I've been playing around with Battle Beast Simulator today, a sandbox (or grassbox or icebox depending on which map you choose) that lets you pit armies of different animals and dinosaurs against each other in ferocious and unconvincing combat to the death. Want to see penguins fight gorillas, or a triceratops take on seagulls, or pigs armed with Gatling guns fight donkeys armed with lasers?
How about giraffes? Want to see giraffes utterly stomp and mutilate every other animal on earth until there's nothing left but bones and gore? Well, in Battle Beast Simulator that's not a problem, because the giraffes in this game are waaaaay OP.
After a few practice session involving dinosaurs, pigs, gazelles, penguins, and other creatures, I line up a small army of giraffes (a group of giraffes is called a tower, by the way) on the ice arena to take on a herd of donkeys. I immediately begin to suspect I may have found a new King of the Jungle Made of Ice.
Granted, donkeys probably aren't the best barometer for determining which animals are best at killing other animals, but it's not the fact that giraffes won but that they won so quickly, completely, and decisively. Their long, slowly swinging legs appear to be made out of adamantium mixed with TNT. The donkeys are decapitated, disemboweled, and splattered.
Next, I line up a mob of kangaroos (a group of kangaroos is actually called a mob) to see what happens, and it's another immediate bloodbath. I also spot some important keys to the giraffes' success, like the interesting quirk of how they keep fighting when they've lost a leg. Or two legs. Or all legs.
Legless and hovering, this tower just won't fall.
Okay, maybe I've been taking it easy on the giraffes and it's time for some more dangerous game. I've seen my share of nature documentaries, and I've watched (through my horrified tears) lions kill giraffes lots of times. It's never a contest. Giraffes are like tall, skinny cows and lions are like lions. There's no way the giraffes will win. I line up the pride and the tower, and watch.
Somehow this fight is over even more quickly than when the giraffes were fighting donkeys and kangaroos. The lions make a massive lunge but are quickly trampled (or something) and within about three seconds it's over. How is this happening?
I wonder if it's because I've been staging these fights on ice. Maybe the other animals are just slipping around too much? (Though, really, if anything is going to fall on its ass on some ice it's got to be a giraffe, right?)
I test out the same battle but on a grasslands map to see if the lions fare better. They don't. They die, quickly and horribly. I go back to the ice and add some polar bears, which in nature live (for the moment at least) on ice. They die too. It seems there is nothing on earth that can take down my tower.
Confident, I throw in a Tyrannosaurs to watch it die from giraffes.
Okay, so, back to reality. Giraffes really do have limits (and bones and blobby inside parts).
Much like the giraffes themselves, I'm fairly crushed. I was hoping there was no creature from any time period that could destroy them. I'll just have to accept that giraffes aren't all powerful murder machines.
Or, I'll just have to arm them with miniguns and not accept that at all.
There, that's more like it. Nature's balance has been restored.
