"Features momentum without being momentous."

For an incredibly slow racing game, Up 'N Down(UD) is also quite hard. It's a bit more of a pleasant combination than it sounds, making it a good game to play if you don't mind crashing out on level two. You control a mauve VW Beetle resembling a mini penny racer car through chainlinking crossroads. The object is to run over all ten flags of different color and avoid various ways to crash.

The most interesting part of UD is how you can retrace your path, which explains the game's name as your travel is actually always on a diagonal. Going backwards has its risks of course as cars tend to jump out a bit quicker from the bottom of the screen, and your car can't jump when it's in reverse. But it can save you looping through the course again(the world is apparently not only round but also very small. Although some turns are necessarily three-point, you can try any sort of retread you want(not that it's risk free,) and though the course bends back and forth the game lets you just push up and down until you get to a crossroads. Momentum is important to gauge here.

Jumping's tricky as well, and one of the game's main challenges is learning how to control yourself in midair. However, it's often not clear when you'll jump off a course and land outside. It's just as deadly as surely as a crash with the tractors and surprisingly flattened out enemies that look like they're trying to be solar powered, except for that raft on wheels. But if you do it right you can skip to another part of the course you'd have to perform some fancy turns to reach.

On the first level there's no pressing need to do jump, but later you'll run into dead ends that aren't particularly well advertised in advance. And the course starts providing for more dips and hills, which adjust your speed and leave you quite helpless. It's not as cool as Bump N Jump on the whole, though.

It's not really even as possible, either. Having two or three lanes to move down allows for some variety and mapping, but the big problem is that if you get killed, you're kicked back to the start and have to go through it all again. So it's tough to see what's ahead. Meanwhile enemy cars will be rocking back and forth in the valleys on the road unless they happen to zoom in from the top or bottom. And you'll need to inch along in a game that really feels as though it should be faster paced.

And then on the later levels it gets terrible. The other cars get faster and more vindictive of course but the roads don't seem to like you either. One path doesn't lead to a dead end until a full screen height later, with no real chance for you turning off. There are hills with dead ends you can't see, or brief grassy areas they put there for you to crash into, just because. And the worst part on very later levels: white flags, which formerly signified a color you picked up, herald a color you need to pick up again if you run through them. This makes getting through a level even with infinite lives a hassle, especially when it's tough to survive to get to some of them.

You've probably guessed how I know this, given how I've complained about the difficulty. The usual ways--and I guess I deserve it a bit for trying to crack the game quickly. But seeing the levels of complexity and challenge underneath the first level, itself not trivial, gives me a chance to pull out one of my favorite descriptive words to use, if not to read or hear: Kafkaesque. No matter what you solve, more can and will be thrown at you, and even if you solve that...well, it's one of the first car games ever, so the people behind this will think of nastier traps in the future.

Whether or not said traps look superficially more pleasant. The beaches and light shrubbery on the sides belie this all, and in fact even the chutes and slides you jump between look more pleasant and playgroundish as they get tougher--less boring than the early rigid interlocking diamonds anyway. The inexplicable ice cream cones and fruit you can pick up for extra points blend with the colorful flags to make it all seem almost idyllic as even the construction-industry trucks you need to avoid except when jumping on them don't look especially intimidating, but they don't spend their time with looking tough. Generally they just ram you. After which your car explodes as messily, if not as noisily, as that cool buggy in Moon Patrol. But the noise that is there is annoying. The theme that plays in the background lumps the same note in a pair too frequently, which makes the game feel that much more jagged.

UD provides for plenty of frustration and it's of the sort I often sense can't be all bad. There's a certain pathos to your car trying to climb up a hill, jumping, and failing before spinning back down into the inevitable crash. But it goes over the line when you see enemy cars run through each other or when it forces over-caution. It's the sort of game I can Orwellize myself into seeing as a break from work--despite my not being able to shut off my brain or truly enjoy it. A nice idea, but if I want nice ideas that explode my brain in short order I suspect philosophy books would provide more long term benefits.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 09/18/03