Weird physical science.
By NBCL

We all love a bit of mountain-biking on the lav, don't we - and now, you, umm, can!

Phew, thank Christ for that. I’m dying for a shot on Bike or Die!

Bike Or Die!, "The only Trial Bike game for the Palm OS Platform", is, erm, just that. You are a little dude, on a little bike, and your mission is to navigate numerous landscapes of varying terrain, collecting red flags and making your way to the finish. Simple. To help you get there, you’ve got some pretty basic controls: accelerate, which makes you do a big wheelie and eventually fall off onto your head; brake, which makes you do a big front-wheel endo and fall off onto your head; and "correction", which rotates your bike one way or the other, and generally results in you falling off onto your head.

Make no mistake, this game is difficult. It carries no pretense of realism - instead, the atmosphere you ride through is strangely devoid of gravity, meaning your biker seems to float through the air, gracefully, before you fall off and hit your head. Sometimes, for a change of pace, you can run into a wall and hit your head. And it's very easy to get disillusioned to begin with, as you slowly meander around the courses, trying not to hit your head.

Bike or Die? Looks like that would be “Die”, then.

And then you will download another Palm OS demo and wonder why you didn't buy a Nintendo DS - let's face it, Palm devices are pretty shit for organising yourself with.

WAIT.

This isn't how it should be.

And indeed this isn't actually how it is, because there's one little trick this game has up its sleeve, and that’s online ranking. It only takes a few minutes of gawping at the top replays for each level and witnessing the mastery some people have over the once-believed-to-be-impossible to control bike. They ride on the ceiling, or leap huge distances into the air from what seems like nothing, utilising the bounce of the bike's suspension. And you look at your own pathetic, flaccid results and grit your teeth because you know you can do that. You know you can do better than that. You will beat the bike.

Invariably though, you won't do better than that. But the rush of determination is all you need to conquer this game - you'll soon realise how things work and soon you'll be bouncing off walls and acting like you have rocket farts in no time. The bike will become easy, nay, a joy to control. Rather than making your head its bitch, the bike becomes your bitch. That’s not to say that it won't still throw you off frequently, though.

Lance Armstrong was just a shadow of his former self after winning that seventh Tour
de France.

The drive to beat your best time is actually slim, and as a standalone game this would easily get boring quickly - you finish the levels, you play something else. But ironically the thing that brings out the best in this game is the fact that somebody, somewhere out there is beating you.

And you can't have that.

September 2005

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