Cartoon Sprint: Added Hurdles only knows broken English and it’s incredibly simple, nevertheless, many people can’t bring themselves to put it down. Like many of the hand-drawn apps that came before it, Cartoon Sprint even made it into the Top 100 for a while.
In Cartoon Sprint, you are a hurdler stick figure or a sprinter stick figure. You sprint by pressing one of four buttons when it blinks red, and not pressing it when it doesn’t (pressing the non-red buttons slows you down). To jump hurdles, touch anywhere on the screen once you get to the yellow line before the hurdles.
There are two things you should know about Cartoon Sprint: Added Hurdles. One: the game is really simple. I don’t mean Galaga simple or Street Fighter simple. I mean Commodore 64 simple. These graphics make those antelope cave paintings in France look like Avatar. And, two: it’s really, really addictive.
I batted those little red buttons like a lab mouse trying to get a crack pellet for an hour and a half before I even got around to playing with the hurdles. There’s nothing like the magical moment when your stick figure comes in something other than last in this game.
Most people will fall into either the “love it” or “hate it” camp. Cartoon Sprint: Added Hurdles is easy to play, rather mindless, and doesn’t demand too much from it’s users. On the other hand, asking folks to pay for such an unpolished piece of software is almost an affront to games like Angry Birds that are professionally-illustrated and offer unlimited hours of addictive gameplay for the same dollar.
Maybe I’m just in a good mood, but in spite of this game’s flaws, I can’t bring myself to rate Cartoon Sprint lower than a 7. It just had too much playability, in a simple, gawky, poorly rendered way. And, it made me laugh.
But what sealed the deal for me was the “Help” section.
I firmly believe that the help screens for Cartoon Sprint: Added Hurdles were written in a language other than English—check that, in a non-Indo-European language—and then translated by a computer using software written as someone’s graduate thesis on disinformation as modern art:
“In Hurdles game, the player can jump when just a touch in screen without buttons.”
And of course, whenever you beat your old best time, you are rewarded with,
“Congratulation/New Record of Personal.”
Cartoon Sprint: Added Hurdles has one or two good points—but the bad points are so bad they’re good. If you’re a purist, avoid it. If not, pay the buck just for the laughs. If you’re somewhere in between try the lite version first.
