Remember when a fish swimming on its bowl was programmed to play Pokémon? It was broadcast on Twitch, attracting a number of audiences who became keenly glued to the game's progress. It was mostly dull and tedious, but it initially made for some entertainment gold, spreading like wildfire across the internet.
Several gimmicks have taken place on Twitch since then, all plotted sparsely on a spectrum that includes anything bizarre, ridiculous and funny. Some are more outré than others, while some are plain silly but unarguably comedic. Like this particular Overwatch player who literally used bananas to control Winston, a character in the game.
The bespectacled ape Winston has enjoyed the endearment of many Overwatch players, owing to his charming love for peanut butter and ape-like rage. Winston is, while this comes as a moot point, one of the best playable characters in Overwatch. And that love has transcended across the web, and what an inflection point indeed to devote oneself in wiring up bananas as a makeshift control mechanism to play as Winston in the game.
Twitch user Rudeism has tethered bananas to wirings and metal contacts, allowing for in-game navigation. Winston's set of moves is mapped in a layout of numerous bananas, all of which correspond to a specific direction or move when touched. As a science class flashback, bananas contain high potassium content, making them fine conductors.
Rudeism appears to have programmed Winston's Tesla cannon to automatically fire, so he could focus on navigation and capturing objectives. The gameplay is notably decent. You'd expect that bananas would prove to be a clunky and dysfunctioning setup for a controller but surprisingly, they actually work really fine.
The bananas became mushy overtime as they sustained continuous impact from Rudeism's touch, although this was actually to his advantage. The mushy bananas appeared to have acquired improved sensitivity, more accurately able to register what bananas Rudeism had touched at a given moment.
Rudeism is popular for his ludicrous but funny control schemes over at his Twitch page. After elucidating his plans to control a game with bananas, Dole asked him what the bananas were for, in a remark obviously representative of good-natured banter. He noted that he had planned to use peanut butter to control Winston, but trashed the idea after finding out that peanut butter didn't make for great conductors. That would have been a messy affair.
Overwatch is a team-based first-person shooter game by Blizzard Entertainment. It was released in May this year for PC, Xbox One and PlayStation 4. Recently, Blizzard released a Halloween Terror event for the game, bringing loot boxes replete with over 100 Halloween-themed items.
