- HubPages»
- Games, Toys, and Hobbies»
- Computer & Video Games»
- Online Video Games
Ski Runner, Free Skiing Game
Ski Runner is probably the most eye blasting skiing game I've ever played, which is saying something,but you won't know what. Ooo, already you are experiencing the thrill of wild mystery.
Ski Runner follows a fairly traditional paradigm. You = skier trying to escape an infinite mountain. You endeavor to carefully steer your wildly careering skis towards health pack power-ups that will make your experience more epic. In reality, all they do is make everything faster, which greatly increases your chances of slamming into some unlikely scenery, like Easter Island heads which happen to be sitting quite near the top of Mount Infinity.
I had one significant beef with Ski Runner from the moment the game started. I wanted to press the up button and ski away from myself, but the game made me press down and ski 'towards' myself, which probably made sense in a 'oooo downward motion' sort of way, but which just felt really awkward, as if you were driving a car by facing the passenger seat, something I'm sure Jeremy Clarkson has already tried to do once or twice.
There is a balance to be achieved in this game. Travel too fast and you risk hurling yourself into a death creating tree, travel too slow and you won't catch the health pills before you die. The madness doesn't end there however (if that simple duality could be considered madness in any sense) taking a great deal of pills will result in trees dancing and rays of colored light beaming all over the mountain side. This makes the game more difficult to navigate, so one is effectively punished for being successful. The story of someone's life I imagine.
Graphically the game relies on heavy use of stick art to make its point, which is fine really. After all, the whole point of graphics in this game is to annoy you. They're a weapon to be used against you, they're not there to please you in the slightest. If you're not happy with them, why, feel free to go mash your head against your keyboard somewhere else on the great Internet.
You probably won't enjoy this game terribly much. It has the obnoxious 'oh ha ha aren't we funny' trait of insulting you when you get incredibly low scores, which you always will because going too fast makes you slam into rocks unexpectedly and going too slow makes it too hard to get enough pills. 9 out of 10 casual gamers wanted to smush the developer's face into a yellow snow drift after seeing the 'derp' face pulled by the poorly drawn stick figure.