The 2024 Halloween event is packed full of treats, no trick! We've got the return of Screamin' Jack, new Halloween Challenge and a special Halloween crate full of goodies.
On July 10, join us for the world premiere of Beach Buggy Adventures, an epic 2D animated short that brings your favorite Beach Buggy Racing characters to life in ways you've never seen before.
T-Mobile will be showcasing Riptide GP (along with some other games you don't have to pay any attention to) in their booth at E3 2011.
From what we hear, their booth is going to be set up like a 50's diner, and you can take a load off and relax in a comfy booth while they ply you with smoothies to drink and games to play. The booth is number 1447, and is near the center aisle, towards the back of South Hall.
If you're in town for E3, be sure to come by! Ralf and I will be stopping in from time to time, particularly on Wednesday afternoon.
One of the great things about being a game developer, is people send you free hardware -- game consoles, dev kits, phones, tablets -- to work with, so you get to try out all the latest cool devices.
The most recent addition to our small but growing collection of Tegra2 stuff is 4 brand new, shiny LG G2X phones, courtesy of the good people at T-Mobile. We're not actually holding on to these: We're pre-installing copies of Riptide GP, and loaning them out to game review sites that don't have Tegra2 devices to play the game on.
Even though these are just passing through, I couldn't resist taking a picture of these four awesome phones, all charged up and running Riptide GP in parallel. As I said, we've had the opportunity to try a lot of Tegra2 hardware, and although they each have their relative strengths, the G2X is one of our favorites. It's a good size, it's nice and light, and like all Tegra2 phones it's awesome for games.
Ahh, Memorial Day weekend is here, the sun is FINALLY shining, and Riptide GP is out there in the Android Market doing it's thing.
We started work on RGP right at the start of January, and finished it in about four and a half months. That's pretty quick for a game of this type -- by comparison, Hydro Thunder Hurricane took us about a year to finish, not counting the initial prototype.
Riptide was definitely a push. We put in some long hours and weekends. But it seemed to go pretty fast. We were totally excited about the idea the whole time we were working on it, and the long hours went by in a blur, because we were working hard to make the game better, trying to squeeze in as much polish as we could in the time we had. It's a lot easier to work hard when you're pumped on what you're doing, instead of working hard just to barely scrape by.
When we started, the goal was to basically just create a super simple water racing game that would show off the graphical power of the Tegra 2 hardware. But as we got more into it, we decided to add additional features: the Championship mode, the reverse tracks, all the OpenFeint stuff.
The whole stunt/boost mechanic got added on a whim in a couple of days right around GDC. The game was pretty fun at that point but it needed something more, and we figured as long as we have the characters on those hydro jets, we might as well do something interesting with them. As soon as we got them in there, with the swipe gestures, we knew it had to be a part of the game.
So now it's done and people seem to be enjoying it, and that feels really, really good. Now we have a chance to take a breath and figure out what comes next. I took a short vacation last week to NYC, and Ralf is going to sunny Mexico next week for some well deserved margarita therapy.
As for what comes next...... well, we have some ideas. In fact one idea in particular that we're pretty excited about. But that's for another post.
Vector Unit's newest game for Tegra2-powered Android phones and tablets, Riptide GP, is now available on the Android Market and is making a splash with users and critics.
As of this writing, average user reviews are averaging 4.7 stars out of 5.
Critical reviews have been coming in this week, too, and the critics have plenty of nice things to say:
WOW! riptide GP is incredible....If you are at all into racing games, Riptide GP is a must-have.
The frame rate, details, and polish of this game are unlike anything this editor has ever seen on a game for a mobile device to date. Riptide GP for Tegra platform truly is a console quality experience.
Not too shabby, right? We're extremely happy with the reception the game's been getting, and the great comments and feedback sent in from players around the world.
Yesterday I spoke to a group of English undergrads at UC Berkeley about my career in video games, about the (sometimes unexpected) ways in which my English degree has helped me in the industry.
One of the great questions that came up during the Q&A afterwards was, "If you were going to teach an English class on video games, what 5 games would be in your syllabus?"
The thing I like about this question is that, although I've spent lots of time thinking about my favorite games from a gameplay standpoint, I haven't really thought that deeply about which were my favorite from a literary standpoint. Which ones told the best stories or had the best writing? Which stretched our ideas of how interactive storytelling might differ from written storytelling?
Unfortunately because I hadn't previously thought about games this way I kind of whiffed on the answer and only came up with two: Valve's Portal and Infocom'sPlanetfall. Well I've thought about it some more now, and here's what I would have answered:
Planetfall(Infocom)
As text adventures go this wasn't necessarily the best-written or the cleverest. But I love it still for the way it blended comedy with a sense of isolation, and particularly the manner in which it drove both of those home in the character of Floyd, the service robot who befriends and ultimately gives his "life" so your character can survive.
Halflife(Valve)
All of the Halflifegames are great, but I'd probably pick the first one for the fact that it broke new ground in immersive storytelling. Who knew you could tell a compelling story in the midst of a fluid and exciting action-game experience without taking a player out of that experience with lame non-interactive cut-scenes and cinematics?
Portal (Valve)
Maybe it's not cool to have two games by the same company in the top five, but Portal really took the immersive storytelling pioneered in Halflifeto the next level. As you first begin to play through the inventive puzzles in Portal you almost don't even realize there's a narrative at all, but Valve reveals a rich backstory and, in GLaDOS, one of the most complex, funny and terrifying characters ever imagined in any medium.
Shadow of the Colossus (Team Ico)
I actually liked Icobetter than SotC, but I think SotCtells a more compelling story. As you seek out and methodically destroy the enigmatic Colossi, your relationship to them evolves in surprising ways. At first it feels heroic and exciting. But as one Colossus after another collapses and falls under your sword, you begin to wonder -- why am I doing this? What did these things ever do to me? Who's really the victim? Best of all, the game never provides a tidy explanation at the end, leaving it to you to work out the answers to these questions for yourself.
Grim Fandango (Lucas Arts)
I'd have to include one game written by Tim Schafer, because I think he's pretty much the single best writer working in the game industry. On one level Grim Fandango is no more literate than a 50's pulp detective novel. But the way it stretches those pulp conventions with tight storytelling, clever dialog, memorable characters, and of course the surprising and delightful mashup of genre fiction and Mexican Day of the Dead iconography makes this game hold up even after all these years.
Hm.......
Honestly I'm still not completely satisfied with this list. There are dozens of games I thought about including and didn't -- Bioshock, the Fallout series, Limbo, Indigo Prophecy... I really wanted to include one of the GTA series, because the quality of Rockstar's storytelling and dialog often surprises people who just think of them as violent panderers. And there are probably a dozen more games that should be in here that are slipping my mind.
Vector Unit has been selected from hundreds of developer applicants to exhibit in the Sandbox area at Google I/O 2011.
The team will be on hand to demo our latest game, Riptide GP, the first console quality water racing game for mobile phones and tablets. Riptide GP features superfast hydro jets racing through futuristic landscapes across a dynamic, ever changing surface of water.
We're super excited about the opportunity to exhibit at the show, and grateful to Google for giving us a chance to participate.
Come by the booth and visit, and check out the near-final version of Riptide GP!
So a couple of weeks ago our rep at Nvidia calls and tells us T-Mobile is having this big launch event in New York for their new Tegra 2 based LG "superphones," the GSlate and G2x. They want to showcase Riptide GP, and he tells us we can go if we want to demo the game.
Now, sounds like fun but our first reaction is to pass. I mean, we're shipping in just a few weeks and we're crazy busy. And a trip to NYC is expensive. And Riptide kind of demos itself...it's pretty easy to pick up and play.
But this event sounds too good to miss, business wise. There are going to be a ton of reporters and editors there. And a whole slew of big wigs from T-Mobile, LG and Nvidia: account managers, directors of marketing and PR...the kinds of people you need to get in good with to nab one of those coveted pre-install deals.
On top of all that, this event -- OK, party -- is going to be at a snazzy NY bar, with free food and booze, live music by the Cataracts and Dev (Bass Down Low, Like a G6), and Carly the girl from the T-Mobile commercials will be there, plus, we are told, "2-5 celebrities."
Celebrities! Already the Superficial addict in me is thinking about who it might be. Jon Stewart? Lady Gaga? Charlie Sheen?! It would be so awesome to get a picture of some celeb playing our game.
So...yeah, we went.
But we went hard. Couldn't take too much time off work so we decided to do the whole thing in two and a half days. Here's how we roll:
Fly out late Tuesday, bringing our giant ass laptop thinking one of us will a maybe get some work done on Wednesday afternoon but instead we spend Wednesday at the Intrepid Air and Space Museum before running back to the hotel room to change, get to the party an hour early for a walk through but spend the whole time trying to figure out which devices have the demo build we sent installed and getting them hooked up to the right stations, do the press event, go to the after party, go to the after after party, sleep three hours and then hop on a morning g flight back to SFO, arrive 10am Thursday, and go back to work. BAM.
Exhausting, right? Yeah, but it was totally worth it. T-Mobile really threw down. The bar was cool, the food was great, and the place was mobbed with just the right mix of people: the ones you want to talk to because they're important, the ones you want to talk to because they're fun, and the ones you just want to look at because they look so damn good.
They had a bunch of different demo stations around the room for people to try out the G2X and GSlate, each one hooked up to a big ol' wall mounted TV. One whole wall was just for playing games and Riptide GP got a ton of airtime. And people really liked it!
It's always great for us to watch random strangers walk up and play the game for the first time, because you get to see the game fresh all over again, see what makes people smile (pretty graphics, big air, ragdoll wipeouts) and what still needs work (reset button hard to use, resolution neds to be boosted when hooking up phone to TV).
But what about our celebrity photo op?? Well...
We didn't actually see any celebs, at least none I recognized. Yeah, Carly was there. And yeah, she's cute and she seemed nice...but I never managed to catch her by our Wall o' Games, and I was too embarrassed to go just grab her and drag her over for a photo.
I had just about given up on the celebrity photo and had started getting my drink on when I noticed a bunch of guys nearby taking pictures of a pretty and vaguely familiar looking woman. I asked one of the Nvidia guys who she was.
"That's the LG Girl, man. Stephanie."
The LG Girl! Of course! I thought, OK, so she's not Jon Stewart or Carly, but dammit! I will have my celebrity Riptide photo. There was no time to waste, as the party was starting to wind down, so this time I just went for it, walked over and tapped her on the shoulder and asked if I could take a picture of her playing my game.
And you know what?
She was better than Carly or Jon Stewart.
For one thing, she was super nice and totally cool about the picture. And she didn't just stand there...she actually played the game. And asked questions about it. And filmed a little segment of it for her show! Afterwards Ralf and i spent some time talking to her and her camera dude/collaborator, and they were both totally chill and normal. Imagine that.
So yeah that's my endorsement: check out the LG Girl's blog. She's cool and she actually knows what the hell she's talking about.
And I got my celebrity photo! Wait for it....
BAM! Makes you want to buy the game right? Right?? Right????
Yeah, OK so I'm no Ansel Adams. But whatevs. More importantly, you can check out Stephanie's coverage of the party for yourself. (She talks about Riptide GP at about the 1 minute mark.)
So yeah. I know this post is way too long about nothing. But I'm typing this on the plane back and can't sleep so, there you go. I just wanted to give y'all an idea of some of the random stuff we sometimes have to (get to) do besides making supercalifragilisticexpialidocious games.
Our pals over at Microsoft Game Studios just sent us this sweet XBLA themed sticker set for the new 360.
It's got pictures of all the recent hits emblazoned across it's ebony hide. There's Raskulls, Ilo & Milo, Scrap Metal, Monday Night Combat...and hello! What's that on the faceplate, down there by the power button? Why it's our old friend Hydro Thunder Hurricane.
So, thanks MGS friends! We will display this Xbox in all of its finery proudly and loudly in Vector Unit HQ.
T-Mobile will be showcasing Riptide GP (along with some other games you don't have to pay any attention to) in their booth at E3 2011.
