#oneaday, Day 189: Keeping Score

I used to hate maths lessons when I was younger. I mean pure, unbridled hatred; we’re talking full on teenage strops here. Not at school, obviously—that would be bad and wrong of course, and would have done enormous damage to my “he’s a good kid” reputation, something which was only really damaged once when I punched a bully in the face in front of the headteacher (it was justified… well, not the headteacher bit)—but… what was I saying? Oh right, maths and strops. No, maths homework used to piss me off enormously. I never used to see the point of it. Particularly the more esoteric, abstract side of things. When was I ever going to need to measure a triangle? (I know, now.) When was I ever going to need to “solve” an algebraic equation with no numbers in it? (I’m still a little stumped on this one.) What the fuck is a logarithm? (I still don’t know; that’s one thing we never did at GCSE, and I gave up at A-level.)

But as much as anyone may hate maths, those little beasts, the numbers, creep into anything and everything we do. And sometimes they provide enormous amounts of entertainment.

Last night my soon-to-be-married friend Sam came by to drink some obscenely strong cider and play some video games. I casually suggested we try out Joe Danger on the PS3, as I’d downloaded it a while back and hadn’t done much with it, and Sam likes those impossibly-difficult physics-based motorcycle games that are all over the Internet. So we did, fueled by aforementioned obscenely strong cider.

Very quickly, we discovered Joe Danger‘s appeal. Racking up ridiculous scores. Much like the Tony Hawk’s series that once was, the joy in Joe Danger comes from stringing tricks together to get a huge score with a huge multiplier. Sam successfully managed to score about 3 million on one level and was justifiably pleased with this. Then I remembered something about the controls, and had a go at the same level. I scored 76 million. Sam was coming back from the kitchen with another bottle of cider while I was in the process of acquiring this score.

“What the— how did you do that?” he exclaimed.

I shared the secret. And thus began three hours of playing about four levels in Joe Danger in an attempt to beat the scores of my PSN friends—something we did admirably well, beating most of my nearest rivals by a factor of at least ten and, in one case, a factor of 100.

It brought back memories of the great Geometry Wars 2 conflicts of some time back… man, those were brutal.

Sam commented that he hadn’t really held an appreciation for the value of game scores prior to that moment. Of course, they’d always been there, and they were always a good indicator of progress. But Joe Danger—something about the way you rack up points in that game is spectacularly and enormously satisfying. And addictive. We looked at the clock having thought we’d only been playing for a short while. And it was well after midnight. Okay, the obscenely strong cider may have helped with the time kompression somehow. But it’s testament to the addictive quality of Joe Danger as a game that it kept us entertained and occupied—at many times, taking over 75 attempts at a level to do it without fucking something up—for a long time.

So, once you download Joe Danger, all I’m gonna say is “shoulder buttons”. Enjoy.