By John Walker on December 4th, 2008 at 5:57 pm.
You know what’s wrong with bowling? Sure, there’s the throwing a really heavy thing at the wobbly things, and the resulting destructive pleasure of watching them fall over, but it really falls short of the possible glory. What’s wrong with bowling is it’s not done as a downhill race, with bombs. Enter Downhill Bowling.
It’s a Unity game, running in a web browser, which makes for easy ignoring-work-play. And it’s well worth. Dumb as a brick that dropped out of nursery school, it’s about bowling at ten frames of pins as you hurtle down a hillside.
There are bonus items to pick up as you play the ten levels, which lets your ball grow bigger, or shrink, or… SNIGGER! Couldn’t keep it in. Better now. Or drop bombs to better achieve strikes. That sort of thing. Which are all icing on top of really smart cake. Seriously, downhill bowling, why has no one done this before? (Cue person in comments who points out downhill bowling game from 1984 that was only released in Paraguay.)
Here’s a very quick clip of the game in action.
04/12/2008 at 18:30 hydra9 says:
What a concept! And nicely executed. This feels like it’s a close relation to
Race TraitorVelociraptor Safari, due to the insanity+fun factor.04/12/2008 at 18:50 The Poisoned Sponge says:
Just slipping on the pedantry hat, but don’t you mean ‘cue’, not ‘queue’?
The game looks swell though.
04/12/2008 at 19:13 davidAlpha says:
ah finally something to fill the gaping wound GTA IV left
04/12/2008 at 19:27 Alex says:
Reminds me of melon racing in Gmod.
04/12/2008 at 19:29 Calabi says:
I think it needs more balls.
04/12/2008 at 20:38 suibhne says:
@Sponge: No, he means “cue” – as in “cue card” or “stage cue”. Tho “queue” wouldn’t be entirely out of place.
04/12/2008 at 21:02 Diziet says:
Damn… that’s actually really good fun. I wonder what they were thinking when they came up with this. Also bonus points because it’s not flash AND they link straight through to a good mac osx dmg file with which you do not need to restart firefox. Good game, smooth ‘install’ process and no restarts.
04/12/2008 at 22:13 TheLordHimself says:
@suibhne
Isn’t that what Sponge is saying…?!
04/12/2008 at 22:18 tactics fish says:
Walker’s made a sneaky edit so suibhne and Sponge’s comments make no sense!
04/12/2008 at 22:27 John Walker says:
I love to undermine grammatical corrections in comment threads : )
04/12/2008 at 22:41 Devan says:
Well, it wouldn’t be a correction if it wasn’t corrected, would it? :)
04/12/2008 at 23:57 Valentin Galea says:
This Unity stuff is starting to pick up! I quite like it:D
I forgot I had it installed on Firefox and I was delighted to just click on the link and just enter straight in the game:)
05/12/2008 at 00:48 Cycle says:
Well, there was Milo’s Astro Lanes on the N64 which added many twists to bowling, including bizzare lanes with ramps and spirals. Also had powerups!
http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=WkxzwRBQSBg
Only video on youtube… very choppy recording of one of the more traditional lanes.
05/12/2008 at 03:36 mutiny sound says:
Call me when there’s a vertically upwards bowling mod.
06/12/2008 at 06:46 TeeJay says:
Doesn’t work for me :(
I just get a static fuzzy brown-splodge picture and sounds, and then when I fall off the course a picture of a flower flashes up.
Can’t see any links to help me find out what’s wrong – probably something graphics related on my crappy laptop?
17/03/2009 at 15:53 super neil says:
it does not work the screen turns black