_DRINKING GAME

NOT AS THINK AS YOU DRUNK I AM

A few seasoned drinkers in Chicago make their beer money off of challenging their fellow bar patrons to see who can drink who under the table. If you think you can hold your liquor, you can seek them out in one of three bars and bet them a few bucks that they’ll hit the floor before you do. Outlast your opponent and you collect on your bet; lose, and you wake up in a ditch a couple of blocks away from the bar. You can back out of a drinking game at any time, but doing so forfeits the bet.

Aiden’s struggle to stay upright and conscious is represented by a short but intense minigame, played every time he takes a drink. The Unicorn Dragon Pub in the Wards plays a drinking game that’s all about quick reflexes and button prompts, as you may have run into when you first met T-Bone (see “Hope Is a Sad Thing,” page xxx), while the version they like at Miller’s Rail Bar in the Loop is a test of your hand-eye coordination. The “extreme” version of the drinking game, as played in Jedediah’s Bar in Pawnee, alternates between the two gameplay modes with each round.

Each drinking game has 10 initial levels of difficulty, and the first nine levels consist of five rounds. Win all five rounds and you advance to the next level, although you’ll have to wait to play again until your opponent sobers up. This takes 30 seconds in real time.

The 10th level of a drinking game has 10 separate rounds. Victory unlocks the “extreme” challenge of that drinking game, also known as level 11. This is the most challenging round of drinking to be had at that table, but it’s also the last; win or lose, all subsequent attempts at the drinking game at that table will be done at level 11.

Unlike similar activities such as the shell game, the drinking game is a one-way trip. You cannot adjust the difficulty once you’ve started or revisit the lower levels for pocket money.

Aiden will not participate in a drinking game if he has any level of Heat. The game is simply listed as unavailable.

HOW THEY DO IT DOWNTOWN

Each round of the drinking game, as it’s played in the Wards, consists of a series of button prompts that will flash on your screen. Each prompt has a shrinking white border that represents its timer, which starts the moment the button prompt appears. The amount of time on an individual prompt’s timer varies widely by the current level and round of the drinking game, but it tends to be between 10 and 20 seconds and is not necessarily the same for every prompt in a given round. If the timer on any of those buttons is allowed to expire, Aiden passes out and you’ve lost your bet.

To activate a button prompt, guide the cursor over it and push the indicated button. Thankfully, the game is very liberal about what counts as having the cursor “over” a prompt, so don’t strive for perfection on this.

You suffer no penalty for hitting the wrong button on a prompt, aside from wasting valuable time, and you can clear multiple buttons at once if they’re close enough to all be covered by the cursor simultaneously. In later levels when a ridiculous number of prompts are onscreen simultaneously, you can button-mash your way through a crowd and get rid of at least a few of them.

The cursor, thanks to Aiden taking shots of what might be kerosene, controls like a greased hockey puck. It is difficult at best to keep still and picks up momentum quickly as it moves in a given direction. Don’t try for precision, because you won’t get it; instead, keep pushing against its momentum to guide it to where you want it to go. Get used to activating prompts as a “drive-by,” as the cursor slides over them, and you’ll be able to react with the speed that the later rounds and levels will demand.

As you advance to the higher levels, the game adds extra complications to each round, such as prompts that move, both in patterns and randomly, or that have additional rules governing when they can be activated:

_QUESTION MARK BUTTONThese prompts only reveal what button you have to push once you’ve placed the cursor on them.

_LINK BUTTONPrompts marked with a chain link will trigger the appearance of one or more other prompts when activated.

_FLIP BUTTONPrompts that are marked with arrows will flip to a new button approximately once a second. This is most often a simple change between two specific buttons but may include more.

_SEQUENCE BUTTONPrompts marked with a number of dots must be activated multiple times before they disappear, once for each dot they’re marked with, and will change their button each time. The timer continues to tick down until all the prompts are activated, and if the cursor is removed from the prompt at any time, the whole button resets and you have to start over. If you do accidentally reset the button, however, the prompts remain the same on a subsequent attempt.

UPTOWN RULES

In the Miller’s Rail Bar in the Loop, the drinking game focuses more explicitly on hand-eye coordination than your reflexes. Your goal is to keep the onscreen reticle aligned with the target zone, then push a button when the prompt comes up.

The reticle will be labeled in accordance with which stick you need to use to control it. In the event it’s labeled with a question mark, you need to take a second and try out both sticks to see which one is attached to the reticle.

Later rounds turn up the difficulty by shrinking the target zone and making it mobile, often both at once. Around level 4, you begin to have to land reticles in multiple target zones simultaneously, which is also when this drinking game suddenly gets difficult.

Like the cursor in the Wards’ version of the game, the targeting reticle in this drinking game constantly fights your control. The difference is that you’re actively trying to get it to stay in one place, which requires you to constantly push it in the direction opposite to where it’s moving.

WHERE THE REAL DRINKING GETS DONE

The drinking game in Pawnee calls itself “extreme” right from the start and, in a successful attempt to justify that branding, uses alternating rules. Odd levels are Wards-style button prompts, while even levels consist of targeting games like you play in the Loop.

The Pawnee versions of these challenges are mechanically identical except that the overall difficulty curve is much steeper in Pawnee. You can expect to see more complex challenges in earlier rounds while you’re playing in Pawnee than you do in either of the other bars.

THIS OUGHT TO BUY A NEW LIVER

Each level of a drinking game requires you to have a certain amount of money to participate. If you win, you get that much money back; if you lose, you hand over the money you bet to get in.

The later levels of the drinking game are not easy, but they have a low barrier to entry and they depend entirely upon your reflexes and hand-eye coordination, rather than your available skills or equipment. Knocking out the first five levels of the drinking games in Pawnee or the Wards is a decent way to earn money early in the main missions, as well as a new shotgun.

REWARDS

• Reach the 5th level against an opponent: Piledriver (Weapon)
• Complete level 10 against all three Drinking Game opponents: Social Lubricant (Achievement)