Confessions of A BOD-aholic for life

What is it with this game?

Here I am, I haven't submitted a game in years I own a brand new Android phone that I love and has gaming potential far beyond what was possible on a palm. I am now in college, and it has been over five years since I started playing. My spelling has improved significantly since I was 13 as has my ability to know when I am beat. My life is full of hours of homework, rehearsals, practicing and working. I don't have time to log onto Facebook, Twitter, heck I have to force myself to check my email(and that involves the chance of canceled classes haha). All this has changed, and I have grown out of a lot of things. I find myself not caring to remember my old favorite games like Star Wars Jedi Knight, Battle front or even halo. I am completely un-enchanted with the idea of buying a Xbox 360, the new Nintendo system or a PS3.

But even now, having spent the last 2 years working full time, going to college and trying my best to accomplish what the world calls "Growing up," I still find myself coming back to this forum, reading through posts four and five years old(boy, was that embaressing). Watching old times that I spent hours accomplishing and still amazed at watching the runs of other participants in our obsession. What about THIS game makes me think in the back of my head, "Someday, I will get an ipod touch or an iphone, and I will finally get into the top ten hall of fame. I will save up a hundred golds and submit them all at once, stunning anyone who happens to stumble on the deserted website." Why after all this time am I still in love with a stick man riding his bike to different flags and then finishing the race?

I just spent around 20 minutes thinking and I have no answer. Sz designed a game to end all games, after 6 years I have failed to find anything as adrenaline pumping as getting a medal on one of these levels. This is the game that always comes back into my head, all other obsessions tend to be one night stands, and nothing really hits the spot but this. I can't explain it, but to this day and probably a great many days to come I will always intend to return eventually. Not now, and probably not in the next year. But the need doesn't go away, I will return one day, and I will try as hard as I can to not let this game die. I am, and forever will be a sold out, 100% Bike or Die-aholic for life.

15 comments

Laser

Yes.

BikerBrian

Awesome post! (in content, grammar, and spelling). You have summed up the feelings of many of us that have played this game and keep coming back. You are exactly right that there is no game I've played that gives the satisfaction of getting a gold in BoD. The only thing better than getting a gold is posting it for others to watch.

My wife and kids were talking last weekend and I overheard them say: "Do you remember when Daddy used to be so obsessed with Bike or Die?"

I hope to see you back again soon!

Laser

There really isn't any other game that's as good for both being a quick "fix" and that you can play for a long time straight. Meaning, you never have to fully commit to playing because just practising through a level can take less than a minute, but if you want gold, you can spend those hours.

You don't really find that kind of balance in consoles where you need to sit down and invest time by booting, loading, and then having to complete long levels/missions/matches or risk losing everything. I do enjoy going back to old Gameboy games or even other systems that can be properly emulated on my laptop, where there are either short levels or I can use save states whenever I feel like it.

I'd say that the community here is also a reason why I'm still here, and while it's certainly awesome, I was already addicted to the game before I got into submitting times and playing competitively.

Basically, I need this game for Android.

Laser

One more thing, when you come back, you need to take CMR. I still can't believe that my gold would last like that, but it probably was one of the most difficult to get if not the most.

Mr.pickle.

I think everyone agrees this game should be on android, but I think sz is done making innovations at this point, on to bigger and more profitable things I think. And yes CMR is on my list for sure..Thing with that level is all the spikes add a crazy element of chance to it and its hard to predict the times when the bike will be launched or just land softly, if all the different chance moments line up correctly it could go considerably faster, it would likely take over 100,000 attempts before it would be getting down to frames.

Vega

Pickle - I have read countless posts from you (well... maybe they could be counted). This "confessions" thread might be my favorite of your posts so far. You captured what so many of us are thinking.

Why do we return to this simplistic, low grade graphic, single player, handheld device only, insanely challenging and suicide inducing difficult game called Bike or Die?

Like BB said above, the satisfaction of getting a gold (or a really good run that you are happy with) is really something special.

Unquestionably, competing well and securing Hall of Fame medals in BoD requires the most skill of any game I've ever played or ever seen. You HAVE to want it.

"OMG, I accidentally got Gold! How did that happen?!"... said no one ever.

You guys are great. You guys are really great.

Spence

Vega- actually that happened to me on The Well game.php?g=223422& cp=c39846

But back on topic, Yes I wish I could play this game again and it will always hold a special place in my heart...but just think of how much more productive we are now! I'm kidding of course. I'm not any more productive than I was before.

I have got BOD v1.6 running almost full-speed on the android Styletap palm emulator but it doesn't seem to support multitouch or button mapping

and so, there is no way to input more than one button press at a time. Perhaps that will change in future versions, which I eagerly await.

In the meantime, the college life has given me gobs of free time which I so wisely choose to spend playing pc games like minecraft and battlefield 3 along with the occasional emulated PS2 game. The only one that give me a similar thrill to BoD is a ranked Minecraft melee server called Hungercraft. Going to the leader-boards after a good match had a air of nostalgia attached to it that greatly reminded me of this game. But the community there is largely composed of 13 year old egomaniacs with rage issues and largely devoid of the ability to be encouraging. And so, I continue to wait for this game to once again fulfill my competitive desires. And realistically at this point, I think if that were to happen a restart of the leader-boards would be in order. This game would be very popular in the android marketplace, given the lack of quality games.

Yes, you guys are the best. It has been quite a journey over the years that I hope doesn't have to fade into irrelevancy.

Laser

I accidentally got Home Sweet Home with under 100 tries, and I still somehow have Bronze. Mike's gold time is 4 seconds better, so there were extra tricks that no one noticed.

He had gold when I took it, and got so upset that he started to send me messages asking if we were still "on the same side." He had both of us draw up lists of levels that we would never go for, and that the other person could. (I could post those lists if anyone cares).

The only other level like that might be Human Insides where I thought that the gold time was a second faster than it actually was, so I kept going for it even though I didn't need to.

PMD

Very well put Pickle!

I have to say, who would have thought 5 years ago that you would post a very elegantly stated, almost 100% correctly spelled (embaressing) commentary that sums up in 465 words exactly how most of us feel?

Nice Pickle, Nice!

I'd like to see you get some College Credit for that post.

Mr.pickle.

The Canadians had a conspiracy against the rest of us.....I knew it.

Ibanez

Well said Pickle - and true to form I'm here checking the forum and wondering when I'll put the time in to go for a Gold, not if but when, don't know when, but it will happen!

Mr.pickle.

Good grief there are people still on here. Someone mail me an ancient device that can play this game...

Seriously though, if I were to buy whatever system would be needed either an old ipod touch or a even older Palm device off of Amazon/ebay or something would there be a way to install the game?

Vega

pickle it's just Andrew and myself now. Kamirashi came back too for like 11 minutes.

I think you'll need to contact Biker Brian if you want to play.

Sz doesn't keep up with BoD anymore. I am trying to find a way to buy the whole game from him but have not had success yet.

I just don't want this BoD site to disappear into oblivion.

Champ

Brute force authentication

Nice to hear from you Mr. Pickle.

I would literally cry if bike.toyspring went offline.

L4gger625

Mr. Pickle, I want to tell you how I was able to enjoy my childhood game again in the hopes that you or anyone else can do it, too.

First, you need the hardware. I haven't been able to find a good Palm or old iPhone emulator so... Search online for a Palm device on sale or on your local flea market. I got a VERY cheap Palm III on a flea market, I wasn't looking for one but I casually saw it on exhibition! So I said "give me that right freaking now" I don't care if it doesn't work well, I love retro tech. It works and has the original charger but the battery doesn't work at all. It only works while charging and all data is lost on power off lol But hey, it was the equivalent of $3 USD! I also found a used Palm Treo 680 in very good condition for sale online a few years ago but the battery died shortly after... I could in theory be able to replace those Palm's batteries with generic 3.7v batteries but before that I need a very good research and confidence in doing this, I don't want to blow up such rare devices.

Recently, I bought a cheap iPhone 3G, it is used but in excellent condition! I was lucky to find not one but two of them in existence in my country's biggest online marketplace, although I snatched only one of them. I'm no big fan of Apple stuff but I am a big fan of BoD! I remember being able to install BoD on an iPhone 6 several years ago but it was barely playable due to bugs related to the menus, level loading or something, can't remember. So I went with a device which originally had installed iPhone OS 2.0, for which BoD was made, although my iPhone has iOS 4.2.1

The next step is installing BoD. Since it has been deleted from the App Store, you can only try to find online the .ipa package and install it through one of the two methods I've found so far: Patching the .ipa and installing it by enabling developer mode on the Iphone, or jailbreaking the iPhone. I can't remember how I did the former but I did extensive research online and did it on the iPhone 6 without jailbreak. Perhaps the bugs were caused by the patching? Anyway here's the ipa download: https://archive.org/details/ios_2_ipa Mirrors in my website: https://elinge.me/files/bod-2.1.1.ipa https://elinge.me/files/bod-2.0.1.ipa

In my case, I did my research online and found this very simple but effective guide https://www.reddit.co m/r/LegacyJailbreak/c omments/uwo07o/tutorialjailbreak_ios_421_untethered/ I had to use a not-so-old but slow laptop on which I installed Windows 7 some time ago, because the Redsn0w utility apparently doesn't work on Windows 10. Once I tried Windows 7 the jailbreaking was a breeze.

Once the iPhone was jailbroken, I installed the BoD 2.1.1 ipa with an old version of iTunes (no real reason to not use the current version of iTunes AFAIK, I just wanted to not install some sort of Apple spyware/bloatware and also to make sure Apple doesn't refuse to install my app and asking me to upgrade to the newest iPhone instead, here's the version I installed in case you're interested, from 2012 or something https://elinge.me/files/iTunes64Setup-10.3.1.55.exe), but I had to first install a package from Cydia which allows me to install apps that I don't "own". The package is "AppSync for iOS 4.0". Once I installed AppSync, iTunes was able to install the ipa without throwing an error related to me not owning a license to the BoD app. If you have a Palm, you will need a serial key to unlock the full version of BoD, here's a keygen which was hard to find https://elinge.me/files/bod2-keygen.exe or you can request me a serial in the Discord

Installing levelpacks from this site doesn't work, the screen freezes and then the lockscreen shows up with the touchscreen not responding at all, I have to reset the device when this happens. Seems to be a bug with Safari or iOS, because visiting an App Store link with Safari also results in freezing and the touchscreen stopping working. But I found a workaround

You need to use a terminal, just like a tech-savy guy using Linux

You need to put the levelpacks' .prc into /private/var/mobile/Applications/1A925875-A49B-4D09-A3D1-25B9A3CD352E/Documents (I don't know if the long ID can vary per device) You can also find your recordings here! In order to put the levelpacks here, you can do it on-device using the Terminal app and the cURL utility , they're on Cydia. Or you can just install the SSH service following the instructions on Cydia, connect to your iPhone and upload the files using the FileZilla or WinSCP program on Windows, the scp command built into Linux distros or even some app to transfer files using SSH on an Android device. If you or anyone else reading this need assistance on this, you can reach me and other BoD veterans on Discord here

https://bikeordie.net/

I should say that playing in a Palm is better in the sense that it is the "native" or "original" experience, you have the physical buttons which are much better than a touchscreen, but you will almost certainly deteriorate them after enough BoD'ing

The screen is also in danger of ugly scratching if you do a lot of BoDesign

OTOH, you can get higher resolution on an iPhone (mine is 320x480 vs the 320x320 of the Treo) and you can play in portrait or landscape mode. Playing in portrait mode is surprisingly comfortable, BoD was designed for the Palms' square screens with physical buttons so in an iPhone you get extra screen space for the buttons and for seeing more level at a time

But I miss my custom binding on the physical key "p" on the Palm to quickly toggle 3D mode at any time

If I ever move or remove the files in my website, I will let you know the new links in future posts, or you can try a listing at https://elinge.me/files/ or perhaps https://files.elinge.me/

I vehemently encourage you and anyone else reading this to try getting their hands on an old Palm or iOS device, following my guide here and reviving this game's old glory! Join the Discord to get help on this, hanging out in general and also to be updated about any advances on the BoD: Revival project

https://bikeordie.net/