Idiot run · 6:38pm Jul 19th, 2014
I had promised to do a favor today -- one which involved waiting in line (standing, briefly sitting, trying not to verge into fuming) for over two hours. Knowing I was pretty much out of data on my mobile plan for the billing cycle, I made sure my Kindle was loaded before I left: battery charge, reading material, music -- and a new game, one which I'd gotten for free from Amazon's app store. What with one thing and another, I spent quite a bit of my waiting time in playing that game, mostly because it kept giving me reasons to think about it.
The game is called Hero Run. It's an official DC Comics product. When you load up the game, you are given access to Batman, who must make his way through Gotham in an attempt to beat the current host of a boss level.
Here's how it works.
Batman jumps down to street level and begins running. To wit, he is running down the middle of a three-lane highway. No matter what happens, he cannot stop moving. A number of things can stop him -- more on this later -- but nothing you can say will convince him to stop rushing down the street. You can, with a little effort, shift him into one of the other two lanes. However, he will always stay in the road. On foot. Running. No grapples, no rooftops, no vehicles, not even sticking out his thumb and getting a ride from Alfred. He is not intelligent enough to, say, use the sidewalk or the completely obstacle-free shoulder. He runs down the road. Ninety-five percent of his brain is dedicated to road running. Four percent are the other moves. The rest is Justice.
Now, since so much of his processing power is now being used by running, Batman has completely forgotten a number of other things. Like how to punch or kick. He only retains three pieces of knowledge: jumping, sliding as if he's trying to steal every base in the world at the same time, and throwing Batarangs.
Jumping is sort of handy. It had better be, because Batman is running down the center of the road. You know what else is in the road? Cars. Coming towards you. Every time. Gotham is a maze of one-way streets and your chosen idiot only moves against the flow of traffic. Also, there are thugs. They stand in the road and wait for you. (The cars never hit them or even try to, because the world hates Batman. You will soon have great sympathy for the world.) Sometimes they run at you. And you can't punch or kick them, because Batman is stupid. You can try to jump over them or slide into their legs. Or you can throw a Batarang at them. Sometimes you try to jump or slide and just throw a Batarang instead, because Batman has a touch of neurological cross-wiring. He gets hit in the head a lot, you know. Largely because he can't hit back.
You can jump a lot of things. You can vault cars. Concrete barriers. Giant bridge supports which are sitting in the middle of the road because Gotham effectively has no law, so why are you expecting it to have a building code? Every so often, you come across a thug who stands roughly twelve feet tall because the game hates you. You can't jump this. You will run into him and fall down. In fact, if you run into just about anything, you fall down. You can take out traffic cones as if doing so was an actual power, but if you run into pretty much anything else, you -- well, let's not dance around this: you die. A shin-high concrete barrier will kill the Dark Knight. So will a road hazard warning sign. He is fully vulnerable to speed limit postings. One hit is all it takes, every time. Because you don't get into crimefighting if you can survive the impact of running into a small piece of concrete at shin height while moving at an overall pace of about twelve miles per hour.
There are coins in the road. You are supposed to collect them. No one explains why. Maybe Batman finally worked out his own version of the Adams Equation, which in this case would be Money Spent On Crimefighting / Number Of Criminals Fought = Cash Given To Each As Persuasion To Retire Forever. We're talking about Batman: that could easily be fifty thousand per thug. Possibly five hundred thousand. The ultimate in bribing his way to victory. Except that we're still talking about Batman and if he uses a moment for picking up a gold coin, he lost three million dollars in earning potential. Plus this one's too stupid to have figured the Adams Equation out at all. But hey, at least the coins don't kill you. Immediately. They're floating: there has to be some chance they're radioactive.
(What can you buy with the coins? Pretty much nothing. Thanks for asking.)
There are other things in the road. For some reason, you have floating ammo canisters there. Filled with Batarangs. Alfred can't be bothered to give you a Bat-Scooter so you can use the shoulder, but someone is leaving little refill gifts here and there, so that you'll have something to throw the next time you fail to jump or slide. One Batarang will take out a thug. Two will remove a giant thug. Three will do nothing to any vehicle because this game needs to have some concession to reality, especially given what's coming up.
There are also shields, which give you the temporary power to knock aside any obstacle. Like thugs. Cars. Trucks. Possibly buildings. They all just go flying off the screen. This is the sort of thing you'd really like to save for the endgame, which is why Batman always turns it on immediately and lets the batteries run down. Why does Batman not carry a thousand of these at all times and make his life so much easier? Who knows? Maybe he can't make them. Perhaps they only randomly appear in the middle of Gotham's roads when the moon is full. Or he's in a coma and this is part of the dream. A stupid, stupid dream.
Every so often, you'll find a tiny piece of cardboard featuring a picture of your own equipment. It is usually resting in front of an obstacle, so that collecting it means running into a shin-high piece of concrete and dying. Batman will do anything for these dumb pieces of cardboard. Batman is suicidal, but I think you figured that out already.
One thing in the road makes all coins fly towards you from wherever they are on the screen. Batman is now equipped with Gary The Snail.
Gotham keeps throwing things at you. More thugs. More concrete. Trucks crossing the street. Oncoming school buses. When you have the shield, you run into them and kill dozens of night-school children. You can make seven left turns in a row and never go through the same territory twice, which makes perfect sense because no matter which way you're facing, the Batsignal is always shining in the sky in front of you, so why not seven left turns in a row and no repeated streets? I figure all those concussions have really taken a toll on his sense of direction, not that I have any idea how he got past his first one because again, any single hit kills him.
You earn experience as you run. This does not improve Batman's capabilities in any way, but does serve to track how much time you've wasted.
Why does he keep running, never trying any other form of transportation? Why is he incapable of the most basic act of alternative locomotion? No one tells you. My second pet theory was that there's a bomb in his underwear and if he drops below twelve miles per hour, it explodes. Fortunately, he learned this ancient Tibetan running technique. Because he's Batman. And he's too stupid to operate a car, which was my #1 theory.
And if you somehow run long enough to reach the first boss, which I only did once? Better have some Batarangs left, which means you weren't jumping or sliding, which is probably why you didn't make it this far. Because you can only use your weapon -- which you're probably out of -- to do damage. Since, you know, you can't punch or kick. How many times do you need to hit the boss in order to advance? Doesn't matter. He hit you once, so you're dead. And when you die, you get two choices. The first is to redo from the start. The second expends two diamonds and brings you back on the spot. Where did you get diamonds? You had twenty when you arrived. How do you get more? Pay over actual money. Not the gold coins (which still do nothing). Real world cash. Yours. Not Batman's. The game recommends spending at least a hundred dollars at a time, because diamonds can also be used to purchase access to equipment which may or may not do anything, plus variant costumes which can be assumed to shatter into a million pieces against the first speed limit sign.
So after puzzling my way through this game for about forty minutes, trying to figure out why the world operated as it did, I have reached a single inescapable conclusion: Batman is the world's biggest moron and needs to be put down in order to insure the safety of the universe. And this must happen immediately.
In service to the universe, I ran him into things. A lot.
But that's only half the game: the half which takes place at night. If you want, you can switch to sunlight and use a second hero. One who should have better reaction time. More access to tactics. Different things he can do. An actual chance to pull something off. Except that the only change is that this hero throws tiny tornadoes, which are also left in the road within floating ammo packs. Otherwise, his abilities, capacity, reflexes, neurological damage -- everything else is exactly the same.
This second hero? The Flash.
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...delete.
This product is approved by the Comics Code Authority of America!
At least The Flash would have made some sort of sense... with the running and what not.
don't you just love companies that make these sort of gems?
That's the worst trend in mobile games now, the real-money thing. Dungeon Keeper is probably the worst at this, but because there are people who pay the fee, I'm sure we're going to see more and worse.
I got a good laugh out of this.
Now you, dear reader, may come out of this with the impression that endless running games in general are crap. Normally, I would agree that this is a reasonable conclusion, but it only requires one counterexample to make it come tumbling down. Here is that counterexample: Race the Sun
I think I played a Tiger game like this ages ago.
2300115
Warning: language not even remotely safe for most workplaces.
2299902
They're dead.
They deserved to die.
2299912
With the reaction time of a -- well, you-the-player... not so much.
2300105
Celestia cheats.
Have you ever considered writing for Cracked?
2300137
It is only a shame that they were killed by changing distribution and marketing structures, and not by a furious mob of comic book readers, ripped from too many Charles Atlas exercise schemes and wielding pitchforks and torches.
I’ll be honest. If I had to forget all but three of my skills, I’d have to say that “throwing Batarangs” is a pretty good one to hold onto. As the Arkham games have shown us, most problems (stuck switches, charging criminals, Kite Man) can be solved by throwing a couple Batarangs at them.
Hell, I’ll bet that we could get Prince Blueblood another speaking role if we threw a Batarang at him. And even if that didn’t work, we still would have thrown a Batarang at him, so the whole adventure is pretty much a win no matter what.
2300206 they remade it for mobile. Construction projects could take literal hours, even for very basic ones, unless you paid real money.
Ah, yes. The infinite run game. Indeed, what you describe sounds massively moronic, but let me assure you, that's not even anywhere near the worst example of this genre...
seriously.
Sounds like Minion Rush turned into Batman. I'm still having issues with the MLP iPhone game. The darned mine keeps making things for me to run into, and I keep running into them. Jump, Scootaloo! Ooooo. That's gotta hurt. Good thing I've got a spare Scootaloo....
And thus, Temple Run spawned many underlings.
Yeah, some games just don't work when applied to licensed products. Well, with licenses where the characters have a modicum of intelligence, at least.
I... like the dream theory. It just explains so much. Like why thugs think Batman is even a threat if all he's going to do is run and killed almost as easily as the smurf in Smurf Rescue. And maybe throw Batarangs. And happen to have his shield on when something would otherwise kill him.