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Punching Robots 2084

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Byte Driver


A screenshot from Byte Driver. It's a black and white racing game done in the style of a Vectrex game. The mountains in the background are lines, the road is a bendy line, the car is also made up of lines.

Byte Driver is a neo-vectrex vroom vroom videogame. The vroom vroom is important because Byte Driver is speedy in a very specific early eighties arcade/home computer kind of way.

It’s a game where every turn is a really wide turn, every straight a chance to try and go fast without crashing into a mine, some bullets, or something videogamey.

You go forward, you go fast. You take a turn, you go fast. Vroom Vroom.

Sometimes, you slow down to hack a car and then you have to make a choice really fast. Hacking a car throws up a menu with some goodies to choose from, which is so far so videogame, except you’re still in a car going fast. That’s still going fast whilst you try and choose whether you want to upgrade something or cadge some energy in order to survive, in case you weren’t managing to keep up.

Without energy, you won’t be going fast any longer. You won’t be going anywhere because it’ll be game over.

Here’s a quick video to show how it works:

Yeah, yeah, I died pretty quick there, you can stop laughing now.

Byte Driver is available on Steam and Itch in exchange for some money. Needless to say, I enjoyed it.

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