I love games that encourage players to break the rules.
Super Impossible Road is a racing game where sticking to the straight and narrow will probably leave you eating dust (or glowy purgatory specks). Here’s what it looks like:
And here’s how it works:
SUPER IMPOSSIBLE ROAD is a futuristic racing game about shortcuts. Get ahead of the pack by taking huge leaps across the procedurally generated speedway. These risky overtaking manoeuvres can take you straight into the lead, or drop you mercilessly into the void.
So basically, it’s like somebody made an entire game about leaping off sections of Rainbow Road in Mario Kart and plummeting into the infinitely ravenous star pit while telling your friends, “I totally always make that jump. I’m just having an off-day. Totally.”
It looks pretty sweet in a hyper-minimal sort of way. Right now it’s on Steam Greenlight, but when it launches later this year, it will have a single-player career mode, online multiplayer and even split-screen. With any luck, it will be on Steam Early Access shortly before that.
I’m slightly worried that procedural generation could lead to bland tracks (nothing beats a lovingly crafted racing game level; NOTHING), but we’ll see. If nothing else, I’m pleased to see that Breakin’ The Law (Breakin’ The Law) is becoming something of a genre, what with games like this and Screencheat popping up on the radar. Then again, if a game encourages you to “cheat”, is it really cheating at all?
Comments
8 responses to “A Racing Game About Finding Shortcuts”
This sounds like it could be terrible. The reason tracks like rainbow road are so terrible is because it makes a party game like Mario kart a complete whitewash where the people who know the shortcuts wipe the floor with everyone who doesn’t.
The procedurally generated nature of the game could offset this, but I agree that it could make for bland tracks.
I give the developers points for the idea, but I’ll be waiting for general consensus on whether it is actually any good.
Get off my lawn!
That’s precisely what makes Rainbow Road (and more recently, Big Blue) so interesting! The encouragement of exploration. If you don’t know the shortcuts in those roads is simply because you haven’t tried looking for them. At worst, you can load up a youtube video and learn. There’s no excuse to stay behind if you want to be a tiny bit competitive. And if you are just a casual… what do you care? Veterans will run circles around you even without shortcuts, anyway.
Nope, see here is the problem I have with Mario kart. Typically when I play with some party people the tendency is that I almost always win the first race (with a more “traditional” racing track) and get progressively worse as the tracks get more gimmicky and reliant on player knowledge.
The barrier that allows vets to stomp newbies is purely the gimmicks and shortcuts and their familiarity with them. While this does mean that the heathens of us who don’t worship the almighty Mario kart can be in a random and power up driver arbitrarily levelled playing field, that person who is miles in front where no one else has any chance of catching them is still a complete knob end. Seriously, don’t be that guy. No one thinks you are awesome.
Again, because this game features procedural generation, it could overcome Mario kart’s flaw, but I’ll be waiting to see.
So… someone who is competitive and has the skills and experience to beat the people without them is a “knob end”? Should that person stop completely in the middle of the track and allow you and others to pass them and leave everything to the lottery of who gets three mushrooms and who gets a squid or one green shell? Yep that’s about right, meritocracy is for nerds and losers, let chance dictate all outcomes… what fun! (And yet, I’m positive that in such scenario, if you won, you’d be convinced it was because your skills.)
If you think that what separates a good player from you is knowledge of gimmicks and shortcuts, you know nothing of high-end playing. Those things only separate degrees of people among the high end. It’s how tightly you take every bend on the road, how well you know when to go straight or bend or when to force a slide the things that separates good from bad players. All things acquired by playing the game. So your complaint sounds like “eh I cannot care enough to put all the effort necessary to get better at the game, so I’ll just badmouth and belittle those who do, because screw them! I want to win even if I don’t deserve it”.
We’re talking a party game here, not some Mario kart tournament. Your attitude is *exactly* why I don’t like Mario kart fanatics, and you’re only reinforcing my arguments with your every reply.
When, say for example, the game switches to something like Halo, those players who are clearly better than others will often play differently than they normally would simply to make the game a more level and fun playing field.
Hell, even experienced *smash* players will typically pick weaker characters in a party atmosphere because it is more fun for everyone.
Yet Mario kart seems to foster a community of players with your type of attitude.
My point stands that there are a few key things that provide such a massive advantage to players that know them, this upsetting the balance of what is primarily a party game.
You might be a fanatic about high level Mario kart, but most people aren’t. Your flagrant condescension is just the icing on the cake.
Fair enough, I’ll agree that Mario kart doesn’t foster a forgiving environment for players to handicap themselves in order to level the playing field. However, I myself, when playing with less experienced characters, pick poor characters/kart combinations to help with that…still win though for the reasons I outlined above. It is hard when you /know/ how to play the game to pretend that you don’t. Taking bends poorly, slowing down, etc. all feels counterintuitive. Moreover, doing so will not reward you with a level-play experience, but rather will cause you to be maimed by items and end 12th.
Still, I don’t see a reason to hate on the veteran players. You find me arrogant and condescending? It is only the natural reaction at your own suggestion that I’m a tool for being good at Mario Kart.
As an Impossible Road on Android player, I’m looking forward to this!