Autos in Cyberspace

Krish Raghav — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 09:53:00 GMT

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?

Share this post: email it! | del.icio.us! | digg it! | newsVine!

Way Off-Target

Krish Raghav — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 08:37:00 GMT

The cheerfully alliterative Gunning for Gold, a game by the gaggle of game-designers at Games2Win.com, is the latest outlet for general Abhinav Bindra adulation – which, having taken over Twitter, Blogspot, and even the murky netherworlds of Rediff, is breaking into that next big bastion of modern-day internet buzzwords.

Interactivity.

Except that it doesn’t.

But it could have.

And done so quite brilliantly.

(Back to normal sized paragraphs now)
Remember that 80-20 rule? How 80% of something contributes only 20% to an output, and vice versa? Its the law of the vital few, and trivial many, and one certainly true for Gunning for Gold – 80% of the game makes little or no sense, or adds absolutely nothing to the 20% gameplay.

There’s bouncy music that sounds like the ‘Fanfare’ preset on those old Casio keyboards.(Thankfully, there's a Mute button)

There’s an annoying 8 second pause between shots, where you are forced to listen to a generic ‘cheer’ sound effect.

Your two opponents score the same points every time you play, giving the game absolutely no difficulty curve.

There’s a live scoreboard, but it doesn’t give cumulative scores or show who’s leading (agreed, there are colour cues, but c'mon, that’s making the player do the math. In-between a game of shooting things)

And why no multiplayer? Gunning for Gold would have been perfect with an online leaderboard and intense three player shootouts. Shooting is a perfect sport for multiplayer. Heck, Typeracer implemented it perfectly, and that was a game about…err, competitive typing.

The basic gameplay involves nothing more than clicking on the manic ‘SHOOT!’ button, moving the crosshair, now zoomed in to the target, as quickly as possible to the bullseye (because, the quicker you get in a shot, the higher your score), and clicking to shoot. This is then repeated 10 times, after which cumulative scores decide who wins. Of course, anything other than a gold medal is epic fail for this game. Silver medals, apparently, are for losers.

Simple enough, but even these minimalist gameplay elements are broken.

Time matters only if you miss the bullseye – but with the payoff of getting a bullseye disproportionately higher than missing it, the best strategy for the game become a ridiculous one.

You move the mouse down (because, bizzarely, the crosshair starts at the SAME spot above the board EVERY time), carefully align with the bullseye, ignore your competitors who, by now, could have finished all 10 shots, posed for photos and addressed a press conference, and then shoot.

‘Well done!’ the game cheerfully informs you, and you smirk.

All games can be gamed, but not this quickly.

…

I do realize, at this point, that this is a flash game we’re talking about, one that makes no pretensions other than being a momentary distraction. So maybe I’m just being mean.

Summary for convenience: “Gunning for Gold is a timely, fun game that offers 10 minutes of distractive fun in between a workday.”

So, yeah.

Links:

Gunning for Gold

Share this post: email it! | del.icio.us! | digg it! | newsVine!

Play Things : games2win

Autos in Cyberspace

Way Off-Target