Ultimate Arena

 Triverske's Ultimate Arena is a slightly more complex take on BrantSteele's Hunger Games Simulator that lets players drop CPU characters onto a large overhead map in a battle to the death. Players can customize characters' icons and sprites as well as their stats, and characters can also have custom lines of text associated with any given action that shows up in the event feed. Maps can be randomly generated or custom-made. While the AI fights, players can view both 2D and 3D versions of the map, as well as take more direct actions—placing mines or care packages, moving fighters around, killing them off, or even causing causing arena-wide "events" (also customizable). Aside from that, the game mostly plays itself. That's something that can be a little controversial for capital G gamers, but it's a feature I find some games—this included—bringing merit to.

 One of the major draws of Ultimate Arena over any of the free web browser takes on this idea is the Steam Workshop. From the screenshots to the trailer, it's clear that the intended way to play is to download a lot of user-made content. You can, after all, put hundreds of these guys on a single map. There's a massive pile of user-made content to browse through, and for a niche game from 2016, it's impressive that it still gets people uploading to the Workshop in 2023. Speaking of 2016, though, much of its official branding and default character database are very of their time. There are plenty of important historical figures in the list, but there's a skew towards then-contemporary topics like the 2016 election candidates... and PewDiePie.

 I personally got the most enjoyment out of Ultimate Arena by using it as an excuse to custom-make little pixel dolls of my favorite visual novel characters and watch as they tripped into landmines and bashed each other's heads in with rocks. So as a jumping-off point for being a creative tool, I do enjoy Ultimate Arena, even if I spend more time making the custom content than actually running simulations. Hell, the first thing I did was delete all of the cringy default characters—I haven't even downloaded any from the workshop because I like the game more when the spritework on the 3D map is consistent. I tried downloading maps, but the majority of them are an "older" kind of map file from the game's early history that just doesn't work anymore.

 Some elements leave me wanting something a little more complex and cleaner around the edges, though. For example, CPUs largely appear to ignore terrain height—the only "real" thing about the map—and can scale sheer walls. Characters have various needs that they need to maintain, like hunger or thirst. These are replenished when they hunt, but it would be nice if maps could be customized to make specific spots more or less amenable to fixing up various needs, which would make character movement more interesting than mostly "wandering towards the center" (unfortunately the map editor never made it out of beta). Another need is "sanity," which slowly depletes but doesn't seem to be tied to any of the stats a player can set on their character. The character creator itself has a few bugs associated with it—sprites need re-added every time an adjustment is made, or else an extra set of the outermost pixels of the sprite are applied around the edges. Characters are unable to have different left-facing and right-facing sprites. Character names are limited by the length of the input box and editor access is forbidden while fullscreen. Characters can have they/them pronouns but due to the uniform way scripting is handled between genders, you get awkward phrasings like "they is" and "they has." It's a lot of little nitpicks (and for what it's worth, the game's source code is available to those who purchase so I could theoretically fix it myself if I was a brain-genius), but it does make me wish that this microgenre of "Hunger Games simulators" took off just a little bit more, or lasted just a little bit longer. Maybe in the future, we'll get something a bit more fully-fledged from people who grew up on these and remember them fondly. For now, though, I can appreciate Ultimate Arena on its own merits.