"I told you so."
His girlfriend didn't hold back in her gloating. She mercilessly grinned at him as he sat defeated behind his terminal. Over a dozen projections of whacky-looking draft designs served as a testament of his failure to find an alternate configuration for his striker mech design.
He spent an entire week on this problem and had nothing to show for it. Every day, he squeezed his creativity to the utmost to design a mech that met all of his requirements. From limbless snake mechs to elaborate dragon mechs, nothing worked out the way he wanted.
His more extreme mech concepts started to stray increasingly further from the norm. He started off with mechs that resembled monstrous alien horrors and ventured into the absurd such as a mech that functioned like a striker mech when oriented to the front and a swordsman mech when oriented to the back!