Discovery allows player to win an avalanche of prizes, provides catharsis for anyone who’s ever wanted to destroy the maddeningly difficult machines.
In video games, the term “game-breaker” refers to a technique that makes it incredibly easy for the player to win. It could be an oversight in the A.I, programming, a slip-up in a statistical simulation, or a misaligned mathematical model, any of which can leave open a loophole for players to exploit the rules of the virtual world and ruin the balance of the game.
On the other hand, you don’t hear about such techniques for crane games/UFO catchers, since they’re governed by real-world physics. But Japanese Twitter user @superUFOcatcher managed to stumble across a crane game breaker anyway: just break the game.
In his defense, it’s not like @superUFOcatcher deliberately set out to tear the machine apart. He simply wanted one of the aluminum foil ball polishing art project kits the machine was tantalizingly displaying, and he tried to play the game by the rules. Using the controls, he dropped the claw down to pick up his desired prize. After the successful snatch, the claw rose back up, and ordinarily would have swung itself over towards the prize drop area, except that the edge of the box got caught on the display shelf inside the machine.
So as the claw struggled to rise, it tugged upward on the shelf…
…until it tore the shelf off entirely, sending the prizes cascading into the drop zone!
Arguably just as amazing is that @superUFOcatcher pulled this feat off with a single 100-yen (US$0.90) coin. His crushing victory over the UFO catcher was applauded by everyone who’s ever thrown an entire pocketful of change into the machines trying to win a prize, earning his video over five million views and comments such as:
“Critical hit!”
“I’ve never seen an avalanche of this magnitude before.”
“Haha that’s a dirty trick you pulled there!”
“So did they let you keep the prizes?”
The last question is actually a legitimate concern, since this obviously isn’t something the machine’s operators expected to be possible, and so it could be considered a malfunction, placing the validity of the win into a gray area of sorts. Luckily for @superUFOcatcher, though, the arcade’s managers were more generous than some of their stingier colleagues, and they let him keep all of the prizes that actually managed to fall through to the bottom of the prize claim area.
That netted him eight ball-polishing kits, and while we’re not sure he, or anyone, needs that many, he’s now a legend in UFO catcher lore.
Source: Twitter/@superUFOcatcher via IT Media