Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Public Spirited Transport

By Kieron Gillen on November 28th, 2007 at 11:25 am.

On the back of a bus! On the back of a bus! On the back of a bus! On the back of a bus!

We’re late to this party, but we better link to it before they reach the final stop. To raise funds for the Child’s Play Charity, seven brave gamers are playing the infamous Desert Bus Subgame from Penn & Teller’s infamously unreleased Smoke and Mirrors. Playing it non-stop. In shifts. For days. Four days, eight hours and 54 minutes at the time of writing. This is a game where you’re driving down a straight road in a bus with wonky steering, for eight hours, then driving back again, so that’s a feat of considerable endurance. And madness. Most of all, madness. Go give ‘em some money or something, yeah?

And, to celebrate, let’s link to Supergrass singing about buses in an acoustic style. Hurrah!

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13 Comments »

  1. muscrat says:

    Wow that is quite the noble effort. Simply booting the game is a stretch for me.

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  2. Piratepete says:

    Now THATS innovative, and not just the Desert Bus game but the rest of the games on Smoke and Mirrors. User interaction taken to the max to fool your friends. What a shame it never saw the light of day.

    So the next time a Dev cites their new game as being ‘innovative’ I will just shout Smoke and Mirros at them :)

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  3. Cryect says:

    Piratepete, btw Nintendo’s recently released DS game Master of Illusion which is the same type of tricks except you actually tell the DS the information as you are actually showing it to your friend through how you interact with it. 12 years later but I would say it would most likely work best in mind with a portable.

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  4. Richard says:

    What a shame it never saw the light of day.

    It pretty much did – there’s plenty of copies floating around the web, and the suitable emulators. The other games work better in theory than in practice, mind.

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  5. Piratepete says:

    I stand corrected. Shame I sold the wifes DS last night to a mad german guy who came round after bidding for it on ebay.

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  6. Carey says:

    Makes the ol’ PCF Quake-a-Thon look like a doddle.

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  7. Garth says:

    Wait, I think I got a game magazine when I visited the UK as a kid (let’s say ‘awhile ago’) and I swear to God it has a review of that game in it. Is that the Desert Bus where the bus leans to the right slightly, and at the end of driving straight for four days you get 1 point?

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  8. Andrew says:

    According to Wiki, it is.

    That sounds like a great concept, I must say.

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  9. terry says:

    For a followup project I suggest the ZX Spectrum version of STUN runner

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  10. Fat Zombie says:

    I say that they should do a Source remake of this.

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  11. WCAYPAHWAT says:

    Wasn’t the whole smoke and mirrors project made just to prove some point about about the violence:fun ratio in games?

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  12. JakethePirate says:

    Fat Zombie:

    Yes, it must be done.

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