VW Partner with Firemint for VW GTI Advergame

Firemint have developed a special version of their racing game, Real Racing, to help promote the 2010 VW GTI. You could even win a GTI by playing the game. Details on the contest will be posted soon.

VW tapped Firemint to create a special version of their Real Racing, sort of a lite version, with tie-ins to the marketing campaign promoting the 2010 GTI. The app was released late last night at the conclusion of a special premier event in New York hosted by G4’s Olivia Munn. Sorry to say, I couldn’t be there.

Real Racing GTI

Category: Games / Racing
Released: 2009-10-22
Price: FREE

The game itself is a slimmed down one based on the engine of the five star racing game we love so much. The main focus of the game, of course, is to push the new 2010 GTI. So, that’s the only car you have to drive in the game and you only have 1 course to drive. What this will give you is a good sense of the realism and amazing console-level quality of the full game, Real Racing.

Try out the 2010 GTI version of the game and if you like it, I highly recommend that you pick up the full version, Real Racing. I really can’t say enough good things about it.

Real Racing

Our Rating: :: Best Racer Ever

Category: Games / Racing
Released: 2009-06-08
Price: $6.99 ON SALE: $4.99

App Store news Round-up for August 12th

Phil Shiller is writing back to Steve Frank about the App Store approval process issues. While we wait for Steve Jobs to return our correspondence, here’s the latest from the app store.

More Wolfenstein! The game was originally created by Id Software, ported to the iPhone by Firemint, and now published by EA. Delayed for nearly 2 months so as to not compete with with Wolfenstein 3D, the game was released yesterday at $4.99. A low initial price for an EA release.

It’s an interesting idea for a game. Take the Wolfenstein 3D game and add an RPG element to it. Early reader reviews are great. We’ll try to have a review up in the next couple days.

Wolfenstein RPG

Category: Games / Role Playing
Released: 2009-05-15
Price: $2.99

Plushed looks lush. Plushed, a new game from Blacksmith Games has a fantastic art style. Platformer + goth + pizza = Plushed? We’ll have to wait and see if the gameplay delivers. Take a look at the YouTube video for more. Blacksmith Games is also doing a promo where the more people that follow them on Twitter, the lower the launch price of the game will be. Expected release date is September/October.

Push, bid, push, bid. Ebay have updated their app to include push notifications for outbid alerts and watched items. You still don’t have a chance against the snipers though.

eBay Mobile

Category: Lifestyle
Released: 2008-07-11
Price: FREE

Real Racing has taken a little longer than anticipated to reach our anxious little hands. The extra time was used to fine tune and perfect the game. It appears from the time I’ve spent with the game that it was well worth it.

Firemint Kick The Tires of the iPhone 3GS

Firemint gotten their hands on an iPhone 3GS and decided to take it for a little test drive. With it’s increased processor speed, better graphics processor, and extra memory, it’s built for killer games. The best way they came up with to test drive the 3GS was to make a special version of their fantastic racing game, Real Racing to stress it. The normal version of Real Racing has 6 cars on the track at once. Their iPhone 3GS test version has not 12, not 20, but 40 cars on the track at the same time! Take a look at the demo video below for the amazing proof — the real fun starts around 30 seconds in.

Amazing, just amazing. Looks like they might have even been able to put even more cars on the track! If you haven’t picked up Real Racing yet, what are you waiting for? It’s the best arcade game we’ve seen yet for the iPhone.

Real Racing

Our Rating: :: Best Racer Ever

Category: Games / Racing
Released: 2009-06-08
Price: $6.99 ON SALE: $4.99

Flight Control 1.3 Update Adds Peer to Peer Cooperative Multiplayer

Firemint has just released a 1.3 update for their extremely popular Flight Control game that adds the ability to play cooperatively with a friend over bluetooth. Flight Control has sold over 1,000,000 copies on its way to becoming an App Store classic.

Flight Control is a deceptively complicated game in which you must guide planes and helicopters to their proper landing places by drawing paths with your finger. The game starts out very simply with very few vehicles on screen at a time, but quickly ramps up in difficulty as more planes and helicopters of varying speeds appear on screen simultaneously. If anything collides, the game is over. When Christine reviewed the game, she gave it a perfect five stars.

In previous updates, Firemint has added new maps and online leader boards via the Cloudcell service. Now, in order to utilize the new 3.0 software for the iPhone and iPod Touch, Firemint has added bluetooth play so you can share air traffic controller duties with a friend. No wifi is required, as you simply need two devices with bluetooth capabilities (note: only the iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS, and iPod Touch 2G can use bluetooth).

In this new mode, you and your friend share a cumulative score for a game. Each person has a complete map on screen (you can either use the same map or different maps), but can only land planes of a certain color. If a plane appears on screen that you cannot land, you have to direct it to the side of you screen, which will cause it to appear on your partner’s screen. This makes the game even more hectic, as you have to manage planes that both normally appear on your screen and those redirected by your partner all while trying to communicate with your partner.

Flight Control

Our Rating: :: HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Category: Games / Action
Released: 2009-03-06
Price: $0.99

Real Racing Revs Up

I got a pleasant surprise in my inbox today, and I hardly slept last night for playing it so much.

Hot on the heals of their great update to Flight Control, Firemint have submitted to the app store a completely different game, Real Racing. Possibly the best racing game we’ve ever see on the iPhone, it’s coming really soon and I’ve got a final build ad-hoc copy. I’ve commented before about how great of a game this is. The final version is even better. It has amazing fit and finish and looks even better than the previous versions I’ve seen. Well done Firemint!

The racing game features 12 tracks, 26 cars, and five different game modes. The most interesting feature, to me, is the asynchronous multiplayer mode. Very well done, and a ton of fun to play.

If you’re on Twitter, you can follow the game specific Twitter account, or become a fan of the Facebook page.

No word yet on price, we’ll see that when the app goes live. And we’ll have a full review ready for when the app goes live. That is if I can stop playing it. For now, check after the jump for the official trailer video, more screen shots, and the official app description.

Continue reading Real Racing Revs Up »

Firemint Games Provides Flight Control Sales Numbers

Firemint Games, the developers of the 148Apps five star rated game Flight Control, have just released their sales figures for the app while it held the #1 spot in the iTunes App Store. The period covered stretches from March 24th to April 25th 2009, which is a sizable amount of time for an app to hold that position.

Here’s some of the information from the report:

Continue reading Firemint Games Provides Flight Control Sales Numbers »

Firemint Detail Pending Flight Control Update

Flight Control from Firemint has been at the number 1 paid app in the iTunes App Store for an amazing 18 days straight. We reviewed it a few weeks ago and found that it owes it’s perfect score to the fantastically sticky game play, originality, and great difficulty progression. A pretty simple game that keeps the players coming back to beat their or others high scores.

Firemint today announced planned updates for the app that includes online leaderboards and automatic save game. That app update is expected to be out by April 24th. Details below from Firemint:

• Online highscores – by far the most requested feature, Flight Control will receive online leaderboards with a simple but clever design, to cater for many of the different ways people are playing. Firemint will use its cloudcell.com technology to go beyond a simple list of names and high scores and offer location based leaderboards and a skill based ranking system. Cloudcell.com has already been used in I-Play’s Fast & Furious game and will also be used in Firemint’s upcoming title Firemint Real Racing.
• Save game – if the app exits mid-game (for example, closing with the Home button or receiving a phone call) the player will be able to pick up exactly where they left off.

Firemint also teased us with mention of future updates that might hold new airports and aircraft.

Flight Control

Our Rating: :: HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Category: Games / Action
Released: 2009-03-06
Price: $0.99

We’re looking forward to this update that will let us see some of the amazing high scores out there. Let us know in the comments what your high score is and check out our review of Flight Control where reader Perry has commented with some great suggestions on improving your score.

GDC 2009 Wrap-up – iPhone Games Coming on Strong

If it’s one thing that GDC taught me it’s that the iPhone has a long way to go as a game console. It’s still a tiny little player in the whole gigantic video games world. But in the nine months since the app store launch, it has made some great strides.

For one thing, the iPhone totally dominated the Independent Games Festival Mobile awards. Not only did they will all the categories, they had most of the nominations as well. The iPhone is now, as far as most are concerned, the best mobile phone platform to develop on. As one developer put it, finally a mobile platform that doesn’t suck.

This past week we did get many clues about what 2009 will bring for iPhone games. First, this will be the year the big boys go full force after the iPhone market. EA, Chillingo, Glu, and others have announced some huge portfolios of games coming out this year.

We will also see an explosion in backend community systems, think XBox Live for your iPhone, and probably some consolidation of those services as well. Consumers aren’t best served by having multiple community systems, everyone knows that, but who will win out as the best? With GameSpy announcing they are bringing over their backend that already powers many console and desktop titles, they will likely start out in the lead. Then ngmoco announced they were opening up their platform to third party developers, another strong contender, but no release date announced. Then you have the underdogs such as OpenFeint, ByteClub, and a new contender, Agon. Then there’s also the Facebook Connect for iPhone that many systems are using. It’s not purely a gaming system, but many have adapted it. A force for sure, with Facebook having over 160 million users.

We also were fortunate to meet with some really cool developers and get a sneak peak at some of the great games coming out in the not too distant future.

Real Racing from Firemint
Release Date: Late April, 2009 at an unknown price
Without a doubt, the best we saw was Real Racing from Firemint. Real Racing is a racing game just short of a racing sim. It’s ultra-realistic and features some amazing community and asynchronous multiplayer modes. You even have the ability to publish hot laps to YouTube, automatically. The controls by default work great and are very responsive. This is one to watch for. Firemint are being close to the chest with the price on this one, but it will be released late April.

Touch Pets from ngmoco
Release Date: unknown
I’ll have to admit I was originally nonplussed on Touch Pets. But after spending some time with it I can see what the excitement it about it. For one this, this game is deep. There’s lots to do, lots of things to collect, there are missions to go on, there are achievements, tons of stuff. But above all, this game has a social aspect that could set it apart from all of the other virtual pet type games. This all ads up to a game that will be very enormously engrossing to many people, maybe even me.

Star Defense from ngmoco
Release Date: pretty soon at an unknown price
Tower Defense games are filling up the app store quickly. And many are really good. Star Defense takes a slightly different direction and adds 3D to the standard game. So instead of playing tower defense on a flat landscape, you play it on a 3D world. One of the more interesting parts of this is that, in one level, you are playing on a cube instead of a sphere. This basically divides up each level into 6 parts as you have to place defense on each of the sides since the weapons don’t seem to work around the corners of the cube. The game itself seems really well done and stable, and should be released soon. We’ll give it more playtime when it comes out and get a full review.

Star Trader: Moon Madness from HermitWorks
Release Date: very soon at $0.99
This game is an expanded version of the DopeWars genre that I’m sure everyone is familiar with. But it’s set in outerspace and uses the Quake engine to provide a 3D world where you can walk around and barter. The controls are a modified 2 location virtual touch pad as we’ve seen on other games and works well for movement and changing the angle you are viewing the world. The developers are releasing this at $0.99 and will be raising the price as they add features such as multiplayer in the future.

All in all a fantastic GDC. Had to great opportunity to speak with some amazing people. We’ll try to get full reviews of these games up as soon as they are available.

This game is an action / strategy game where you have to plan the flight paths of the airplanes coming into the landing strip. Sounds easy hmm? Don’t be too confident, this game is addictive, fun and difficult to land all the planes!