Firemint’s Real Racing [App Store] is the game to show people when you’re showing off the graphical capabilities of your phone. The immersion experienced in the cockpit view is substantial, and the remarkably lifelike AI makes the game extremely fun to play. I even made note of how great it felt playing against the AI opponents who actually play like people do when playing against others online in my review of Real Racing:
Real Racing is an entirely different animal. In my previous hands-on / first impressions post I mentioned how great the AI is, and countless races later I still feel this is Real Racing’s greatest asset. The AI opponents play how they should play; they’re not mindless drones following a simple line around the track, they’re extremely competitive racers that just flat out won’t put up with you trying to cut in front of them, or leaving yourself open on a turn.
Now imagine this, but not against one or two racers, but forty. Allow me to introduce you to an excerpt from the latest post on the Firemint blog:
Real Racing has up to six cars on the track at any one time. Since the game uses a high fidelity physics engine, adding cars is a good test for pushing the hardware. We started our tech demo with 8 cars on the track, then 10, 12, 16 and 20, and the 3GS still didn’t break a sweat. We finally stopped when we got to 40 cars on the track at the same time, still with no perceptible drop in frame rate. We think the results are mind blowing.
Unfortunately, this is just a tech demo by Firemint. They don’t actually have plans to release a version of Real Racing to allow for 40 racers at once. Regardless, this serves as a remarkable benchmark of what the iPhone 3GS is capable of.
App Store Link: Real Racing, $9.99
