The GU iOS Game of the Week -- Smoke Your Tires

It is not very often that the GU iOS Game of the Week happens to be a game that has ties to the racing and NASCAR -- but our selection this week, Smoke Your Tires, is also a celebration of the launch of the 2012 stock car racing season! In connection with the International Speedway Corporation ("ISC"), the leading promoter of motorsports activities in the United States, the ISC has lent its track marks to a new iTunes app, Smoke Your Tires, a burnout bonanza for players of all ages.

The app features the likenesses of the Daytona International Speedway, Homestead-Miami Speedway, Talladega Superspeedway, and other iconic ISC tracks. Motorsports fans will relish the excitement of burning out, victory spin-outs and other extreme maneuvers, and the only thing missing is the smell of burning rubber!

Smoke Your Tires was developed by Sportsblast, a production company that creates original works of animation and gaming with an emphasis on sports. The company was founded by producer and noted voice actor Nancy Cartwright (Bart Simpson) who is a NASCAR-licensed driver and a huge fan of motorsports racing. The company's previous forays in this realm include the web-based series The Kellys, in partnership with Turner Sports, and the creation of the character Haley, the star of the 'toon' series Haley's SportsScopes, which was seen on SprintVision and via webcast. Sportblast also co-created "The Lane" series with the NBA.

The app allows players to customize a stock car to feel as if they are smoking tires on an actual ISC track in never-before-seen-on-apps 360 degree spins, the difficulty of which increases by graduating levels. The first two levels, with backdrops at Homestead-Miami Speedway and Daytona International Speedway, respectively, are free with multi-level tiers added with each new event of the stock car racing season hosted at an ISC track. Each level will be a unique experience with new and different challenges and degrees of difficulty.

To give the app a test run using a simplified version in Flash, head on over to www.smokeyourtiresgame.com, or you can download the app for your iOS device at http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/smoke-your-t...

A Little Hand's-on Gaming

Your first step in the game is popping into the Garage to customize your ride -- who wants to drive a plain-jane stock car when you can make it look the way you want it to? Customization options include primary and secondary colors, as well as detail colors and a fairly extensive selection of decals for business sponsors and race tracks. You can pick the number for your car, and when you are happy with the design finish it up and then head out on the track. We should mention that the customization process has a soundtrack of music and garage noises to get you pumped up for the rubber-burning part of the process!

Once you have the car you want, all that is left is putting in your driver name, and then it is off to the races!

While the Flash version of the game is a bit easier to master, once you figure out the balance of just the right motion on the steering wheel with your left thumb, combined with just the right acceleration with your right thumb, you can achieve some impressive burnouts -- and you will have to because reaching the next level in the game means reaching or exceeding the target score!

You start out at Homestead with only 30 seconds on the clock to reach a target score of 5,000 points and progress from there to Daytona for another free level -- beyond that you will have to plunk down .99 cents for the paid version.

The game provides a visceral pleasure -- especially once you master avoiding the walls and burning nice tight smoke-filled circles that do not involve blowing up your car. While there are plenty of racing games that involve you know, racing, there are few enough that reward the player for making the car do things that it was not designed to do, and this is one of them!

We give Smoke Your Tires a solid Thumb's Up!