Super Summer Dash

Super Summer Dash was, as its name implies, made for the RMN Summer Games 2012. It was then promptly forgotten, as often tends to happen with contest games around here. Even so, it’s still a rather fun game even when played now, on its own merits.

Storyline



There’s this obstacle course on the Avvy Beach, and they are holding a contest which rewards anybody who could get through it before others with a cool million! This obviously sounds good to our protagonist, Chase, and so he chooses to do so, in spite of the warnings from his female friend, Jenny. The contest itself is run by the DJ Zeke (who looks like any other RTP hooded bandit/dark mage), who announces the challenges and comments on Chase’s performance. In between the challenges, where Chase gets “five minute breaks”, there are also brief “interviews” from the local reporter. It’s nothing earth-shattering, but it does carry over the atmosphere of a sports competition.

Gameplay



I have to acknowledge here that I was never particularly interested in top-down platformers, and thus never had the opportunity to get good at them as well. Thus, you well might enjoy gameplay itself more than I did. To me, pressing A to jump a little, Shift to run and these two buttons together for a long jump (even from a standing start, which took me a while to figure out) with no other elements, wasn’t that compelling. However, I quite liked the area design, whether it’s the second challenge area, partly depicted above, the third one with a large waterfall, or even the moment early on in the first where the most obvious path is blocked and requires activating switches earlier on. Though, there’s a potential issue with the way your character “respawns”. Falling into the water between platforms simply causes Chase to climb up where he last left off (since summer beach contest obviously wouldn’t have anything death-defying), adding a “fail” to a count announced by Zeke at the end of the stage (which doesn’t affect anything) and taking a couple of seconds off the time limit. The exact spot relative to the edge of the platform can be inconsistent, though: sometimes, jumping from there was fine and even the way to go (since some platforms are so narrow you can fall down from backing away too far), but usually you are practically on the edge itself, and need to back away a step, or fall again. Otherwise, though, the game is not truly difficult, because of the large time limits given: 5 minutes for the first and 4 and 3 minutes for the other two is more then enough, even if you are not particularly good.

Aesthetics (art, design and sound)

The screenshots already show some of the games’ graphics, which are a mixture of RTP and KRokon work, and work well enough for what the game is going for. The OST, however, is the real stand-out: it consists of several “summer-styled” songs with lyrics, and even the “Discotheque” menu theme already sets joyful tone from the get-go. The other couple of tracks are good too. However, they obviously can’t compare to the final stage music, which is literally Joe Esposito’s “You’re the Best Around” and is stupidly awesome, almost like that Kid Rock song in The Sword and the Fish.

Conclusion



Finishing it with 8 seconds left, after embarrassingly failing 3 times to jump over the last gap and having to start from the first platform in this sequence was incredible indeed.

So, that’s Super Summer Dash. Hardly the greatest game ever, but it’s a fun example of bite-sized entertainment regardless, and might just be what some people would like to spend 15 minutes on this summer, 5 years after its original release.