Why Do We Fight?

Virtual On Oratorio Tangram: so much more than just four pins in a dictionary.

Get ready to rumble into battle for a futuristic, twin-stick robot blast-em-up.

But wait!

In much the same way that any reasonable person sitting down at Street Fighter II for the first time is bound to enquire about the concerns and motivations of this gentleman Ken before wishing to either punch or kick him – whether weakly, strongly, or mediumly – and will dodge his presumably accidental flying uppercuts until it is established from a dependable source that a fighting tournament is under way and that all participants are in fact informed, consenting adults – we will, with equal attention to the propriety of our actions as a massive gun robot, not be activating either our left or our right weapon until – and unless – a proper reason to do so has been established. So why this belligerent atmosphere of jumbo-robo arena combat? Simple.

Well, not that simple. In the Virtual Century (go with me on this), when megalomaniacal corporations have taken over every aspect of life on Earth (go with me on this), one of them, DN Corp, found an ancient military installation underground on the moon (go with me on this).

DN Corp appropriated the alien technology from the underground moon base and made massive fighting robots to violently destroy their competition.* That all went great except that the dormant fighting robots already inside the underground moon base woke up and got a bit crazy. Boo. Don’t worry: DN Corp were able to defeat them with their own big robots. All they needed were ace pilots, recruited by installing Virtual On: Operation Moongate machines (the first game in the series) in 1990s Japanese arcades in our reality. Players of that game were therefore in fact remote-controlling real robots in another dimension.

And by all accounts they did a jolly good job.**

Anyway, in this game, DN Corp has collapsed following the whole moon fiasco and broken out into its eight manufacturing plant subdivisions. The eighth plant and the fourth plant, as a result of some new administrative regulations, have inadvertently—

Fuck it let’s just shoot the robots.

- - -

* Due to a questionable Japanese L/R transliteration decision, the robots are called not VirtuaLoids, as in virtual, but VirtuaRoids – as in piles.

**This reminds me of the Philip K Dick novel Time Out Of Joint, in which the government transports a future man to a faked up little 1950s USA suburb where he believes he lives a normal life and solves crossword puzzles for fun. In fact, those puzzles are the encrypted coordinates of planned Martian missile attacks on Earth and the man is unwittingly saving humanity in his suburban stupor. I’d like to think that if the government wanted to keep me calm and unquestioning while they tapped my brainpower, the imperfect nirvana they’d choose would be a dingy Akihabara arcade where somehow the 90s is now retro.