Flash Line Rider

Every now and then, the Web provides a showcase for talent in corners where you never would have expected to find it.
Consider, for example, the amazingly simple, but overwhelmingly addictive Flash-based game/simulation/physics experiment known as Line Rider.
You start on a blank white screen. You draw lines—hills, ramps, valleys—with a pencil tool. When you click Play, a tiny, weird, funny little guy on a sled gets dropped onto the uppermost line you drew—and gravity takes it from there. Make your lines too steep, and he wipes out. Make them too shallow, and he runs out of momentum and stops. Cross them in just the right way, and the simulation goes nuts and spits him forcefully hundreds of feet in the air.
It’s spawned an entire mini-subculture of Line Rider nuts, who spend hours drawing elaborate fantasyscapes for their little sledder guys, and then capturing the results (either with a screen-capture program or even with a camcorder filming the screen) and posting them on YouTube.
It looks easy. But it’s actually darned difficult, especially because there’s no eraser tool, and lines you draw from the left and from the right behave differently.
Still, I’m almost sorry to hear that a new version is in the works with an eraser tool. The difficulty of creating a great course using today’s crude tools makes you even more amazed at the genius of the best Line Rider artists’ work