Split/Second is a racing game, and it is dairy-product buffet, a veritable milk-n-slide of cheese, ice cream, and butter that will leave you worshiping a golden calf.
Unlike Mario Kart, a racing game that is like a conversation with your company's new CMO that you're begging for a departmental budget increase, Split/Second is a racing game that resembles a conversation with God. Scratch that, Split/Second is a conversation with Zeus and his Olympian brothers and sisters, and you are a four-wheeled demi-god, and you are gonna land on the finish line with just a massive engine and a fistful of prayers. You know who you should worship: you worship drift, you worship draft, you worship hang-time, and you worship reflexes, dodging around your enemies attacks, and you hope the gods are watching, and you keep those hopes close to your heart.
The blessings they return to you in exchange are mixed and riddled with word-play and semantics. Princesses will be turned into trees and statues will turn into ladies! Did you wish the world would explode around your rivals and crown you King of Springtime by default? Be careful what you wish for, that fire might consume you as well. Did you wish a crane would fall on the driver in first place? That driver might be a more skilled warrior than you, and he might dodge the attack, using that goodwill with the gods to earn more destructive favors.
The game is rigged. Actually, at first glance, it's rigged, but, see, it's rigged against everybody. The game hates sentient intelligence, be it organic or digital, so maybe at your third glance, you realize it isn't rigged, it just contains a ton of luck, and not just luck, but transparency. Hoo-doggie is this a blow to people that go into a videogame expecting blind devotion in return. People will run circles around a map in Call of Duty, get shot in the head, and shriek about the unfairness as if they're exposing an super-dang-secret, invisible alien-annihilation plot, gosh-darn it! Well, Split/Second flips the script and strips everybody in the room naked, and states, "Yeah, there's a ton of luck involved. Watcha gonna do, nipple-dick?" Your brain will do some mental gymnastics, understand luck's confessed omnipresence, apply Math, multiply it by skill, and really begin to compete. Watching poker on TV is boring as shit, men sitting around a table is only exciting to the bedridden -- literally, metaphorically, and psychologically -- and yet it proves the game is not entirely luck, because there is such a thing as a good poker player. Even when they're counting cards and trying to stay cool, there is skill, there is manipulation of the odds, and there is luck, and there is prayer.
We in the bizness call that "hope." Remember that? Throwing all your brainpower at something and "hoping." Nut up, you cunts. Every day isn't Thanksgiving. You can't eat everything at the buffet, but you can eat better than everybody else if you know what you're doing. That's how life works. Analyze, learn, understand, and hope.
Split/Second begins as rhino-ride around your back yard, your parents' inevitable stern lecture be damned -- because, rhinos! They tear up the sod and leave dung-piles as big as Klingons. It's fun for a while. Then, like every good game should, Split/Second evolves and it demands you evolve with it, otherwise a hyper-evolved fish-bird with wings and talons will eat your slithering ass in a great example of Darwinism. So you must learn. You begin to aim your rhino. You want him to rip up trees and hope they wreck the other racers. Then you realize a rhino, like, wait the heck-on, isn't a tame beast, in fact, none of the rhinos in the race are. So you appeal to a higher power, hoping to gain better control. Well, the proposed agreement that is presented by the gods is that they'll listen to your prayers, and they may even manipulate the world for you, but you have to sit and watch these assholes in their pantheon deliberate. Yeah, they're totes talking about you!
Sorry, friend, if you can't help yourself, you're on God-time. Remember that Fate's Customer Service Hotline ain't great. You're the one that's unhappy enough with your dealt hand to trade in four of your five cards, and now everybody knows you have one of the aces. Take a number. The deity will see you when they feel like it.
It's a look into the sausage factory. You see every element in the race being considered -- luck, speed, skill, aptitude, foreknowledge of the track, and timing and patience. You will not be handed a lightning bolt and told to shrink-encrunshen the entire field of racers. Your blessings are intrinsically linked to your own racing-aptitude. It's all in real-time and you're constantly commanding a modicum of control, more and more if you've driven a lot of races, naturally. You trigger the powerplay properly and you see the nuclear cooling tower drop on your competition, just as you hoped. You see the unfair speed-boost given to the AI drivers. You sense the hand of God strangling you from behind as you claim the lead, all too-wary that the rest of the field will catch up if you don't drive the fucking wheels off your car -- and even then, they still might. You see the opposition's miraculous immunity to the explosions you triggered and stomp your feet in frustration, enraged that you have to compete in this race, marionette strings exposed and invulnerable as they are. No favoritism is made for you, human, you are on equal footing with everyone else, and if you can't deal with this sex-with-lights-on scenario, then you have only been lying to yourself about how much you love competition, and fairness, and explosions. It's a game of luck and skill where everything is visible. You have to accept that.
The game isn't easy, especially as you learn it, and you definitely hit a wall, overcome it, and then when you get a car that can hit mach-5 and drift with the spiky friction of a steel-wool sponge on soaped-up morgue's floor, you get a flow. All that anxiety about life you felt earlier were just your awkward teenage years. Welcome to adulthood.
-- @Alex Crumb (originally published 10/17/12)
