RedLynx Trials 2: Second Edition is one of the oldest templates remixed for the Internet age. It follows the Kikstart/Stunt Biker template, where you make your way across a side-scrolling obstacle course. There are four controls - lean forward, lean back, accelerate and brake. By manipulating these, you have to do things like climb ramps, mount tyres and career wildly down a wooden Rollercoaster course at a significant proportion of the speed of light.
If you had to make that game with modern technology, what would you add? Well, you would increase the physics massively, creating a much more authentic experience - as authentic as a clearly artificial game concept can be, anyway. Probably a better way of describing it would be "more interesting". Oh, and the physics clearly has to go to work on the ragdolls, meaning that when you misjudge a gap and slightly over-accelerate there's a winceworthy collision as your rider's face hits the obstacle, while your bike happily trundles on. The first fifteen minutes of play in Trials 2, the beneficiary of these what-ifs, will be pretty much constant laughter at the ludicrousness of the collisions. In the hours that follow, there'll still be moments that force a gasp or a yelp.
RedLynx has slashed 80% off of its arcade racing game Trials 2 Second Edition, offering the title for just $2 through the middle of the week.
Eurogamer writes: "After 10 years, you become pessimistic that nobody's going to buy the game," says Antti Ilvessuo, creative director at RedLynx, but with a laugh. He's talking about how he felt going into Trials HD, this summer's big success story on Xbox Live Arcade. He's relaxed because Trials HD has sold over 500,000 copies, which translates to about five million quid.
RedLynx, not entirely surprisingly, turns out to be an office of petrolheads, where lunch-breaks consist of stunt-biking and hospital visits. Nestled in a stark, concrete portion of an otherwise picturesque Helsinki, Finland, it's a quiet place. The building used to house architects, so the small team of 25 people is spread around half a dozen rooms, some for iPhone teams and others for other things. Trials may be the game RedLynx is mostly widely known for, but the developer has done a lot more than the bike stuff."
probably one of the most loved/hated (at the same time) games on the market at the moment. They have made a great game and deserve all the success they get with it and then they give back as well. there are certain developers out there that could teach the rest a thing or 2 about customer and community satisfaction.
10/10
Trials developer RedLynx has admitted that in order to market its PC title it leaked it to torrent sites for pirates on the same day it was released to paying consumers.
The pirated version of the game does not include support for leaderboards, said company CEO Tero Virtala, a crucial feature that is the "soul" of the game. Without it, he hoped users of the hacked version would want to upgrade to the legitimate copy once they began enjoying the game.
"Piracy is here, so how can we take advantage of that? What we did actually, on day one, we put that game immediately on all the torrent networks ourselves," revealed Virtala, during a panel discussion at Develop Liverpool yesterday.
