Day 303 - On the Road Again
Racing, Short and Free, Immersive Sim ·
Skeeter’s Take:
On the Road Again, despite its simplicity, is actually kind of fun.
You steer a big rig around barriers as it barrels towards the finish line. The finish line is made out of black and white checkered blocks, which fall over when the truck crashes into them. That’s pretty entertaining.
On one of the levels, there was a stack of hay that the game encourages you to run through. You learn on this level that the haystacks don’t restart the run and can essentially be ignored. Then a few levels later, there’s a barn with an opening for the truck to drive through sitting in the middle of the track, and a haystack in the middle of that opening. I was surprised to find a wood “game-restarting” barrier hiding behind the stack of hay I had just bowled through. That was some Dark Souls BS.
While I was surprised by today’s game being decently fun, I really chose it because the name would allow me to talk about a very strange rabbit hole I went down on Youtube. I won’t be talking about On the Road Again, again, so if that’s what you were here for I just wanted to let you know that the train is about to leave the tracks, and it’s your last chance to step off.
The almighty YouTube algorithm served me up an intriguing video of some kid cleaning the piano in the O’ Hare Airport.
I was reading the comment and saw this nice comment:
But wait a second, 31 replies? Most of the comments had 4 or 5 comments on them, how could this possibly have 31 replies.
Enter to the stage our catalyst, bertjesklotepino:
I was impressed. Maybe more confused and interested. I absolutely had to know how ol’ bert over there took a nice comment about how impressive it was for some kid to clean a piano in an airport and make it about humanity being unable to land on the Moon. I had to know more, but thankfully, all I had to do was scroll down:
And so I did, in fact look up Helium 3 from my trusted source “Wikipedia”. I’ll give bert some credit. Pretty interesting read:
To answer bert’s question, I think the “excuse” for not mining seems to be that most discoveries in this field are recent and there are still some doubts about if it’s even possible. And it also sounds like China is actively doing research into seeing if this is a real possibility. You’d know that, bert, if you looked up Helium 3.
Unfortunately, I think twichytail also did some research, because he came in swinging with a sick logistics line:
And is he wrong? It seems to me that bert thinks progress is inevitable and it’s not human beings making incredible breakthroughs that make it happen, and that sometimes things fail or don’t work out.
But boy, bert wasn’t having any of that. I was wrong. bert had looked into Helium 3.
I can kind of see bert’s point. We figured out how to get trucks to run on LNG, Liquid Natural Gas. We can use a drone to drop a peanut on a top of a civilian, she, and the child. We have no excuse for not being able to automate a Helium 3 Moon mining and nuclear fission program with robots!
The last line reeked of “Moon Landing was Faked” energy, and bert does in fact spiral into that and argues with some other commenters about that very idea, so I’ll spare you the rest of the bert comments. Well, except this one:
First of all, I’m amazed he managed to bring it back around to the piano cleaning video. However, it is highly ironic that he’s admiring knowledge and understanding of how to do a job, but is talking like he understands the difficulty of automating robots. He’s so close. He so close to turning that mirror back on himself.
I had to know how this guy was. I went to his youtube channel and he only has 3 videos, one of which is a 10 year old bandicam stamped relic of some footage of a flight simulator game. The other two are videos of bert driving a big truck while filming a car 50 yards behind him through his mirrors while he complains about their driving. Those videos were named “on the Road again”, bringing it all full circle.
On both of these trucking videos there is a very special commenter. One might say, a true hero. UFObuilder:
What cracks me up even more is that in each of these video bert has pinned some long winded comment to the top of the section.
That’s what UFObuilder responded to, not the video, but the pinned comment:
And I find that very funny.
Turns out UFObuilder also has a YouTube channel with three videos, one of which is this absolute banger:
I just can’t wait to get on the road again!
Recommend: yeah
Replay Percentage Chance: nope
Time Played: 9 minutes
Sam’s Take:
There is no way I can compete with what Skeeter has posted today.
The game is simple and functional, but doesn’t really stand out in the sea of Itch games. Gotta give props to a functional physics game though. Good learning everybody!
The idea of posting your moon landing conspiracies on random YouTube videos and thinking everyone else are idiots is just such a fascinating hill to die on.
Recommend: Soft no, but whatever man
Replay Percentage Chance: 1%
Time Played: 3 Minutes
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