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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1813 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for September 18, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Video-game thread

Batomon Showdown released earlier this week, taking out a lot of my work hours from the following days, I've been waiting for it to come out since playing the demo. It's an asynchronous PvP-ish autobattler in the manner of Backpack Battles or The Bazaar, if you played one of those games you know roughly what to expect; the main difference is that instead of playing inventory tetris, you pick a trainer with a unique passive, deploy a team of up to 6 (hopefully synergistic) 'mons and get matched with another player's team to fight. As the rounds progress, you accumulate StS-style relics that boost your roster in some way, buy and upgrade better and rarer mons, and figure out a way to make number go up to keep up with scaling. Winning gets you a badge, losing takes off lives, amount increasing the further you are into the game. The goal of the game is to win 10 fights before you lose your 11 lives (10 lives + your immortal soul you literally sell to a shady trainer for a last-ditch power boost).

The game's main strength is its relative simplicity compared to other games of the genre; I like Backpack Battles but I hate its late-game optimization which all too often goes "oh great, I rolled a strong item, better spend 10 minutes painstakingly rearranging my entire board so it fits". Batomon has adjacency bonuses too but not all mons have them, and a 3x2 board doesn't leave much room for optimization anyway, so your main focus is deciding what to buy and thinking of how to scale, i.e the actually fun part of this type of games. It's relatively well-balanced, although there are obvious shitmons and some types are stronger than others (Poison/Burn is much more reliable and easier to scale than raw damage, and shields >> healing since you can overshield but not overheal and there are very few ways of boosting max hp), and ranked play does slowly crystallize into metafaggotry as I get closer to Master rank. Also unlike Backpack Battles the scaling is hilariously breakable sometimes, whether that's an upside or downside is up to you.

Its other strong side is the charming pixel art, trainer/fakemon designs are very sovlful (even surprisingly cultured in places) and feel much more faithful to the inspiration than e.g Palworld, although the occasional "ay that's literally just Torterra" overlap is, I suppose, hard to completely avoid 9 generations in.

Main weakness I would say is the relatively small dex, though the type identities are relatively fleshed out - Fire/Electric/Poison revolves around statuses, Rock is all shields all the time, Bugs are cheap and scale with more of themselves, Curio is all about trinkets, etc. I also feel like the RNG fucks you much harder here than in other games of the genre; some archetypes have mons central to the "build" working, and if you burn your entire income on rerolling without a single Dollhime to show for it so all of your trinket generation can actually start cashing out into damage, you are Shit Out of Luck, not to mention greatly behind on scaling compared to opponents, which tends to send promising runs into death spirals. But overall the game is a great time killer and I thoroughly recommend it if you're into the genre or the monster catcher aesthetic.

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