By Kieron Gillen on September 20th, 2010 at 7:59 pm.
I’ve talked about my love for Robot Unicorn Attack before. That said, that short paragraph isn’t nearly enough. Frankly, this Canabalt-elaboration is one of my favourite games of the year. I’m terrible at it though, thus going onto the adult swim leaderboards is a bit of a waste of time. Now, however, it’s on Facebook, meaning you can challenge your friends and create a more even playing field with your equally useless friends. Hurrah! Of course, if you’re not on Facebook, and you haven’t played it, you can still play it here.
I wanna be with you, and make believe with you
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ
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AAaaaaalwayssssssssss………
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and live in harmony harmony always!
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do not want facebook games.
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I’m sorry, what?? If it weren’t for you, I’d never go near that thing. It totally looks like a 4chan trolling attempt. It even has the exact same music AND title: http://encyclopediadramatica.com/Robot_Unicorn_Attack
So I had to really make sure the posting was not someone doing a SQL injection.
Because of you I actually went to the site, and clicked play. OMG. Sorry, I can’t play that. It’s like playing a Meatspin-themed game in a Japanese twitch-inducing color scheme. There are things, you just can’t unsee.
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Good sir!
I highly recommend you look into acquiring a funnybone. It is most delicious and allows one ot enjoy such frivolous entertainments as this here jumping, dashing robot unicorn. Life is not worth living without jumping, dashing robot unicorns.
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Bleh Facebook… The really cool kids use MySpace! When will those silly people learn?
Ah! Don’t hit me! I don’t use either.
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Ugh, I don’t know how did my post end up as a reply here…
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The song in the game is fantastic, anyone know what it is? Or if it’s on Spotify.
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“Always”, Erasure.
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Thanks! How did I not realise that was Erasure? I feel ashamed.
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Do not worry, Gonzo. There will be no shame.
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Leader boards make so much more sense when it’s a leader board only among your friends. After all I don’t care how I compare to random strangers on the Internet.
That being said I just noticed how unfair the scoring system in the game is. You need to build up chains of destroyed stars to get high scores, but sometimes it’s just impossible to tell which path will contain the next star. And if you miss one your multiplier goes down to 1 again.
My score is just over 30.000 right now, which is just embarrassing. But I blame my laptop’s bad screen: Whenever the game accelerates, I just can’t see the stars in advance, because everything gets a little blurry.
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Young Padawan, one does not see the stars–one knows they are there. Equally, do not try to dash through the stars or jump the gaps. Simply step aside and allow the pure gameplay to unfold.
This shit be zentastic.
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When I first played flOw, I read a big long wanky piece on what “flow” in the context of a game meant and how to maintain it etc. This game, this silly old bit of double-jumping unicorn rainbow, this game is the very essence of flow.
When you play a good Wish well into the 20ks, your brain cannot afford to waste braincycles on anything other than pure reaction. The world is gently tuned out, and only the game matters–the game, the sounds, the music, your eyes on the right edge of the screen, a very low lizard part of your brain anticipating patterns and sending lightning-quick commands do your fingers. It is pure bliss.
And the song, dear Rockers, Paperers, and Shotgunners–the song is fabulous.
If there’s one thing I have to say about the facebook version, it is that I get random stutters that I didn’t get on the original version. I like to think it’s just the game interfacing with Facebooks (my fingers were trying real hard to type Faecebooks) humongous Do Evil API, but yeah, when you’re whizzing past at four times the speed of AWESOME, an 0.2s slowdown can end a run.
I’d love an offline remake of this. Really solid coding in an engine with a little more sparkles, fullscreen mode, one hundred percent fluid and no slow-downs. That is the only possible way to improve on this brilliant game.
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You can get it in full screen. You have to download the .swf, run it in your browser and press F11. Unfortunately this breaks the high score tracking.
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Which is the whole purpose of playing it on facebook anyway – the score tracking.
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Oh and I also get stutters, but it’s not random, it’s always mid jump, or near jump, almost as if when it’s loading the next bit of land (before you can see it). And the game keeps failing to register key strokes – which is a pain.
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of HARMONY.
HARMONY HARMONY
oh love.
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my highest score is 52,000, and I feel like a hero achieving it. Apparently this is a resoundingly pathetic high score, but pffff!
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I think I once got 66000, thought this was amazing, then my female friend who doesn’t play videogames got 80000 in go. I don’t understand it.
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As I read this, the sound of a gauntlet crashing to the ground echoed through my mind.
I refuse to lose to someone who doesn’t play videogames.
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My girlfriend’s highscore is 130,506, utterly dwarfing mine.
Perhaps it’s the affinity that girls share with unicorns, or perhaps something in their mind is simply more purely driven to see as many robot dolphins on screen at once?
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The game would be NOTHING without Erasure.
Bless ‘em.
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And suddenly DRUGS, THOUSANDS OF THEM
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God, I want more Erasure in games…
(used to annoy fellow office FPS players in the 90′s by blasting “Pop!” during LAN Quake sessions)
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“God, I want more Erasure in games…”
THIS IS TRUE!
KG
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Sadly Always and Little Respect are their only 2 great songs – they have a few other good ones, but mostly it’s album filler.
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God, I want more Queensrÿche in games…There, I fix’d it for ya…you can thank me later ;)
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I dunno’, I’d put Stop, Chains of Love, Blue Savannah Song and Ship of Fools up there too…
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Chorus had some good songs, too. Everything after that was shit though.
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There will be no shame.
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Great game, great song, doesn’t need facebook.
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Now everything I look at scrolls slowly to the right
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Wowies – I’ve not played many games after a little bit of alcohol, but one-and-a-half drinks later and I’m performing so much better! Knights Tippler, unite!
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Hit 80,000. Never want to play again. May play again tomorrow. Love the song. Game design is actually quite smart risk/reward with the chaining score system and the stars being worth big points but also dangerous to try for while descending from a jump. Landscape is only very rarely unfairly generated.
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Ah, I forgot to mention. My Flash in Firefox keeps stuttering. I actually turned off antivirus to try and play this unicorn game better.
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In case you didn’t realize – that page on Encyclopedia Dramatica was created entirely after this game was released.
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