DanLabGames' DynaStunts [$2.99] places itself in a difficult spot from the start. Motocross games, trials games and even racing games are genres that are already looking well stocked on the App Store. Just in the last few months we've seen several motocross games pop up, including a few solid ones, but while DynaStunts might initially look like another trials game, it might be best to think of it as something else altogether -- a platformer.

For anyone who has played a significant amount of motocross games, this is the most evident in the control scheme. It's reversed, as in, the gas and brake are on the left, while the tilt is on the right -- like a platformer, but not like most other games of this ilk, where the tilt is usually on the left. There's no option for customization either, so if you've been playing a lot of say, Bike Baron[99¢] recently, you'll have a hard time grasping the controls. The developer has mentioned in the forums that customization is on the to-do list, along with adding Game Center achievements, but if you train your brain to think of DynaStunts like a platformer, you should get the hang of it quickly.

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If you've been listening to our show, you've probably noticed that we've been growing more and more in love with aggressive stunt games. Most of the titles we highlight have revolved around bikes, though, so we thought we'd throw a bone to cars today with this neat and goofy-looking stunt car game with a weird name from Blue Riversa, RPM: Gymkhana Racing.

According to publisher BulkyPix, RPM is a four-location, 20-stage affair that solely focuses on the zany stuff you can do in fast cars, including drifting, donuts, and burn-outs. It's obviously up to snuff from a visual perspective, and seems like it'll have a fair share of off-the-wall challenges, like say, Paint The Wall -- a mode where you skid around in wet paint in order to color a barrier. The game will also include star-collecting and an online component.

Interestingly, it'll also pack in a record mode that'll allow you to share your feats of stunt strength with your friends. That mechanic in particular is an emerging one. We've seen quite a few games in the recent past update to include video sharing and taking, so it's nice to see Blue Riversa sticking with the pack.

You can bet your right-hand that we'll be checking this one out soon. RPM hits the iPad and iPhone later this November on the 17th.

Vector Unit has already made a name for itself with water-based racing games -- especially when you consider the developers release last year of the stupid-entertaining Hydro Thunder Hurricane for XBLA. Now, they've ported the initially Android only Riptide GP [$4.99] to iOS and the arcade action racer is boasting some of, if not the best water physics on the platform, but the game itself might not totally live up to the impressive water effects.

That said, those impressive water physics come at a cost -- namely that they're only really impressive on the new devices. The game plays significantly different on a 4S than on, say, an original iPad, because the waves move and change in real time on newer devices, but are flat on older ones. It's not just a visual thing -- you'll feel like you're playing a different game.

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In 3D Pixel Racing [$1.99] the car graphics look extremely blocky - there's simply no anti-aliasing (or smoothing of the edges) ...but that's not a bad thing, because it's completely intentional! This car racing game uses 8-bit pixelated graphics to depict the 3D cars, tracks and menus, so they look like they're constructed from tiny blocks of Lego. You might think this sounds like 8-bit Rally [99¢], but no, this is far more pixelated than that.

While the unusual "pixel" graphics are definitely the main draw, there's also quite a few other features, including 5 game modes, 11 cars, 10 tracks, and various weather conditions, which all sounds really good on paper. However, this game has received mixed feedback in our discussion thread, with the menu system in particular being singled out for criticism.

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Back in 1996, during my sophomore year in high school, I have many a fond memory of playing Wave Race 64 endlessly with my buddies. At the time, Wave Race 64 was a technical marvel for its fantastically realistic water effects, and even today the visuals are still pretty darn impressive. It also didn’t hurt that it was an incredibly solid experience in the gameplay department, especially with 3 friends by your side all vying for the top spot in any given race.

Now 15 years later and developer Vector Unit is readying Riptide GP for iOS, another watercraft racing title with impressive water effects, but one that can fit in the palm of my hand. We’ve already seen a pretty stellar watercraft racer with last year’s Aqua Moto Racing 2 [99¢], but Riptide GP looks to differentiate itself with a more arcadey and over-the-top brand of racing, as well as your more traditional racing game track designs.

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You wanted it, apparently, so Remedy Entertainment is dropping it into Death Rally [$.99]. This morning's update to the arcade racing title re-born adds a beta online multiplayer for up to five dudes. From what we're seeing, the online is just like the typical campaign component, except actual people are pummeling your rear and scuffing your 'caps. Only six maps and one car are available at the moment, but we're fairly sure that number will go up in future updates or IAP opportunities as soon as Remedy is finished testing.

Interestingly, this pack rolls in a few new 'additions', including a multiplayer variant of the Shrieker, which offers a "separate level advancement" from cars in the single-player mode. You'll also notice some better anti-aliasing on the iPad 2, a new Flamethrower weapon via IAP, and some new achievements.

Death Rally is senseless fun. We totally re-realized this earlier today when putting the multiplayer through some paces to test its awesome-ness. If you're still in the market for something a little silly, a little violent, and pretty frantic, this is probably definitely it. Now, if you'll excuse us, we have more death to rally.

Lately, I've been on the lookout for freemium games that offer up more than the usual. I feel like I've built and bred just about everything under the sun, ya know? Forever Drive [Free], though -- Supermono knocked it out of the park with this one. It's free-to-play, it's gorgeous and it's eons away from the same old thing.

As we've covered extensively, Forever Drive is about, um, driving forever. It's an arcade-style driving game where your performance is ranked not on speed but on the points you pick up and the combos you build. It sports a comprehensive leveling system that earns you better, shinier and cooler cars as you progress, and a track editor that lets you help build the endless roads you'll be riding on. And everything looks like it's been ripped straight out of the best parts of Tron. Sounds great, no?

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Zero dollars is the final asking price for Forever Drive [Free], Supermono Studios' latest and easily its most ambitious project to date. The game cleared certification and hit the App Store just yesterday after an unfortunate setback or two kept the game from hitting as planned.

We’ve covered Forever Drive exhaustively over the last month or so, but it’s unusual approach to the racing genre still hasn’t lost its luster with us. In brief, it’s a game that leans a lot on its users, asking them to create all of its 2D tracks and colorful instances. Each and every race you participate within the game is a product of its sharp track editor, and you’ll be encouraged to make your own whenever you’re not busy with the driving forever part of the core experience. Here’s a little teaser from one of our pre-release report-y things:

With Forever Drive, Supermono Studios is taking a way smarter approach to user-created content design: instead of asking players to shape entire experiences, it asks that they mold a fraction of a blip of an infinitely expandable super-highway. By managing expectations before you even start creating, Supermono is freeing you from failure and the game’s players at wide from having to filter out tons of garbage. Most user-created content leaning titles, including Media Molecule’s venerable series, don't enforce any kind of control or creative constraint, which makes Forever Driveunique, and as we’ve been discovering, pretty fun.

Zero dollars isn’t a lot, so even if the idea of the game sparks some sort of reaction from your squishy grey matter, you may as well give it a spin. We’ll definitely get you a full review in the near future, though, if you’re the cautious type.

A pre-existing game might be one of the best to show off your soon-to-be brand new iPhone 4S’ power, if Firemint’s Real Racing 2 is in your collection. Real Racing 2 [$4.99] and Real Racing 2 HD [$6.99] are set to receive a free and new update that’ll add an extra layer of graphical goodness on top of their pre-existing sizzle, all in the service of harnessing the A5 chip. New dynamic shadows and lighting, increased polygon counts, reflections, and exposure effects are all being added in the game’s latest update, which should hit pretty soon.

And that’s not all -- iOS 5 is coming and so are a handful of features to Real Racing 2 that revolve around Airplay support. With the update, you’ll be able to wirelessly stream the game’s content to your TV. Also, if you’ve got friends with the game and an iPhone 4S or an iPad 2, you’ll be able to play with them in split-screen. “Party Play” mode will allow up to 4 players to compete on the same screen, provided the host has Apple’s new hotnesses.

Firemint isn’t known for missing a hardware launch, so we didn’t expect any less. Still, this seems like an absolutely spectacular deal for current and new owners of the game. Real Racing 2 was great to begin with, and now it’ll look even sharper than ever.

So, we got a build of Forever Drive and decided to put the pedal on the floor in order to bring you some early impressions. And, wow, guys, does this seem cool.

With Forever Drive, Supermono Studios is taking a way smarter approach to user-created content design: instead of asking players to shape entire experiences, it asks that they mold a fraction of a blip of an infinitely expandable super-highway. By managing expectations before you even start creating, Supermono is freeing you from failure and the game’s players at wide from having to filter out tons of garbage. Most user-created content leaning titles, including Media Molecule’s venerable series, don't enforce any kind of control or creative constraint, which makes Forever Drive unique, and as we’ve been discovering, pretty fun.

Forever Drive is built by you and everyone else. There are no curated races, no lifeless campaign, and no attempts at narrative. Supermono is shooting from the hip and guessing that its approach to user-content will be enough to keep everyone interested in the racing part, which by the way, is more about the journey instead of the destination or wins. It's some next level stuff.

“What we've tried to create is a very streamlined experience — something a little different from the "load a track, do 3 laps, stop, repeat" gameplay that's become almost universal in driving games,” Supermono’s Dave Ferner told us earlier this year.

“We're trying to create something that feels more like an epic journey, with that feeling of discovery and wonder you get driving fast into an unfamiliar land…”

I recently gave the level editing portion of the title a go and I’ve been surprised by how deceptively simple it is and how graceful most of your projects end up being, even if you’re just goofing around and attempting to make something phallic. You’ll probably never make a level on par with 1-1, but you’ll make something that works and fits with the game.

Basically, there are two parts to the creation process: track editing and environmental editing. The former editor lets you build a small swathe of track from one end of the editor to the other, while the latter gives you the power to add scenery. Other tools give you the power to raise or lower the track where you please, as well as make fine adjustments on the turns you may or may not choose to have.

It’s not rocket science and I think that’s important: executing on the design concepts floating around in your head at any given time is about as hard as drawing your bedroom realistically from the mental picture you see when you close your eyes. By making the editor simple and keeping the bar low with the amount of content you’re responsible for, Supermono is constricting the scope of your ideas, but not their potential.

And while whatever you make will probably be gold, there are tricks to making a good track, as I’ve learned from Dave. He suggests paying attention to the actual curvature of tracks, how a straight benefits the overall design, other high-concept-y things. He also suggests checking out this article by Luke McMillan called A Rational Approach To Racing Game Track Design, which is crazy good read if you’re into design or production.

"One of the main barriers to mainstream acceptance of user-created tracks is the complexity of the editors -- we didn't want a PC style professional tool with a million hotkeys, we wanted a super-streamlined editor which was fun to use," Ferner tells us. "We honestly spent months on that thing -- it takes a lot of work to make something simple out of something complicated!

"And because our game relies on users to create the content, we aimed to create an editor that was almost a mini-game in itself -- there's even some unlocks which you can only get by building popular tracks, and we may even put a highscore table for track creators... it's all a big experiment, but hey, you never know until you've tried it!"

If a section of track somehow manages to suck, you’ll be able to down-vote it. After enough, it’ll be removed from the rotation.

The track I made while farting around (after the no-no shaped one, that is) was a simple “S”-shaped joint. The game automatically integrates in spots where players can drift to earn XP (which is currency used to purchase upgrades, cars, and more stuff for the editor) and it also auto-scaled the height in order to accommodate some lackluster building placement. The actual placement was a simple as dragging and dropping or pinching to zoom to smooth out the rough spots. You’ll see a few images of it if you look around this write-up.

We still haven’t seen the full-full game -- you know, the one with the potentially hundreds of thousands of user-created sections of tracks, so we haven’t really dug into the core of the experience. We’ll definitely do that when the game goes wide later this October.

On that note, this is definitely a game that’ll live and die by its audience. It’s a title that will rely on a community and a vast one at that, so we’ll have to wait and see how people react to it when it hits and how long they’ll stick with the user-creation component in a post-release environment. Provided there is an audience, Forever Drive has the potential to fulfill the promise of its insane conceit, and really, we can’t wait to see if it can manage.

Fresh off another heavily physics-based sports title, Natural Motion Games is going to hit us with a My Little Pony-like game. No, seriously -- Venture Beat has the exclusive on the studio’s My Horse, a horse simulation game that’ll feature radical horse physics, radical horse visuals, and radical horse grooming, feeding, petting, and training.

In addition to this, it’ll feature an RPG-like progression system and IAP functionality. And while the visuals on display are pretty hip, it seems pretty obvious that this is a game for the casual crowd and not us hardcore, push-it-to-the-limit types.

Venture Beat reports that each horse in the game will move and act in different ways, and all the horses will be differentiated in terms of look. It’s probably important to note that this is an outsourced project -- Natural Motion is using MunkyFun for the actual development of My Horse.

As silly as it sounds, I’m all about this. I plan to maintain the nastiest horse this side of Shadowmere in My Horse, provided it allows me to create an undying, fast-traveling horse with red eyes and an ugly demeanor. I guess I’ll know for sure when the game launches in the next day or so on the App Store for the radical price of $0.

[Via Venture Beat]

Developer Fractiv just introduced a new mechanic and a new character in a free and fresh update to its arcade racing game Lane Splitter [$.99]. New version 2.0 -- which the studio says is the game’s most comprehensive update yet -- adds Ricky, a character “who looks cooler than you because of his sweet [blue] chopper. Also, police. Yep! For the first time ever, you’ll be asked to avoid the long arm of the law as you switch lanes to and fro at silly speeds. From our tests thus far, escaping the police seems to simply boil down to "just keep driving fast," a conceit that jives with the whole game.

New animations, tweaks, and optimizations are also a part of the  free update. Interestingly, the studio has also added four more characters, but only as IAP. You can grab them one a piece for $.99 or in a bundle for $1.99. The latter is an introductory price for the moment.

Lane Splitter is stupid fun and we certainly got into it earlier this March. If you’d like to learn a little bit more about the crotch-rocketry that fuels this game, you should definitely give our review a read.

jAggy Race [99¢] arrived on the App Store without much fanfare, but this kart-racing game is an impressive debut release from Swiss developers SevenOnly. The goal is to race your little kart around the track within the allotted time. That sounds pretty easy, except the tracks are totally crazy.

They curve down-and-under, so your vehicle ends up racing upside down with 360-degree gravity. You can do massive jumps on the track which send you flying for ages, even around corners, or to other sections of track. If you've ever played the snowboarding game iStunt 2 Insane Hills [Free] the tracks are just as crazy, but here you're on wheels.

There's no other karts in this game, as you're solely racing against the clock and trying to avoid crashing. A timer starts beeping if you're running out of time, which really gets the adrenaline going, but If you take the corners too quickly you'll fly off the track altogether. Fortunately, there's mandatory checkpoints which illuminate as you pass and act as a re-spawn point if you wipe-out. This is a game of skill and timing as you can't simply hold down the accelerator.

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Kairosoft’s Grand Prix Story [$2.99] feels more like Game Dev Story [$3.99 / Lite] than any of the other studio’s subsequent releases following the launch of the overly-cutesy and absorbing simulation game about making games. In both games, there’s a lot of overhead before you can see any practical applications or meaningful progress. There are also a ton of hidden systems and mechanics to find and discover as the game moves you along with its forty foot stick with a dangling carrot on the end. Also, in both games your race to be the best is often determined by the time you put in being the worst. You have to click with and then master both games’ mechanics in order to see profit and, yeah, that can be a tall order for mobile.

Grand Prix Story specifically is a painfully slow-burning simulation with a familiar set of problems that plague almost every Kairosoft release -- lack of feedback, too many hidden or unexplained systems or mechanics, a bad tutorial, and a steep difficulty curve -- but it’s also a fun title that hits all the notes that it needs to. Its systems are deep and defined enough, the racing is oddly entertaining even though its just a conglomeration of dice rolls, it’s burst-y, and the overall atmosphere, action, and theme play well off each other. (more...)

RedLynx's original DrawRace [$2.99] sucked up a large amount of my time, so when DrawRace 2 [99¢ / HD] was first announced, I had a small panic attack thinking of the amount of time it would kill in my day. Turns out, the attack was well warranted, because the sequel steps it up in every way imaginable.

The first game introduced us to the mechanic and it hasn't changed much this time around. You draw a line around a track, moving your finger quickly or slowly depending on how fast you want to go during that time, then you watch your car try to follow the line. The only difference is an added turbo button, which helps keep you engaged while you watch. (more...)