Kick your stands up and twist that throttle — Beach Buggy Racing 2 v2026.04.21 is here, and it's rolling in on two wheels with the brand-new Road Hog chopper motorcycle.
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.
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.
Our friends over at Pocket Gamer UK have run a preview of Riptide GP that offers some tantalizing new details about the game and a couple of exclusive new screenshots.
The biggest new announcement about Riptide GP's gameplay is stunting as a core part of the game mechanic. Here's how it works:
Every race track in Riptide GP features lots of opportunities for grabbing huge air. Not just ramps, but massive rolling waves that -- if you catch them just right -- vault you high above the track. When you're in the air, you can use swipe gestures on the tablet or phone screen to pull off tricks like Superman, Can-Can, flips and tabletops. Pull the trick off successfully before landing and you earn boost. Splash into the water mid-trick and...well, the results are painful.
A few people have asked me for a copy of the PowerPoint slides I presented at GDC 2011 earlier this month. Sorry for the delay -- am finally getting around to posting them now, in PDF format. Link at the bottom of this article.
It might be a little light on content without the speaking part, but at least it's an overview of the presentation and a reminder to jog your memory if you went to the talk.
At some point when I have more time I plan on breaking some of this out into separate articles, about forming a company, pitching to publishers, etc. "When I have more time" probably means the end of May, after Riptide GP is finished, so don't hold your breath. :-)
Thanks again to everyone who came out for the presentation -- I really had a blast, and I hope people came away from it feeling like there was some useful content there.
Back in December, Creative Director Matt Small flew out to Washington DC to talk about "The Language of Game Environments" to a group of government and university researchers.
The Game Changers conference was hosted by the University of Maryland Center for Advanced Study of Language (CASL) and the Foreign Service Institute (FSI). Attendees were mostly language-learning researchers interested in finding ways to use video games to aid in education and language acquisition.
Matt's presentation is a high-level overview of how game environments have changed during the last 30 years, and explores some of the techniques environment modelers and level designers use to guide players through these increasingly complex 3D spaces and interactions.
The presentation slides and video have now been posted on the CASL website. The video of the full 45-minute presentation and Q&A is here. If you're watching the video you may find it helpful to grab the PDF first, since you can't see many of the slides in the video. You can download the presentation PDF file here.
Particularly good are Brian Upton's presentation on how designers use and manipulate player anticipation, Mark Dank's on the changing game audience and how it's affected the industry, and Sarah Stocker's on the virtuous cycle of addiction in games. Keep in mind the audience here are all non-gamers, so some of this stuff may be a little "introductory" for the hardest of the hard-core, but it's all interesting stuff. You may also want to check out David Traum's presentation on the university research going on around natural language simulation.
Matt Small, Andrew Silber, Detmar Peterke, and Ralf Knoesel prove they are masters of water physics and beer drinking.On Thursday night, March 3, 2011, history was made when Hydro Thunder Hurricane developers Matt Small and Ralf Knoesel sat down to dinner with two of the developers of H2Overdrive to eat foods, drink beers, and gossip about the wet, wild world of water racing video games.
Andrew Silber and Detmar Peterke of Specular Interactive were in town for GDC 2011, and agreed to meet with us at Thirsty Bear Brewery in San Francisco.
We were pretty stoked to meet up with these guys. For one thing, as I've said before we're huge fans of water racing games of all shapes and sizes, and H2Overdrive is a primo example of the genre. Detmar actually worked on the original Hydro Thunder at Midway (as did several of the Specular team) and Andrew worked on Offroad Thunder around the same time, so it was awesome hearing about the bad old days of arcade development and getting a little behind the scenes scoop.
For another thing, reading the forums out there you'd think there's this intense rivalry between our two studios -- particularly since Specular has the HT pedigree, and because H2Overdrive and Hydro Thunder Hurricane came out around the same time.
And maybe there is a little element of competition there. But it's the healthy kind that still gives you room to drink beers together and share war stories.
So thanks again for meeting up with us, dudes. We'll definitely swing down to Irvine one of these days for Alco-Thunder Part 2.
Well GDC is winding down and it's been a really great week.
I gave my presentation this morning on game startup advice, and I think it went pretty well. Didn't barf or flip out so that's good at least. And got some really good, really specific questions from the audience afterwards.
Feels good to get that out of the way because it was definitely taking up a lot of my brain space over the last week or so.
Now that the presentation's done, I feel like I can finally look around and take stock of the week. It's been pretty productive, lots of great meetings and all -- but my favorite part of GDC is always the chance meetings, running into people on the sidwalk that you haven't seen in 5 years and catching up. Always reinforces what a small industry we all work in. And what a vital one -- the energy, the vibe around GDC is great. There's something I love about walking around downtown SF and seeing it overrun with OUR PEOPLE.
Now just a few more meeting and we're out. Looking forward to relaxing this weekend. And not practicing my speech in my sleep.
Vector Unit has been selected from hundreds of developer applicants to exhibit in the Sandbox area at Google I/O 2011.
