Elasto Mania
Jul. 1st, 2017 11:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
davidnI got back into playing Elasto Mania again after seeing it mentioned on a "shareware games we grew up with" thread on Twitter! Seventeen years after it was first released, I finally registered it (which you can still do on the slightly spartan original site) and gave author Balázs Rózsa some money at last.
The usual
Did anyone else here have this? It was called Action Supercross earlier in its life, and is labelled a "motorbike simulation", which doesn't really describe it at all (though I will concede it does have a bike in it). It's sort of an... action-puzzle platformer?, starring a man with nerves made of steel on a bike with suspension made of elastic. The aim is to propel yourself around the levels, collect all the apples and then get to the flower for some reason. You have to watch your rider's head, because if that contacts the scenery at any point, you're dead - and the same goes for letting your wheels touch any of the nasty spinny obstacles that start appearing in later levels.
What will probably happen the first time you try it is you'll line yourself up with an apple, hold down Accelerate, immediately flip over and die. Because this is a physics game - and one written from the ground up before we had Box2D and Havok to mess it all up for us, making it an impressive piece of programming indeed. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, the author went on to establish a lab for 3D function network and dendritic imaging, whatever the hell those are.) Acceleration tips you backwards, so you have to go easy on the throttle and control your brake to keep yourself upright. You can also influence your rotation a bit by using the left and right arrow keys to throw yourself in that direction - and the last control is Space to "turn around", which somewhat bizarrely flips the chassis of the bike around so that the front wheel becomes the back and vice versa, without affecting the bike's acceleration or angle or anything.
It starts off simple enough, with flat surfaces and gentle slopes, with just your own overenthusiasm as the main obstacle. But things start becoming more involved very quickly, and you have to navigate the nightmare-skateboard-park levels by using all kinds of impossible tricks - only your head and wheels collide with the ground, so sometimes you'll have to cling on to a platform with your back wheel with the rest of your bike and rider dangling below it, desperately getting up the momentum to reach for an apple with your front tyre.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ywexteMZJ0
I was drawn back to the game by finding that there is, of course, a competitive community that has sprung up around it. Some of the recorded runs they've achieved are unbelievable, flinging themselves around levels at the speed of sound while I have to carefully teeter over mild hillocks to avoid crashing and burning. In fact, if I have a criticism of the game, it's that the later default levels tend towards ridiculously long and large, taking upwards of three minutes to complete with just one unrecoverable slip between you and the ground (and a subsequent restart). So now I'm working through the vast library of community-created ones!
The usual
Did anyone else here have this? It was called Action Supercross earlier in its life, and is labelled a "motorbike simulation", which doesn't really describe it at all (though I will concede it does have a bike in it). It's sort of an... action-puzzle platformer?, starring a man with nerves made of steel on a bike with suspension made of elastic. The aim is to propel yourself around the levels, collect all the apples and then get to the flower for some reason. You have to watch your rider's head, because if that contacts the scenery at any point, you're dead - and the same goes for letting your wheels touch any of the nasty spinny obstacles that start appearing in later levels.
What will probably happen the first time you try it is you'll line yourself up with an apple, hold down Accelerate, immediately flip over and die. Because this is a physics game - and one written from the ground up before we had Box2D and Havok to mess it all up for us, making it an impressive piece of programming indeed. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, the author went on to establish a lab for 3D function network and dendritic imaging, whatever the hell those are.) Acceleration tips you backwards, so you have to go easy on the throttle and control your brake to keep yourself upright. You can also influence your rotation a bit by using the left and right arrow keys to throw yourself in that direction - and the last control is Space to "turn around", which somewhat bizarrely flips the chassis of the bike around so that the front wheel becomes the back and vice versa, without affecting the bike's acceleration or angle or anything.
It starts off simple enough, with flat surfaces and gentle slopes, with just your own overenthusiasm as the main obstacle. But things start becoming more involved very quickly, and you have to navigate the nightmare-skateboard-park levels by using all kinds of impossible tricks - only your head and wheels collide with the ground, so sometimes you'll have to cling on to a platform with your back wheel with the rest of your bike and rider dangling below it, desperately getting up the momentum to reach for an apple with your front tyre.
I was drawn back to the game by finding that there is, of course, a competitive community that has sprung up around it. Some of the recorded runs they've achieved are unbelievable, flinging themselves around levels at the speed of sound while I have to carefully teeter over mild hillocks to avoid crashing and burning. In fact, if I have a criticism of the game, it's that the later default levels tend towards ridiculously long and large, taking upwards of three minutes to complete with just one unrecoverable slip between you and the ground (and a subsequent restart). So now I'm working through the vast library of community-created ones!
