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| You were right, Blur is good. Now listen to me complain about it for ten minutes by Jerry Whorebach 03/31/2013, 1:19pm PDT | ||||
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| The courses are almost unbelievably drab. They're ostensibly set in some of the most beautiful cities in the world (and Brighton), but apparently G.I. Joe wasn't able to stop Cobra's Von Neumann missiles in time because it looks like everything's been reduced to grey goo. I can completely understand why they went this way, since the dim, uncluttered backgrounds allow the glowing neon weapons and power-ups to stand out, which is probably essential to playability when you've got twenty(!) cars all battling it out at high speed. But that doesn't mean I have to like it.
Which leads to my second complaint: I don't like battle racing in general. I'd rather out-run my competition than blow them up any day. It just feels like cheating, especially since I'm generally the one in first place getting blown up. However, this is by far the fairest battle racing game I've ever played. All the power-ups appear on the track in predictable locations, so there's no randomness to their dispersal - it's always the best power-up collector who gets the best power-ups, not whoever happens to be in last place. There are no leader-seeking superweapons, and most items can be used both offensively and defensively; you're never punished for driving too well, because not only does the lead car get first choice of weapons, most of them can be fired backwards to intercept anything your persuers throw at you (provided you've mastered the technique, of course). And here is my third complaint: the driving itself is not particularly technical. Which is not to say it's bad - if anything, the handling is TOO intuitive, TOO predictable, it places TOO MUCH control in your hands without making you fight for it. The car absolutely feels like it's connected to the track by four patches of rubber, fully in accordance with the (admittedly simplistic) physics of the Blur universe. It's essentially a dumbed-down Project Gotham 4, which was itself a slightly more arcadey Project Gotham 3, which was a slightly more simmy Project Gotham 2, which... well, you see where this is going (Metropolis Street Racer on the Dreamcast, obviously). It's arguably the perfect handling model for a driving game where driving rarely commands your full attention. Which brings me, finally, to my last complaint: the progression system. Bizarre Creations has always been a trailblazer in the field of integrating scoring/experience systems into genres where they don't belong, and Blur continues that tradition with a truly baffling array of numerical ranking systems, all constantly incrementing. PGR's trademark Kudos system (a trademark which still legally belongs to Microsoft) has given way to an even more elaborate network of Fans, Lights, Demands, and other assorted bars in need of filling. Thankfully, unlike PGR with its mandatory drift events and cone challenges, seemingly all of these numbers can be COMPLETELY IGNORED. To quote Snoop Dogg in Dogg's Turismo 3, "Just make sure that you finish first, second, third, that's all that matters / and I doubt there's a racing game that's phatter." So this objection is really more philosophical than practical, and probably even safer to dismiss than all the rest. Examining my list of complaints, I can only conclude that Blur is a rock-solid battle racer that simply wasn't meant for me. I prefer highly technical driving games (whether that technique focuses on precision cornering and smooth overtaking or on-rails drifting and ludicrous boosting is immaterial) that emphasize the pure joy of racing (as opposed to screwing over other people and/or making numbers go up) and take place in gorgeous hyperreal locations, with blue skies and green grass and autumn leaves and the Milky Way. I can find plenty of reasons to dislike Blur, but none for which I can fault it. I believe that's what Arthur Gies would call a 10/10. 
Above: Barcelona. Or possibly San Francisco. Hackney, maybe? |
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