Autos in Cyberspace
Krish Raghav -
Thursday, October 16, 2008 3:23 PM
Autorickshaws are perfect videogame material - they exemplify the sort of dizzy, exhilarating, barely controllable speed thrills that most racing games attempt to simulate.
Out of curiosity, I started scouring the online flash game world for signs of autorickshaws - surely there was a game that captured the endless charms of careening down a narrow, crowded street? The wonderful sonic signature of the beloved auto horn? Surely even elements of edgy, exciting stuff - like price haggling and meter fudging?
I couldnt have been more wrong.
let me show you an exciting screenshot from an autorickshaw game first, and then explain.
For reasons best left unexplained, the first rickshaw that Google dredges up is a bizarre title called Rickshaw Jam. I knew things were amiss when I read a reader review at the site hosting this:
Logical Thinking? Surely ultimategamer92 was mixing up his adjectives?
Well...he wasn't.
Rickshaw Jam is indeed a game of logical thinking - you play a benevolent divine traffic redirector entrusted with the task of getting a rickshaw out of crisscrossing jumble of cars and trucks through 50 levels of increasing difficulty.
Oh well.
Next stop was the ad-riddled Games2Win.com, which hosted not one but TWO whole auto rickshaw games: Rickshaw Rampage, and Raju Meter 2
Rickshaw Rampage had nice, clean graphics, and a decent interface (and a very impressive title screen) but as game, was virtually unplayable. It suffered from the odd problem of being a little too fast - to even survive with some degree of success, I had to crawl through the stages, pressing the accelerator with extreme caution.
Raju Meter 2 (The prequel was, unfortunately, nowhere to be found) is a top-down racing game set in a mythical Bombay - which has large, endless stretches of six lane highways with orderly, well-behaved traffic. It's a decent play, but there's nothing distinctly autorickshawy about it.
Slightly disappointed, I headed over to the Zapak.com wilderness - where I found this fancy pants 3d (3d!) auto racing game called Meter Down. My increasing excitement waned a bit right as soon as the game began - the environment felt more like Bangkok or something than an Indian city, and controls felt a bit tacky and sometimes needlessly over-responsive. It plays like that old, overly-pirated racing game Midtown Madness.
(Sorry Zapak, putting in the Taj Mahal doesn't quite convince me this is India)
Still, the game looks pretty neat, and has some nice graphical flourishes (like kicking up dirt) - and the premise of going around ferrying people is a potentially fun one - but c'mon Zapak, whats an auto game without a haggling minigame?
Desi Racy, while a simple racing game that plays like a Nokia phone's Beach Rally, offers a compelling vision of India's future cities.
Cast your amazed eyes at these idyllic vistas of present-day Chennai and Mumbai.
Then there's Desi Auto, over at newgrounds.com, which has one sheer moment of brilliance in an otherwise mediocre package. When you turn a corner, the world tilts dizzyingly, and there's a rare sense of thrill in being so precariously unbalanced (pictured unconvincingly below). Good stuff.
I was ready to give up, deeming this a lost cause - when I stumbled upon this little snippet of description at an Indian game developer's site:
1) Autorickshaw Drag Racing Game - Oram Po
Intriguing.
'Oram Po' (Tamil for 'keep distance' or 'stand aside') is a 2007 film about Autorickshaw Racing.
The site goes on to describe the game thus:
Oram Po is a cool and slick racing game of autorickshaws,
developed exclusively for the film. It's the first time a level-based,
downloadable 3D game that has been developed for a film and it's going
to be the hottest add-on game buffs could want.
Now this sounded promising.
Unfortunately, though, the game's sole online partner - gossip site Galatta.com, seems to have either misplaced the game or hidden it cunningly, as attempting to download it led to an endless maze of compulsory registrations, and invalid download links. i refused to give up, scouring Google again - surely the game MUST exist elsewhere?
It didnt. All we have left are these tantalizing screenshots. Sigh. Anyone out there who can locate this potential beacon of gaming brilliance?
