S60 Open to new features

Oval Racer from Great Ape Software really pushes the graphical boundaries of S60 3rd Edition to a whole new level. The premise is simple, it's a stock car-style race game, but Oval Racer takes the mobile race genre much further.

The first thing you'll notice when begin a race is the fantastic 3D rendering. When selecting a course to race on, you're shown a rotating 3D model of each course. When you select your car (nine cars in total I believe, three for each difficulty), it's presented to you in rotating 3D, you can also change the colors of the car and add different racing stripes.

There's graphic options galore for those who like to tweak their settings - you can change the detail, car texture, sky texture, track texture, car shadows, dashboard, lighting, as well as adding a working rear-view mirror. All of these of course will alter your frames-per-second rate. With details all maxed out, my Nokia E70 was too slow (although I heard it's great on the Nokia N93) but it looked nice with detail on high, however I prefer an ultra high smoothness so I turned details to low but kept the sky texture on. If you're not much for tweaking settings, the built-in "Calibrate graphics" feature will set the optimal settings for your device. And the game is compatible with all the S60 3rd Edition resolutions (and I can play in either landscape or portrait mode on my E70)

You can choose from a race, practice, and championship. Race allows you to go a few laps against opponents, practice us just you on the course, and championship gives you a lot of races of different courses at different levels. Up to 16 AI opponents can join you in a race. It's amazing how well the game simulates stock car driving, when you're sandwiched in between four cars and the wall you really feel like you're behind the wheel.

The real key to Oval Racer are the physics and gameplay. This is not just some mindless thumb twitcher, there's a very comprehensive driving system built-in that you need to learn and practice. Courses have three different types of surfacing (dirt, mud, tarmac) that change the physics. Once you've mastered a course in practice, all your teachings go to waste when 9 other highly-skilled AI opponents challenge you. Not only do you need to learn to race, you need to deal with your opponents.

Once you're done with a race you can watch the replay. Just like on TV the reply shows the cars at different angles, you need to see it to believe it. These are not only fun to watch, but watching the reply will show you what you did wrong and how to improve your technique.

At the writing of this post, the app is in the process of getting Symbian Signed. It's hands down takes the awards for Best Racer, Best Graphics, and Best Gameplay for S60 3rd Edition. It's not another mobile game you'll get bored of after 10 minutes. And the in-game help/manual is the most extensive I've ever seen. The crew at Great Ape really put some heart and soul into this. Visit their website to get more info and purchase it.