Techpedition

First off, I have never really been a true handheld gamer. Albeit often times dazzled by them, I have never owned any of the Nintendo Gameboy/DS handheld devices, and have purposely stayed away from the Sony PSP. I had pretty much given up on the handheld gaming market as a consumer, until I was greatly surprised to find that the Apple iPhone had serious gaming chops. Sufficient to say, owning an iPhone has been a pretty awesome experience. TWIIG, my new column (This Week In iPhone Games), is all about iPhone games and setting apart the gems from the crap. First up, Fastlane Street Racing!

Racers have long been one of my favorite game types to play and often the genre that I have excelled in the most. More recently though, I have found the transition to gimmick racers (and when i say gimmick, i just mean different control interface/type) like those on the Nintendo Wii to be more of a struggle. Which raises a question that I have seen a lot, “Do new gamers become adept to different control types faster than avid gamers who are use to the old way of doing things?”. Probably so.

The iPhone brings its own ‘gimmick’ to the genre, with the use of the accelerometer. Fastlane Street Racing, developed and published by ATOD-AB, is a 3D racer for the Apple iPhone that attempts to bring you quality racing on the go in said fashion. We all know by now the iPhone brings a certain uniqueness to gaming, but how does this translate to game types that we have played forever with direction pads or a keyboard and mouse? Certainly the notion of using the accelerometer for steering in a racing game may seem cool at first, but does this actually translate into great gameplay? The easy answer is… Yes and No.

FSR allows you to use the iPhone as an impromptu steering wheel. Smartly, the ATOD-AB guys have adjusted the in game camera to tilt opposite the way you turn, so your view stays steady for the most part. For basic turning and weaving through traffic, this scheme gets the job done. But herein lies the problem for someone like me, I want precision. I have found with the use of the device for steering, that it is almost impossible to be precise. For someone that is use to perfect runs, it’s more than frustrating not being able to turn the corner, or hit a drift just as you had intended. And while you don’t get punished as much for hitting a wall on easy mode, hard mode is almost impossible.

FSR has five game modes, ten original cars, eight city routes, two race circuits, and six challenge tracks. As you could have guessed, it follows the pattern of most games these days by allowing a few tracks to be played several different ways (i.e. regular, backward, the grouped tracks) and the standard unlocking tracks/cars by achieving first place status in a race. As far as the cars, your not going to see anything branded here, nothing but generics are available.

As far as graphics are concerned, I still find it hard to believe the 3D graphic power that this device is capable of producing. The quality of the graphics for this game very much remind me of the arcade-like graphics of a Sega Dreamcast. I constantly wonder how far they actually can push the graphics of this device. It will be interesting to see the graphic quality of the games that are being produced a year from now.

Now let’s take a look at the sound. FTR offers an eight track soundtrack that is upbeat and techy. It would have been nice to have an option to play your own music rather than the music that came with the game, but I’m sure that will be added with an update later. While iPhone speaker quality is another topic for another day, I would always advise using your headphones when playing an iPhone game, or listening to music for that matter.

What the future of the franchise? Who knows, but here are a few things I would like to see. I would be very much interested in seeing this game use the Wi-Fi or 3G network connectivity to make this game online compatible. With any racing game, multi-player compatibility is a must. And with the new iPhone 3.0 SDK there may even be a possibility for this game becoming multi-player via Bluetooth connectivity for short range multi-player matches. It would also be a nice feature to be able to export video or images of a run to you iPhone.

In conclusion, I would definitely recommend this title if you like racers and you own an iPhone. Shortcomings aside, this is still one of the better racers on the platform. Fastlane Street Racing is currently available in the iTunes/iPhone App Store for a mere $1.99. Three and a half out of five stars.

[3.5/5 Stars]