The first game with a table of high scores was Space Invaders. My highest distance driven was over 23,000 meters, but if I didn't use coins I'd rarely make it past the 6,000 meter mark. But that score is inflated because I spent money. Sure, I probably actually am better at the game than many of them, nor did I hack it. I'm not proud of the fact that my name sits above every other player of Endless Road. Every player besides myself in the top five of the Distance leaderboard seems to has way more coins than could have been collected through normal play. I've collected 27,878 coins, but Game Center shows that some players have over 1 billion of them, which implies that they've somehow hacked the game and taken as many coins as possible without paying. One of the game's leaderboards tracks the number of coins that players have collected while driving.
In Endless Road, it only took me $25 and a few hours to become the world's greatest.Įndless Road seems to be suffering from problems with hackers. Some players find themselves spending thousands of dollars on these games to stay on top. While some game developers say they'll never embrace a "pay-to-win" scheme in which the biggest-spending players will always dominate their non-paying friends, some embrace it.
Since Apple began to allow "in-app purchases" for free iOS software, many games using a free-to-play model allow players to spend unlimited amounts of money on virtual items. Am I some kind of Endless Road savant? No, I just paid twenty-five bucks.
*Life After Disc is a series exploring new development in digital gaming platforms, from app stores to browsers to downloadable console games.*Roughly 16,792 players have purchased Endless Road, according to its GameCenter leaderboards, and as of this writing I have scored higher than all of them. The farther you drive, the higher your score. It challenges you to outrun an earthquake that is causing the road behind you to collapse. 21, Electronic Arts subsidiary Chillingo published its 338th iPhone game, a racer with a minimalist visual style called Endless Road.