Collateral

How it works

Drag on the view to steer, or use the arrow keys. W and S open and close the throttle, from seventy metres a second up to four hundred and thirty — about Mach 1.5. Two calls are live at a time: somebody on a roof, somebody in a plaza. Reach them before the window closes.

The whole game is in one rule. Your wake only reaches what you fly level with. Above the rooftops you can hold the throttle open and nothing below you notices. Drop into the city above the speed of sound and every tower you pass close to loses its glass, for as long as you are down there. Fly through one and it comes down. You are fine. It is not.

So the run is a sequence of decisions about when to give the speed back, and the answer is always earlier than feels necessary — the throttle takes time to close, and a turn at the top of the range takes most of a kilometre. A pilot who slows down a second before the block flies almost the same route as one who slows down a second after it, and pays half the damage.

How it is scored, and why it is a ratio

Seventy points for every person you reach, twenty-five off for every one you do not, and one off for every point of collateral. That is the score. The grade is a different question and the one the game is actually about: damage divided by people reached. An S is under two points of damage per person. An F is over forty.

A total would reward a long destructive run about as well as a long careful one once the numbers got big enough. The ratio asks the only question worth asking: what did it cost the city to get you there? A run that reaches nobody has no ratio and is not graded, which is the honest reading of standing still.

Everything it cost, itemised

The panel under the view names every charge as it happens — which tower you flew through, how many lost their windows to your wake, which call you missed and when. “Your score went down” teaches nothing. “You took the glass out of nine towers on the way to that roof” teaches the thing you did.

The city is the same one for everybody today

The skyline is generated from the date, so every visitor flies the same eight hundred towers, the same plazas and the same gaps until midnight UTC. That is what makes two scores comparable at all. Tomorrow it is a different city.

How the numbers were chosen

The same way every other game in this corner chooses its numbers: by playing it before it existed. Four reference pilots — never touch the throttle, hold it wide open, spend speed high and give it back before descending, and the same thing decided a second too late — flew sixty seeded cities each, and the constants were moved until the table said what the design claims.

It says it now. Flat out reaches almost exactly as many people as the best pilot and pays twice the damage. Never touching the throttle is by far the cleanest run on the board and the only one with a negative score, because it cannot reach anybody. The winner spends speed where it is free and gives it back before the block. And the most interesting row is the fourth: the same policy, decided one second later, reaches more people and still loses by seventy points. That gap is what skill means here.

Nobody is drawn, and that is deliberate

There is no figure on screen, no suit, no cape, no face. The camera is the flier’s own eyes. Naming a work and its characters is what nominative fair use permits, and this page does that plainly; reproducing a character’s visual design is a different thing, and an actor’s face is protected by a right of publicity that fair use does not reach at all. An original 3D model “of” a character would be worse than a still, not better.

It is also the better game. A camera behind a figure turns a city into scenery. A camera inside the flier turns a tower into something that arrives.

If the canvas does not open

A browser that refuses a 3D context gets a written statement rather than a broken box, and everything above still explains the whole game. The rest of the corner plays without a canvas at all.

Settle it in the forum

The board’s forum is where a grade goes to be doubted. Post the link; somebody will tell you they got an A without breaking a window.

This is fan-made, and unofficial

This is an unofficial fan page for the television series The Boys and the comic series it is based on, naming them under nominative fair use. It is a free, unofficial fan tribute, made for fun. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Amazon MGM Studios, Sony Pictures Television, Point Grey Pictures, or any official rights holder of The Boys.

Every word on this page is original writing. No dialogue, script text, scene, panel, still, logo or artwork from any series is reproduced anywhere in it, no character is depicted, and nothing here imitates an official mark. Iron Realms — the strategy game the rest of this site is about — is an original fantasy world with its own map, its own houses and its own art, and has no connection to the world of The Boys.

The rest of the corner

The The Boys wing is new and this is its first page. The fan tributes hub has the Westeros, Supernatural, King of the Hill, Fringe, Jericho, Big Bang Theory and Last Kingdom wings alongside it, and the free tools that are not about anybody’s fiction. If you would rather play something with more to it, Iron Realms is free and runs in a browser tab.