Road Madness

About this game

Road Madness is a top-down driving game played in a tall, narrow frame, looking straight down at a four-lane highway with a painted centre divider. Your car sits low on the screen and the road scrolls up past it while traffic arrives from ahead.

The header carries three readouts and no timer: a heart figure that starts at 100, a cash total, and a distance in metres that begins at zero. Distance is the thing that grows, damage is the thing that limits it, and cash is what a run leaves behind.

How to play

The game states its own control before the first run: tap and hold to move. It draws a mouse and a pair of keyboard arrows beneath the car, and both work, so you can steer by holding a direction or by pressing left and right.

Changing lane is the whole of the input. A grey arrow slides across the road to mark the lane the game is pushing you toward, and traffic occupies the others, so the run is a sequence of decisions about which gap to take rather than about speed.

Tips

• Commit to a lane early rather than drifting between two. Holding a direction moves you continuously, so hesitating in the painted divider leaves the car straddling two lanes with no gap available in either.
• Read the far end of the frame, not the bonnet. The road scrolls toward you at a fixed rate, so a gap noticed at the top of the screen can still be reached, while one noticed level with the car cannot.
• Treat the health figure as a budget rather than a warning. It opens at 100 and there is no timer forcing the run to end, so a run finishes when that number is spent, and a scrape taken early costs exactly as much as one taken late.

Provider details

The provider's listing files Road Madness under action and cars online. Its embedded build is version 1.0.2. The interface keeps no account: the health figure, the cash total and the metre count are all presented in the header of the run itself.