a file on your hard drive. So you might not want to play it on a Mac or PC that you care about.

Each Space Invader is procedurally generated, corresponding to the files on your machine Shoot down the alien and the game wipes the attached file. And while the aliens will not shoot at you, if any of them touch your ship, then lose/lose deletes itself. Imagine putting this on an important PC and testing yourself to see how far you can get before permanently crippling your box. It’s like Namco’s version of Russian Roulette. Hardcore!

In the final analysis, lose/lose is more art project than game, foisting real world implications on your in-game actions. Creator Zach Gage asks “As technology grows, our understanding of it diminishes, yet, at the same time, it becomes increasingly important in our lives. At what point does our virtual data become as important to us as physical possessions? If we have reached that point already, what real objects do we value less than our data?”

So how long until some idiot in the mainstream press catches wind of this and calls it a virus?

Source: GameSetWatch