Tweet Land: Racing Past Tweets On iPhone

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Tweet Land is a fast paced 2D indie racing game for the iPhone and iPod touch. Initial funding for the project was through crowd funding platform Kickstarter which promises a second game under the umbrella of ‘Tweet Land’ called ‘LoveCity’ to be released in the near future. The racing platform is not ground breaking, but what is fascinating is how some novel in-game obstacles and rewards come to the player – through real life tweets on Twitter.

The developers are a small team from Costa Rica who go under the name WHY Ideas / Tree Interactive, they have created a neat little game with pick-up-and-play gaming action, best suited for waiting for a bus or a need to kill some time. The game is a sideways scrolling racing title using a cocos2d platform and integrates OpenFeint as their social gaming network.

The game control is a virtual joystick and the player maneuvers past other cars and collects points by smashing sideways into them. The aim of the game is to get to the checkered flag area. Watch out through, crashing head on with cars or other tweet-fed obstacles damages the car and the player can be left skateboarding perilously to the finishing line.

After finishing each level more obstacles and rewards are unlocked to be fed by Twitter and it is ind of exciting to drive over zombies and collect a flame thrower the clear a path when traffic becomes thick.

Gamers progress quickly trough the levels and there is some technique to be mastered. The rewards and obstacles make or break a chance of completing a level, this stirs in an element of luck to gameplay. This is not bad nor good – it just makes the game interesting. I just hope there aren’t too many people tweeting with words like ‘Meteor’,’Angry Bull’ or ‘Police Car’ when playing a level!

Tweet Land’s content is limited, I can’t see a gamer playing it everyday for the next year but I do see players completing a handful of levels when they feel inspired to do some retro gaming from time to time.

One concern is while the app does not pull from a personal twitter account, but the twitter verse in general, some of the tweets are oddly redundant, many are spam, and the game works with no internet connection, so it’s reasonable to assume the tweets used are not from Twitter in real-time.

That said, the 8-bit graphics  coupled with the retro soundtrack make Tweet Land an enjoyable title for on and off game-play. I think Tweet Land is a great start for the new Twitter Fed genre and hope to see more contextual gaming soon.

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