Ride To Hell has a bad rap and there isn’t really a paragraph of Cara’s excellent breakdown of Why It Is Not Very GoodTM that I disagree with. It is by most traditional measures A Bad Game, it is borderline unplayable, the script is hilarious, it has the most dry humping scenes in a videogame I’ve ever seen and that’s a thing I never really thought I’d find myself typing out when writing about a videogame but there we are.
Really, everything everyone says about it, well, it’s not really wrong.
I picked it up earlier in the year. It was cheap and long removed from Steam anyway. Why not, right? Yeah, I’m the guy who buys all the bad games anyway, sorry about that.
I’ve known plenty of people over the years who’d see this as their absolute perfect game. I used to drink with folks who I’m sure had this existed 20 odd years ago would have passed it around with the same excitement they reserved for piling into someone’s house after the pub to watch biker/stoner films or with the same respect they would share a tape compilation of Pink Floyd demos or something. The same folks who rolled up to every bar rock gig but sometimes were the dudes playing the bar rock at a gig. It’s the most hairy old stoner biker videogame I’ve ever played and I appreciate it for that.
It’s for these guys.
In a lot of ways, I like Ride To Hell because it’s that. It serves a very particular and probably quite out of time niche in the videogame pantheon. It’s a videogame for people who don’t really play videogames as a rule but will happily spend hours customising a bike and punching people in the face in one because, well, figure.
I just kinda think videogames get this one wrong a lot. It doesn’t seem too big a leap to me to imagine that if Ride To Hell were a film, it’d have potential cult classic written all over it and yeah, maaaaybe it should have been a film instead of a game. Or maybe not. Maybe it should have been a game and it’s us, us folk in games who need to be more tolerant of slightly rubbishy things existing and to let it be, broken and silly as it is. Because who knows what’ll get picked out in years to come as the things we come back to, right? Maybe not for the best of reasons but hey, that’s sort of how it goes isn’t it?
I’m not here to defend the game or what’s in it. I don’t think I’d have the heart really and it’d be pretty insincere. It is the game it is. I enjoyed it though. I enjoyed it because it made me smile knowing full well that there’s folks I’d met who’d really go for this and I enjoyed it because it’s unintentionally hilarious at times. By the time you’ve realised you can keep punching a dude you’re supposed to be fighting and he won’t hit the deck but you can carry on punching anyway and it becomes like the Gunpoint joke made into an actual videogame, I dunno, I found it really hard not to crease up laughing
It’s disappointing that now, if I want to play Ride To Hell, I have to hunt for it rather than just be able to nip on the internet and buy a digital download at the click of a finger because it existing mainly as a series of mocking Let’s Plays doesn’t do it the justice it deserves, no matter how poor a game some folk think it is.
Originally published on Take This Machine, 21st November 2015