Cubivore: Survival of the Fittest
You, a cubivore, remember a past you never saw or heard but still remember in great detail.
Once upon a time, many colorful beasts called Cubivores lived and died, ate and were eaten all across the world, and the world was bursting with Wilderness.
However, a group of colorless beasts began to work in unison and devour the beasts, along with the wilderness, storing the wilderness in augmented limbs called Raw Meat, which gave them great power. The leader of these colorless beasts was called the Killer Cubivore, and had six pieces of Raw Meat. He set out to devour every bit of the world's wilderness and render the land lifeless.
Then, you're born, and you start to eat things.
Cubivore is a very odd game, where you play as an animal who eats other animals in a law-of-the-jungle world. The game was developed originally for the disc add on to the Nintendo 64, the reason for its low-res cubic art style. Cubivores are basically an animal head with strategically positioned flaps of limbs called meat stuck to either its body or other meat flaps.
The primary mechanic of the game involved collecting combinations of colors, which allow the player's cubivore to mutate into different color-coded species with different abilities. These combinations start out as light or dark solid colors or mixed light and dark, but progress to "Rage" colors which require different mixing principles to form "Clash" species. The goal of the game is to obtain 100 different mutations and confront the Killer Cubivore to restore Wilderness and life to the world.
On the way, the player would battle the colorless beasts, who held the Wilderness in their Raw Meat. Devouring them allows the player to progress to the next area, and also allows them to mate, producing more powerful offspring with more limbs. Of course, the game started you off with one limb, then up to six.
The sister game to the popular Animal Crossing. Unfortunately, Cubivore never caught on like its counterpart. It had mostly average reviews, praising the game's creativity but criticizing it for its length and extremely outdated graphics.
- All There in the Manual: The manual provides an in-depth explanation of Cubivore biology. If you don't have the manual, or haven't read it, you won't know how the fuck a Cubivore lives with only a head and flaps of muscle too thin to hold organs.
- The "head" of a cubivore is really their entire body, containing their stomach and other digestive and nervous organs, and don't have a heart. The movement of their meat flaps functions as a blood pump, hence why all cubivores have an idle animation of them moving somehow. Color in limbs is based on what sort of five kinds of blood runs through it.
- Applied Phlebotinum: Wilderness
- Atlus: Nintendo developed it but you can thank Atlus that it ever got out of Japan.
- Big Bad: The Killer Cubivore
- At least, until you become him.
- The real Big Bad constantly changes due to more powerful beasts taking the title.
- Bleak Level: They are white and desolate.
- Boss in Mook Clothing: Considering that every single boss is some sort of species, chances are that you'll see plenty of normal, colored beasts exactly like them sans Raw Meat or silvery appearance.
- Chick Magnet: You become this when you enter the Mating Tunnel with a new piece of Raw Meat.
- Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Everything in the game.
- Curb Stomp Battle: If you're in a powerful enough form, you can smack around a few bosses so easily it's pathetic.
- Death of a Thousand Cuts: If you are in a weak form, such as pale red, and the thing you're trying to kill and eat is pure dark or more intense and equal or superior to youin number of limbs, you'll have to rely on chip damage to bring them down since the gaps in power are so great.
- Death by Sex: Pretty much.
- "I MATED WITH TWENTY FEMALES. THEY ALL BORE CHILDREN."
- Exposition Fairy: Considering nothing else in the game even speaks or does anything but try to eat you or run away, you happen to control an example of one.
- Extreme Omnivore: If it moves, or grows, you can and will eat it.
- Fragile Speedster: Redapeds. They might not be the fastest, but their jumps are so great that they can dance around anything if one knows how to use them. That, and some dive bomb when the pounce, becoming a bullet made of meat.
- Generation Xerox: Every time you mate your character dies and you start playing as their son with the same consciousness.
- Getting Crap Past the Radar: When successfully pulling of an "Eat 'n Run" the eaten monster's head creates a fountain of blood. Eating regularly also results in the monster expelling blood. Yet the game still is rated E.
- Glass Cannon: Blueocytes, which have great attack power and illogically cool long ranged pounces, but are weak otherwise. Some species have their heads positioned sideways so that they can circle their prey.
- Gotta Catch Em All: Collecting mutations is the driving game mechanic. If you don't get one hundred mutations by the end of the bird lap, you're sent back to the pig lap for a second run until you get one hundred forms.
- High-Pressure Blood: When you do an Eat n' Run, instead of bleeding a little like when limbs are normally ripped off, the victim's head spirals into the air with a geyser of purple blood that does not stop bleeding until the head decomposes.
- Hurricane of Puns: Your character loves to make stupid puns based on its current species (not mutation form, rather, the appearance of its head).
- Interspecies Romance: Whenever your character mates, there are numerous species of cubivores in their harem.
- Jack of All Stats: Purpials, considering that their stats are mostly balanced and are unremarkable save for their reverse stats, which allow them to go great speeds without becoming exhausted.
- Lightning Bruiser: Greyodons. So much so, that the entire boss cast (except for one section) of the bear lap are dark Greyodons.
- Mighty Glacier: Yellowbrates, which are often painfully slow, but powerful, and have a nigh-impenetrable guard.
- Better At Moonwalking: Trope namer. Also, Purpials qualify as this.
- Nobody Poops: Averted! "Taking a doo" is a valid gameplay action that helps with mixing colors at the later levels.
- Phlebotinum Overdose: Your character eventually holds so much wilderness in his body, he begins to go feral.
- Rainbow Speak: Whenever your character talks about certain colors of species, their species name is colored appropriately.
- Time Skip: Implied to happen when the Consu-Mate eats you.
- During these time skips, the Big Bad also changes, since the original Big Bad has been kicked down in rank to be the District Attorney Beast in the Bear Lap, and at the end of the Bird Lap, it is mentioned that the Hitman Beast was recently the Killer Cubivore before being usurped in rank before you got to him.
- Warrior Poet: Your character frequently composes poetry about killing, eating, and mating. As you progress through the Bird Lap, your character gradually dispenses with the poetry and replaces the rhymes with screams of bloodlust.