NOCLIP Pocket E91 - Seventy Percent Gamer - Rollerdrome

The podcast is watching. Welcome back to the podcast! Today, we’re going to be talking about Rollerdrome, a game that mixes the extreme sports of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater with the extreme crime of gun violence. In Rollerdrome, you are tasked with eliminating all the enemies that spawn in waves within a level while performing tricks to reload your guns, and doing so quickly to maintain combos and end up with a high score. Maybe the concept doesn’t sound simple at first, because it isn’t, but even so the game is still much harder than you might expect at the outset. The game’s short length means that compared to the amount of time you have to practice for it, the challenge ramps up quickly, with levels in the first round of the game being able to kill you repeatedly if you aren’t careful, and probably still a few times even if you are. Is the game worth learning well enough to push through these difficult stages? I’d say yes. The act of getting better at this game is incredibly satisfying because the mechanics all play so well into each other. Your weapons all serve very distinct purposes and each contain different mechanics to get used to, like timing or charge-up mechanics, but all feed off of the same ammo pool, meaning that managing your resources by sprinkling tricks in wherever possible is a major part of keeping combos up and even just surviving. This means that when it clicks, your runs look very fluid, improvisational, but controlled. We’re going to be talking about, yes, the difficulty and how we each felt it handled it, the game’s light narrative, and we discuss the pros and even better pros of being able to skate on a huge monster’s ass. Thank you for joining us again this week! Rollerdrome is one of the rare video game ass video games done for Pocket, and one that didn’t really take me by surprise. But just because I got exactly what I expected from it doesn’t mean it isn’t great. Did you feel that Rollerdrome was a satisfying challenge, or are we babies? Let us know in the comments, or over on our Discord! Next time we’re going to be talking about The Fall, which is an ancient (by today’s standards) indie adventure game, so we hope you’ll join us then.