Blur (from Bizarre/Activision) - Does anyone still play?

[GekkoP]

Interesting. Could you elaborate more on that comparison with Wipeout HD? I don't know Blur, and everytime I read about this I always see it compared to Split/Second. In fact, I want to buy one of these two soon, but I can't decide which one.

Are they any similar? Which one is better?

[UB3R~JKP]

Blur is like WipEout HD Fury but with cars pretty much. That is because it's a combat racer with a Neon'y glow to it. The weapons are very similiar, startingly similiar to be honest. It's a really good game but in my opinion the handling leaves much to be desired, having logged in about 150 hours+ of gametime.

If you are choosing between S/S and Blur it's important to note the games are often compared because these 2 and Modnation racers all came out within a month of each other, it's not difficult to see why both Blackrock and Bizzare where let go. Why try and fracture an already dwindling genre? Anyway, S/S suffers the same problem regarding handling, 'tank like' comes to mind but S/S is one of those games I recommend anyone to pick up.

In my opinion.
Blur - 8.8/10
S/S - 8.7/10

Whatever you choose, you are gonna have fun.

[AG-wolf]

Bleh Blur and Wipeout HD are only similar in the fact that they're a combat racing game. The intricacies and dynamics involved in either make them as different as Apples and Oranges.

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Wipeout HD is all about piloting. I'll admit, I'm not the best HD pilot out there, but I'm competent enough to usually hold my own. The problems with WOHD online stem from the unforgiving nature of the game's physics and weapons systems. A lot of pilots out there are INSANELY good, and I'd be okay with repeatedly losing to them, if it were the result of something I did as a pilot when racing. But that's not how the game works... it punishes you SO BADLY for taking a hit from even one SINGLE weapon, that you're basically screwed for the rest of the race.

--- With any attack, your ship comes to nearly a dead stop, you lose control of the craft for like three seconds (in races where a single lap might be 22 seconds, 3 seconds is an ETERNITY), and half the time you slide off the track entirely or sit at the wall while something else comes and blasts you while you're vulnerable.
--- sure, a shield could block any incoming/upcoming attack, but you're shooting yourself in the foot if you hold onto a shield for an entire race. You can't barrel-roll if you're not absorbing items to regain health, and you forgo potentially picking up a Boost or a Quake if your item slot isn't empty... and I say "potentially" because you're never even guaranteed one specific item over another
--- As far as bombs and mines are concerned, someone might say "just learn to avoid them," but in many places it's literally impossible to avoid a strip of mines... and half the time a Bomb will explode and hit you even if you're on the entire other side of the track! Your only chance is if you were lucky enough to get a shield from your most recent 1 or 2 weapons pads
--- Sure, you can deflect/block some weapons with others, but your item pick-up is such a crapshoot all the time that there's no way to be certain that you'll have a chance or not.
--- while you're juggling all this other bulls***, you're stuck with laps that are ritually 20-30 seconds long, leaving you with nearly no margin of error to make up for any indiscretions.

Wipeout HD online does require good piloting skill, but that's only about half of the equation, the other half is just stupid luck. One person could get half a dozen boosts in a race while someone else gets nothing. Or someone behind you could fire four quakes and keep you from ever having any opportunity at all. Add one or two elite pilots, and you'll never even have the luxury of seeing their ion-trail. It's all just frustrating and obnoxious... you could turn weapons off and leave it up to pure piloting, but then every race against a better pilot is a slap in the face, you might as well just sit in offline Time Trial at that point and avoid disappointing yourself. My entire experience with playing Wipeout online has been a nuisance, and it's unfortunate since I know the team worked really hard to make the game
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(I'm disregarding the single-player campaign of Blur because it's... it's alright, but pales in comparison to the online experience. This is primarily an online game, there's almost no point to play it without the challenge of a lobby of other human beings.)
Blur, is a complex matrix of driving ability, weapons skill, and intuitive human perception. The game was built by the people responsible for Metropolis Street Racer on Dreamcast, and the Project Gotham Racing series; they had an intelligent and capable team in charge of creating a game engine that was a fair balance between simulation and arcade gameplay physics...

--- the weight and momentum of your vehicle affects how it drives and how it responds to input and environment, wheels individually recognize traction and power, terrain influences grip/speed/accel/etc (asphalt vs dirt vs gravel vs grass vs water vs bush). Each of the +50 vehicles handle differently; compact coupe, bloated sedan, sleek sports car, lumbering truck or SUV... their center of gravity, their drivetrain, turning radius, etc all have different applications for the over TWO DOZEN tracks
--- the power-ups are all straightforward and balanced (single mine, 3 bolts, homing shunt attack, barge, lightning, shield, health, nitro). YOU CAN HOLD UP TO 3 AT A TIME, AND SWITCH BETWEEN THEM
-----You can use a barge to block/negate bolts, shunts, and mines
-----you can use a mine to block/absorb 2 bolts, shunts, and destroy other mines
-----you can use a shunt to block/absorb 2 bolts, a shunt, and destroy a mine
-----you can use bolts to destroy shunts and mines (requires two bolt hits), and one bolt will negate another bolt... if your aim is that good lol
-----Barges are an immediate-range attack which emanate from your vehicle, they can't be negated without a shield, but they require that you be close to your victim
-----Bolts, shunts, mines, and nitro can all be fired forward OR reverse; reverse shunts don't have homing properties, forward mines only travel a finite distance before stopping, reverse nitro causes a shockwave/wall which stuns other vehicles and then gives you a lesser burst of speed than if you had fired it normally (forward/normal boost has no shockwave)
-----lightning spawns 3 large domes of electricity in front of first place (can you say "Blue Shell?")
-----health gives you health
-----shield blocks everything for its duration, but only absorbs one lightning dome (unless you have the Shielding Efficiency modifier applied to your vehicle...)
--- The power-ups are laid-out in a line spanning the width of the track, each line is always in the same spot on the course, and there are multiple lines of items at intervals over the distance of the track. THE WEAPONS ARE ALL VISIBLE, YOU KNOW WHAT ITEM YOU WILL BE PICKING UP AS YOU APPROACH THE NEXT LINE OF ITEMS. On some tracks, a few lines of items change between two or three combinations, but it's on a per-race basis, and you learn which ones are always static vs which ones might be different.
--- The item that another racer currently has selected is shown above their vehicle (unless it was something they received from a modifier like Bribe, Drifter, or Adaptive Shielding... I'll get to those)
--- Items can be dropped/discarded back onto the track if you don't want them, or if you're cooperating with someone whom you wish to help
--- Every sound in the game informs you of your surroundings, you can anticipate certain attacks or what another person is doing just by listening to every little thing; they spent a long time building the environment of the game, both visually and audibly, and it pays off very well (I don't even listen to music when I race, it's all just the gameplay sounds)
--- Races last typically between 2.5 and 5 minutes long, with 2, 3, or 4 laps depending on the location and class

-- > here's a 1minute video of one of the in-game tutorials to explain some of this stuff: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDKantywKQA < --

And this is where a lot of the game's strategy starts coming into play... After you're familiar with the layout of a track and where each item line is, you can map out a plan of attack... You may choose to grab a shield, thinking ahead to get a boost for a nasty corner after that; this lets you shield any incoming attack and boost through the corner safely. Or maybe you'll grab a shunt or bolts and the boost; taking your chances so you can boost out of the corner and fire backwards for some unwitting sap to round the corner and take your attack to the face. Maybe you'll grab a mine and leave it on top of a nitro, so that someone else can't pick it up, but that's only useful if they don't have something to block/destroy it so maybe you shouldn't do it if they might have just picked up a barge or a shield? What if you're carrying two or three benign items like a health and a barge, you can drop both of them right in front of a boost- that way, if the next person doesn't have enough empty slots or isn't prepared to quickly drop something, you've effectively just blocked them from getting the boost...

There are SO MANY variables to take into consideration when you know the possible order of weapons, but being able to carry 3 items for any length of time, firing/dropping them at whatever order and point you choose, means you also have to really focus on how other people are playing. Watch what racing lines they take, watch how aggressive they are- do they fire immediately or hold onto things and wait til an opportune shot? Do they race civil or smash into you? Do they fire first or wait to see what you do? What risks do they take? Do they disregard certain weapons in favor of something else? It forces you to be cognizant of so many different little intricate things, to the point that every race is like a 160mph chess match... You know that making a certain decision or taking a particular risk at the beginning of Lap 2 might cost you the race by the end of the 3rd lap if you don't stay on top of things; one too many shunts might traipse their way up to you, a bunch of people at the back of the pack might all dive for lightning and leave you screwed if you didn't bother picking up a couple shields.

you spend as much time looking in front of you as watching your track radar and rear-view mirror to see who is where. You can press a button which brings up a list of everyone in the race, their position, their player rank, and the Mods they're using; this way you know if you have to worry about a more skilled veteran or some trigger-happy noob, or you can tell if some low-rank is doing unusually well then they might be a problem. If someone is using a certain batch of mods, you know whether you have to be more defensive against certain attacks, you have a better strategy for fighting more challenging opponents, etc etc.

Mods are another element to the game; there are three banks of 8 different mods that you can equip to your vehicle (you get to pick one of each bank)... some are offensive, some are defensive, some amplify or reduce the effectiveness of your own items or incoming attacks, some change the handling characteristics of your vehicle or the payout of points for different maneuvers, sometimes two mods will work in tandem, sometimes one mod will counteract two mods. For the most part, every mod has another mod to counterbalance it; one might deal extra damage when smashing into a vehicle while its opposite negates the added damage and makes your car more stable. One turns every power-up you discard on the track into a damaging decoy while another allows you to pick them up like a normal item... The diversity of these adds an exponential layer to the strategy involved with finishing on the podium. I literally can't explain how every one of them affects things in the game if you're not already a little familiar with it, because they all have a sort of spider-web like connection with different aspects of what goes on. Just know that it really asks you to learn everything that happens in the game lol
I typically use a specific combination of mods which compliment the way I play and how attentive I am of my surroundings in the game, but you can't always rely on the same mods for every track/class/event, though.

All of these things combine into an experience that is almost consistently intense every race. I, personally, have never encountered a more engaging and addictive game than Blur; I've already logged at least 45 days of playtime across my primary and secondary accounts on Xbox and my account on PS3 (and I wouldn't hesitate to say the total might be pushing nearly 60 days if you include the time I spent with the private beta on the Xbox before the game was finalized)... I don't know what kind of a challenge or experience other people are looking for in a game, but something about Blur just pushes all the right buttons for me. I was furious at how Activision fumbled the launch of the game; bad timing, bad support, didn't give the developers any opportunity to iron out some issues, didn't give them a chance to set up ANY of the online stat-tracking and social-networking functions they originally planned... Activision basically dumped the game on the market and then immediately ignored it and pushed Bizarre Creations onto their next project. Within three months of the game's launch, Activision said the genre (battle racing, etc) wasn't worth any further pursuit and they completely disregarded it. Blur was essentially a +2 year effort to revitalize the genre as a whole and build an entirely new IP, and after all the money and time that Activision poured into Bizarre to craft this masterpiece, they shot themselves in the foot by completely mismanaging everything about the game from the moment it hit store shelves. To add insult to injury, Activision killed-off Bizarre like 6 months later (for all you Wipeout-exclusive die-hards, that's akin to Sony disolving Studio Liverpool and previously Psygnosis.)

Unfortunately, now Blur suffers from a significantly low user base... it's not that you can't often find (usually) full 10-man or 20-man lobbies, but sometimes you're stuck with thin competition. A lot of people who still play the game now (after nearly 3 years) have played it so much that they're going to be a strong challenge until you get acquainted with it, so it might feel discouraging. And nobody knows when the servers will finally be taken off-line; every online game has a finite lifespan before the producers disable its online infrastructure... that day might be around the corner, or it may still have another couple years. But for a game that was projected to consistently have thousands of players (sometimes in the tens of thousands) at any given moment, yet you might only see 200 - 300 on a good day, I ca't imagine Activision will nurse its bast**d lovechild for much longer

if you want a few more examples of the insanity, here are a couple more video links:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VL4t__1aozI - relatively casual race
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RnTiL40mlo - very intense/difficult race against other veterans. Low-res webcam, but you can see what's happening. WARNING: I rage, turn your volume down lol
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OgN2MFNslI4 - 1080p recording of a lobby of veteran racers, no Drifter or Front-Runner mods allowed. This isn't my recording, but I do finish 2nd place :3
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And as far as split/Second goes, it gets old quick. The CPU vehicles have bad rubber-banding (can always catch up no matter what, like the 2005 NFS: Most Wanted) in single-player, the destructible areas on the courses are the same all the time and once you've learned where each spot is, it's easy to prepare for and avoid... it takes a lot of the dynamic human-competition aspects out of the race when you can be like "I'll just go over here to avoid X and watch out that someone doesn't bash into me and I'm good." The game is flashy and initially attractive but gets redundant quickly, its racing engine is too generic and doesn't offer a good sense of the track, the weight and momentum of the vehicles, or the speed you're traveling. I appreciate that Disney was trying for something kinda new/different for the racing genre, but it just felt kinda shallow. It wasn't enticing enough for me at least.

[GekkoP]

Though you did not convince me about Wipeout HD issues, you sure got my attention on Blur with that in-depth description. Videos look pretty good, I'll go with it as soon as I find it at a good price.

[chalovak]

Do not forget that there IS still a connection (one at least), that makes people compare WO and Blur and say that there is some WipEout vibe in Blur. This connection is Karl Jones, art director of Fury and lead designer of 2048, who was working on Blur at Bizzare Creations for awhile.

PS. Blur is a crazy game, love every bit of it.