Fig 8. is a stylistic Time Waster

While I've written about plenty of great online games, sometimes a Time Waster really surprises me. That's the case with Fig 8, a very stylistic and unique game. In it, you control an old-fashioned bicycle as it rides along a page of old-style diagrams. Your tires trace lines as you go, and the goal of the game is to get as far as you can as the window scrolls over more and more of the page while avoiding riding the bike into any of the digrams.

Making things more difficult is the fact that the bike's rear tire, like on a real bike, doesn't necessarily trace the same route the front tire does, particularly at slow speeds. So you need to be extra careful when weaving through spaces to line yourself up ahead of time.

As you go, there are checkpoints so that you can continue without having to start from scratch, though they seem to be spread very far apart. As you go, you collect points, and your points are multiplied substantially for every moment that your tires trace the exact same line. If you hold the Shift key, you can slow down your steering, which makes it easier to keep your multiplier going, but much more difficult to avoid obstacles.

Probably my favorite part of the game is that the music is appropriate for the style of the game, and it progresses along with you. The creator of this game gave a lot of thought to style, while at the same time inventing a unique and addicting gameplay.

Tags: bicycle, checkpoints, fig 8, fig-8, Fig8, gameplay, music, obstacles, slow speeds, slow-speeds, SlowSpeeds, timewasters, trace lines, trace-lines, TraceLines, window scrolls, window-scrolls, WindowScrolls