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andygates Street luge is silly.
It's the Playstation game Wipeout made flesh: constant steady acceleration, wooshy moving across the track at sick speed, lots of ablative braking, and most importantly obsessive refining of the racing line, braking distances and intensities, swoops and dives. It's a game for nutty perfectionists.
I suck at Wipeout (I do much better with "zone" games like NO2 and Rez) and oddly, I suck at street luge too. Of eight solo runs, I had two clean ones. The course was the Gurston Down motor-racing hill-climb track, run in reverse. There were ditches and banks and hay-bales and lots of armco crash barriers. I hit them all. Some of them quite hard.
Gear was reassuringly battered: ancient bike leathers (some with pastel wiggle designs from about 1988) patched and reinforced at the contact points. Lots of gaffer tape: you grind it off, you stick it on. Rinse, repeat. Gloves were fists of tape, the fingers rendered immobile to prevent bend-back breaks and the knuckles reinforced for ape-like starting power. The luges are seven-foot aluminium beasts that started out being uncontrollable sleds of death, and ended up being friendly, controllable, noble sleds of death.
Worst run: 2:14 crashing out twice.
Best run: 1:10 clean but flaily.
Best crash: Clean to the final swoop when an insane speed-wobble rolled me at about 35mph - flailng limbs, hard bang to the helmet, luge stoked into the opposite bank, and I broke a... shoelace. I'll get back to you on how I managed that.
For yucks, here's me at the end of the day with my luge, a heavy agricultural thing that scooped up so much mud and grass on my spills that I christened it "the Harvester" (I'll get some Flickrage up later):
Thanks are due to Ding and the SSSprint crew for making it happen.
I suck at Wipeout (I do much better with "zone" games like NO2 and Rez) and oddly, I suck at street luge too. Of eight solo runs, I had two clean ones. The course was the Gurston Down motor-racing hill-climb track, run in reverse. There were ditches and banks and hay-bales and lots of armco crash barriers. I hit them all. Some of them quite hard.
Gear was reassuringly battered: ancient bike leathers (some with pastel wiggle designs from about 1988) patched and reinforced at the contact points. Lots of gaffer tape: you grind it off, you stick it on. Rinse, repeat. Gloves were fists of tape, the fingers rendered immobile to prevent bend-back breaks and the knuckles reinforced for ape-like starting power. The luges are seven-foot aluminium beasts that started out being uncontrollable sleds of death, and ended up being friendly, controllable, noble sleds of death.
Worst run: 2:14 crashing out twice.
Best run: 1:10 clean but flaily.
Best crash: Clean to the final swoop when an insane speed-wobble rolled me at about 35mph - flailng limbs, hard bang to the helmet, luge stoked into the opposite bank, and I broke a... shoelace. I'll get back to you on how I managed that.
For yucks, here's me at the end of the day with my luge, a heavy agricultural thing that scooped up so much mud and grass on my spills that I christened it "the Harvester" (I'll get some Flickrage up later):
Thanks are due to Ding and the SSSprint crew for making it happen.
