Something for the weekend: Line Rider
Published 01 August 2008
Iain Simons recommends a simple but beautiful game to while away the hours... But don't let the management see you!
This weeks game was prompted by a mention of it by Media Molecule’s Alex Evans, speaking at the Develop Conference in Brighton.
He namechecked it during his presentation as one of his favourite casual games of recent years and the audience found themselves nodding in nostalgic agreement. That we could feel a warm glow for something only a few years old is an index of the relentless march of innovation within your browser. Ahhhh, 2006 - how we loved thee.
Evans has been working for the last few years on LittleBigPlanet, the most anticipated PS3 game in the world today and was examining the obsession with 3-dimensionality in games today.
It’s been an assumption in recent years that for a project to be valid and interesting it needs to contain that extra ‘z’ dimension - x and y alone proving sadly lacking.
There is of course a long and illustrious pedigree of 2-dimensional titles, from Pong to Tetris to Jet Set Willy - but few have demonstrated the joy of simplicity as persuasively as his example.
Line Rider, created in 2006 by a Slovenian student Boštjan ?adež, is a simple concept, beautifully executed.
Draw a course and send your rider sledging along it, bound only by the physics of the world within which he’s travelling.
In a sense, there’s little else to say about the tool itself. It’s in the hands of the users that the software shines.
As the gallery of movies featured in the site shows, the constraints that the tool forces on the user propagates some wonderfully inventive creations.
For a game that was initially featured on a site called Deviant Art, it’s with a heavy heart that we note how it’s recently been used in a campaign for McDonalds but hey, Deviant’s have mortgages too.
Ride Here.
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