68 - Blurry Vision

Bizarre Creations’ (Project Gotham, Geometry Wars, The Club) latest racer, Blur, now has a public beta on Xbox Live.

Its very positive to see a game like Blur receive a public beta. It’s a tenant of game development usually reserved for shooters, strategy games and MMOs; games that require scrupulous changes to balancing, map design and the like. Not often necessary for a Mario Kart rip off.

But its such meticulous attention to details, honing every corner and carefully tweaking every power-up, that makes Blur such a perfect platform for bitter rivalries, obscenities shouted down the microphone and broken friendships. Play a bunch of races with a group of friends and you’ll soon be down a few Xbox Live buddies.

Basically, Blur takes the jovial fun of item-based go-kart racing and replaces everything bright, colourful and cheery with licensed cars, dusky tracks and men with wife beater vests, tribal tattoos and dreadlocks.

You’ve still got a selection of vehicles, but its now zippy sports cars vs gas guzzling landrovers instead of Yoshi v Bowser. And all of your favourite Mario Kart weapons are there, and you’ll still call them by their Nintendo names. Some of my friends have now moved onto calling them “Barges” and “Bolts”, but I still call them Green, Blue and Red Shells. Force of habit.

I mean, for Christ’s sake, you can fire projectiles behind you as well as forward, and you can lob bananas - uh, I mean mines. There’s one that attacks the guy in first place and, guess what, it’s coloured blue (although, Blur’s blue shell is a lot more forgiving that than Mario Kart’s. It shoots lightning bolts in front of the first place racer which can be avoided, and only slow you down a little if you do hit them). What it doesn’t nick from Mario Kart, it yoinks from Wipeout: ones to give you a speed boost, ones to nudge nearby enemies, one to shield you from attacks.

All in all, it has a nice mix of defensive and offensive weapons, with a carefully balanced rock, paper scissors matrix tying it all together. The red shell, for example, can be deflected in tonnes of different ways; shoot it green shells, bounce it with a barge attack, activate a shield or just zig zag your car a little.

I just don’t really like the sort of hip-generica aesthetic it has going on. I mean, it’s just so bloody relevant with Call of Duty style perks and Twitter integation and something, believe it or not, called RaceBook. And its bland, too; licensed vehicles and the same tracks you’ll see in every Burnout, Need for Speed and Project Gotham game, but now with incongruous floating pick-ups.

Funnily enough, I had this exact same problem with Bizarre’s last game - The Club. Under the surface, The Club was an addictive rush of fast shooting, adrenaline-fuelled time runs and strict memorisation. It melded shooters with racers and came out with something that felt more like Laser Quest than Gears of War. But then Bizarre stuck it in corridors and warehouses, and filled it with characters less interesting than Big Brother contestants; no hoper rejects from Virtua Fighter 6 auditions.

The Club looked like every single shooter it wasn’t, and Blur looks like every racer it’s not.