VHS vs BETAMAX

Technology evolves at a steady pace over the years, and some things just become obsolete after a while. Such was the case with a variety of physical storage mediums, including floppy disks, VHS tapes and CDs. However, one can always find an interesting use for them with a bit of imagination, but maybe the best option is to chuck them at someone as hard as you can.

VHS vs BETAMAX allows you to avoid actually hurting yourself in real life, by providing you with a chance to do it in a virtual environment. The game is not very complex, but it doesn’t need to be, especially when you consider its premise: throw VHS tapes at your friends and see who’s the last man standing at the end. The entire idea was inspired by the vaporwave music genre, in case you were curious.

The game supports up to three players in the same arena, and the mechanics are not difficult at all. Each player can either chuck a tape, hold his shield up to avoid being hit, or just run around trying to dodge the projectiles in order to get in a better position. You can use a controller if you want to, but the keyboard works just fine in most cases as well. There is obviously no story involved at all, and there is only one map.

To make matters more exciting, the three characters are fully rigged with a ragdoll skeleton, so you really feel the tapes hitting them. Unfortunately, it only takes one hit to die, and you do not really get to enjoy the slow motion effect at the end, because the game rapidly cuts to a new round. The tapes can be thrown in a variety of ways, depending on where you want them to go.

As far as the visual quality is concerned, you need to be prepared to deal with quite a bright palette of colors. This is also a wink to the vaporwave genre, because it’s very common on the album covers. However, the actual game is designed in Unity, so the models look pretty decent, although there’s not much to look at anyway.

As you might have figured until now, VHS vs BETAMAX is not the kind of game to play for hours on end. Instead, it’s just a fun little activity you can do with your friends every now and again, and it would be rather nice to see more maps, and maybe improved controls sometime in the future.