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Side-view dirt-bike on rolling hills. Bumpy peaks launch you airborne — tilt back or forward to align with the surface before you land, or eat dirt.
Your bike rides automatically left-to-right across rolling hills at a steady throttle. You can't slow down or speed up — you only control the bike's pitch when it's in the air.
Two buttons at the bottom of the screen handle that pitch. Hold the left button (◀) to lean backward and rotate the nose up. Hold the right button (▶) to lean forward and rotate the nose down. While on the ground, the bike follows the terrain naturally and the buttons have no effect — they only do something while you're airborne.
The terrain has bumps. A sharp peak launches you into the air with whatever angle the slope gave you, and gravity arcs you back down. When the bike touches the ground again, the game compares your bike's angle to the slope of the ground at that exact point. If they're close enough (within about 34 degrees), you land cleanly and keep riding. If they're off — nose pitched way up or down compared to the slope — you crash and lose a life.
You start with three lives and ninety seconds. Score is measured in meters of distance covered. Every hundred meters cleared adds five seconds to the timer. Lives or time at zero ends the run.
On the way up a ramp, your bike's nose is already pointing skyward — the slope made it so. The danger isn't being too pitched up at launch; it's being too pitched up when you land. If the next slope after the gap is roughly flat and you're still at the launch angle, your nose will be way above level and you'll dig the back wheel in. Lean forward in the air to bring your nose down to roughly horizontal before touching down.
The lean buttons only work in the air, but the rotation they apply continues even after you release. A short tap is enough — hold a half-second to get the rotation going, release, and let inertia carry the rest of the turn. Holding the button the entire flight will over-rotate you into a backflip-into-the-dirt, which counts as a crash too. Build a feel for the tap length your flights need.
Landing rules are forgiving but not infinite. You have about 34 degrees of slop, so you don't need millimeter precision — you need to be within roughly half a quarter-turn of the slope angle. The most common crash isn't a heroic over-rotation, it's landing on a downslope with a level bike: the bike's nose is at zero, the ground is at minus twenty, you're 20 degrees off and that's still OK — but landing on the same downslope with a slight nose-up tilt of plus fifteen, you're now 35 degrees off and you crash. Whenever you launch off an uphill peak and the next surface is descending, you must lean forward in the air, even if the launch felt fine.
Don't be greedy with style. A 360 looks cool but only one of the four touchdown angles is safe — the same one you'd have without any lean. Every full rotation in the air is a 75 percent chance to crash. Save the rotation for when you have a long flight time and the next slope is the same as the launch slope. Otherwise: lean only enough to match the next surface, no more.