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iPad, iPod touch, & iPhone app reviews from our editors—and you!
Filed Under:
Developer:
ndWare Pty Ltd
Age rating: 4+
Compatibility: Compatible with iPad.
Requires iPhone OS 3.2 or later.
Real Racing HDCurrent Version: 1.03
NEW HD GRAPHICS – the most immersive and impressive racer yet
NEW CAR SKINS – apply your own images to your car
NEW GHOST RACING – race against your personal best or against the top drivers
NEW CONTROLS – touch screen controls specifically designed for iPad with adjustable sensitivity
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Acclaim for Real Racing on iPhone:
- #1 Racing Game in 45 countries
- Featured by Apple in “Rewind: Best of 2009”
- Extensively used in Apple’s iPod touch advertising including TV commercial, print and web
- Slide to Play – Game of the Year 2009
- IGN – Best iPhone Racing Game of 2009
- iLounge.com – Best iPhone Racing Game of 2009
- Best App Ever 2009 – Best Racing Game, Best Game Graphics, Best Simulation Game
- Independent Games Festival – Winner, Technical Achievement
- International Mobile Gaming Awards – Winner, Excellence in Connectivity
Visit firemint.com/realracinghd for more information.
Please visit firemint.com/support if you have questions or need help
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NEW IN REAL RACING HD
HD GRAPHICS: high resolution textures, more detailed car models and exceptionally smooth graphical performance.
CAR SKINS: select an image from your Photo Album to automatically wrap it around your car and race it on your iPad. Export built-in skins, edit them in your favourite paint program, and import them back into the game for personalised racing decals. Check firemint.com for new skins!
GHOST RACING: race against a pre-recorded ghost saved on your iPad or downloaded from Firemint’s servers. Improve your personal best, or race against the top drivers. Ghosts will also appear in Online League races, making them even more fun and competitive!
WATCH REPLAYS: watch your Time Trial races or any races uploaded to the leaderboards. Select different camera angles and learn the best racing lines from top drivers.
USER INTERFACE: new HD graphics and changes to take advantage of the larger screen, including a redesigned Career Menu.
Real Racing HD also includes all content and features from the iPhone version:
- 48 cars in 4 classes: Hatch, Sedan, Muscle and Exotic.
- 12 unique tracks in City, Forest and Desert settings, 6 car grid lineup.
- Race the way you want to with 5 game modes: massive Career Mode with 76 events; Quick Race; Time Trial; Online Leagues; and local multiplayer for up to 6 players over WiFi network or 2 players over BlueTooth, playing on either iPad, iPhone or iPod touch (a copy of Real Racing or Real Racing HD is needed on each device).
- In-car cockpit view with animated driver and dash, or external camera.
- Numerous control options including touch or tilt to steer, and manual or automatic acceleration and braking.
- Extensive connected features including global leaderboards, Facebook app for friends leaderboard, and uploading video replays to YouTube (check realracing.cloudcell.com for details)
- Select your favourite songs from your personal music library while racing, or listen to the included tracks.
Buckle in and get set for the most exhilarating racing experience on iPad. With Real Racing HD, the race is in your hands!
Real Racing HD Review
Racing game makes beautiful shift onto iPad platform
Real Racing HD and the iPad were basically made for each other. From developer Firemint, this first-person racing game is just as good–maybe even better–than any console racing game out there, but at a fraction of the price.
More than a pretty face: You haven't really raced on a mobile platform if you haven't tried Real Racing HD on the iPad.
First thing’s first: like any racing game, it takes some practice to get a feel for Real Racing HD’s controls. Luckily, there are a whopping five control schemes to please everyone. Pick your combination of acceleration (automatic or manual, meaning accelerometer), steering (accelerometer or touch-screen), and braking (automatic or manual). I found the more tilting involved, the better, but there’s something for everyone.
There are three main racing modes, with near-endless replayability in each. Career is your standard tournament race structure, with 12 multi-course cups in all. You start with the “hatch” car and a one-lap qualifying race, with a goal time to beat in order to win a bronze, silver, or gold cup.
After the qualifier, there are two tournaments to beat in the hatch car, before you move up to the “sedan” qualifier and its two tournaments—and so on and so forth, up through the “muscle” and “exotic” cars. If you manage to make it through all 12, there are three levels of difficulty to master before you’re truly done.
And that’s only one game mode. The other two, Quick Race and Time Trial, are quite a bit less labor intensive, but just as multidimensional. The courses here don’t have specific cars associated with them, but you can only use the cars that you’ve unlocked in Career mode. Four courses are available at start and the other eight must be unlocked as well.
For Quick Race, you can customize how many laps you want to do and whether you race against opponents. Time Trial is always one lap and you’re always alone, but as you unlock the more advanced cars, you can compare your times on the same track.
Multiplayer is available for local races through the same WiFi connection. For rankings and worldwide competition, Real Racing HD uses Cloudcell, an online, third-party service for leader boards and race matchups. Unfortunately, the registration process for Cloudcell is almost prohibitively involved. Worse yet, stats and rankings aren’t integrated into the app, so opening the links to see them forces you to exit Real Racing and launch Safari, then go back when you’re done looking.
There’s nothing to say about the graphics except that they’re flawless, and with the iPad sitting right in front of you, it feels like you’re driving a go-kart. The looks and sounds of the game are customizable as well. Cloudcell provides skins to outfit your car: just follow the “More skins” button to the website, take a screen capture of the one you like, and wrap it or any other photo in your library around the car. And if you are so inclined, you can tap the pause button at the beginning of any race and select music to listen to from your iPod.
Real Racing HD has such a vast amount of gaming options and combinations, it would be impossible to enumerate them all here. Suffice it to say that you will probably never complete the game and almost certainly never get tired of it. Not many console racing games can say that, and none of them will set you back just $10 either.
[Meghann Myers is an editorial intern for Macworld.]
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