Back to the road

Knuckle Road

Knuckle Road remakes the arcade mode of Road Rash (EA, 1996 Windows port, known in China as 暴力摩托 and the version I played) as one race shared by whoever is on the road right now. While you race, you can punch and kick whoever rides beside you. W rides, A and D steer, J punches and K kicks; on a phone the left thumb rides a stick and the right thumb fights.

To race another person, each of you presses the gold Humans only button, then Accept. The race leaves ten seconds after the last of you joins. Race with NPCs is for riding alone.

What good means here

A good race is a few friends in one room on one road. It races like a race, the road and the riders look right, a punch lands with weight, the music sets each road's mood, and nothing strange pulls anyone out of it.

Right means the game I played. Remakes usually keep a game's story and replace its mechanics (Neill Hoch, 2020); I kept the mechanics, because the original is no longer sold (Video Game History Foundation, 2023). My first plan, written from memory, left out the police and both weapons, so every mechanic now has a sourced row in the ledger saying whether I copied, adapted or left it out. The look is matched against 137 screenshots.

A punch has weight only if it starts on the keypress. Bernier (2001) calls deciding whose screen is believed "a game design decision", and I made Valve's choice, as Gambetta describes: your browser runs the server's simulation for your own rider and draws everyone else slightly behind. The cost, in decision 1, is that you punch where the server says a rider is, a little off from where you saw them. A club cracks on a helmet with a recorded sound. Each road plays its own recorded rock track, in place of a synthesised loop that sounded thin and made the five roads blur together.

Strange means what a player would notice: two bikes inside each other, a rider stuttering as you pass, a race lost to a slow network. The first two are tests now, and the netcode is ridden at 300 ms with 3% loss before it ships.

Wilson (2012) makes games "confrontational" because that makes play in a room festive, and Shirky (2004) and Sloan (2020) argue for software made for a few people. So a room holds eight, each in leathers nobody else there wears, NPCs fill only the empty seats, and your browser is your rider, with no account (decision 2). Everyone starts on one GO, anyone can watch at /live, whoever knocks you off is named the next time you meet, and /leaderboard keeps everyone who has raced.

Which claims are tested, and which are judged

A test in spec/ or a script on the deployed app holds every claim above except three, which are judged: the look, frame beside frame against 137 screenshots; the music, by ear; and a punch's weight, by playing it and reading every frame on a contact sheet. The tests catch a blow that moves wrongly, but no test can say whether it feels heavy. The checks list which test or script holds which claim.

What I left out

Sources