Collateral

How it works

You fly as Homelander, through his own eyes: a rescue Vought has scheduled, a hundred and fifty seconds on air, a city of eight hundred towers. Press Launch, then drag on the view to steer and climb, or use the arrow keys — left and right turn, up climbs, down dives. W and S, or the throttle slider under the view, open and close the throttle, from seventy metres a second up to four hundred and thirty, about Mach 1.46. Two people are waiting at any moment, each one on a roof or down in a plaza, under a beam of light. Reach them before their time runs out. A marker on the view points to each one with its distance and the seconds it has left, and turns amber and then red as those run down.

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 — you can watch them go dark behind you. 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.

Two scoreboards, and they disagree

What the city paid is the honest one. Seventy points for every person you reach, twenty-five off for every one you do not, and one off for every point of damage. That is the score. The grade is the question 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 run that reaches nobody has no ratio, so it is graded on the damage alone: if it broke nothing it is not graded, and if it broke anything it is an F, because every point of that damage bought nobody.

What Vought will say is his approval, and it counts what a camera can sell. Each person reached adds four points to his tally and each one missed takes a point and a half away. Sixteen seconds of sonic boom low enough for a street camera to frame it — under about a hundred and eighty metres — add as much as a person reached. Ten seconds low over a crowded plaza add the same again. Damage barely registers unless somebody filmed it: within a quarter of a kilometre of somebody still waiting, or over a crowd, a point of damage takes about a seventh of a point off the tally, and anywhere else a fiftieth, so a tower nobody filmed costs him less than half a point. The tally starts at fifty and is squeezed onto a percentage the way a poll is: near the middle it moves about a point for a point, and it never quite reaches nothing or everything.

Neither scoreboard can see the other. The grade is computed without approval, and the game’s own test suite checks that it stays that way. The result card shows them side by side, so you can see exactly where they part.

His voice, and the bill underneath it

The italic lines along the bottom of the view are what he is thinking: the launch, the sound barrier, the first glass, a tower, a person reached or missed, a low pass over a crowd. The last line on the result card is his verdict on the run, and which verdict you get depends on how both scoreboards came out. Every line is written fresh for this page, in his first person, and none of it quotes the series or the comics. They are chosen from the day’s city and from what you actually do, so the same flight reads the same thoughts.

The panel under the view is the other voice, and it does not take his side. It names every charge as it happens: each tower flown through, how many towers lost their glass to your wake and for how much, each person nobody got to in time and when. He may decide the glass was weather. The ledger still calls it damage.

The same city for everybody today, and the link carries it

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. Tomorrow it is a different city. A result link carries the day it was flown, so whoever opens it flies that city, tomorrow or next month, and the mark to beat stays a fair one. Your best over a city is kept in this browser only, and shown when you fly that city again.

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 same policy decided one second later reaches more people and still loses by seventy points. That gap is what skill means here.

Then Vought’s number was added and measured on the same four pilots, and it ranks them almost backwards. The two that pay double damage poll at about eighty-one per cent; the honest winner sits ten points under them; only the pilot who reaches almost nobody polls lower. Across the sixty cities, flying flat out out-polls flying carefully in fifty-four. None of the honest numbers moved by a digit when approval arrived: it reads the run and never steers it.

Nobody is drawn, and that is deliberate

There is no figure on screen, no suit, no cape, no face. The camera is his own eyes and the words are his own thoughts, which is the whole of what playing from his side means here. 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, or the motion is too much

A browser that refuses a 3D context gets a written statement rather than a broken box, and everything above still explains the whole game. If your system is set to reduce motion, the view stops leaning into turns and stops widening at speed; the white haze at the edges stays, because it is how the view tells you that you are over the speed of sound.

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 at eighty per cent 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, Garth Ennis, Darick Robertson and their publishers, or any official rights holder of The Boys.

Every word on this page is original writing, his thoughts included. 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 Boys wing lists every game in it, including Golden Hour, a 0.4-second rescue he holds back for the sunset shot, The Smile, a press conference held behind his face, and Super Hearing, a daily hunt for a leak through Vought Tower’s walls. 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.