Welcome to the roundup for one of the most exciting months in Line Rider history! The color layers feature for the linerider.com build dropped around the start of the month and you’ll see that reflected in a number of releases, but there have also been just an astonishing amount of absolute banger releases in general, regardless of color. So, believe it or not, this roundup is the longest one yet by far, featuring my usual long-windedness plus the addition of numerous amazing guest reviews by OTDE, Ava Hofmann, and Ethan Li, all of whom I am extremely pleased to welcome back. Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoy!
Click here for a playlist of all videos in this roundup (in order). Titles also link to videos individually.
🙌 = highly recommended
👍 = recommended
🤷 = neutral
👎 = not recommended
My Boy (Mirror to Mirror) - Ava Hofmann
Guest review by OTDE:
It’s lonely at the top. Owing to its youth as an art medium (working stolidly through its second decade) and its lack of large-scale community (with active membership barely approaching triple digits), Line Rider often shocks newcomers with the sheer glut of ground yet to be broken. Ava Hofmann’s newest release, My Boy (Mirror to Mirror), is not just exceptional in its breaking of new ground, but in the utter glee it takes in the act of doing so, a kind of window-crashing, glass-smashing, we’re-here-we’re-queer abandon that cements a piece of art as simultaneously of the moment and timeless.
Ava’s previous pieces in Line Rider have ranged from messy and loud (BELLS, You Want It?) to quiet and thought-provoking (Three Memories of Snow, sodomite), encompassing a number of emotional spaces as a collective body of work, but tightly focused as individual experiences. My Boy is a noticeable departure from this pattern, with an opening section that’s tender and sweet, a gentle “we won’t be alone” refrain sung with two different voices, the riders’ personalities embodied in the different styles of text Hofmann fills the screen with. As the guitars from the accompanying Car Seat Headrest song kick in, however, the screen grows noisier, and the riders flit around each other, expectant and hesitant, as we see a diary entry, a budding queer crush blooming into a first love, and then suddenly there’s a rainbow and the clouds are no longer black silhouettes but bright, bright, white, and the sky is blue and clear and they’re kissing, and—
And I’m wondering to myself, why did this take so long? In a world full of queer people, and out of all the art we’ve made, why has it taken Line Rider, out of all the art media in the world, this long to produce a single track with a depiction of a queer relationship? You might think I answered that question at the start of this review — after all, it’s a young medium with few active artists — but there’s more to it, I’d say. I’m not one to generalize, but I can pretty safely say queer people go absolutely bananas when given the opportunity to make art of any kind. Hell, the first time I spent a concerted amount of time with other trans people outside the confines of the internet was a retreat where we spent hours just hanging out and painting. It’s not because we didn’t want to make tracks like My Boy for a decade and a half, then. So what was it?
The reason there’s such a huge possibility space in Line Rider, and the reason that My Boy, in October of the Year Of Our Lord 2021, wears the heady and burdensome title of first, is because the set of community-reinforced, peer-endorsed, quote-unquote “allowed” actions within Line Rider was, for over a decade, so utterly constrained, so completely cordoned off, that personal expression, vulnerability, and sincerity simply were not considered interesting, or even possible.
To make something like My Boy in the wake of such a barren landscape cannot be anything less than powerful. It’s a treatise on young love and coming to terms with your own feelings, a joyous vision of the better world we could create for our children. Pride was, and is, a riot.
Guest review by Ethan Li:
There's a tweet which says: "Gay culture is being a teenager when you're 30 because your teenage years were not yours to live." Along these lines, I love the bittersweet feeling I get whenever I rewatch Ava Hofmann's My Boy (Mirror to Mirror) - a feeling magnified by the video's description, which excerpts the lyrics of the song it's set to: "It'll take some time, but somewhere down the line, we won't be alone."
The first part of My Boy (Mirror to Mirror) consists of two colorless Boshes riding their sleds in parallel on separated lines through a straightforward visualization of the song. This continues until the song/video's halfway mark, by which point we still haven't seen much joy, connection, or development in our li— I mean, the Boshes' lives. But then the song goes off the rails, and the video reveals its intimate feelings to us: the two Boshes converge and start to ride playfully together, and we're taken to a diary entry from 2009 written and doodled in the style of a kid, who writes about getting markers at the art store and discovering some queer feelings. The Boshes play together, and as the singer belts out the final "BUT SOMEWHERE DOWN THE LINE, WE WON'T BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE", they sneak in a quick upside-down kiss during their joyride, and then the markers spill out an astonishing rainbow which fills the screen before introducing gloriously colored-in versions of previous backgrounds. After this personal and relational blossoming, the song concludes by returning to the sparse instrumentation at the start of the song. The video ends as sparsely as it started, but now everything feels totally different, because the graphics are colored-in with markers as if we can now remember connection and life on this path.
This story, as I've read it, is one which I wish could've felt like a possibility for me and so many others when we were teenagers in 2009. Instead, in a high school environment permeated with casual homophobia and run by conservative administrators, my own experience was mainly one of angst, self-isolation, and hopelessness. So much of my time felt lost to going through the motions mechanically, alone, devoid of color. Those feelings were counterbalanced (but also intensified) by “It Gets Better”, a neoliberal fantasy which I had internalized as the only future on offer:
It'll take some time
but somewhere down the line
you'll leave behind the people around you and move to an unaffordable/gentrifying gayborhood in some city to become a responsible Adult and, so long as you can make yourself respectable/desirable/marriagable to the white wealthy gays,
you won't feel alone
Back in reality, the work of building a world which feels safe and is safe for each other, for queer people, for everyone, is much more messy and painful. For people who've had strong and persistent experiences of the opposite, it can be hard to imagine the feeling of collective joy and collective safety in our communities; but we need these feelings to anchor our relationships with each other. And so the way Ava Hofmann's My Boy (Mirror to Mirror) resurfaces these feelings and desires, the hopeful way it presents an alternative world-that-could've-been or world-that-could-still-be-if-we-make-it-so, makes it deeply powerful and precious to me.
I simply cannot imagine a better work to debut the first integration of full color into Line Rider. You know when a piece of art - a movie, a book, a play - has an unassuming start, and then gradually adds more and more elements until the final act brings it all together for a magnificent, glittering finale? My Boy is a gorgeous, shining example of this in Line Rider, complete with a “Wizard of Oz” moment where the entire track transforms into vivid technicolor at exactly the right point in the narrative. The opening 90 seconds reads almost like a parody of the recent trend of music-visualizer tracks (where Bosh moves left to right on a flat line at a constant speed while every instrumental voice in the mix is depicted with simple visuals) but even this section has a lot of new ideas and hints at a deeper meaning, with hearts playing a prominent role in the visuals, a camera transition between two separate riders, and lyrics scrawled across the whole screen. At the 90-second mark, jagged guitar kicks in as the two sledders suddenly join together to dance around each other like in Andrew Hess’s Run Away With Me. Then, the scrawled text from earlier shows a diary entry (vsbl’s Freaks was clearly an influence) in which the author discusses getting markers from the art store with their mom - implying that these markers are diegetically responsible for the text and drawings in the video, which include clouds and a black and white rainbow - and also meeting someone new. “But it was strange…” the writer muses, “I kept thinking about kissing him…” And then suddenly the markers are drawing a glorious full-color rainbow that explodes across the screen as the riders continue to frolic in celebration of this budding queer crush, sneaking in a quick kiss and then literally flying over the rainbow in what can be only described as a “joyride”, before Ava masterfully brings nearly all the ideas from the previous two and a half minutes of the piece together for an incredible finale that left me breathless.
In the past, whenever I’ve thought about my queerness as a potential subject for a Line Rider video, it’s always felt impossible. It’s a little sledder and a bunch of lines, how could anyone make that about big, heavy, complex topics like gender or sexuality? It seems so hard just to express something like a sledder’s desire or motivation, let alone something like the relationship of that desire to societal structures or oppressive systems. But I think what My Boy makes clear is that the reason it can feel impossible is not because the potential for tackling these subjects in a medium like Line Rider isn’t there, it’s simply because in the past we lacked the visual and choreographic language to even begin to express things like queerness in Line Rider in the past. After a decade of near-stagnation, it’s a dream come true for me to watch as this language is finally beginning to be developed - it’s easy to see that Ava didn’t invent all of the ideas used in My Boy to convey a narrative out of whole cloth, rather she drew on numerous other Line Rider works for inspiration and then synthesized them. This is the fundamental process of making art - exposing yourself to others’ ideas and mixing the ones you like together to create something uniquely your own. From its queer narrative, to its synthesis of a wide scope of ideas, to its creative utilization of tools old and new to make something emotionally powerful, My Boy is, in virtually every respect, the Line Rider video of my dreams. An absolute must-watch for anyone and everyone.
🙌
Green Lines & HAM - pocke
Guest review by OTDE:
Adding new scenery to existing, unscened Line Rider tracks is a kind of lost art that’s generally best left buried under the sands of time. But for pocke? For HAM? I will allow myself an exception. As a treat.
First: what’s HAM?
HAM is a 2016 track by Ride Liner. It’s 30 seconds of balls-to-the-wall, batshit quirk set to music that can only be described as “jazzy screaming.” It’s complete mayhem. There’s lines everywhere. There is zero reason, on God’s Green Earth (or even the heathen places from which God averts his eyes), to try and add scenery to this track. Who would even try?
Second: who’s pocke?
pocke is a Geometry Dash creator who broke into Line Rider about one and a half years ago. Since then, he’s released a number of tracks (A Fool Moon Night, New Machines) that fall into the small but burgeoning genre of maximalist Line Rider tracks, swamping the screen with detail and overwhelming the viewer at every possible moment. The answer to “who would even try?” could only ever be pocke.
Third: what’s in a name?
Scenery lines in edit mode are traditionally green, hence “Green Lines and HAM”. I am going to show some of my cultural bias by assuming you are familiar with the classic Dr. Seuss children’s book “Green Eggs and Ham” and move on to question four.
Fourth: is it watchable?
Obscenely. Pocke corrals the noise in HAM’s bare track with judicious use of invisible layers. There’s dozens of blink-and-you’ll-miss-it-moments; combine this with HAM’s sub-minute runtime and you’re left with one of the most replayable Line Rider videos in years, an effortless watch despite its howling, ceaseless intensity. There’s musical instruments, a Bosh dismemberment factory, some wicked and weird abstract art, and much more. Jam(Ham?)- packed.
I still remember the first time I saw HAM in 2016 - when the glitchquirk started I began loudly and uncontrollably cackling, completely unable to stop until well after the track itself had concluded. I’ve written about my thoughts on HAM at length already, so I won’t go over everything again here, but suffice it to say that when I first heard that pocke was scening HAM I became unreasonably excited, and when Green Lines & HAM eventually came out, not only was I not disappointed but it actually exceeded my expectations. It’s an absolute banger. In Line Rider’s past, there has been a persistent - and wrong - idea that if you took the most celebrated manuquirk track and added scenery to it, the result would be something even better, almost by definition - cool track + cool scenery = even cooler video! Of course, few works have aged worse than Incito Scaena, the track I would regard as the zenith of this philosophy. So in 2017 if someone had announced they were scening HAM it’s not unlikely that I would have felt myself slipping into a bloodrage and would have had to go run around the block a few times and scream at the sky for a bit to calm down. But, pocke? in 2021? Shit, that’s a match made in heaven. Pocke’s messy, psychedelic, no-holds-barred scenery style is absolutely perfect for HAM’s over-the-top, no-holds-barred, blitzkrieg style of track, especially when linerider.com’s layers feature allows creators to move the track to an invisible layer and just scene around the movement.
Green Lines & HAM is a cacophonous delight, a torrent of brilliant ideas blasting your eyeballs like a firehose. Every tenth of a second, pocke is absolutely crushing it (my favorite tenth of a second is probably the bit with the drum - it gets me every time). What’s really striking to me about Green Lines & HAM, though, is how it showcases Bosh’s movement in ways that draw attention to loads of cool things that are much harder to notice when watching the unscened track. Much like OTDE’s The Road Less Travelled rejects the ethos of Transcendental while refusing to throw away the beauty present in the original (to paraphrase Miles Fogle’s review for the Top 10 Line Rider Tracks of 2019), Green Lines & HAM similarly rejects the focus of HAM on technical prowess, along with a simultaneous preservation - celebration, even! - of the absurd, jagged, glitched-out movements of the original. I’m confident that Green Lines & HAM would be an absolute blast to watch for anyone, whether you’re a hardcore quirker, you’re way into weird experimental stuff, you long for the olden days of TechDawg scenery, or even if you only know about Line Rider through DoodleChaos and Matthew Buckley. Somehow, pocke has taken a track revered and dissected by quirkers and remixed it into a crowd pleaser that everyone will love, and that’s nothing short of remarkable.
🙌
BEHOLD - OTDE
OTDE is known for a mix of works spanning the artistic spectrum form jaw-dropping high-production-value masterworks (where a garden once grew, The Little Lab Rat & The Big Escape) and hilarious mildly-pretentious lo-fi shitposts (lineridercommunity.mp4, PETA). It is with the greatest pleasure that I would like to inform you now that BEHOLD is somehow all of these things at the same time. It’s a jaw-dropping hilarious mildly-pretentious high-production-value lo-fi masterwork of a shitpost. It’s a fuckin’ riot is what it is. Set to a wildly over-the-top Doc Severinsen trumpet piece that sounds like he’s underscoring the opening to the cheesiest romantic drama of all time, it opens with OTDE having a blast milking the linerider.com zooming and panning functions for all they’re worth as Bosh sits stationary in a white circle surrounded by blackness. Just when you’re starting to wonder if this is all there is to BEHOLD, hark! The sledder speaks! And what do they say, but “BEHOLD!” And then comes the fucking coup de grâce - as a trumpet solo in an absurdly high register starts, white space appears in the lower half of the screen, and the limp offsled body of a second sledder is ragdolled around by invisible lines in pitch-perfect sync with every bit of the trumpet solo. Reader, when I first witnessed this, it was like a religious experience. This is the kind of brilliant high-end shitpost that clears your skin and waters your crops and convinces you that maybe life is worth living after all. It’s so fucking good.
Okay, okay, I’ll calm down. I know BEHOLD isn’t going to make me re-evaluate any aspect of my life, and it’s not going to generate a lot of thoughtful discussion, and it’s probably not going to inspire me creatively (though that’s partly because OTDE appears to be the untouchable reigning monarch of shitposts and I could never make a shitpost half as good as BEHOLD). But the thing is, this is hands-down the funniest Line Rider video I have ever watched. It’s so fucking funny. And personally, I think that counts for a lot. Watch this silly over-the-top shitpost, it’s fucking great.
🙌
Abandoned Castle - pocke
Guest review by OTDE:
Taking home the prize for most in-season October track is Abandoned Castle, a delightfully straight-faced, gothic-horror-themed Line Rider track, the likes of which haven’t been seen since wendel’s legendary crazy castle run and ilT’s Hell Rider. This piece manages to bring a little something for everyone. Spooked by the eeriness of being alone at night? The opening, set in a breezy, starlit landscape, has that covered. Are you into the funky geometry of old castles? pocke’s spiky, Escherian take on the style is distinctive and fun to pore over. Still thinking about Bolted To The Wall (2008) and feeling nostalgic for brick textures for some godforsaken reason? Just me? Well, fine, then - that part’s for me, and that’ll leave the lovely and wildly camp ending (dungeons, lightning flashes, and a Mysterious Bosh Silhouette) for whoever’s left. Did I skip over the ghost knife fight? There’s also a ghost knife fight. Bosh loses. That’s how he ends up in Castle Jail.
These sections are lovely on their own, but not exactly compelling in the way more fleshed-out visions of those concepts might be. What sells the complete piece is the feeling of cohesion between each section, where pocke fills in the gaps with interesting transitional scenery timed excellently with shifts in the accompanying music. You can really see how, since A Fool Moon Night, pocke has developed a clear sense of how to structure a Line Rider track in a way that makes some gut-level of sense, giving the viewer clear beats to follow and toying with expectations in a way that speaks to a heightened medium awareness gained through practice.
It speaks to the positivity of this review that my biggest negative is that I’m left wanting to know more about this world, to see Bosh descend endless flights of fenced-off stairways, to dodge past Yet Another Flurry Of Knives, to know how in God’s name Bosh is going to escape from Castle Jail and the Mysterious Bosh Silhouette. There’s an endless creative well here that feels like it’s only barely been tapped. Abandoned Castle is short, smart, and built on the eternally remixable Castlevania aesthetic. I’d love to see more people try their hand at this kind of track.
Abandoned Castle is at least pocke’s best work since New Machines, and possibly my favorite Line Rider creation of his to date. Taking inspiration from the Castlevania video games, it opens with Bosh cautiously venturing into a spooky medieval castle before a fast-paced 2D-platformer-esque trip through the dungeon ends with some pulpy melodrama that is nothing short of delicious. Every section of Abandoned Castle is near-flawlessly constructed to generate a sense of fearful exploration, physical environments, compelling worldbuilding, edge-of-your-seat dramatic tension, and even a touch of gothic horror. Did I mention it’s all perfectly synced to a remix of a Castlevania song? Abandoned Castle fucking slaps. It blends an astonishing number of cool ideas together into something that’s exactly the right amount of cheesy, dramatic, and fun.
🙌
And the day goes on - Xavier
Guest review by OTDE:
Songwriter and multimedia artist Bill Wurtz has an instantly recognizable style. The singsong non sequitur lyrics, the jazzy, upbeat neo-edutainment instrumentals, and the unpredictable, messy visuals combine into a weird, colorful soup, one that contains enough quotables to spread like wildfire across the internet. His music sets the stage for Xavier’s latest, And the day goes on, a track that diligently matches the vibes of Wurtz’ oeuvre moment-for-moment.
You don’t need to squint to see the artistic similarities: much of Xavier’s previous work is stuffed to the gills with creative ideas that can’t seem to find anywhere to land. You can’t fault a 13-minute behemoth like The FitnessGram Pacer Test for having too little to say, that’s for sure. As always, the devil is in the details, the roughest parts showing right when the idea gets interesting enough to warrant elaboration. It’s a pleasant (and welcome!) surprise, then, that And the day goes on manages to carom its way through a two-minute runtime without missing a beat. This is a smart move, in part because it draws on Xavier’s strengths as an artist (snappy execution and a collection of interesting concepts) while masking some of his weaknesses (lack of sustained attention paid to ideas that could be explored further).
Like Wurtz, Xavier stretches the limits of his chosen medium to great effect. This means both in Line Rider itself - the majority of the track uses a zero-gravity modded version of Line Rider Advanced - and the final video, which includes a cutaway shot of a drawing of Bosh on a piece of paper being moved by a hand off-camera to represent the lyrics “the year is 1900 and the times are going to change”. Some of these stretches land beautifully, like Ye Olde Paper Boshe, but some are pretty cryptic, like the thumbnails referencing previous tracks set to “things I can’t explain”, a confusing self-insert that could generously be seen as some kind of reflection on the difficulty of making things in Line Rider that make sense, but ends up smelling a tad like Main Character Syndrome instead. Thankfully, the parts that feel confusing or stilted are blessedly short, and it’s mere seconds before Bosh jets off into another interesting moment elsewhere.
This track is super fun to watch, and I’m glad it exists. My one hope is that this review, along with the glowing reviews it received before this one, don’t pigeonhole Xavier - that, even though this is a great concept, he doesn’t feel like it’s the only thing he can make now. I’d love to see something in a similar vein that’s uniquely his, if that makes sense.
A lot of what I was going to say is already covered in OTDE’s rundown above, but suffice it to say Xavier’s style of trackmaking and Bill Wurtz’s style of songwriting (and music videos, from which Xavier obviously takes inspiration) feel like they were made for each other. And the day goes on is strongest when it is showing rather than telling (e.g. Bosh flying into the sun on “traveling straight into the sun”, flying past clouds against a sky-blue background on “fly away”, in a flying saucer on “jumped onto a spaceship”) and this feels like a missed opportunity when we get on-screen text for stuff that could have been depicted with visuals (e.g. “jumped out of my suitcase and I’m travelin’ down the road”, “I went to the future thinkin’ bout how to spend my day”). On the other hand, some of the ways Xavier animates text are really fun (and Wurtz-y), there’s a clever bit where text is recycled as Wurtz sings “goes on” several times in a row, the Line Rider Overlay artifacting from importing images of the text somehow only adds to the work’s charm, and there’s even a few great moments with purely abstract visuals. Xavier’s animation-heavy cannon-studded style is so offbeat and wacky to begin with that post-production effects, cuts between track files, and even a full cutaway to footage of a drawing of Bosh on paper somehow don’t feel out of place at all, something I struggle to imagine any other Line Rider creator pulling off successfully. All in all, And the day goes on is a cornucopia of delights - if one part of it leaves a bad taste in your mouth, there’s 12 other flavors here to love coming at you in a matter of seconds. It’s Xavier at his best, and it’s a joy to watch.
🙌
Frequency Hotline - Blastkin, Blinky, Arglin, Xavier, Nevs5138, RetroTune, QBalt, Malizma, TheMatsValk, Instantflare, BeljihnWahfl, and Faintmint
Before I get started on my review, I want to say a few words about the rollout of this track, because it was a bit of a mess. Upon initial release, multiple collaborators complained about issues with the finalization, recording, and editing, which caused one collaborator to hastily upload a re-release the same day, before Arglin uploaded a re-re-release a few days later, which seems to have been largely accepted by the creators as the definitive release, and is thus what the title above links to. However, for reasons I have decided not to go into detail on in my review (since it’s mostly minor details like the unintentional motion blur working really well in certain sections), I actually significantly prefer the original release, which you can still watch here.
Rollout aside, the track itself was an enormous collaborative effort multiple years in the making. Frequency Hotline is definitely a bit all over the place, but it’s significantly more focused than a collaboration like Fall Breeze, and while it definitely has a lot of technique-based tricks, often without a lot of rhyme or reason, it mostly manages to avoid the monotony of a collaboration like Work. After a slow, ominous opening, the first half of the track has only a handful of noteworthy moments (most notably, 10-point cannons are used to fake pause, stop, and fast-forward, to great effect), while the rest of these opening minutes largely consist of superficially-synced manuquirk. If this 4.5-minute track ended at the 3-minute mark, it would be a largely unremarkable release along the lines of “well, I can only assume the quirk crowd had fun making it”, but the fourth minute of Frequency Hotline is absolutely something special. The first 30 seconds following the 3-minute mark contain some mildly-trippy music-synced visuals and a gradual buildup of Bosh moving in increasingly erratic ways as the black lines and white background begin to pulse red - one of the most effective ominous buildups I’ve seen made with quirk techniques in a hot minute. This leads really nicely into what I can only describe as a creepy, trippy, brilliant, disturbing montage, as the creators let loose a torrent of ideas at such a rapid-fire pace that it is guaranteed to wow just about any viewer. Bosh blasts through a mess of scribbles, vibrates like a piston, falls through darkness in slow motion, witnesses a hundred glowing red eyes and a hundred other phase-shifted versions of themself, a garden of flowers dissolves into radio static, and then it’s over, and we’re back to… well, some more half-assed manuquirk, before we see the personalized logos of each contributor as the track ends.
There’s a lot to unpack here. First, I think Frequency Hotline is absolutely worth watching for the 30-second montage segment alone. It’s not flawless - some ideas land much better than others - but it’s like nothing else in Line Rider, and the 30 preceding seconds do a great job of leading into it too. However, I am left trying to understand why the fourth minute is so breathtaking when the preceding three minutes (and the final 30 seconds) are… well, not. I think my best guess is that when Arglin made the fake-pause moment around the 2-minute mark, that inspired others to try wackier and wackier ideas as the project wore on, and it organically developed from there until (from what I can piece together) Xavier got ahold of the project and did what he does best - slam out a million brilliantly unhinged ideas in rapid succession to make it look like Bosh was having a bad acid trip. Don’t get me wrong - this segment is incredibly good - but I get all melancholy as soon as I think about how amazing the whole track could have been if that concept of Bosh-on-drugs had been there from the start. Or even if that was never feasible, if it had been at least carried through to the end, and then the first half had been given another pass-through to add some foreshadowing of what’s coming, even if it’s just with decorations or effects. Ultimately, I’m left unsure how much of this track was the brilliance of individual contributors, how much of it was envisioned by any one person, how much of it developed organically as people bounced ideas off each other, and how much of it was sheer luck, but the end product is, while stunning and utterly brilliant, also - much as I’m aware I’m becoming a broken record, I still have to say it - muddled and unfocused. I say this not from a place of imagined superiority or judgmental anger, but out of respect and hope for potential future creations - y’all can do better than this.
👍
I recreated Line Rider in 3D and the result feels cursed - DoodleChaos
A remix of DoodleChaos’s first ever Line Rider track and 2017 viral hit Mountain King, I recreated Line Rider in 3D and the result feels cursed is essentially the exact same track translated into a 3D environment using Unity and a modded Line Rider Advanced build. DoodleChaos has replaced the familiar blank white void with models of snow, trees, rocks, sky, and occasionally caves that are modeled and lit to feel like Bosh is travelling through a cross between a wormhole and a subway tunnel. The two main highlights of the video are the camera that DoodleChaos uses to continually pan around Bosh so you can see their progression through the track from all angles, and the considerably-enhanced feeling of vertigo when the track takes place on a 3-D snowy mountain, especially in the highspeed falling section at the end where it feels like Bosh is sledding at hyperspeed down an impossibly huge cliff. Is it gimmicky? Sure. The Bosh model looks like a bad 90’s 3-D video game (though the video’s title already acknowledges its cursed nature). There’s not much of an attempt to explore what might work better in 3-D than it did in 2-D, since it’s a direct translation of DoodleChaos’s biggest hit in 2-D Line Rider, leaving the movement itself entirely unmodified. And I also get the sense that he was a little overexcited to show off the 360-degree camera panning capability, without giving as much thought as he could have to what camera angles might be most effective for the drama of the piece. But it’s the first 3-D re-imagining of Line Rider that I’ve seen that I’ve actually enjoyed watching (sorry, original creator of Line Rider Boštjan Čadež, Line Rider VR: Plane and Simple is fun to play but it’s not terribly fun to watch others’ creations - at least not yet), so I have to give DoodleChaos kudos for making the first watchable 3-D Line Rider video. When the music swells and the mountain slope starts getting steeper and steeper with no bottom in sight, it’s undeniably a rush, one that feels more like an actual roller coaster than 2-D Line Rider ever has.
👍
bitchenbitchenbitchenbitchenbitchen - DeafTab
Guest review by OTDE:
Say hello to the first track I’ve ever had the privilege of describing as “onomatopoeic.” Bosh crashes their way through this piece like there’s gold at the end, the screen full of wild scribbling and the speakers full of so much noise. Text and texture overlap with little care for cleanliness or legibility; in fact, there’s nothing even remotely coherent about any part of the entire track. It’s all id, a wild, unhinged mess, purely instinct-driven and flying by the seat of its pants. The part Bosh plays in the role of the track is reduced exclusively to moving the camera into new vistas of noise, flailing from one collection of partially-shaded shapes to the next. Insofar as it’s even possible to call it a “sync,” the track does its absolute best to match the manic, pulse-pounding, unhinged energy of the music to which it’s set. And while I certainly wouldn’t watch 56 minutes of whatever this is (This Will Destroy You: A Bitchen Feature Film), I also had a pretty good time watching the 30 seconds I did get. There’s a reason we don’t have feature-film-length roller coasters; some experiences are bite-sized, to their own benefit.
As far as I’m concerned, any new track from DeafTab is a gift. This one most closely resembles the kind of gift you’d get from your pet cat, a dead bird of a track, dragged in front of you unwillingly, squawking and clawing wildly, as your cat looks at you expectantly. Do you understand the cat’s thought process? Totally. Do you have any idea what to do with the bird, now that it’s lying limp on your kitchen floor? Not at all. Are you very proud of the cat nonetheless? Of course you are.
bitchen/10
It seems that DeafTab watched Ava Hofmann’s BELLS and though to themself, “I like it, but what if it were 70% shorter and about 3000% WORSE?” bitchenbitchenbitchenbitchenbitchen is hot garbage, and I mean that in the most affectionate way possible. Set to a piece of music by Five Starcle Men (which Google tells me is an “experimental music group, psychedelic shaman collective, and” - sorry, I’m just now learning this - “alien abduction self-help cult known for their intense live shows, experimentation with psychedelic and dissociative drugs, radical conspiracy theories, and engagement with mental illness”) that is so aggressively terrible that it becomes genuinely fun about five seconds into its 30-second runtime, around the same time that the already-thin premise of this being some form of experimental lyric video collapses into madness. This is probably a good thing, because the repetitive (sung? rapped? shouted? screamed?) lyrics are already mostly covered by the work’s title, which is to say it largely consists of endless repetitions of the word(?) “bitchen” assaulting your ears. The track itself consists of layers upon layers of messy garbage (that appears to have been made largely through liberal abuse of copy paste and the shade and scale mods) that does in fact loosely approximate the messy garbage present in the music, featuring an endlessly flailing offsled sledder who usually feels barely relevant. It’s easy to picture DeafTab making this piece, a huge grin on their face as they survey their in-progress creation and excitedly declare, “Hell yeah this looks like absolute ass!”
My first impression of bitchenbitchenbitchenbitchenbitchen was “bad”, but the more I watch it, think about it, and write about it, the more it seems to - bewilderingly - be giving me the happy brain chemicals. I think the reason why is in part because of how intensely expressive of a shitpost it is. It’s so obviously a DeafTab piece, so unapologetically unique, that for me it crosses that fuzzy, imperceptible line from “dumb shitpost” into “dumb shitpost which I unironically think is Great Art”, alongside the likes of Yahoo by Chuggers and lineridercommunity.mp4 by OTDE (or BEHOLD, reviewed above). Even compared to other dumb shitposts this month, such as Malizma’s juvenile I_should_post_something.mp4, or TheMatsValk’s vapid Furret Walk, bitchenbitchenbitchenbitchenbitchen stands out not because it takes itself any more seriously - if anything it actually takes itself less seriously - but because DeafTab wasn’t afraid to indulge in wild personal expression with reckless abandon, shedding any hangups about what a Line Rider track “should” be made of, or look like, or even whether it matters at all if the result is terrible and ugly, and simply allowing themself to have a blast with the creation process. The result is something that I think anyone who can appreciate uninhibited artistic expression for the sheer fun of it would absolutely get a kick out of.
👍
Fall Harder - pocke
Released on pocke’s second channel, Fall Harder is pocke’s first foray into colored layers after he painstakingly constructed a color Line Rider with video editing for Rosen Grove (I would hazard a guess that few creators were more excited about the rollout of this feature than pocke). Starting off with some non-directional quirk synced to upbeat guitar stabs, then progressing to manuquirk when the drum comes in, it’s not until the full-color scenes come in with the vocals that the video piques my interest. For a while we alternate between gorgeous colored scenes evocative of the lyrics and plain ol’ manuquirk until we get to the chorus, where pocke treats us to a glorious full-screen extravaganza of big multicolored circles. To finish off the track, we get multicolored ribbons with the title written out over them as Bosh crashes and Bosh and sled proceed to dance to the music in a duet, seemingly undeterred, back in black and white land except for multicolor clouds(?) hanging from above by chains, until Bosh and sled reunite and credits roll past. The song’s themes of new relationship energy are well-represented by the endlessly chipper movements of Bosh, the liberal use of bright colors throughout the video, and pocke’s seeming carefree approach to creating the piece. Depending on how you feel about having a crush, Fall Harder is either saccharine enough to make your teeth hurt, or unashamed enough to be quite a bit of fun. Unfortunately, it’s also a bit of a mess, albeit a delightful mess. It seems to me that pocke’s approach to this piece was to just start making stuff and having fun without worrying about whether it would work, and, in the case of something not working, shrugging and carrying on anyway. The manuquirk feels less like a deliberate choice and more like a default setting that rarely gels very well with everything else going on, the color sequences can feel jarringly sudden at times, there’s a kramual that completely kills the flow, the remount toward the end could have been given a lot more weight, and the last 30 seconds feels pretty uninspired. It seems to me like maybe pocke himself was super excited about the color layers feature, and proceeded to make a track with a lot of color, only to realize that the feeling was more along the lines of infatuation with a crush than the foundation for a dedicated commitment, and it would perhaps take more work to make something with color that really clicked together as a whole. Or maybe I’m reading into this too much. I don’t know. It was fun!
👍
Descenso del Monte Rascaestrellas - El Loco Invisible
Guest review by Ava Hofmann:
Descenso del Monte Rascaestrellas by El Loco Invisible feels like a product of genuine line rider art. The key operative here is “genuine”; in order to achieve the effect of this track, El Loco Invisible manages to completely reanalyze a myriad of notions people within the Line Rider community tend to take for granted—the ways in which a track is filmed, the music that a track uses, that a track consists simply of its linear physics-simulation start/end points. Instead, Descenso del Monte Rascaestrellas takes each element and flips it on its head, operating with coherent artistic notions and intent but without a notion of what a line rider track “should” be. Instead, El Loco Invisible films the screen the track is running on from a peculiar, upward facing angle; he creates his own music in time with the track instead of the other way around; he takes the last minutes of his track to rewind it all the way back to the beginning. What results is a clear sensation of a distinct aesthetic practice, of emotions oftentimes rare in (people’s beliefs about) Line Rider’s emotional palette.
There is a tendency to read Descenso del Monte Rascaestrellas as sort of a creepy track; Chuggers described the track as an instance of “analog horror” in Line Rider. In some way, I think the track is cuing us into a zone of peculiar and defamiliarized emotions; the angle and lighting of the way the camera films the screen makes the moments in this track feel strangely embodied; in the slight sounds from the room around us, we can distinctly feel the human presence of the tracks’ creator, jolting us out of the disembodying, ecstatic fantasies of movement that line rider prompts us into - instead, Bosh is on this computer screen, in this person’s room. The camera’s angle makes vertical movement feel disorienting and fast—almost like the sensation of actually falling. And the music feels at times like something you might see in some kind of UFO horror movie, with distant, icy-echoey synths and odd soundclips of “hola”s and laughter punctuating the ambient noise-landscapes. And at the end, the entirety of Bosh’s trip down the mountain is rewound, looping us back to the start, cancelling progress. These strange qualities creates a kind of horror, an uncanniness which takes us away from our familiar ideas of how a track is “supposed” to be.
Although I think these emotional experiences derived from the track’s vision are quite valid (I feel them myself), there are further notions that this track is prompting us to think about. Despite the experimental nature of the form, the actual narrative content of Descenso del Monte Rascaestrellas is quite standard for Line Rider: Bosh makes a journey down a snowy mountain into a forest, meets a couple other people on their way, and sleds/plays with them until they arrive at the forested cabin. The “hola”s throughout the track are actually the Boshes greeting each other, and the odd clips of laughter maps onto moments when, in fact, the Boshes are frolicking together. The presentation, however, undermines this. I think when we have this information, we might be inclined to state that the interesting facets of this track are “accidental”, arriving only from wonky, amateurish choices that the track-maker made. But I want to caution against this, because these choices were choices this author made, aware of their implications or not, and that kind of distinct artistic expression alone is worth celebrating. But in constructing our understanding of the track we might also want to consider the following:
a) The author’s other videos indicate that he already knows how to export tracks normally and edit video.
b) The author spends the time specifically to rewind the track all the way to the beginning, starting where he began.
For me, all these things make me think about memory—the way in which even a happy moment can fall through the shattered and disorganized pathways of the mind into a kind of agony or misery. Some neuroscience suggests that the more you remember a memory, the more it degrades, being filtered through your consciousness-processes again and again like a series of bad xeroxes. This is how that track feels, to me: like a stored memory of sledding with your friends, waiting to be played, but encoded with the pain of growing up, the pain of such an experience never being that way again, the pain of returning to the start and playing it all over again.
No rating.
Guest review by Ethan Li:
I want to follow Ava's reading of Descenso del Monte Rascaestrellas by examining some remarkable creative choices in the video and building on her suggestion to consider this video as an exploration of experiencing memory. To recap, in the track a group of riders sled through a series of landscapes; the video represents these events in the track through an extra layer of indirection, as we watch our own screen playing a video which is itself a camera recording of a track being played on another screen; and the soundtrack mixes and loops echoey ringing sounds and audio samples which give a sense of fragmented motifs being evoked in vast ambient landscapes.
The figurative, repetitive use of audio samples in the soundtrack pulls the track playback away from the more traditional experience of following events as they happen linearly in the present (e.g. as with the use of sound effects in Transcendental), and instead towards a symbolic representation more like memory, at least as I experience it. For example, when I remember moments which involved laughter, I usually don't remember the actual sound of the laughter at the time, but instead my mind evokes the concept of laughter and helpfully associates it with stereotypical sounds of laughter. When I remember hiking through a snowy meadow, I don't remember the actual sound of the meadow's vast openness, but instead my mind fills in the blanks, reminding me that it was mildly windy and the echoey there, and recalling the actual and hypothetical sounds of windiness and echoeyness blended together from entirely different times and places, even made-up scenarios. The soundtrack's choice and repetition of audio samples produces a similar effect, but with a darker tone.
As the video progresses, the riders descend through biomes: from frozen windswept hills, ravines, and mountains; to rocky alpine tundra; to a Badlands/karst-like landscape; to alpine meadows scattered with conifers, cabins, and cattle; to a lively coniferous forest; and finally to a lush temperate deciduous forest scattered with a few seemingly random human artifacts. If the narrative simply represented the world in a literal way, it would be hard to explain several things in the track - for example, who would cross huge chasms and mountains to build or visit a graveyard in a desolate frozen landscape? But if we read the track as a more figurative piece, it makes sense that hidden connections in the mind would evoke such symbols in such places. Similarly, while the creator could've chosen to change the type of clouds depending on biome, most biomes are populated with a mixture of different kinds of clouds which wouldn't appear together in real life the way they're arranged throughout the track. This makes sense if we see the clouds not as literal representations, but rather as visual expressions of the conceptual category of "cloud"ness evoked by our memories - just like the audio samples used by the soundtrack.
Most of the drawings, but especially the clouds, are composed of freehand lines and curves drawn crisply, confidently, and economically: every single stroke builds the form and feeling of its object, and many shapes are drawn in an open-ended way so that we fill in the remainder from our symbolic, abstracted memories of the concepts being illustrated. I'd sell my soul to achieve such consistent clarity of expression - it's a basic skill in industrial design sketching, where it requires building an artistic intuition not only for communicating ideas through lines and shapes, but also for seeing the world within and beyond its literal form. And so I'll conclude by discussing how the video lets us see the world of its Line Rider track.
Descenso del Monte Rascaestrellas begins with a camera pointed upwards at the computer screen, showing a linerider.com browser tab with a track in editing mode as it is scrubbed forwards from the start and then back to the start, with the camera subsequently being zoomed into the track as playback starts. As the riders move through the video's final biome, the camera gradually rotates to face the screen head-on, removing the angled perspective previously used. Next, the creator puts the camera back into the angled perspective and rewinds the entire track, even adjusting the angle again early into the rewind and once again much later. The high-speed rewind gives us a highly compressed memory of this descent through landscapes, with frames and scenes blurring together into a disorienting playback of the journey which has transpired, and finally concludes at the start of the track with the video cut as the first rider starts the descent all over again.
The way I visually experience memories is that I see events evoked in my mind at a layer of indirection, as if I'm there but not really there, and also without a consistent directionality of time when my mind replays experiences. Sometimes, especially in my memories of a particularly stunning moment while hiking, the visual content is reduced to a set of representative outlines and conceptual associations like the ones which make up this video's track. In other memories of the outdoors, especially of hiking towards, into, or above a particularly memorable or interesting view, I mainly recall how my perspective shifted (or at least how it felt to have my perspective be shifted), but not in a linear or straightforward arrangement of time - similar to how Descenso del Monte Rascaestrellas uses and shifts its camera angle, how it plays with time at the start and end of the video, and how it even at one moment uses the sensation of one-point perspective enabled by its oblique camera angle to show a rider moving through hills towards the viewer, which is a much more familiar experience of moving through space. I have no idea if anyone else experiences memories the same way I do, but I bet this video's visual and musical choices could provoke interesting reflections from many people about how they remember things.
The kind of work which I most want to see and make with Line Rider is art which revisits from an oblique angle not only the established conventions and structures of the Line Rider Track Video™ as a genre, but also simultaneously our own experiences of life. If we set aside any prejudices we might have about a fifteen-minute camera recording of a computer screen playing a Line Rider track about sledding down a mountain, and we instead dig into the artistic choices made in Descenso del Monte Rascaestrellas, we can find an intriguing and creatively inspiring perspective on both (Line Rider) art and life.
Part of maintaining the Line Rider Archival Project involves watching every new video uploaded YouTube with “Line Rider” in the title each month. Mostly this consists of 12-year-olds uploading unwatchable garbage, but every once in a while, as I slog through what I habitually refer to as “the dregs of YouTube”, I come across something that initially looks like trash but upon closer examination is remarkable. The example that I recall most clearly is Branches’s Who Cares if You Exist? which unexpectedly floored me when I first watched it during an archiving session. Descenso del Monte Rascaestrellas is one such piece. Initially, the fact that it was recorded with a camcorder, the fact that most of the scenery is messy and scribbled, and the fact that it mostly consists of sledding down a mountain, all seemed to indicate to me that there was little intention behind the piece. But then I noticed the scenery’s consistency through highspeed sections, the presence of multi-rider and remount choreography throughout the 14-minute runtime, and the fact that the musical soundscape was custom-made for the video, and I started paying attention. I struggle - in comparison to the two excellent guest reviews above me - to get any personal meaning or creative inspiration out of the piece, and I struggle to unpack what artistic choices were intentional and what were happy accidents, but I won’t dispute that Descenso del Monte Rascaestrellas is uniquely effective at creating an unsettling vibe compared to any other Line Rider track I can think of. It’s worth checking out if you like weird, offbeat, potentially disturbing video art.
👍
good bones - OTDE
To the casual viewer and without any context, good bones is incredibly cryptic, even deliberately obtuse. A fixed camera, at such a low zoom that our sledder is little more than a few pixels, shows a strikingly modernist image consisting large block areas of black and orange in rectangles and circles, which Bosh slowly works their way through from the top left to the bottom right over a minute and a half, as the electronic-ambient piece “Olsen” by Boards of Canada whirrs and thrums peacefully in the background. Some viewers might perhaps draw the connection between the title and the fact that that the piece looks vaguely like a deconstructed cubist representation of Bosh themself, and wonder if the “bones” in the title refers to Bosh’s physical construction. If this hypothetical viewer ventured into the video’s description, finding a poem also titled “Good Bones”, they might be more than a little befuddled by the poem’s grim, yearning outlook. To some of us, however, particularly veteran Line Rider creators, there comes a moment where Bosh’s movement starts to feel somehow familiar, before we then shout, “Aha!” as all of it - the title, the modernist scenery, the poem - clicks into place, and we suddenly embody the meme of Leonardo DiCaprio pointing, as we cry aloud, “That’s Silk Road!”
Ram Tzu’s seminal 2007 release Silk Road is iconic not only because of a winning combination of manuals, xy sections, and extremely-smooth-for-its-time circular curves that made it a viral hit on youtube and inspired innumerable Line Rider creators for well over a decade, but also because it is perhaps the most scened Line Rider track of all time. It has been scened by x612nt13, LineRiderGjert, Georgio_Jc, and Chuggers, and those are just the ones that were completed and are still available on YouTube. Scening Silk Road had become a cliche almost before the first scened version was released, because seemingly everyone and their dog was already talking about their exciting new project of scening Silk Road. After all, the track itself practically begs to be scened - it’s nice and compact, so scening it shouldn’t be too much work, it’s got all those delightful curves, and those xy lines that you could turn into just about anything, and also it’s an iconic work that everyone knows and loves, and just think - you could be the one to make the definitive version! Ultimately there never was a definitive scened version, and thus, in the end, the definitive version remained the original unscened release. Scening Silk Road in 2021 is thus inherently an attempt at some sort of reclamation of the concept of scening Silk Road - and this is where the title and the poem in the description start to make sense. OTDE has reimagined the structure of Silk Road as a Piet Mondrian painting, filling in the circles with black and covering the XY sections with large orange rectangles. If nothing else, it’s truly striking how beautifully the loops of Silk Road fit this aesthetic. Silk Road, it turns out, does indeed have good bones.
Where the work loses me a bit is the connection to Maggie Smith’s 2016 poem of the same name. “Good Bones” is an achingly tender, yet uncomfortably honest piece of writing about the tension between the necessity of hope for the future and the awful brutality of the present world, and the lies we tell ourselves and our children in the name of creating a world that’s hopefully better. It seems to me a bit self-serious to try to draw a connection between the hard task of imagining a better world and then building it, and the relatively easy task of reclaiming the concept of scening Silk Road. Perhaps it’s trying to say something about how Line Rider is a canvas of infinite possibilities that has been largely squandered in the past, but to me the forced association of this gut-wrenching poem with this cool little Line Rider work does the poem a disservice, while also making it feel like the Line Rider piece is trying to be more deep and profound than it actually is. Ultimately, good bones is a well-executed reimagining of a tired old idea into something fresh and new that’s genuinely pretty clever - provided you already have the context, since without context it’s largely inscrutable - but there’s not much more to it than that.
🤷
Hot milk - Roaxial
Roaxial’s newest release is a great example of how an oft-abused mechanic such as LRACE’s 10-point cannon generator can work if it’s justified by an underlying concept and used in a consistent way. The titular song, by electronic musician Snail’s House, which features quirky synth licks and sudden, blaring synth chords, became popular through its use in an animation art meme, in which an animated character is appears cute and cuddly before suddenly becoming a terrifying monster whenever the synth chords play, before reverting afterward. Roaxial’s use of 10-point cannons thus happens at the start and end of each synth chord, and - crucially - nowhere else. Add tight, highspeed pinches (and later, high-pressure flatsled curves) during every synth chord, and you’ve got a solid conceptual base for a Line Rider piece. Hot milk is nothing if not consistent, and the result is a work that is undeniably satisfying. However, Roaxial stops there, opting for half-hearted manuquirk synced to the quirk synths for the rest of the track and then calling it finished, instead of building on this solid concept, so the track feels solid but unmemorable, a feeling only heightened by the extremely abrupt end of the video.
🤷
Erased Matthew Nelson Drawing - Ava Hofmann
Guest review by OTDE:
TechDawg’s 2008 work Transcendental is over 13 years old now, and yet today it remains the undisputed king of detailed scenic worldbuilding, a timeless classic so well-executed that it has become cemented in the Line Rider canon as that piece that, perhaps more than any other, creators tried to best at its own game, before ultimately failing. While other flash-era dense-scenery works like Breathtaking Silence, Incito Scaena, and Evolution have all either faded into memory or become horribly dated (or both), Transcendental feels like it’s barely aged a day, pristine and polished, effortlessly stunning. It’s no surprise then, that since the track file became publicly available in 2016 as part of the Line Rider Archival Project (which, full disclosure, I created and maintain) creators have started remixing it. OTDE’s 2019 release The Road Less Travelled took the idea, “What if we made Bosh sled roughly over the rocks instead of riding the rails?” and ran with it. Ava Hofmann seems to have created Erased Matthew Nelson Drawing from the idea, “What if we erased the entire track?”
Erased Matthew Nelson Drawing seemingly takes its inspiration from the controversial 1953 Robert Rauschenberg artwork “Erased de Kooning Drawing”, in which the artist asked Willem de Kooning, who he admired, for an artwork he could erase to create a new work of art, and, after being given a detailed and dense drawing that would be difficult to erase, spent over a month with a variety of erasers proceeding to do so. We can already see here a few distinctions: de Kooning’s drawing was never published before being erased, and Rauschenberg’s process of erasing it was considerably more time-intensive than moving the lines of Transcendental onto an invisible layer. Ava has also chosen to preserve the movement of Transcendental, slowing the 2-minute track down to a full hour, adding a thick very-light-grey line following the almost-transparent Bosh’s path, zooming in until the sledder takes up almost the entire video, and adding a long ambient-drone piece of music in the background.
It’s clear that this is intended as a shitpost, but a lot of postmodern art is equivalent to high-effort shitposting, and I think nearly everyone will find that in the case of both postmodern art and shitposting, they like some works more than others. So, in my opinion, is Erased Matthew Nelson Drawing good? Eh. It’s okay. It feels like the kind of thing that might be kind of cool to see running continuously in an art gallery after you read about the context of what you’re watching on a plaque - the kind of thing you might pause and look at for a minute or so and then move along - but as a YouTube video it’s hard for me to recommend. The movement, after all, is the least interesting part of Transcendental, and I can’t say that I got much of anything out of the (as I wrap this review up, now several) times I have watched Erased Matthew Nelson Drawing, though I must admit it’s a totally unique concept. If I had watched Erased Matthew Nelson Drawing for the first time upon its YouTube premiere, I would perhaps have speculated that it was more about the process than the final product. However, given that I was actually present during the creation process, I can in fact confirm that that was the case. I had a blast watching this piece get made. Watching the result on YouTube though? Rather dull. Maybe the real erased Matthew Nelson drawing was the good times we had along the way.
🤷
what's the point? - OTDE
The appropriately titled what’s the point? consists of a three-minute zoom-out as Bosh does absolutely nothing. However, the scenery is where the work gets interesting, as it consists of the famous pointillism painting “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” by Georges Seurat, generated in Line Rider using the new color layers feature and some custom code. Pointillism consists of large numbers of dots or tiny brushstrokes of dramatically varying colors that look abstract when examined up close, but when surveyed at a distance an image becomes clear. In a similar sense, what’s the point? starts at a zoom level high enough that you have no idea what you’re looking at, and then about a minute in you realize it’s some form of pixel art, and then about 2 minutes in you realize that you are in a park with human figures and Bosh is resting on the tail of a dog, and then by 3 minutes in you can see the whole picture (and possibly recognize the well-known painting). While the pixels in what’s the point? are not remotely representative of the actual dots and brushstrokes in the original painting, and OTDE didn’t spend years meticulously copying the piece into Line Rider, what’s the point? effectively captures that feeling of looking at the dots of a pointillism piece up-close in a gallery, and then backing up slowly and crossing an invisible threshold where the whole image suddenly snaps into focus.
The main question I have is: What’s the (ahem) point - of doing this in Line Rider? I think the only real answer is novelty. While people have imported images into Line Rider using publicly-available tools like Ollie’s Line Rider Overlay for years, this is the first time someone has done so in such a way as to recreate the beauty of observing a pointillist work of art. Beyond that, I’m not really sure that what’s the point? has anything to say that you couldn’t convey with a video of a slow zoom-out on a high resolution image of “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte”. Pointillism is certainly beautiful, but what’s the point? doesn’t seem to have anything to say beyond that.
🤷
Weak - RetroTune
Guest review by OTDE:
Few things make me feel the passage of time quite like the reminder that there are trends in Line Rider, whole fads come and gone. Usually, the craze revolves around one person doing some kind of trick to great effect in a single track, followed by dozens of people who think to themselves “I want to do the exact same thing for three minutes’ worth of Line Rider track and God Help Anyone Who Tries To Stop Me.” Everybody wanted to copy TechDawg’s hyper-detailed cliffs, then MrZNF’s dad-rock manuquirk, then “whatever it is Kramwood’s doing”, before arriving, finally, at the faux-sheet-music aesthetic of DoodleChaos. Watching this track made me realize with a dawning horror that, without my noticing, the baton had already been passed, and the crown, heavy as it always was, now rested atop Arglin’s head.
The vast majority of Weak follows the formula laid out by tracks like Believer: shoot bosh in a direction really fast when music makes big noise, stop bosh when music makes no noise. The kind of control 10-point cannons give you over Bosh’s absolute position is enormous, but the use they’re put to in Weak is staggeringly narrow. It’s like someone found a Swiss Army knife and thought to themselves, oh neat, a screwdriver! Think about that for a second: this tool can put Bosh anywhere, at any time, and it’s used here for maybe two or three marginally different things. It’s the same with animations - the faux motion graphics at least break the monotony of Yet Another Big Ten Point Cannon Section - but if the end result is something you could do in an hour with After Effects, what’s all that frame-by-frame work accomplishing? Because the animated text tries to straddle the line between hand-drawn line animation and kinetic typography, it doesn’t really land in the way you’d expect.
If I’ve learned anything in my second decade of Line Rider, it’s that trends rarely die out completely. I will see this track reflected a thousand times, beat after beat of ten-point cannons, set mechanically to some knockoff Imagine Dragons flavor-of-the-month pop rock I-shouldn’t-party-but-I-love-it-so-much chart topper, by the time I’m done with my third decade of Line Rider. It will be just as exhausting the thousandth time as it was the first.
Look, I’m not trying to use a review of one video to bash another creator that took no part in its creation, but I have to be honest: RetroTune’s Weak is such an accurate distillation of everything I dislike about the typical Arglin work that at times it feels on the verge of crossing a threshold into becoming a satirical piece that’s some kind of weird high-effort dunk on the prolific quirker’s often bland and formulaic approach to trackmaking. There’s the basic approach that sees cannons, manuals, flings, and smooth flatsled as the only building blocks worth using while constructing the track. There’s the casual insistence that there are only two speeds - slow and fast - and the idea that any changes between those two speeds should happen instantaneously via cannon. There’s the half-hearted animations depicting lyrics or brief moments of instrumentation, including the ubiquitous highspeed-livedraw-pencil-in-LRA effect that was kind of cool the first time I saw it in 2017 and then never again. There’s the endlessly distracting zooms that are always happening either over a couple seconds while nothing else is going on, or instantaneously and paired with a cannon as part of some superficial sync - one of these is an 0.1-second slam from a close zoom all the way out to infinity synced to a Truck Driver’s Gear Change that’s just the right combination of uninspired, predictable, and unbelievably self-satisfied to be (probably) unintentionally hilarious to me every time I watch the video. There’s the custom scarf color scheme that RetroTune uses for all of his tracks as a kind of “signature” (which I recently learned is actually in a database that Arglin themself attempts to enforce as - I shit you not - “Privately Owned Scarves”). There’s the endlessly jarring - and endlessly vapid - full-screen color changes every time we move into a new section of the song (and occasionally even for moments that last less than a second) because I guess coming up with a way to shift the tone of the track that isn’t absurdly gimmicky is too hard. And then, of course, there’s the approach where any time there is any perceptible beat in the music, from any instrument, there absolutely must be a cannon - generated ten-point cannons, of course, that’s the fastest way to make them after all! Gotta have that primal efficiency in your track making! It makes me wonder if some people see syncing a Line Rider track as little more than an exercise in beat recognition. Wait a second, there’s even animated flatsled spinning? There’s a novel remount mechanic used as a superficial representation of the lyrics?? The “line-friends” are here too?? There’s an inexplicable 3-second XY section??? There’s also an inexplicable 3-second alt quirk-section??? Is this track trolling me???
I’m pretty sure the answer is no, that this piece is not intended as satire, rather, that it was constructed entirely in earnest by a creator who just genuinely likes Arglin’s formula and wants to make stuff like they do. I try to be as honest as I can in these reviews, but I am also increasingly trying to be kind when I can (since many Line Rider creators are anxious teens who put more weight into my reviews of their work than they probably should) and I don’t want to be unnecessarily harsh on someone who has clearly put a lot of time into something they appear to have genuinely enjoyed creating. There’s definitely something to be said for making unapologetic fan-fiction that mimics an artist you really like, and copying someone else’s ideas is absolutely a great starting point for building something transformative of your own. I think my bewildered despair comes from two sources: first, the awareness of the amount of time and thought that was put into what is essentially a cheap knock-off of an artist whose work I typically experience as disappointing at best; and second, my prior appreciation of RetroTune’s Line Rider video-art piece Buttercup this past January - a unique piece that is flawed and disjointed, but also endlessly inventive, trippy, and fun. Maybe it was too much to hope for that that same exploratory creative energy might be translated into Line Rider itself.
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