Hello! In this post I'd like to describe our game Horror Racing. Even though it was released last year our website has been launched only recently and I would like to provide our potential customers with a detailed review. So if you still haven't bought the game but want to know more about it this article is for you.

Horror Racing pioneered top-down racing on iPhone. The closest match in terms of gameplay experience is ancient Rock'n'Roll Racing for NES by Blizzard Entertainment. There is also some noticeable similarity to Micro Machines and Twisted Metal, but not that big.

Now, the aim of the game is to get the first place in a race lasting several laps. There are 15 different tracks out there, placed over 3 unique settings - cemetery, forest and town. You will race against 3 opponents on each track and will have fun blasting them with 3 types of weapons: machine-gun, rocket launcher and mines. The strategy is very simple: feed the enemy bullets and rockets when he is in front of you and try to save your butt deploying mines when you are in the lead.

You can not die permanently in this game...

Update contains only iOS4 fixes. Also I'd like to inform that right now we have no plans to add new features or content to the Horror Racing. Our primary concern is to support the game in terms of its operability.

Cheers!

I've never considered seriously those stories about Apple's evil approval department. But lately we got the chance to feel their eternal wrath on our own hides. Yes, we regret to bring the bad news, but Apple has rejected our last update for Horror Racing (which contained various fixes for iOS4) due to our use of private API. Having said that I feel obliged to clear some things up.

In update v1.1 we've added the screen rotation feature to make sure the game runs in both landscape orientations (to allow people hold their iPhone the way they like). We've added this feature to the 3D OpenGL engine and to the native GUI, but eventually we got stuck with one particular issue on the character selection screen. Look at the screenshot below:

The car is displayed as a video file. And the problem is that the video player can't be rotated once it has started playing video, except by using some private API functions. So we had an option either to:

• reject the rotation feature
• release the game with a bug (the rotation won't work on the character selection screen)
• risk to use private API

And so we took that risk. The update v1.1 was approved without problems. We got warning on update v1.2 and finally our update v1.3 was totally rejected.

The controversy with Apple's policy stems from their strict stance on forbidding the use of private APIs because there is no guarantee that such APIs will be supported in future releases of iOS. From the first glance it sounds reasonable. But in reality, the same goes for the official API as well (we've spent the whole day trying to make the video player 'behave' on both iOS3 and iOS4). Moreover, the official API has often got really poor functionality - I have dozens of stories about employing ugly hacks to get the needed functionality within iOS SDK.

So we got tapped trying to implement better usability. Formally Apple is right. But in reality they simply raised unnecessary hurdles along our track.

Again, back to our problem. At first we decided to remove forbidden code completely - the rotation 'bug' smells, but it's not THAT critical. Yet, after another brainstorming we've found a new ugly hack to deceive the iOS SDK and preserve our intended functionality. The implementation is ready and today we will try a new submit.

We apologise for the inconveniences. Let's hope that v1.3 will soon be accessible via Apple's App Store.