Paperjam

Canabalt will mess you up good

Games // Jim // 2nd November 2009

Some wanker nicked my bike the other week, forcing me into the Sophie's Choice-esque nightmare decision of whether to get up earlier and walk to work or stay in bed even longer than usual and get the urinal-on-wheels that is the local bus.

So as I sat on the smelly pseudo tartan seats trying to avoid any sort of contact with my fellow passengers (two pensioners, three white-lightning types and a bloke who was almost certainly masturbating) I decided to whip out the iphone and have a crack at one of the many games that I have downloaded on a whim and then promptly forgotten about.

Canabalt was purchased the other week for a quid or so - I had a quick go on it at the time. Based on this less than extensive trial I would summarise it as: a one button game where you make a little free-running bloke jump between buildings in some sort of monochrome. parallax, industrial, cyberpunk, war torn landscape.

Canabalt: Jump, You little twat

On the bus however I learned that Canabalt is the sort of game that can cause you to turn into the sort of hunched, cross-eyed, tourettes- ridden mess that will cause even self-abusing bus-psychos to give you a wide berth.

As far as I can tell success in Canabalt is down to three things, quick reactions, blind luck and an aptitude for not blinking. Your little geezer's rooftop dash rapidly speeds up to the point where oncoming obstacles arrive at a rate that you can't really deal with or anticipate properly. If the speed of things doesn't get you then the randomly generated landscape will throw in a cunningly low window to smash through or a bomb type thing that you have no chance of avoiding and game over. "FUCK IT" you yell too loudly because you've got your headphones in, and tap the screen to have another go. Although you can avoid bus embarassment by playing the free online version, but where is the fun in that?

No game of Canabalt seem to last too long, I'd guess somewhere between 10 seconds and a minute, but it is fairly addictive - well up until the point that your eyes have started moving independantly and you get told off by the bus driver for shouting "OH YOU FUCKING BASTARD" once too often.

My absolute record is just over 4000 metres run, which (as the spasms in my optic nerve calmed down) I imagined was some sort of record, which of course it wasn't. There is a video here of someone named ibrahimkaluzny playing for eight minutes, eight fucking minutes, before their inevitible death. I can only imagine that Ibrahim completed this attempt in some kind of Ludovico institute, eyes wired open with a man in a white coat applying drops while someone else injected amphetamines straight into his brain.

Still despite the terrifying implications for your health, this game is pretty cool, the style of it is reminiscent of some of those old Delphine games like Another World, plus the music is suitably atmospheric. There is an option to link it to your twitter account but I can't imagine that is going to achieve anything except alienating you even further from the rest of the world.