From Foddy.net, creator of QWOP, comes another bite-sized keyboard-based game that makes about as much sense as a boat made out of tahini. In GIRP, you play a climber scaling the side of a rocky cliff. The water is on the rise, so you've got to stay ahead of the liquid or face certain watereyness. By using the keyboard, you can fling your hands to nearby grips, moving one arm at a time to ascend the wall. If you played QWOP, you know this isn't a game of slow precision. It's about slapping the keys in some sort of strategic pattern and hoping everything works out in the end!
Lining the cliff wall are grips, each with a letter of the alphabet on the face. To take hold of a grip, press and hold that key. To release, just let go of the key. Now, all would be fine and good if your goal was to hold on to a few grips and call it a day. But with the water rising and all, it's best you stay moving in an upward direction. That's where flexing your muscles comes in to play.
Tap [shift] to pull yourself up using whichever hand is holding a grip. Then, pray to Poseidon you can reach the next highest grip point with your free hand! Often you'll need to flex your muscles to get a bit of a swing going so you can move horizontally across the wall. If you're really cool (and daring, and probably a bit bonkers), you can even fling yourself around and catch grips on the other side. Distant points change their letters, though, so you can forget about holding a key with a far target in mind.
GIRP is a lot like QWOP in many ways, providing you with sloppy, overly precise control of a character and tasking you to perform something difficult. It's also crazy amounts of fun, allowing you to make hilarious mistakes and simply laugh off the awkward results. The goal is to make it as high as you can, driven by desperation, a sense of physical exhaustion, and sheer determination. Waiting at the top is a nest with "amazing treasure" hidden inside. You'll also have to fight with the bird that owns the nest. But you know what? You're a hardened rock climber. You can deal with such trivialities!
Go play GIRP, see what real-life rock climbing isn't like. How high can you climb?
Unfortunately, keyboard limitations add a touch of fake difficulty to the challenge. Mine, for instance, won't register the F, T, and Shift keys simultaneously. I suppose that's why there are alternate stretching methods, but trying to click the mouse while I'm pressing Q and K... miiiiight need an extra hand for that.
My Macbook can't register shift/ctrl (or cmd) for the "pull yourself up" command.
Only the mouse click works, which isn't too bad considering the position of the touchpad, although it's harder to control than the surety of a key press.
Still, it's easier than QUOP. But then again, so is curing cancer.
Oh dear. I should have learnt from The Accident that Mavis Beacon and rock climbing do not mix well.
On my first attempt, my spastic arm flailing made me fall off the ladder.
I can see the hilarity potential of this game.
Too wide range of letters.
I don't really know what to make of this one. Its a lot harder than I thought it would be
Worth mentioning: if you try to play this game with your fingers in a proper touch typing position, you're asking for failure. Get your hands up and bend them all over the place.
Yeah JohnB, it's definitely a Finger Twister. But it's surprisingly less rage inducing than QWOP. Actually it's not that surprising because it would be tough to be MORE infuriating than its predecessor.
...also, is the game's name supposed a joke on GRIP (as in, "use a strong grip to climb a rock wall")? Because if so...bravo.
Sweet! I won a glass horse!
There is no feeling of achievement like the one you get when you make your first successful drop-catch. Jumping is oh so tricky, but possible. You just about have to to get to the very end.
I love it, but then I also used to love Crazy Climber, so this should come as no surprise. And while QWOP is probably funnier, this one is much more enjoyable to play at length.
My record is 25.0 m. I do wish there were an easy way to switch hands on one rung. I'm getting better at it (aim the other hand at a far-away rung in the correct direction so that it's hovering over the other hand, then release both buttons and immediately press the original rung again), but it's very much a last resort.
Based on the way the climber moves, I think this game should be called DERP
Love this! I managed to get veeery close to the top.. going to try again later :)
I got surprisingly far up... 9.5 m, I think. Only my second or third actual try. As mentioned, only the click works on my MacBook. Thus, I have to hit all pairs with only one hand.
And yeah, I wish you could switch hands while holding a single rung.
Still fun. :D
Would be better if removed the need to hold shift all the time, and if space would switch hands on ring.
Very wearing on my pinky though, pressing shift for so long really hurts. Very nice and difficult game, though. I've found that releasing shift and then pressing it again is a good way to "throw" yourself upward, giving you the extra height sometimes needed to grab a rung.
I just can't make the final steps! I think a jump is necessary..
Get a great start! Then realise I have to switch hands. End up falling. Would like to know height of end? Ended up using click of mouse button because of stickykeys for shift and keyboard shortcuts for ctrl.
Wish it was easier to jump from rung to rung. Jump wonderfully, but then hand not fast enough to move over rung.
I actually think QWOP was easier because of my strategy for it.
This! This damn game!
Reached the top after 35 minutes.
Never once jump-grabbed, until the end when I had to.
Nerve-wracking, to say the least.
I got to 63.4 and then lost it. How far is it to get to the top? 100m?
The best trick that I've found so far to get a good reach going is to click once for the hand hold and release, climb up and hold, and then reach and hold. Ends up giving you an extra boost for a reach so you don't have to do much jumping.
fuzzyface, you'll actually do better if you don't hold shift. Just use it for short bursts to get yourself swinging.
Diego, you have to make a very short jump to get to the final three set of rings, even if you manage to grab the fourth-to-last ring all the way on the left-hand side.
I've gotten my time down to about 24 minutes. But I'm not really going for speed. I think I'll be coming back to this game as a relaxation activity a lot in the future. If you get out of the habit of holding shift, it's quite relaxing to swing there as you contemplate your next move. Holding the tension in your arms with shift actually makes the tension of playing the game greater, which is saying something about the quality of the design.
Finally won! I got two carrots.
N@, I managed to get to the last three rings without a jump, by having my hand just far enough to the left on the highest rung in the middle-right.
(I did have to let go earlier on, at the part around 60-something meters where the left side tapers off. But that was more of a "let go and fall straight down, grabbing another other rung as you pass it" thing, which wasn't too difficult.)
I got to 64m before a rouge bird made me bite it. It's more of a swinging game than a climbing game. Once you get a momentum going you can cover a lot of ground.
Tip: Don't be afraid to let go of your old grip and only hold down one letter at a time once you connect to a new one to let the speed of the launch take you through to your next mark.
This game utterly failed to impress me. It just lacks any real substance, the whole point of it being about the complexity of control.
So... you have to be able to hit 3 keys at once to get anywhere, something which 99% of keyboards & systems cannot accomplish.
What was the point again? What a waste of electricity.
Gah! Sooooo close to winning and I bungle the last leap of faith... why is this still so addictive? Apparently if you make it to the top what you find in the box is randomized.
My first time was 18 minutes! Except I got an oyster shucker. -__- So then I tried another go at it... and it's possible that the bird gets the present at the end. /headdesk I was already on the last ring when the damned thing came up to its nest before I could swing onto the present. ;____;
I've learned to hate that bird.. It took me a good hour or two to actually get the movement down & little tricks to accomplish it. I didn't have to make any jumps to make it all the way to the end.
It's a relaxing game, you just have to figure out the mechanics. I found it easy if you identify your next move, and your fingers are in an awkward position, just put down your other finger or other finger on the other hand onto the button.
Once again a brilliant game.
I won a WIG!
ha, I love this game. My best shot was 64m and I don't get why people are complaining that most keyboards can't handle 3 keys at once... just use on hand on the keyboard and one on the mouse. For me, that worked best, and stetches from A to P shouldn't that much of a problem for most people.
Guys I made it to the top in like 15 min, it's about 70 m, but if you don't hurry the bird will make you lose. This game is mostly about swinging, hold on with one hand and press shift briefly to make the body swing. If you cannot press shift, control also works (keyboards have something that certain combinations of keys wont register, if that happens, try the other shifts/ctrls). As for the end, it takes quite a lot of tries, but the final super stretch does not require jumping. It requires some very precise swinging. And I considered jumping impossible, as the only time I tried it I failed misserably. But still it is a fun game, tough I found faaaaaaaar easier than QWOP. And way too short, with a very annoying dead end somewhere in the middle.
I must say, I was disappointed. I was really hoping that I'd find a shotgun in the gift at the top to shoot down that stttuuppiddd bird!!!
Girp game is insanely addicting - there may be a way to get to the top without risking at least one "leap of faith" but I'll be danged if I've figured it out. The weird thing about this game is that I've found myself almost wriggling myself out of my chair while I'm playing it and it seems to fool your psyche into thinking you are actually doing the climbing - it makes me physically exhausted!
I think Foddy would make his fortune if he sold a premium version of the game with a hidden ability to grab the bird, rip its head off and squeeze its guts out like a cake icing piping bag. Personally, I'd pay $100...
Sorry, I flared.
I won it twice yesterday. My rewards were a clove cigarette and a blank cassette tape. My time was 37 minutes and 29 minutes. I have made it to the top and fallen at the last moment about 4 times...
This is definitely in my top 5 alphabet-based paraplegic-climbing sims.
Anything's possible if you can do unlimited single-arm dyno's without tiring.
Makes me want to make a little big planet climbing level ...
I've had surprising/terrifying bird, bat and snake encounters whilst climbing (in the real world), so that bird is a pretty good addition.
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