Screen peeking during Call of Duty deathmatches, 'accidentally' knocking the controller out of your mate's hand while playing FIFA, ramming into the back of other cars in Gran Turismo: everyone's cheated during couch multiplayer sessions just to get ahead. Super Impossible Road will take all the guilt out of taking shortcuts in racers by making it an integral part of the experience when it comes to PlayStation 4 this year.
The follow up to Impossible Road, which debuted in 2013 on iOS and Android, Super Impossible Road is a four player split-screen multiplayer racer from one-person indie developer Wonderful Lasers. You're put in charge of guiding a rolling ball down a procedurally generated course, attempting to beat up to five opponents to the finish line.
Since there's no rubber banding to even the odds, the only way you'll be victorious is to go off-road, leap into the abyss, and cross your fingers that you'll land on a piece of track before you blip out of existence and reset back where you started.
Though there's a lot of WipEout and Mario Kart in here, developer Kevin Ng tells 12DOVE that Super Impossible Road's true inspiration "was probably Geoff Crammond's Stunt Car Racer, which really captured my imagination as a kid. The jumps, the banked corners and sense of vertigo were amazing for the time. It was essentially a roller coaster that you could drive on".
The roller coaster metaphor is apt here too; in Super Impossible Road there are no brakes, there are no barriers, and the speed of the game as you rocket round the winding tracks starts at 'cor, that's quick' and just gets faster from there. All this is presented in a future-minimalist palette, and ticks along at a rock-solid 60 frames per second in 1080p. The game is due later in 2015.
