Finally, there’s a sprint down the home stretch, when the jockey’s riding crop needs to be used with sparing, careful timing to egg your steed on. Between these rounds, you need to position your horse tactically on the track, balancing many factors: the horse’s comfort zone, which determines the difficulty of the solitaire tableaux (and how much energy they earn) the stamina it will cost to move position the horse’s preferred positioning relative to other horses the distance from the inside of turns and the location of power-up cards that litter the track. Hands of solitaire determine how well your horse starts out of the gate, how much energy you build up, and the strength of the bond between horse and rider. Image: Game Freak/AppleĪ Pocket Card Jockey race has several phases. The design they eventually settled on has surprising depth. “Neither wanted to create a horse racing simulator,” he says instead, they planned to smuggle an involved and authentic horse racing game into something that appeared quite different, so they could win unfamiliar players over to their hobby while still satisfying fans of the sport. Taya and Ichinose got together with programmer Toshihiro Obata to hash out a prototype. So I imagined that a jockey riding a fast thoroughbred, who is constantly analyzing the situation and making decisions in order to win, is likely under a similar sort of stress and experiences the same kind of excitement when things go well.” “To achieve that, I needed to both ‘think of efficient plays’ and ‘rapidly, accurately move cards without wasting a single second.’ I found my mind was in a state of comfortable excitement as I did this. “I was hooked on getting a high ranking on that leaderboard, to the extent that I even got second place in the world on the rankings one day. “The solitaire app also had a leaderboard where you would compare your completion times to players across the world,” Taya says. Solitaire is typically a relaxing and thoughtful game, but Pocket Card Jockey has the player clearing tableaux quickly against a time limit in the middle of a race to determine how well the jockey is balancing the horse’s levels of energy and stamina. He knew of my idea and suggested that I use solitaire instead of my card game.” Key to Ichinose’s suggestion was the particular solitaire app he’d recommended. “Then one day, my colleague - Pokémon series composer and fellow horse racing fan Go Ichinose - recommended that I try out a certain solitaire mobile game. However, even I don’t think those ideas were very good,” Taya confesses. I had been proposing ideas that combined horse racing with card games within the company. “I was already a horse racing fan and had been making horse racing simulators and similar programs. But, Taya tells me over email, it was a friend and fellow horse-fancier at Game Freak who had the final moment of inspiration. He’s the director of the original Pocket Card Jockey and Ride On!, a horse racing obsessive who dreamed of somehow combining his passion with a card game. Who on earth had come up with this bizarre idea for a video game? And… why?Įnter Masao Taya, a programmer at Game Freak who worked on most mainline Pokémon titles from 2002’s Ruby and Sapphire to 2016’s Sun and Moon. Playing the game also reawakened in me a desire to know the answer to two burning questions. I’ve had the game for the past few days, and it’s been a delight to be reacquainted with its chibi racehorses (look at them, they’re trying so hard), fast-paced card-clearing, flippant sense of humor, and unexpected tactical depth. The just-released Pocket Card Jockey: Ride On! brings this inexplicably moreish combination to iOS via the Apple Arcade subscription service. Pocket Card Jockey, an unlikely mashup of horse racing and solitaire from Pokémon developer Game Freak that became a cult favorite on Nintendo 3DS, is back.
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