Grindzilla Gaming Blog

There are plastic peripherals like guitars, drum kits, and fishing rods, and then there are plastic peripherals like Steel Battalion’s absolutely foldout robot controller. This was the game that promised to make you feel like you were really piloting one of its giant, hulking mecha walkers, and the add-on was an essential part of the experience. If you had room for it on your coffee table (and there certainly wouldn’t be much room left after it was installed), it would turn your living room into the cockpit of an elaborate machine, providing access to all the switches, gauges, and dials a futuristic pilot could desire, with even a few joysticks crammed in.

It was financial suicide, naturally, but it is also the kind of thing that makes the video game industry so enduringly fascinating to follow. And the dress up games for girls who love fashion that was wrapped around the inputs isn’t at all bad either; a stylish in-cockpit mecha assault game in which you pilot your walking death machine through various scenarios, in a bid to take down the enemy in the most explosive manner possible.

Somewhat inevitably, Barbie dress up games for girls simply proved too much for too many players – in terms of complexity, financial commitment, and the sheer amount of room taken up playing it. And furthermore, a series of ingeniously brutal design decisions eroded even the most enduring of players’ loves; fail to eject safely before your robot is destroyed, and the game will delete your entire save file, giving you a sense of what death might be like.

But let’s put such ancient scars aside. In an era when video games like free Barbie dress up games scrabble over one another to become more casual, more caring, and more immediate, it is nice to know that there are still elaborate, delightful, disastrous follies like this in existence – even if they are now wedged in the back of the closet.