Autoblog

Imagine riding along in your family's car as a kid. Your hand is out the window and slicing through the air as you explore the concepts of drag and lift. As a child you might work that hand to rise and fall around the objects on the horizon, dodging treetops and ducking below bridges in the distance. Some German students apparently had this experience, and now they've taken that basic premise and added more cowbell. The result is Carcade, a scrolling video game concept that uses a webcam and laptop to scan the view out your car window and use it as the interactive background for a spaceship adventure. It recognizes and uses the objects in the view out your window as obstacles, instantly incorporating them into the action. It even adjusts game play speed according to vehicle speed. It's all pretty amazing work by the crew of Andreas Nicolas Fischer, Martin Kim Luge and Korbinian Polk. Watch the Carcade demo after the jump and let us know if you wouldn't have liked to waste away your family's road trip playing this game.

The cloak on the GT by Citroen has been pulled back again to reveal a little more sheetmetal. Call us crazy, but we have the feeling this car is going to put the "Whoa, that's wild..." back into concept cars. This little corner shows off two vastly different personalities: look at the center structure and it could be any pleasant Frenchmobile -- a 2CV even; scan out to the sides, and it's got the kind of vicious appendages of a predator. Then there's that diffuser hanging out there like an arctic steppe, mirrors that are 18 inches long, and a tapered rear end that can't possibly stay planted without some aero aid on scaffolding. For all we know, the car could be hiding nine or ten other personalities, as well. We can't wait to see it.


[Source: ZerCustoms]

Click above to view video after the jump

The trailer for Need for Speed: Undercover is out, and it is 60 straight seconds of "We want." The in-game texture looks primo and the storyline sections are a nice mix full-motion and rendered video. We have no idea what the game involves yet, so we can only hope that EA has restored some of the buck-wild madness that was missing from Need for Speed: ProStreet. We do know, however, that not only have police chases returned, but the boys in blue appear to be driving... R34 Nissan GT-Rs. So if as the sultry voiceover in the trailers says, "This is all going to come crashing down," it looks like you'll have a whole lot of fun making rubble. Follow the jump for the video, and check out the Need for Speed site for a couple more. Thanks for the tip, catgirlshyla!

[Source: EA]

Way back in nineties, this particular blogger had to get rid of his PlayStation because he was spending far too many nights on GranTurismo. Something about knocking a tenth of a second off our best time in the Mazda Demio was as addictive as air. Last Friday we spent an hour in front of the pre-production version of Midnight Club Los Angeles, and we've gotta admit... we're getting the itch for a PS3. Replacing several different cities for one highly detailed rendering of Los Angeles, the new Midnight Club is all about racing wherever you want -- in LA -- and however you want. Follow the jump to find out what's new and hot, and check out the gallery of hi-res screenshots below.

The Lotus Evora, which you can't drive on real streets yet, has already been driven in GT5. Attendees at the British Motor Show got a chance to put Lotus' latest over the kerbs, thanks to a tie-in between the folks at Hethel and those at game developer Polyphony. If you didn't attend the show, fear not: you can be pretty sure there'll be a version of it in an upcoming batch of downloadable content for GT5 Prologue.


[Source: Autocar]

Advertising has been creeping into video games for a while now, but in most racing games is relegated to billboards that we hardly notice while whizzing by and concentrating on our line for the next turn. Codemasters, however, is working with in-game ad firm Engage to take video game advertising to a new level by including a fully functioning eBay Motors marketplace in the developer's next racing title, Race Driver: Grid. Players in the game will actually buy and sell in-game vehicles using the eBay Motors service just like they would in real life. eBay Motors will also get a title race in the game called "The eBay Motors Mustang Muscle Series" in which they can drive the eBay Motors Mustang GTR concept car in San Francisco, Long Beach, Washington D.C. and Detroit. This type of next-gen in-game advertising should work well within the confines of Grid, since eBay Motors is widely visited and used by the type of person who might pick up the game.

[Source: Joystiq]

Hey, the pseudo-video-game as a car ad technique worked well enough for Pontiac, so why shouldn't Alfa Romeo give it a try too? While we think Alfa's take on arcade-style driving enjoyment is clever, it's not quite as cool as the G8's Spy Hunter recreation, which, as children of the era of excess, we were totally smitten with. Regardless, the expert driving Italy's newest hot hatch looks to have had a great time racing through all 11.1 kilometers of the Forest Track stage, which is actually Arjeplog, a town in Lapland, Sweden, and a popular European destination for winter automotive testing. This video makes us wish even more so that an official announcement regarding the Mi.To's hopeful trip across the Atlantic is impending shortly. Follow the jump to watch it.

[Source: Youtube via Autoblog.it]

Click above for more screen shots of Bus Driver

When I was in Kindergarten, I rode Bus 11. It was an oil-burning 32-passenger GMC that was ready for retirement by 1982. It was driven by Sarge. I'm not sure why she was called Sarge, but her demeanor definitely lived up to the moniker. Frequent exhortations to"SIT DOWN AND SHUT UP" kept us all in line. Nobody ever laughed when she ground the 2-3 upshift. Think you'd enjoy ruling passengers with an iron fist? You could go get the endorsement on your license and then hit the job market, or if that takes too much effort, just buy Bus Driver, the video game.

Hey, at least it's still a driving game, but it's the staid, responsible version of gaming. Rather than speed around a track or create mayhem, your mission is to follow routes in your school bus, city bus or tour bus while picking up and dropping off fares. What fun, the replays must be enthralling. It could be worse, though – it's still a wheeled conveyance you're controlling rather than some Wiimote-powered silliness. We do wish that Meridian4, the game's publisher, had included the DeLorean bus that never got off the ground.


[Source: Winding Road]

The Gran Turismo series is one of the most successful franchises in all of gamedome, and the racing game's fifth installment will be available in Japan on December 13, just two weeks before Christmas. If that seems like a long time to wait for GT5's release, we have some good news. Demos of the game with the same great graphics as the final version will be sold on the Sony store, but they cost a despicable $43.10 on Blu-ray. If you want to go cheap, you can download the game from the Sony store for only $38.95. We remember back to a time when demos were given away for free to entice potential customers to buy the full version. If the demo is worth $43, we're sure that the full game will be worth skipping it in favor of the real thing, even if it takes until Christmas.

[Source: PS3 Fanboy]

Drinking and driving has been a dangerous gamble taken by millions of motorists around the globe since the first cars hit the road. Police have gotten very good at spotting, arresting, and prosecuting offenders, but many still slip through the cracks, and thousands of innocent people die in accidents as a result. In Germany, this major problem is being combated with urine. No, bodily fluids aren't being used to test blood-alcohol content. Instead, video game makers are converting drunken streams into a bathroom steering wheel.

LCD screens located above urinal stalls display a video racing game that uses sensors inside the urinal to track the urinal stream, which steers the car. Quick reflexes are needed to "steer" the car through heavy traffic and objects (not the "mint" at the bottom), and when the gamer loses stream, the car crashes violently and the phone number of a cab company appears on screen. We can see a lot of people liking this game, as it passes time when you're at the stall. We just hope people don't start drinking more so they can get in more laps. At this time there is no word on whether a similar game is being made for women.

[Source: InsideLine]