Spanking Runners Steam Charts & Stats

i havend fount a way to segs or spank the runners. Moonshiners?

Sometimes I see a game so bizarre I have to get it and [i]Spanking Runners[/i] is one of the more interesting impulse purchases I've made. I've beaten the entire game and I still don't know what a [i]Spanking Runner[/i] is. At first glance it kind of looks like a Eurojank version of [i]Sonic R[/i] which it kind of is, but the actual game is even weirder than that. After a [i]very[/i] long ([i]at least[/i] 10 minutes) opening cutscene that lays out the entire [i]Spanking Runners[/i] lore (which boils down to "robots invaded because they want the planet's water), you're dropped into a hub world where you can feel out the controls and pick a race track. The game's technical aspects make a surprisingly good first impression, the hub and all of the race tracks take place on [i]Super Mario Galaxy[/i] style spherical planets which is a pretty insane feat for a game that came out in 2001. The physics also do an unexpectedly deft job at handling this unique quirk, and visually there's some impressive reflections going on. The characters have a Klasky Csupo look, like they could be extras on [i]Aaah! Real Monsters![/i] and the facial animations are surprisingly expressive and fluid, especially for the time. There's a lot of personality to [i]Spanking Runners[/i] and if the game was meant to be a tech demo I think it succeeds at showing off its developer's technical prowess. The actual racing is... eurojank in the classic sense. There are times when it flows really well and the game's a lot of fun, and there's times when you're fighting against the game just to stay alive. There are several different worlds which have about 5 racetracks each and the quality kind of depends on which world you're looking at. The pirate themed levels are consistantly the most fun and best looking, but the volcano levels are a miserable slog that exist to throw as much nonsense at you as possible. The clock themed levels remind me a lot of the factory racetrack from [i]Sonic R[/i] and are probably the best balance between "chaotic nonsense" and "actually playable". Trying the first race is like jumping into the deep end, though you can acclimatize, especially once you get used to the powerups. The first track is so small that laps last literal seconds and even the bigger maps are smaller and more chaotic than in a lot of games. Getting out of the gate is an exercise in surviving a multi-car pile-up and you'll constantly be getting bumped around by other racers, hazards, terrain, etc. Like I said, some tracks are [i]saner[/i] than others but even the normal ones have some sharp 90 degree and even U-Turn angles that feel odd to navigate even once you're used to the game. If you're going to master [i]Spanking Runners[/i] you'll have to get a feel for the powerups. Unlike [i]Mario Kart[/i] where you pick up different powerups during the race, you equip a loadout of three powerups that form your "vehicle" and they have a cooldown that speeds up as you collect blue cross markers. The powerups are very hit or miss, and I found the ones you start with are actually better than quite a few you unlock. You get a movement powerup, an attack powerup, and a hazard you can leave on the track. The best speed powerups are the ones that let you fly and you gradually get better versions of it. Being [i]off the ground[/i] lets you skip a lot of the chaos on the ground [i]and[/i] turn a lot tighter which helps out with the really sharp turns. [i]Avoiding[/i] the actual racetrack as much as possible will keep you safe. Ranged powerups are useless since the physics are so chaotic you'll never be able to lead a shot in advance enough to hit somebody. I just stick to the powerups that do an AOE attack around your car. For hazards I stuck with mold spores since they leave the biggest nuisance and that did me just fine. What annoys me about the power-up system is the game's weird obsession with non-consensually changing your load-out. You progress through the game by collecting a certain amount of bottles to buy new power-up and racetracks, and thankfully you don't actually have to [i]win[/i] to get bottles. If you had to win this game would be nigh-impossible on some tracks, but placing first gets you significantly more bottles. When you unlock a new powerup it automatically assigns it to your load-out and you have to go back to the power-up place in the hub world to change back. Most of the power-ups are kind of useless but you should still collect them all because you can't actually beat the final bosses without using a specific power-up for each boss. If your car is destroyed on the track, the game sometimes completely re-works your power-up loadout until the race is over. That said, if you get destroyed you might as well restart anyway because the respawn times are wildly inconsistant. Sometimes it takes about 4 or 5 seconds for your car to pull back together, sometimes it takes 10 or 15 seconds as you watch everyone else go whizzing by. Surprisingly, the kart racing gameplay isn't the only thing the game has to offer. Every time you enter a race you also have the option to play the game in a "turn-based mode", where you basically draw the path you want your car to take, and tell it when to pop the power-ups. Playing the game like this, some of the ultra-sharp turns and tight 180's make a bit more sense and seem more navigable, which has me wondering if perhaps [i]this[/i] was meant to be the game until they realized the turn-based mode [i]doesn't work at all[/i]. It would certailn explain the sharp divide in track designs and it seems kind of weird to have the option to experience the game as a whole-different genre as just a bonus, so I feel like there's a deeper story there. It's interesting and amusing to play once or twice, but it's really not practical at all for winning and manages to be even more insane and chaotic than the racing mode. The last thing to talk about are the boss fights, and the first three are kind of fun. The game doesn't tell you this, but you really need specific power-ups before you can beat the bosses and there's kind of an order too them. There are Steam guides that explain the order and while I generally don't like looking things up to beat a game it's kind of essential here. The fourth boss, the dragon is ridiculously hard but has a cheese where you basically run the race backward and I can't tell if that's a bug or a legitimate strategy, but even doing the cheese strategy is insanely hard because the dragon wings power-up you're supposed to use on the dragon boss hover you up and down at such a rate it's very easy to miss the power-up refills. I had to ironically take it slow and make absolutely sure I stopped over each pickup to ensure I had enough juice to keep going. I think if the bosses had been less obtuse, I'd say the game doesn't outstay its welcome at about 6 hours, but I probably put about 2 hours just into the bosses which stretched my playtime to about 7.4 and I did kind of want to be done with it. It's not a polished game, but like all great Eurojank, it's wildly ambitious and creative and there is good stuff to find here if you're willing to sift through the races where you're fighting the universe just to stay alive. Unusually for a Eurojank, I think the bigger failings are actually more design-wise than technical, it ran pretty well and didn't have a problem running at 144 FPS, though one particular track did like to crash a lot when I had to restart that particular race. I don't think it's the kind of game I could easily recommend to someone like "yeah there's this cool racing game, it's called [i]Spanking Runners[/i] you gotta try it", but if you tell someone "this game is [i]Sonic R[/i] on fentanyl and you have to see how weird it is" you might raise enough eyebrows to get someone to check it out. At the very least it deserves an hour-long Ross Scott deep dive.

After the body-horror post-apocalypse of Elite-like Vangery and before the RTS sterile esotericism of Perimeter, there was supposed to be another entry into the portfolio of the developer. A turn-based racing game, also set in the univang. That game was never made, and all of the pre-production work was retooled into this cartoon childish comedy carting game. There’s the turn-based racing mode in it, and it does somehow take place in the univang. After the long intro of a VO talking over static pictures, you are dropped right into the hub world where you pick one of the characters with their minor stats differences. You ride towards the first available race and you are offered a choice between the turn-based mode and the real-time mode. So the turn based mode doesn’t work. First of all it’s not turn-based, it’s simultaneous turns with pause. The AI treats it like a real-time race and the turns do not influence its behaviour at all. So by picking the turn-based mode you just lose no matter what. The stupid mechanics do not compute. You draw the trajectory, unpause and an AI tries to follow your plan. The longer the distance between the planned nodes the faster your AI is supposed to go, but it can never go faster than the enemy. And as it’s simultaneous turns, the enemies will interrupt and obstruct your planned path. The combat actions also have no mechanics to react to the changes on the field. The arsenal is pretty generic and there are no conditional actions. And then your AI can overshoot your planned node, and start driving in circles trying to get to it. The unusual gameplay is so not working, that playing real-time-only is the only sane choice. So what’s left is just a classic carting game with weapons. CTR, the Mario-themed ones, etc. For a car you pick a resistance member, each having different stats. Despite fighting against the robots you always race only with each other. You can swap your character at any time in the lobby. Then you have three slots, which represent both your dismembered rayman cart parts, and the three spells you have during the race. I also have a suspicion that that choice influences the road grip and the speed, but there are no stats. All the racing tracks are marked on tiny planetoids and all are extremely off-road and very short courses of 5 laps, filled with death pits and death spikes. When you are out of HP you explode, and then usually slowly re-assembled. If a bot explodes near you, you can mix-up your parts. Each race is absolutely unpredictable chaos. Everything is extremely RNG — one second you are leading, the next one the rubber-banding AI kills you, and while you are respawning for almost an entire minute you get lapped. The tracks get filled with traps and you barely can drive for ten second without getting into something nasty. Especially not with these, controls, with these physics, and these mechanics. But to skip the low-agency random gameplay you get some currency for each race, as long as you wasn’t the last one to finish. Each race contains a new spell/cart part. You get it for free if you finish first, and you can buy it for the currency as long as you didn’t finish the last. Returning to the hub world you can spend the currency to unlock more tracks. Or swap your parts/spells. The hub itself sucks. It all looks the same, the tracks entrances have no distinct markers. And then when you unlock the boss-fights you lose even those mostly similar-looking landmarks. This game is basically Fall Guys–QWOP–Goat Simulator RNG no agency simulator carting with shamelessly cheating bots. And the difficulty sucks. Checkpoints can not trigger even if you go through them. The bots are rubber-banded, and then they are not simulated out of sight but just moved on the map. As long as you see them, the bots are always dying, often get stuck in a wall and can’t get out. The second you don’t look they are teleported to the finish line and are already lapping you the second time. The more races you finish the harder they get for the entire game. Even if you return to the starting tracks the bots are plain harder better faster stronger than you. You need cash to unlock more races and you need cash to buy your way out of the races, so you have to farm and farm, and even if you’ve found your best case scenario combination of a level, parts/spells and a working tactic, you still will be mostly finishing fourth out of five, getting the minimal amount of cash. And then there are the boss fights. You can unlock them pretty early, but they all have one specific strategy in mind, and you are never warned. The first boss you get is the frog, somewhere during the mid-game phase. But to play against it properly, you need a part/spell, that drops from another boss. The frog race just sits there taunting you. To start racing the bosses you first have to clear every single race in the game, and use the spells you just get in a chain of whale-frog-spider-dragon-golem. But then each boss-fight is really hard and tight, including the straight-line race against the whale. The game never tells you, but you get a small boost if you press the gas pedal in the right time. Then you have to just keep ahead and get lucky to never smash into anything. You have to finish perfectly and there’s barely enough mana between the checkpoints to keep your spell powered. In the second fight against the frog you just have to train for an hour or two until you win. Now the spider fight is the hardest in the whole game. The track is a very thin ridge and you can fall off it any second. You will never win if you make even one mistake, but you can easily lose if you complete the track perfectly. Because the spider has randomized set of paths it takes. On the fork part of the track it can execute the turns perfectly at extreme speed, or crawl on the walls and lose a lot of time. If you get extremely lucky it can repeat the losing crawl five times in a row. Or it can chose to blast past the fork in the road all five times. You just have to repeat this race for hours until you just win. The next fight against the dragon is made to be basically impossible. The track is pretty hard, the dragon is possible to beat only if you execute everything perfectly. But then, all the mana pick-ups are below your flight altitude. So to win you have to fly perfectly on track, but to fly at all you have to drop off track so you can get the mana pick ups at lower altitude with inertia. You can win this fight if you spend an ungodly amount of time and if you perfect this race. But in fact, the fight against the dragon is a troll race. Damn i hate Ready Player One so much. You win against the dragon by racing backwards. Just fly a little bit properly, to get enough mana, then turn back and move towards the next checkpoint. And then you see that all the checkpoints in this race are arranged in almost a straight line. You just turn left and fly diagonally forward and to the right in a line going through all the checkpoints in order. The last fight is easy you just have to memorize the track and spam the teleport spell at the right time. You get the stupid last cutscene and that’s all. The game has its unusual look, even if it’s a joke for a joke sake, like the titty stripper kettlebell. The music written by Ruber can’t compete with Vangers OST, but if you can accept it sounding cartoony, it’s actually pretty decent. I’ve played the fresh Steam re-release of the game. I don’t know which changes were made in this version, if any. They sure did rename it from Moonshine Runners to Spanking Runners, tho. The link to the manual doesn’t work, so you can’t blame me for not knowing some of the mechanics. The games sometimes crashes, and sometimes it freezes. The turn-based mode doesn’t really work, and that’s the game’s USP. So. Do you want to play a crappy carting game, which is nothing like any other carting game, but at the same time is exactly like every other carting game?

Oh God, at last!!! For so many years I have suffered so much every time I have tried to find this game and get it installed and get everything to work! And here - everything works, everything plays, everything is perfect, just brilliant! THANK YOU!