GIRP

This is what you might call a bit of a pickle

When you're laying out the controls for a game, you usually want to make them as natural and invisible as possible, so that the player has to only think about what they're doing in the game and not about what they're doing with their hands. So it's interesting and unusual to deliberately take the opposite approach, and make mastering controlling your on-screen character the primary challenge.

The stress of the last month made me less inclined to work on personal projects than usual, but as a result, I've been playing loads of games in my spare time instead - this is one of the smaller ones. GIRP is another control-fighting Flash experience by the creator of QWOP, the game where you suddenly realize just how difficult running is when you're forced to control each individual thigh and calf in a tragically hysterical parody of bipedal forward movement.

This time, in an arguably easier arrangement, your task is to climb a rock wall with various rings on it that have letters of the alphabet attached to them. Pressing a letter on the keyboard causes the hapless climber to attempt to reach out to that letter, while you try to swing him over to cling on to it with the left mouse button, Ctrl or Shift (whichever you find least totally impossible with the current arrangement of your fingers). Then you've got to keep your finger firmly on that key while attempting to grab on to your next handhold, and the cycle repeats itself as your fingers get more and more knotted and you try desperately to remember which one you can safely lift without plunging into the water.

I've got to just over eighteen metres, but really if you get up to the point where the music starts and you have to deal with knocking birds off the rings before you can grab them, you're doing well.

Additionally, WHY IS IT SNOWING AGAIN