As such, we are going to make the Jungle Fever level available first to everyone who has invited at least 30 friends to the site from the invite friends tool - and gotten at least 5 of them to join and become active racers! If you don’t make the cut, you’ll have to wait to get Jungle Fever just like everyone else.

So for early access to this new level, log in here and invite your friends ASAP. Remember, to get credit, your friends have to click through the link you send them from this tool here, register, and then become active racers. Good luck!

1) Game stops responding at the finish line

2) When the first player finishes a race, we have doubled the time for the remaining players to cross the finish line

3) We have the overlays related to idle racers and lone racers

4) We’ve added bold and italics in the game room chat

5) We’ve fixed bugs related to the race results overlay after the game ends

There was some other minor stuff too but those were the highlights. Please let us know how it’s looking. Thanks!

So you asked for it, and we’ve been building it.  Here are some sneak screenshots of weapons we are adding into the game.  The first release of weapons will include missiles that you can shoot at karts that are ahead of you. 

Right now we are thinking of the kart upgrades in three categories:  missiles (essentially a series of forward-aiming weapons include rockets, missiles, and machine guns), bombs (mines, bombs, clicks, etc. that you can leave on the track for other people to go over), and performance enhancements (speed, drifting, or jumping upgrades that are good for a set of races).

Got ideas or thoughts?  Let us know in the comments!

Specifically, we have had the emergence of mega-teams - some teams are >200 players in size!  Since only the top 10 players in a team count towards the team point totals, having hundreds of team members results in many players becoming passive participants rather than actively taking part in team activities.  This will become even more acute as we roll out some more team-based challenges.

As a result, we are implementing a limit of 50 players/team.  If you belong to a team and are ranked lower than #50, you will be removed from that team and will be able to either join a new team or create your own.  So you have a little bit of time to get up the ranks of a team if you want to stay - or else dust off your Captain’s badge and form your own!

Here are the details of the contest:

1) Make a MobRacer-based video on YouTube. It can be funny, fun, showing-off while driving, using your avatar to tell a story with added sound, whatever you want it to be. The only requirement is that it be credited to come from MobRacer, and it use MobRacer characters and karts. Just keep in mind that every video reflects on the game, so please use good taste.

2) Post a link in the comments here to your videos. Since we have a bunch of people reading this blog everyday, you’ll get some initial people to check out your video. From there, if it’s good/funny/great, it hopefully takes off with people moving on to share it with their friends, etc. You can also embed your video in your own Friendster, Facebook, or MySpace page. Remember, the tournament will be based on MOST VIEWS - which can happen anywhere on the Internet.

3) In one month - on 4/1 - we will check all the videos that have been posted in the comments below. The single video with the MOST legitimate views will be the winner in our YouTube tournament.

THE PRIZES:

FIRST PLACE: 30,000 GOLD
SECOND PLACE: 10,000 GOLD
THIRD PLACE: 5,000 GOLD

Think of all you can do with that gold! And keep in mind that we have some new features coming out soon too for which you definitely want to save up your gold!!

So good luck, and have fun.

To kick things off, we’re posting a couple of videos below that have already been created. Enjoy!

UPDATE: To encourage submissions, we will also give 100 gold to every legitimate entry in the contest. Put forward a real, bona fide video, and you’ve got 100 gold guaranteed - plus the chance to win a lot more if a lot of people viewed your video!

UPDATE:  The date for the contest has been extended to April 31, 2009 to encourage more entries.