QWOP!

One of my more successful attempts

I haven't posted about independent games in a while - this one's a Flash effort, and the Clickteam chatroom were very enthusiastic about it on Friday. It's called QWOP, after the keys that you use to control it, and is simple enough on the surface - your task is to run a hundred metres without falling over. Not incredibly difficult, you might think, but you have to do this using the very unusual controls - you need to control each thigh and calf separately. When you think about it, running is not a simple action even though we tend to take it for granted after learning to do it - and if you still don't think it's difficult just now, wait until you try learning it all over again via a keyboard.

And, not to discourage you or anything, it's totally impossible. On my first try, I bravely hit one of the thigh-controlling keys, which instantly caused my runner to fall over backwards and hit his head on the track, prematurely ending my attempt with a laughable score of minus 0.7 metres. The next few tries saw me barely making it off the starting line before buckling pathetically or cartwheeling madly into the air as if I'd stepped on a banana peel, followed by the inevitable bonk of QWOP's head against the ground as gravity took hold.

Eventually you do sort of get the hang of it, or at least, you tend to develop eccentric walking methods that involve dragging your legs behind you or skipping along like a giraffe with its legs tied together in a bid to propel yourself forwards. If you just use Q and W you can sort of hobble along on your knees. Apparently it's possible to learn to get him to run in a normal human way if you get used enough to it, but as you can probably tell I'm a long way off from achieving that yet. Instead, my best effort got to about sixty metres by using a hilariously tragic crawling action as if both his legs had gone dead, before finally collapsing into a pathetic heap again. QWOP!