Hey all, I found this awesome game called Toribash I think you should try it.
It's an turned based Fighting game. Plus it's free
http://toribash.com/

Good game. It's been around for quite some time.

Besides Cortex Command, Toribash is my favorite Freeware game, because of the steep learning curve, And requires time and dedication. Unlike most games.

I wouldn't really call cortex command freeware.

that's weird as hell that you'd consider the most atypical of a genre to be the definitive game of the genere. in fact so atypical as to make one question the validity of its classification in the conventional genre it only superficially resembles.

that's pretty much like saying you haven't had sex until you've been shat on by horse being ridden by a tranny midget (while being whipped by the tron guy)

in all honesty i see pretty much no resemblance between toribash and conventional fighting games. it looks like an alright game though.

Yeah I know, I meant to say indie

Haha what?

Ehh. I played for a while, since something like version 2.4, but I pretty much stopped around late 2009. The corporate bastardization of Nabi ("oh lol let's take out the private clan servers worth $50 USD and put in freely-creatable public ones, sure it will piss off our hardcore fanbase but hey it will make us more popular with the new kids") coupled with the steady decline in overall intelligence of the forums veered me away from the game in general. Plus, it got boring. You can only do so many things in single-player before all of your replays start looking similar. Multiplayer, 9 times out of 10, boils down to luck- if you have a better "opener" (first set of moves) than the other guy, you will typically win, and vice versa. It's not like there are any criteria for quintessentially good openers either: some are fast, complex, and stylish, but can still be countered by simple symmetric openers. There's not much skill involved, unfortunately.

If you haven't played it, it's pretty unique. You move a set of 20 joints on your "Tori"- basically a representation of a human- with commands like Hold, Relax, Contract, Extend, Rotate Right/Left, etc, with the intended result being movement. It takes a while to get used to, but it lends a sense of creativity and an open-ended gameplay which one rarely finds in fighter games. It's a strategic fighter- like chess, except with more blood and dismemberment.

I did play on a daily basis about three years ago when it was "new" and, if I dare say, I got pretty damn good.

But how ragdoll says, it gets boring pretty fast. Once all the novelty ends it all boils down to having a good opener, luck, some basic joint management and experience on what to do in order to recover correctly from aerial battles.

This, although I got more then good. I hit 40th of the world in general and 4th in twinsword. Or at least I did in the annual championship of 2000something.

The ranking system was implemented later.