The Zune HD has been out for a while now, but the current news is the Zune Marketplace's addition of five free 3D titles, including our Vans SK8: Pool Service, which garnered some great reviews in the spring as its original iPhone iteration. Hop over to Gizmodo to take a brief look at the five games available. The new Zune HD edition of Pool Service features a number of tweaks over the original thanks to the device's more robust processor and graphics capabilities, including a new environment, new animations and an smooth framerate of over 50 fps. The game also takes advantage of the Zune's custom playlists, so players can skate to their own tracks. For some video footage of Vans, and the other titles, check out the always sharp-tongued, not-always neck-braced Blair Herter at G4tv.

With the release today of the iPhone 3.0 OS software, Vans SK8: Pool Service has also been updated. The biggest new feature is that we now allow you to select your own music tracks when playing the game. If for some reason Penuckly, Slowride, Methadones and Dwarves aren't good enough for you, just hit the "User Your Own Tracks" button and play anything in your iPod library. Similar functionality is also in the Lite version, just press the "My Music" button on the main page to choose your own tunes.

Get Vans SK8 from the Apple App Store now!

Vans isn't just great at making shoes, they're apparently also wicked at putting together cool trailers. Here's the latest trailer for Pool Service, now up on the App Store, courtesy of the team at Vans.

At long last Vans SK8: Pool Service is now available in the App Store.

Initial feedback is still coming in but several sites have already posted reviews including:

• Discussion in the TouchArcade forums.
• iLounge posted a roundup comparing Vans SK8 to some other games.
• The Appera seemed to enjoy the game quite a bit as well.
• Even ESPN has jumped in on the review action.

Let us know in the comments what you think of the game, and if you have any other feedback or thoughts.

Happy Riding!

With Pool Service set to release later this month, we're stoked to present you guys with the latest trailer. Check out some more gameplay footage, and take a look at some of the boards and wheels on offer. Most of all--let us know what you think!

I'm excited to tell you a bit more about how you, the user, can customize your experience in a number of different ways in our Vans game. The first, is the ability to pick from a wide range of board designs. There's a little something for everyone here. You're into 80's retro colours? We've got a board for that. You're into Death Metal? We've got a board for that. Overall there's 20 boards to choose from. Next, you've got your wheels. There's 10 different designs, so there's bound to be one that fits just right with your board. Being a skater myself, I wanted to make sure we are giving the player the chance to add that "flair" to their experience. I've included below some of the boards I'm really digging from the arsenal.

Last time I wrote about the various ways we let the player move around the pool environment. While that is the most fundamental aspect of playing the game, it's something that should just work without the players having to think about it. In contrast performing tricks should not only work but should "feel" right as you do them, and should be fun to do. Again we tried several different things and ideas, and the screenshot above shows part of what we finalized on.

One of the exciting, and challenging aspects of an iPhone is that there's no buttons available for the player to press. While we could put artificial buttons on the screen that feels artificial. It doesn't make sense for the platform and we feel should be avoided wherever possible.

Without buttons we still have fingers and accelerometer input which we can key off of, thus our first test was the simplest. When the player was in the air you would tap to perform a trick. This actually worked incredibly well, with just one problem: you lose a lot of player control. We could either give the players just one trick to perform (boring) or we could automatically choose a trick based on where they are in the pool or something (also boring). We needed a way to let the player have more control over what move they could do.

One of the most interesting challenges of creating games for a platform like the iPhone is figuring out a control scheme that really works. Ideally the controls should be completely natural to players so that the learning curve is as low as possible and players can spend more time playing, and less time learning.

The catch is that the iPhone is such a new platform there are no established standards for how to interact with the game. There is no thumbstick or arrow keys that people are used to using, and there's no A or B buttons to press.

While we have some good ideas on what might work well, we ultimately have to just test things out a bit and see what feels the best, and what just doesn't feel right at all. Today I'm going to talk about the basic player movement and next time I'll talk about trick execution.

Movement in a 3D game is actually pretty tricky since most people have issues (whether they want to admit it or not) in easily navigating and understanding 3D worlds. We knew that we wanted the movement to be accelerometer based but had to work to find something that was intuitive enough.

Our first attempt was an over the shoulder camera view. This actually worked out fairly well but it got a bit confusing as you came back into the pool and the camera flipped around quickly. You might think that you were going left but you ended up going right because of this.

Next we tried keeping the over the shoulder view but fixing the controls so that a tilt up on the phone always took you "North" in the pool and tilting left always took you "West", etc. We found that this worked great for experienced gamers, but got very confusing for casual players as you'd often times end up tilting left to go West, but moving right on the screen because of the direction you were traveling.

At this point we decided to drop the over the shoulder camera view for a bit and see if we could get a top down or isometric camera to work.

So I thought I'd post a little more info on the environment. The setting for the game is an abandoned California backyard with an empty pool that's yours for the taking. The sun is setting, the weather is perfect, no cops in sight! We went over countless rounds of revisions on this element of the game to make sure the mood is just right. Let us know what you think!

Various debris and lawn furniture to give it a bit of a lived in feel

Is that graffiti I see? Who left the gate open?!

With the release of our official iPhone game for Vans coming up on us, we'll be rolling out more details, screenshots, and videos.  For now, ejoy this gameplay preview from an earlyier build of the game.

Even better head on over to Vans' site and help name the game!