#oneaday Day 679: Hold on to the night, there will be no shame

I was randomly reminded of the existence of Robot Unicorn Attack this evening, and I am pleased to report that despite Flash being long-dead, you can actually still play the original (complete with Erasure soundtrack) over at CrazyGames. We are officially living in an age where Flash, as a platform, is old enough to have Web-based emulators. Not only that, this blog is old enough to have posts referring to the original incarnation of Robot Unicorn Attack, along with its excellent Facebook-based incarnation. Now there's something I don't say very often.

For the unfamiliar, Robot Unicorn Attack is a simple, "endless runner" game with just two buttons: one to jump (which can be used again in mid-air for a double-jump), and one for a rainbow attack dash move that can break through crystal stars. Your one and only goal in Robot Unicorn Attack is to survive as long as possible and score as many points as you can across three "wishes" (lives). As the game says when you start it, "you will fail". And indeed you will. But then you will try again, and again, and again.

It's a potent example at arcade-style game design at its absolute best: provide an experience that is extremely easy to understand, even for those who don't play a lot of games, and then balance it just well enough to make it inordinately compelling rather than frustrating, but still challenging. It is unironically one of the most well-crafted games of the 2010s, and I'm glad that people have found a means of preserving it — and in a fashion that is true to its original incarnation, no less. As a Flash game, originally published by Adult Swim, Robot Unicorn Attack's home is very much on the Web, and while I certainly wouldn't be averse to having an offline version I could play at any time I want, you can't get much more convenient than just going to a website and playing using nothing more than the Z and X keys on your keyboard.

Web games are in such a strange place right now. There's always been a certain amount of cloning and overly derivative stuff, but this seems to be particularly rife these days. There are about a billion variations on the "run down the path and go through gates with numbers on them" game. I don't know what the original and first one of those was; I just know there are now so many of them it is, at times, difficult to find anything else.

It doesn't help that a lot of today's Web games are adaptations of mobile games, with all the obnoxious predatory monetisation and infestation with adverts that entails. But, like I say, I'm pleased to see that some of the all-time classics are preserved through emulation — and best of all, no-one can bitch at you about not playing on "original hardware" if you play Robot Unicorn Attack on CrazyGames, or anywhere else it might be hosted, because it always was intended to just be played right there in your browser.

Now that I've rediscovered it, I think it might be time for a high score run or twenty before bed. Sing it with me, now… always, I want to be with you, and make believe with you, and live in harmony, harmony, oh love…

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1200: It Was Just a Joke

Playing Robot Unicorn Attack 2 on the toilet earlier, a question came to me. It's been lingering in my mind for a few days, actually, but as I was there attempting to better my score and ensure supremacy for Team Rainbow in the twilight hours of the second of May, 2013 — Team Inferno probably have it in the bag, sadly — it struck me that perhaps Robot Unicorn Attack 2 is taking itself a bit too seriously.

And then this, naturally, led my mind on to ponder "how far is too far?" for things that are, essentially, jokes, memes, gags, whatever you want to call them. Because that's what the original Robot Unicorn Attack was — a joke. An immensely popular joke, yes — one million plays within a week of its release, apparently, and plenty more since then — but still a joke. This much is probably self-evident from its title. It is a game called Robot Unicorn Attack. No-one has called a video game something quite so literal and ridiculous and meant it since the 1980s.

And yet here we are in 2013 with Robot Unicorn Attack 2, a surprisingly well fleshed-out expansion of the original's "endless runner" gameplay that features online asynchronous cooperative "community" goals, an upgradeable unicorn, a levelling system, downloadable content, a bonus level unlockable if you either progress far enough in the game or stump up enough in-game currency, and all manner of other things. It's not the deepest game in the world, but it is a mobile phone game — and, more to the point, it is a mobile phone game that understands the sort of experience that is sensible and practical to put on a mobile phone. (It's also one of the less offensive examples of the "freemium" model I've seen recently, though the pop-up adverts are a bit gross.)

It's hard to explain, but it just feels a bit "wrong". It feels like it's not a joke any more. I hesitate to use the words "sold out" but… well, yes, it's sold out. It's Robot Unicorn Attack, but monetised out the wazoo to be profitable, whereas the original was a freeware Flash game that anyone could play without having to pay a penny.

I think that "monetisation" part is the key defining characteristic that determines "how far is too far" when it comes to jokes — particularly ones which started on the Internet. By the time money gets involved — i.e. it gets incorporated into something which is sold, or used to advertise something else for profit — it is probably already well past its sell-by date.

I can think of a number of examples where this has happened in advertising in particular. Take the advertisements for the price comparison website Go Compare, for example. For quite a while, these featured an irritating moustachio'd arsehole singing the service's jingle over and over again in various different styles. Everyone got immensely irritated with it. So, naturally, what the "clever" marketers did was leverage the fact that everyone was irritated with the "Go Compare Man" and put out some ads in which he was subjected to various indignities. But by that point, everyone had already pretty much just moved on to wanting to fire everyone involved with Go Compare into the sun and never hearing of their stupid company ever again. (Any time I need insurance, I will not go to their stupid site on principle any more.)

See also: the number of pointless mobile apps that have attempted to incorporate any combination of Nyan Cat, Gangnam Style, the Harlem Shake or any other "viral" sensation out there. Viral sensations are a marketer's dream — they provide a ready-made audience, so long as you can inextricably link one annoying thing with a specific brand. The audience doesn't even have to like the annoying thing — they just have to start thinking of these things not as "Gangnam Style" but as "that music off the [Brand X] advert".

I often wonder how a lot of marketers sleep at night knowing that their career is, essentially, to irritate people as much as possible. It surely can't be satisfying to flick on the TV, see a Go Compare advert and think "I did that."

Still, I guess they'd probably say the same about a games journalist's output. Oh well. Each to their own, I guess.

#oneaday, Day 329: Be A Dick Mode

With the increasing mechanical complexity and narrative ambitiousness of many modern games, it's easy to forget the purity of how gaming used to be. Just a player, a joystick, and an arbitrary number representing how "good" the player was at the game. In other words, the score.

Games with scores aren't dead, though. Far from it. And in this age of global communication thanks to the Internet, one could argue that games with scores are more relevant than they've ever been.

The reason for this? The hidden option that you won't find on any game's menu. The mode that allows you to compete against your friends and mercilessly taunt them when you prove yourself—with numbers—to be objectively better than them.

I am talking, of course, about Be A Dick Mode.

Be A Dick Mode crops up in many game, though it's not just any game with a score and leaderboards that it works with. Shatter on PSN and Steam, for example, is not an example of a game featuring a Be A Dick Mode, despite being in possession of leaderboards and scores which frequently extend into the hundreds of millions. Geometry Wars 2, conversely, has Be A Dick Mode in spades. After Burner Climax? No dick action there. Pac-Man Championship Edition DX? Dickishness in spades.

There are few games with a more powerful, potent Be A Dick Mode than Adult Swim's seminal two-button masterpiece Robot Unicorn Attack, however. It was bad enough when the game was first released on Adult Swim's website. Twitter became awash with screenshots of everyone's latest and greatest high scores.

But now, they've gone and embraced Be A Dick Mode with open, err, arms.

How have they done this, you may ask. Simple: put it on Facebook.

For all Facebook's faults, privacy concerns and stupid, stupid UI redesigns, the one thing that it is magnificent at is promoting friendly (and not-so-friendly) competition between diverse friends across the globe. The ability for Facebook applications to access your name, profile picture and activity in applications you have in common with your friends was a masterstroke, privacy concerns aside. There's nothing better than looking at a leaderboard filled with the real names and photographs (or avatars) of your friends and seeing yourself at the top of it.

And there's nothing worse than seeing yourself in second place, with first place tantalisingly out of reach. There's nothing worse than knowing that the next time you log onto Twitter, there will be an @mention in your direction inviting you to check out Facebook and suggesting you might want to play some Robot Unicorn Attack instead of whatever it was you were planning on doing.

And then you play Robot Unicorn Attack. And you fail to beat your friend. And then you play it again. And some more. And then you get annoyed, so you go and play Bejeweled Blitz instead, but then you realise that someone else has pipped you to the top of the scoreboard on that too, so you go back to Robot Unicorn Attack and play it until that Erasure song has burnt itself into your memory and you can't see a field of horses without wanting to sing and fart rainbows at them.

In short, Be A Dick Mode will ruin your life and the lives of your friends. But you know you wouldn't have it any other way.