{"id":330,"date":"2026-08-10T12:49:42","date_gmt":"2026-08-10T12:49:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/spooky.punchingrobots.com\/public\/?p=330"},"modified":"2026-08-10T19:32:04","modified_gmt":"2026-08-10T19:32:04","slug":"ride-to-hell-retribution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spooky.punchingrobots.com\/public\/ride-to-hell-retribution\/","title":{"rendered":"Ride To Hell Retribution"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Ride To Hell has a bad rap and there isn\u2019t really a paragraph of Cara\u2019s excellent breakdown of WhyItIsNotVeryGoodTM<\/a> 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\u2019ve ever seen and that\u2019s a thing I never really thought I\u2019d find myself typing out when writing about a videogame but there we are.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Really, everything everyone says about it, well, it\u2019s not really wrong.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I picked it up earlier in the year. It was cheap and long removed from Steam anyway. Why not, right? Yeah, I\u2019m the guy who buys all the bad games anyway, sorry about that. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve known plenty of people over the years who\u2019d see this as their absolute perfect game. I used to drink with folks who I\u2019m sure had this existed 20 odd years ago would have passed it around with the same excitement they reserved for piling into someone\u2019s 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\u2019s the most hairy old stoner biker videogame I\u2019ve ever played and I appreciate it for that. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s for these guys<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a lot of ways, I like Ride To Hell because it\u2019s that. It serves a very particular and probably quite out of time niche in the videogame pantheon. It\u2019s a videogame for people who don\u2019t 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\u2019t seem too big a leap to me to imagine that if Ride To Hell were a film, it\u2019d 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\u2019s 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\u2019ll 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\u2019s sort of how it goes isn\u2019t it?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m not here to defend the game or what\u2019s in it. I don\u2019t think I\u2019d have the heart really and it\u2019d 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\u2019s folks I\u2019d met who\u2019d really go for this and I enjoyed it because it\u2019s unintentionally hilarious at times. By the time you\u2019ve realised you can keep punching a dude you\u2019re supposed to be fighting and he won\u2019t hit the deck but you can carry on punching anyway<\/em> 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\u2019s 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\u2019s Plays doesn\u2019t do it the justice it deserves, no matter how poor a game some folk think it is.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Originally published on Take This Machine, 21st November 2015<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ride To Hell has a bad rap and there isn\u2019t really a paragraph of Cara\u2019s excellent breakdown of WhyItIsNotVeryGoodTM 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\u2019ve ever seen and that\u2019s a thing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Another rescued from the archives, Ride to Hell: Retribution (or how much dry humping can you squeeze into one singular game)","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[26],"tags":[79,110,109,80],"class_list":["post-330","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-videogames","tag-archive","tag-bikers","tag-ride-to-hell","tag-take-this-machine"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spooky.punchingrobots.com\/public\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spooky.punchingrobots.com\/public\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spooky.punchingrobots.com\/public\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spooky.punchingrobots.com\/public\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spooky.punchingrobots.com\/public\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=330"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/spooky.punchingrobots.com\/public\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":366,"href":"https:\/\/spooky.punchingrobots.com\/public\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330\/revisions\/366"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spooky.punchingrobots.com\/public\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=330"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spooky.punchingrobots.com\/public\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=330"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spooky.punchingrobots.com\/public\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=330"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}