I hope you like the landscape you see here because if you buy Amateur Pixel’s new Desert Bus app, you’ll be looking at it for the next eight hours. Seriously.
The $.99 Desert Bus app is a pixel-perfect remake of the original trek as seen in “Penn & Teller’s Smoke and Mirrors,” the duo’s first (and only) video game from 1995. In it, you play an intrepid bus driver named Jocko who’s tasked with driving his rig 360 miles from Tucson to Las Vegas. Ah, but there’s a twist: you’ve got to do it in real time.
Don’t think you can let your phone sit there as the bus chugs along, either: the bus’s steering pulls ever-so-slightly to the right so you’ll have to make sure it doesn’t go off-road. If it does, the bus is getting towed back to Tucson in — you guessed it — real time. Here’s hoping you didn’t nod off at the wheel, because that’s one chunk of your life you’re never going to get back.
Desert Bus has become something of a cult classic recently, and has even spawned its own yearly charity event. It’s only fitting then that all the proceeds from the app’s sales go to this year’s Desert Bus For Hope event, which raises money for the day-brighteners at Child’s Play. Versions are available for iOS and Android, but you may want to keep some No-Doz handy just in case.