Beware the claw: Do you want to win the bunny or reboot Android?

Today's victim of the bork fairy is a claw machine that even Android seems to have rejected for its alleged unfairness. And Google, as we all know, is all about fairness.

Eagle-eyed Register reader Scott spotted the stricken machine in an arcade adjacent to a roller rink, a place our reader visited with a friend and described as "something my currently bruised body reminds me I hadn't done for about 20 years."

We assume they were talking about roller-skating, and not the exertions of accompanying their pal.

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The machine itself is a recent iteration of the infamous claw machine, which has spent a century emptying players' pockets in exchange for frustration and the very occasional reward of tat. Infamously, the devices are sometimes rigged so the claw's strength varies between turns, and in several parts of the world, gambling laws cover the machines.

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However, the only gambling to be done here is on whether or not Android will boot. Like so many players in the past, the machine has lost this bet, and an Android Recovery Console is on show. We're not sure who lennie022 is – perhaps a user or perhaps some corporate account – but the words "release-keys" probably don't belong on top of the device. They're unlikely to entice any everyday players to part with cash.

The usual recovery menu is hidden thanks to the dimensions of the screen. If something like this comes up on a mobile device, the volume up and down buttons tend to be used for navigation. In this case, the joystick is presumably the only I/O method, and the selected option would be pot-luck. Which, we guess, is the whole point.

More discreet is the screen below the machine which, rather than encourage a player to grip the sweaty handle, is now plaintively asking for some removable storage (we've seen enough electronic gizmos to know what those pictograms mean) on a blue background that would bring a tear to the eye of many a Microsoft engineer.

In fact, something that looks a bit like a blue screen of death and a borked Android? Perhaps this combination would lure an engineer to the controls… Sure, there's no obvious place to stick removable storage or attach a keyboard. But a waggle of the joystick couldn't hurt, could it? Perhaps one more?

Dammit. Now we're restarting Android, when all we wanted was that pink bunny. ®