PAX 2009: It's All a Blur
Activision kicks off the show with a look at Bizarre's new racer.
September 3, 2009 - The Penny Arcade Expo kicks off on Friday, and mega-publisher Activision got a jump on the festivities with a mini media preview event in downtown Seattle on Thursday evening. There were finger sandwiches, there were unidentified PR honchos lurking in the Presidential Suite of the Hyatt hotel, and there were British people.
Said Brits were part of Bizarre Creations, on hand to show off their newest racing game, Blur. Bizarre were showing the same build of the game our intrepid IGN brethren saw at Gamescom mere weeks ago, so I won't bore you with the same details here. Rather, I'll give you my brief impressions of how it feels in your hands and what it's all about, short and sweet.
If you're not familiar, Blur is an arcade style racing game from the studio that brought you the Project Gotham Racing series. This time around, though, the developers are staying far away from the simulation field and heading straight for the fun factor. That means power-ups, nitro boosts and a simplified progression system that rewards your wins with "fans" instead of the standard reputation points we so commonly see in racing games. Sound familiar? It should.
Think of Blur as a racing game with Rock Band or Guitar Hero lain over the top. At both Gamescom and PAX, Bizarre have taken care to show off the game's four-player split-screen local multiplayer, as if to say, "See, this is a party game too, just like a music game!" And actually, they're sort of right. It's as if someone took Mario Kart, gave it a realistic skin, darkened things up a bit and gave the whole package a ton of Bizarre polish. The group I played with seemed to be having loads of fun, until the IGN editors thrashed them all soundly two games in a row. Owned.
Blur is part of a new direction in games that you can expect to see a lot more of, especially from publishers like Activision. Rather than aiming for the uber-hardcore with all of their titles, the company is rethinking some of its biggest franchises/development houses to line them up more with the widening mass market of gaming. Is that a good thing? Depends on what you're after.
In my brief time with Blur, I found the controls to be crisp and clean with a touch of that Bizarre drift thrown in for good measure. The car count is low by sim standards (50+), but the model and make choices show the flair and sass an arcade racer should have. Many are modified versions of well-known supercars or sport models instead of the usual magazine suspects. Rather than just plop in an Audi R8, Bizarre picked a Project Kahn R8, for example. But none of that will matter much to gearheads, as there's nothing to fiddle with under the hood. Blur is all about power-ups and varied race types to keep everyone happy.
Bizarre is making a pick-up-and-play racing game that should appeal to a wide range of gamers, and what I played was a refreshing shift from the hardcore grind of some of the genre's more unforgiving franchises. Will Blur have enough horsepower under the hood to entice those of us who are drawn to the challenge, speed and technicality of car racing? I personally haven't seen enough of the game to make that judgment. But from what I've seen so far, this may be the only racing game this year that your whole family may actually be able to play together.
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