The Cars

PGR2 still loves its cars every bit as much as those more feted simulation franchises. This is the game that introduced a showroom mode, letting you wander among your collection of gleaming expensive machinery. From here you can test drive any car you happen to be looking at. The game might not get bogged down in the minutiae of having every possible iteration of every model of every car, but it does want you to feel a sense of ownership and it does want the cars to feel real. In any car, in any event, even a test drive, there’s a small odometer clearly visible beneath the speedo, totting up every single mile you drive and have ever driven in each car. In your favourites, those quickly add up.

With no upgrades to buy for your car, the only means of progress is to get the hang of the Project Gotham‘s particular plays-style, which puts the spotlight more squarely on the handling model – thankfully one of the best things about the game. While it’s standard-definition graphics (positively photo-realistic for the time) were always going to age horribly, I still haven’t come across a game where the simple experience of driving the cars is more enjoyable than in Project Gotham 2 (and that includes its own sequels). The close walls can be unforgiving to begin with but the rhythm of brake/acceleration soon becomes inbuilt and your variation on that comes from the track and the car but also from how you want to approach each corner. Do you want to smoothly turn-in, kiss the apex and carry as much momentum as you can through the exit, narrowly avoiding the outside wall on the straight? Or do you want to jam on the brakes, spin-up the wheels and swing your tail around the corner while pointing sideways? That probably depends on the event and your mood but most of the time both approaches are equally valid. As you get better, that decision gets made in the millisecond before you brake as you instinctively make judgement calls on whether you’re too late or early, whether you’re going fast enough, whether your car is stable or still rocking from the last corner.

Playing from the bumper cam is usually my favoured way of playing racing games, even if in PGR it means missing out on seeing the immaculate model of your car. Yet even though the car you’re driving is invisible from that viewpoint, it feels like a solid, living creature. The camera follow every little movement: pitching, diving and rearing up with every prod of the throttle and brakes, rolling from side to side as the springs work through the corners. You’re never unaware of the vehicle’s weight as the handling model forces you to constantly consider it and do what you can to either shift it into action or try to settle it down.

The Driving

The life of the car is transmitted brilliantly through the much-maligned Xbox controller. If Bungie showed how the Xbox’s responsive analogue sticks could be used for first person shooters, PGR2 demonstrated how much analogue triggers and force-feedback could add to racing games. The Dreamcast was the first console to introduce analogue triggers and Bizarre’s Metropolis Street Racer made good use of it. The Xbox had similarly springy triggers with a large amount of travel, letting you feel exactly how much throttle or braking you were applying with a great deal of sensitivity. In turn, PGR2 is a game that demands you use that instinctive feel to master driving. Meanwhile force-feedback, packing quite a punch on the Xbox, constantly communicates with the player in ways the visuals never can. Slightly uneven paving stones under your wheels might pulse the controller, while gear changes jerk it. Most usefully and thrillingly, the controller practically throbs in your hands when you’re too heavy on the accelerator and the wheels are scrabbling for purchase – it almost feels like the plastic is trying to kick its way out of your grip and a heavy right index finger, without some careful steering, will probably lead to the car similarly rebelling from under your spell.

In spite of the choice of setting and cars, perhaps the best tricks you can use come from the world of off-road rallying. Often the quickest way to hustle a car’s mass through a tight turn is to shift it into instability before hand or apply a dab of handbrake or spin-up the rear wheels till the back of the car comes alive and swings round. They all become naturally learned techniques in your repertoire and the controller feedback ensures you can keep your vehicle on the thin edge between performing a controlled-slide and spinning-out.

The cars that best show off this union between controller and handling model are also the ones that demand the most in terms of concentration and trigger control – not, as you might expect, the exotic hypercars but instead the classic American muscle-cars. Their considerable heft and soft suspension give them boat like handling, rocking and bouncing at the slightest provocation. Their overpowered engines and low grip mean that the right trigger is carefully monitored at all times, any hint of controller shake causing you to either back off or attempt to use the sliding rear. Either way the level of concentration required is uniquely punishing and rewarding.

All of which brings us to the mode that PGR2 introduced and remains the best expression of Project Gotham – the Cone Challenges. Here driving meets Tony Hawk and becomes like an extreme sport. There aren’t jumps or incredible stunts and you don’t get to create your own lines to run through – there’s pretty much only one tightly prescribed route. But finding the way to master each track and putting together a perfect run quickly becomes an obsession. Speed isn’t the ultimate factor here, although it’s undeniably important. Driving precision and control are what’s most important in order to get through the cones, while speed keeps you chaining them together for the combo-score. Power-slides can keep your score ticking up too, particularly when you want to buy yourself a half second or so, but since you still have to thread them through the cones they can’t be overindulged – you need to be confident in any slide’s trajectory, angle and end-point once you’ve started it. Pull all of that off, consistently, with no mistakes, and on certain tracks the resulting replays can look like automotive ballet. The Cone Challenges don’t feel like a competition but instead a performance, with your own inner perfectionist harrying you to hit retry until you get that flawless run. It’s the mode that best illustrates and justifies the series’ raison d’etre: the Kudos scoring system which looks at how you drive rather than how fast.

Project Gotham's Florence is beautiful if rather less engaging than the version from Assassin's Creed 2

Marks out of ten?

The game’s Kudos scoring system yet another part of the game that’s been carefully judged, the perfect example of balancing risk and reward. Any time you score, by going through a cone gate, completing a clean sector, hitting an apex, pulling off a slide etc., you have a window of a couple of seconds to keep the combo going by scoring again. Usually this keeps you racing through to reach the next scoring opportunity – if you miss that time window you simply bank the points you have so far. The combo score increases massively as the chain gets longer though, with each subsequent ‘trick’ bringing ever greater amount of points. If you mess up though, by hitting a cone or a wall, you lose all of the combo score you’ve built up – so the pressure builds with every little on-track success. It’s all too easy to hesitate, whether deliberately or not, and simply bank what you have, starting a new combo from scratch – but the only way to hit the higher medal scores is to plough on through, to twist instead of stick, to keep gambling on your own ability and hope you can hold on to your combo score as it climbs ever higher.

PGR2 does something interesting with the medal system too – before attempting an event you have to choose which medal you’re aiming for, from copper to bronze through to platinum. If you don’t make that medal’s score target, you don’t get given the lesser medal, you simply fail. If you pass and happen to get a platinum score while aiming for gold, all you get is a gold. It might sound unfair but it’s way of getting the player to set the pressure on themselves. There are many times when I’ve repeatedly tried for a gold and eventually given up and gone for the silver. Inevitably, with the pressure off, my silver run-through would then be near-perfect and my score good enough for a gold-medal – if only that’s what I’d gone with. It’s like the high jump – it doesn’t matter if you clear 2m when the bar was set at 1.5 – you’re score goes down as 1.5. Nowadays the consensus in game design would say that’s too frustrating for the player – just give them what their score tallies too. But Bizarre, as with the Geometry Wars series, understands the psychology of players and how to induce that “one more go” mentality. It’s crucial, for example, that PGR‘s Restart option is always instant with no loading time whatsoever – undoubtedly that was something they strived for early on from a technical standpoint.

Project Gotham Racing 2 is a game that’s had a lot of thought put into it at every possible stage. I could go on about the range of fastidiously reproduced cities that provide the game’s backdrop; the atmosphere of flicking between the sunlit roads and skyscraper-cast shadows in a deserted Chicago; the thrill of winding through narrow cobbled Edinburgh streets at night. I could mention the impact the game made online, changing the way people thought about online gaming for both consoles and racing games with the player community effectively creating their own modes. I could branch off to talk about Geometry Wars, the little in-game easter egg that re-introduced dual stick shooters to the mainstream and became a critically acclaimed series in its own right. Ultimately though, what’s stuck with me most from PGR2 is the moment-to-moment driving. It’s best encapsulated in the singular experience of burning round a corner with headlights, tyres and tarmac all pointing in different directions, wheel-spin shaking through the fingers and the car never completely tamed, all while the ticking sounds of the Kudos-meter collapse together into a crackle, like a happy Geiger counter. Do it once and you’ll never lose your taste for it.

The Instrument Genre years

With the death of the Guitar Hero and DJ Hero series and Harmonix being let go by MTV Games, we’re currently seeing the demise of the music-game genre. Or at least the musical-instrument genre – dancing seems to have stepped up to at least partially fill the void. All of which makes Ubisoft’s sudden entrance into the instrument genre, due for this September, even more unexpected – but more on that later. Only 3 years ago, the music game genre was booming. In fact its success was so remarkable that, in a record year for games sales overall, the rise of the music genre seemed to be most responsible for a bumper 2008. Guitar Hero and RockBand were the two titles underpinning the music genre so with the former now gone people are naturally asking if, and how, Rock Band can survive. Harmonix themselves have been teasing an announcement at the forthcoming E3 but the hints have been pointing at either new IP and/or a use of motion controllers. So is Rock Band quietly going to slip into the background of Harmonix’s lineup?

Well firstly, the massive sales success of 2008 was never going to be repeated simply because a large proportion of the quoted  numbers was down to the money spent on expensive instrument controllers – controllers that have to be compatible with all future versions of the game. Rock Band 3 added the keyboard controller but for the most part their target market already owns all the instruments they need for the foreseeable future. This should be a good thing – Harmonix have always said that they want Rock Band to be a platform on which to sell content so not having to ship and push instrument-controllers is only to their advantage.

The Rock Band Platform

Presumably the households are now out there with their controllers, they just need to start buying the new stuff Harmonix are selling. Originally that was purely going to be DLC, which went along with the ‘platform’ idea – a disc was simply a portal to playing and downloading whatever songs each person wanted. Since we don’t really have any sales figures or trends for the DLC we don’t really know how well that’s done for Harmonix, but they’ve been remarkably consistent to that goal, releasing new tracks every week in batches that have only gotten bigger. Add to that the Rock Band Network that allows bands to create and put up their own tracks for sale and it’s clear that Harmonix can’t be accused of shrinking away from the idea of Rock Band as a digital platform. But Rock Band 2 – a boxed retail release – ended up being released only a year after the first, much sooner than many expected. Perhaps this was a case of striking while the iron was hot since the game sold respectably – over 4 million compared to the first title’s 5 million or so (according to Screen Digest).

Another reason for releasing new discs and instrument bundles is that it simply represents great promotion. Having the discs on store shelves along with the giant instrument boxes, automatically gives Rock Band visibility which they need in order to build an audience. New discs and bundles give retailers a reason to keep stocking Rock Band titles – an old product way past its peak sales is not going to stay in shops for long, especially when it takes up a lot of valuable floor space. Without steady sales or a large marketing spend – a la Nintendo with their evergreen DS and Wii first party titles – the only way to keep growing the market for Harmonix’s digital content was to have fairly regular retail disc releases, hence RB2, Lego: Rock Band and so on. Of course, those regular releases have to sell for this to work.

Splitting the platform

The more worrying cases are those of The Beatles: Rock Band and Rock Band 3. Beatles represented a victory for Harmonix and MTV Games over Activision in securing the rights, but it almost certainly cost them too much. The marketing push for Beatles was much higher than for any other Rock Band, probably to ensure they made the licensing fees back…and yet Screen Digest reports sales of about 3 million – a disaster that seems to have led to MTV Games getting rid of Harmonix and ultimately closing down. And, apparently because of the licensing conditions they agreed with Apple Corp, the Beatles tracks they had and could release would only be compatible with The Beatles: Rock Band, effectively splitting their own platform. Limiting their potential DLC sales to only Beatles: Rock Band owners serves no-one and as a way of encouraging sales of that game, it hasn’t paid off – it turns out that The Beatles, even with a game that is a lavish tribute to them, were not enough of a carrot to bring in customers in anywhere near the numbers expected.

Rock Band 3, with its introduction of keyboards, harmonies and pro modes, has caused another division within Harmonix’s DLC library – all DLC being released after RB3 is no longer compatible with the older games, so anyone wanting to buy new content has to buy the newest game. Judging by the disappointing sales of 3 this hasn’t worked out and it means the DLC is now being sold to a potential audience that is much, much smaller than before. On the other hand you could argue that the people who are likely to buy Rock Band 3 are the dedicated fans, the people who were buying most of the DLC before. Without any numbers we can’t say if that’s true of not.

The Hardcore

What’s clear though is that Rock Band 3 is a game that focuses on the hardcore members of its audience with the addition of Pro Mode. This sought to bring the game much closer to playing a real instrument – with the keyboard in Pro Mode you’re playing the actual notes of the song verbatim, for example. For the guitar it requires a more complicated controller – either a Mustang controller with fake strings and 100 buttons or a specially made Squier guitar that can also be plugged into your console.

When the controllers get so complicated and expensive, surely even the hardcore move on to the real thing?

One of the main criticisms of the instrument genre from the uninitiated has always been “Why not play a real instrument instead?”,  which is to miss the point. The appeal is that the games lets novices and the relatively unmusical experience some of the pleasure of playing music or, perhaps more accurately performing music. Along the way it works as a remarkably good teacher of timing, rhythm and some of the co-ordination involved in actual musicianship, which just happens to be a side-benefit of the game. Rock Band 3‘s Pro Mode, requiring expensive controllers, some of which can double as actual instruments, does start to make this question pertinent again. For any player looking for a greater sense of immersion in the music ‘playing’ experience there is always the readily available and often cheaper alternative of simply buying an instrument and learning the real thing. By all accounts I’m certainly not the only one to have made that jump. So why release the complicated $150 Mustang controller? The Squier guitar is less questionable but still, at £195/$280, a relatively expensive way to go about learning a real instrument.

Harmonix might argue that the Pro Mode and its controllers are only aimed at a tiny niche that want to learn instruments within the Rock Band framework, but it’s also the cause of a split in the DLC library between Rock Band 3 and its predecessors. Surely that’s a large change in the direction of their platform for the sake of this niche?

My Rock Band experience

Rock Band is a series that I’m a huge fan of. If I were to list the games that have had the largest influence on me, not just as a gamer but as a person, then Rock Band would have to be near the top. I’ve probably spent as much time with that game as with any other. I’ve certainly spent as much money on it – thanks to the huge collection of songs I’ve downloaded – as I have on several other games. It’s brought massive amounts of joy to me and many friends, gamer and non-gamer alike. The reaction I’ve witnessed from ‘non-gamers’ has helped to confirm, in my mind, the potential future reach of interactive entertainment as a medium. Perhaps most importantly to me, playing Rock Band convinced me to get back into playing music after an 8 year hiatus, as well as to learn 2 new instruments in the bass and electric guitars.

Rocksmith – the pitch

Which conveniently brings us to Rocksmith, a game that isn’t really a game at all – it’s explicitly aimed at teaching you how to play guitar and it works with just about any electric guitar. Leaving aside any questions over how (and how well) the technology works, there was a lot of skepticism at the announcement since the the consensus was that the instrument genre was now ‘over’. Rocksmith isn’t really in the same genre at all though – it’s aiming to be a tool firstly and foremost. Ubisoft have previous experience with serious games that aim for self-improvement – their My…Coach games, from my experience, have been cheap and popular games on the Nintendo platforms. With the success of Just Dance on the Wii, Ubisoft could also argue that they understand the music genre. The major expense for creating Rocksmith would be licensing the tracks but Guitar Hero and Rock Band have already helped to establish a new appreciation for gaming among record companies – they already know how licensing can increase their own sales. With the added cachet of Rocksmith being for real budding musicians, there shouldn’t be a shortage of artists happy to have their music licensed. Meanwhile for retailers, they don’t have to take a gamble on the delivery, storage and floor-space costs of giant instrument boxes, so they’re going to be much more eager to stock the title.

Beyond the sales questions, is Rocksmith a good idea as a teaching tool? Obviously it’s too early to say but it’s worth pointing out one of the aspects of the instrument genre that could make Rocksmith particularly useful – the note-highway. From what little that has been shown, we already know that Rocksmith uses a horizontal highway instead of a vertical one and it hasn’t been angled away from the viewer either, but the principle of scrolling ‘notes’ and matching your timing as they reach a point seems to be much the same. As a way of engendering muscle memory in a player, the scrolling notes approach has already proven to work in Rock Band and the like – as a way of teaching music it could be brilliant. Your vision is focused on one small space with your body reacting as notes enter, while with sheet music and guitar tab the sensation is much more of ‘reading’ and it feels much more like you’re processing the information – at least until you’ve spent a lot of time with either system and acclimatised yourself to them. Either way, the panning/page-turning and scrolling of either sheet music or tab can add another concentration breaking hassle to learning music and further removes you from learning at an instinctive level. While learning with an electronic ‘aid’ might seem alien to some, for today’s generation of new guitar players and gamers it is much more natural. Feeding the information in steadily on a scrolling note-highway, akin to the punch-cards on old player pianos, completely eliminates the need for the brain to process the timing information being communicated in sheet music or tab (usually very poorly relayed in the case of the latter).

Of course, sheet music is a much more subtle and powerful way of communicating music; tablature is a democratic way of doing so, readable and writable by just about anyone anywhere. That doesn’t mean, particularly for beginners, that Rocksmith couldn’t sit alongside those two or be helpful in conjunction with them. Ubisoft might well be onto something with this title and they might even have exploited a gap that Harmonix should have filled first. Rock Band 3‘s Pro Mode attempts that while still being part of the game and I can’t help feeling like it compromised the Rock Band platform as a result, while the route it offers into real guitar playing isn’t as appealing to the average consumer as it should be.

It’s become an oft repeated cliche about console launches that there’s nothing decent to buy when a platform first comes out. For all the hype and midnight queues, once you’ve got your hands on the machine there isn’t anything worth playing on it until at least six months down the line. Rushed development on unfamiliar hardware in order to meet the strictest of deadlines – it’s a formula that’s rarely conducive to creating good titles. But the exceptions to this rule of thumb are also notable. The Xbox launched with the original Halo, a title that not only justifed the console’s existence but also Microsoft’s rather surprising entry into the gaming hardware market. Super Mario 64 was similarly important, a game that felt at home on the N64′s weird tri-prong controller and also showed how Nintendo’s mascot could not only remain relevant while moving to 3 dimensions but also still blaze the trail for others to follow. Arguably the most important launch title was Wii Sports, the free pack-in title that for many families was the only reason they ever bought the console and made it into the must-have gadget of the time.

3DS Built In Games

Ok, so perhaps my introduction wasn’t fair on the 3DS, building up to it’s packaged software by mentioning one of the best-selling games ever. From the looks of things, Face Raiders and AR Games are more like nifty distractions that are fun to show off for a little bit but don’t go any deeper. Face Raiders works well as a word-of-mouth demo – once you’ve taken a photo of someone’s face they become enemies for you to shoot at by moving around the 3DS itself, while the level background is whatever the camera is recording in your surroundings. The face-photo is sort of 3D too although it mostly just seemed to be mapped onto a sphere in this game. It was quite fun though and by encouraging you to take photos of new people, it also quietly encourages you to show the console off to more friends – or, alternatively, to start creepily photographing strangers.

AR Games puts a boss encounter in familiar surroundings

AR Games meanwhile makes use of the AR (augmented reality) cards packed in with the console. The game I played (I don’t know if there’s more than one) had a card lying flat on a table – looking at it through the 3DS camera instead ‘revealed’ a 3D monster on the desk. You shot at it through cross-hairs on the 3DS display so you had to move yourself in order to adjust your aim and it felt a bit like playing some kind of real-life/virtual hybrid FPS. You could move up to and around the monster from any angle while shifting weak points forced you keep circling to get a shot off. As a game beyond the few minutes I played, it would require more to sustain it – but as a new experience it revealed some of the potential in the hardware. Having the game taking place on the desk made the monster’s virtual presence seem very real – which made some of the later effects, when the desktop surface shimmered and warped, even more impressive.

Kid Icarus: Uprising

This was only being demoed by one guy who had the 3DS strapped to his belt. I don’t think anyone was about to steal the cartridge – more likely they wanted that particular rep to be always on hand to explain the controls. Kid Icarus used the touch screen equivalent of dual-sticks so it wasn’t exactly intuitive to any casual fans but I found it reasonably easy to get the hang of after a little while. The left stick controlled movement while flying, and the touch-screen determined where you aimed. Having the L-Button to fire though was a bit awkward and gives you a precarious grip on the actual console – I can only imagine how it would feel after prolonged play sessions.

The demo itself started as a Star Fox-like rail-shooter, except you could move about screen while aiming elsewhere. The enemies flying at you looked great except in a few instances when they got too close and the 3D effect stopped working – it made those moments doubly jarring. Not quite as jarring as the unexpected change after the shooting gallery to a level where our winged hero was running about (on foot!) in a free-roaming environment. More often than not we were hacking at enemies up close instead of shooting which might have been a nice change of pace except that the controls struggled when dealing with more than tunnel-movement. Imagine playing a PC FPS with a particularly insensitive mouse on a tiny mouse mat and you’d have some idea of how it felt – to turn 90 or 180 degrees you’d need repeated swipe and drags of the stylus. Since the section was short though, perhaps the developers have used these on-foot bits sparingly in the final game.

Pro Evolution Soccer 3DS

The demo started off in a slightly unexpected over the shoulder view looking up the pitch (similar to what you might see in American Football games like Madden). It was playable for a bit but since football is fundamentally a sport about movement and passing in every direction, it’s another view like Street Fighter IV 3D‘s Dynamic Mode that is mostly a gimmicky handicap. FIFA‘s Be A Pro mode is a much more appropriate use of this sort of view change, restricting you to one player and constantly panning and zooming in order to focus attention where you need to. It’s good to see Konami trying new things and it does look fairly spectacular in 3D, but the game would have to be seriously re-engineered before it became properly playable from this viewpoint.

The new default viewpoint for the 3DS version

I changed it back into something like the ‘classic’ pitch side camera where it played as expected. One thing I did notice in my short play time was that from both camera angles the 3D did help in judging the balls flight once it was lobbed. In football games it’s become fairly common to put trajectory markers down to show where the ball is going to land since it’s hard to determine in both games and even when watching live matches. The 3DS version didn’t use any markers but I still felt like I instinctively had a better idea of where the ball was in the air. It helped from from a playability perspective but it had a bigger effect on how immersive the game felt.

Rayman 3D

As port of an old title that’s been released on consoles from the Playstation to the Dreamcast and iOS devices, Rayman 3D is a fairly conventional 3D platformer that seems to have dated looks and mechanics. And yet, as the only 3D platformer there, it did allow to me to pick on something that might bode well for 3DS’s future.

A task you don't think about in a 2D game is much more fiddly in 3D. Imagine hitting the coin box without the shadows - it's pretty much trial and error. Can stereoscopic 3D displays alleviate this problem?

When platform games went from 2D to 3D the gameplay emphasis had to move away from the joy of precision running and jumping over deadly gaps because judging distance was suddenly an exercise in wooly estimation. You would often rely on switching the camera to the exact right angle and nudging your character around until you’d lined your run up just so. Meanwhile the gravity and physics are often a lot floatier than in 2D to give you plenty of time to correct in mid air and the normal technique is to watch your shadow so you can figure out where you are compared to the ground.

3D platformers give you a great sense of exploring a new world then, but at times actually traversing them can be fiddly when you need a modicum of accuracy, at least when compared to 2D equivalents. Playing Rayman though I noticed that with the stereoscopic 3D turned on I suddenly wasn’t watching my shadow at all – movement and jumping felt far more instinctive and I had much better of idea of the jumps I could and couldn’t make. As a little test, there was a large mushroom to jump on that sent you bouncing up. After doing it easily with the 3D turned up, I switched the stereoscopic effect off completely and tried the same jump again – immediately I found myself having to look at the mushroom for my telltale shadow and correcting to help my landing.

I can’t imagine Rayman 3D being a sales or critical success but it might signpost a more viable future for 3D platformers that don’t have to babysit players around obstacles.

Ridge Racer 3D

I only played one race – a race against 3 other wirelessly connected players. I’ve never really been much of a Ridge Racer fan either. Maybe it was my natural competitiveness then, or maybe the game’s great sense of speed, but I was enthralled while I was playing it. With the device held close, the display effects turned up and the camera set to my favoured bumper cam, it was the most immersive experience of the night – I spent precisely zero seconds evaluating it as a game and simply wanted to drive fast and win. Ridge Racer didn’t need impressive graphics to suck me in – it’s smooth framerate kept things buzzing by at a fair clip and with 3D it felt like a handheld version of a 3-screen surround desktop set-up. The game itself would be hard to judge beyond that since my time was so limited, but again a fairly underwhelming title on paper has shown promising glimpses of what can be done on the console. The 2 major changes from the DS to its successor – namely the 3D display and analog slider – have made the Nintendo handheld infinitely more appealing as a home for racing games. Having said that, it’s only launch competitor in the genre, Asphalt 3D, was thoroughly underwhelming in the brief time I spent with it.

Steel Diver

I was shocked to see that not only was this a Nintendo developed title, but it was also a full price game rather than a pack-in or downloadable. The game itself mostly involves you rotating your body in order to rotate a submarine’s periscope, looking for battleships so you can fire your torpedoes at them while also avoiding any attacks coming at you. Not that it’s a particularly tense game of cat-and-mouse strategy like you might imagine a decent submarine sim to be. In fact there were battleships constantly sailing by and I found myself rapidly firing off torpedoes like I was in a shooting gallery. Occasionally I would dive but the level of input and thought required from the player seemed pretty small. At a time when Nintendo higher ups are criticising the booming app market for offering cheap, low quality thrills, the likes of Steel Diver severely undermines their argument – this is a game that should be digital download for a few pounds at most, not a full priced cartridge.

Super Monkey Ball 3D

As much as I was a fan of the Super Monkey Ball series from the GameCube days, this was a disappointment. Apparently the game can use tilt controls but just playing with the analog stick I’d find the 3D effect often blurring and getting lost from even small movements of the console. That might be more due to me not being able to keep the console still but with 3D on or off, the game was surprisingly not as easy as I expected. The first level had plenty of safety barriers to guide you but even then it seemed difficult to get any kind of fluent progress going. I couldn’t put my finger on what it was exactly – perhaps a different angle or field of view, a more rapidly tilting world or something else – but movement never felt as intuitive or as comfortable as it should in a Super Monkey Ball game. Even worse though were the two modes that counted as the multiplayer offering. Past series titles have had either a plethora of multiplayer minigames or, preferably, a handful of really well thought out, imaginative and polished modes that kept you coming back. For 3D though, there was just Monkey Race and Monkey Fight. Monkey Race I’ve completely forgotten and after looking it up I see that it’s a kart-racing-clone. Monkey Fight meanwhile is not the great boxing-glove-on-a-spring game from before – simple manic fun with various pickups and ingenious controls – but instead a Super Smash Brothers clone in sparse dull levels where nothing really happens. Since SSB is a game built on chaos, you have to wonder what the developers were thinking other than “get it done in time for launch”. It has monkeys, they can fight, I guess that meets the absolute minimum requirements for a Monkey Fight.

Two proper Nintendo VIPs

The Event

I was lucky enough to be at Nintendo’s VIP launch event for the new 3DS in London, despite being a Very Unimportant P. Nintendo could certainly be accused of putting on the event purely for the benefit of furthering their standing with the mainstream – hosting was by Russell Kane and there were performances by Plan B and Parade (a girl band…no, I’ve got no idea either).

For the cameras, filming for Sky 3D, there were more than a few knocks against geeks as if to reassure everyone that they weren’t about to catch some kinds of nerd-disease for turning up or tuning in. When they cut to a presenter live at the HMV queue counting down to launch, out came the tired cliches at the expense of the eager punters there. It’s obvious that Nintendo wanted the buzz of a midnight queue event so why go on to imply that the hardcore faithful fanbase they are sad weirdos?

The kind of celebs present – the likes of Blue and Louise Redknapp – are people you’ve either seen or could imagine doing their gaming in cream coloured DFS living rooms. In other words, the event (and particularly the coverage) was targeting the same market Nintendo created and expanded with the original DS and Wii, and who can blame them? Sales to new demographics are what made the original DS the monster success it is but one or two of those same demographics are now likely to have an iPhone in their back pocket competing for their attention.

The event hadn’t forgotten about the lucky pleb members of the public at the event though, who tended to be made up more of the traditional gamer demographic. Hadouken and DJ Yoda were both game-savvy performers on the bill with music the hardcore were more likely to appreciate. Importantly, on top of the generous food and drink, there was plenty of opportunity to try out 3DS software without having to wait, with an army of PR helpers on hand. How did the games and hardware stack up? Bearing in mind my limited time impressions for some titles, here’s what I thought.

The Hardware

As you probably know, the 3DS itself looks and feels very familiar to DS owners. Holding one, the biggest change seems to be the analogue circle pad, with the D-pad moved down to make way. My thumb naturally gravitated towards it and instantly became comfortable to using it instead of the D-pad – it feels far closer to a full analogue stick than the PSP’s nub. The 3D effect is really impressive the first time you use it while the slider to vary the effect, or turn it off, is very easy to use at any time. It’s also a necessity, since from game to game and person to person, there seems to be a large variety in the range of depth the developers have employed and that each individual is comfortable with. For some, it’s worth pointing out, keeping the effect low or turned off completely was where they enjoyed it most. Personally I liked to play with the hand held closer to me (a la the rather cringe-worthy adverts) and the effect turned up – it felt rather like peering through a window into the game-world. Depending on the type of game, speed of movement, field of view and so many other factors, I’d still end up changing the slider occasionally – but this is where the 3DS has an advantage over 3DTVs with a home console and glasses. The disadvantage is that with some games I’d end up tilting the console ever so slightly and the effect would suddenly become blurred or my eyes would start to strain to maintain it.

Pilot Wings Resort

This is the game that Nintendo were pushing hardest at the event. There were at least 50 DS kiosks there and probably half of them were running this game. As one of their launch titles that’s understandable but it seemed to be merely a solid game rather than anything I could recommend. The environment – the island from Wii Sports Resort – is immediately familiar and if you’ve played the plane game in that then there was actually little incentive to explore old ground. It’s certainly welcome to see Pilot Wings back after a such a long hiatus but by and large it seemed to be the same game as the last one from the N64 days, without the novel and fun backdrop.

Nintendogs + Cats

This was the other big first party game there but Nintendo only had a couple of kiosks with it – strange when you consider how much of a sales success the original was for the first DS. Playing it though, it seems the decision was based more on how unsuitable the game was for the event hall. It’s quite easy, through no fault of your own, to get to the point where you have to give vocal commands for your pet or have to speak its name. With all the music and loud noise, the 3DS had no chance of picking up or recognising anything we said – however the game refused to let you quit out of this and would persist with asking you to record some audio. The only way out was to reset the machine – bad design decision Nintendo! Playing the game, it was Nintendogs as expected, with some good fur effects and 3D adding to the cuteness. For me the pet’s eyes are well into the uncanny valley though so I remain unmoved by virtual pets. I can’t say I’m in the target demographic for that title though!

Super Street Fighter IV 3D Edition

With live Ken & Ryu performers duking it out (sans fireballs sadly), plenty of game footage around as well as a long queue to play Versus on the big screen, Street Fighter IV was certainly the 3rd party game that Nintendo were most pushing. But once the big screen kiosk had been packed away and the performers gone – fairly early on – it was actually hard for us to find somewhere to try the game. Eventually we found one stand where my friend and I could play. The wireless versus worked seamlessly (admittedly standing a foot apart). Both being pretty big IV players, especially against each other, we were already familiar with the game from the home consoles – the 3DS version certainly stacked up well against those versions, barring one or two kinks. For committed players who want to use the D-pad and all six buttons, the L-button is almost impossible to reach from the new D-pad position. The inclusion of an extra Dynamic Mode, with the view pulled into a sort of half over the shoulder view, seems like a rather tacked on inclusion in an attempt to justify the addition of 3D. Playing with this view was pretty difficult since your enemy was often obscured by your own character and it was much harder to judge their attacks.

Dynamic Mode might look fancy but it's a nightmare to play

Luckily that’s entirely optional so we stuck to the traditional side on view. After a while of beating each up using our usual techniques, we noticed the touch screen with it’s four rather large squares – each was a shortcut for pulling off a special move. Two were devoted to normal moves, one to the super move and one to the ultra combo. Since you just had to thumb them to perform a move, our fight immediately changed into a lot of spamming of moves. Hitting the touchscreen would pull off moves instantly rather than after two second charge period for the likes of Guile & Blanka, so there was an advantage even for veterans. How would this work in the long run? Personally I think once you get past the inevitable over-use of special moves that comes with this approach, it could make for a greater focus on strategy rather than favouring whoever can pull off moves quicker or more reliably. It’s certainly a big change for the Street Fighter series.

After the cheap and almost unusable iPhone version, the 3DS version justifies its release.

That’s my round up for now – in part 2 I’ll be looking at some of the less well known titles we tried.

As the game goes on though, whether through the dialogue, newspapers or the shock of seeing one of the new fangled automobiles, you realise that you’re actually in the early 20th century – 1911 to be exact. Of course, Red Dead is hardly a documentary and it’s set in the fictional area of New Austin, a US state on the border with Mexico. But like it’s sister Grand Theft Auto series, Rockstar’s game is very much about a real time period, a real location and the real-world America (not to mention Mexico). There’s a reason why the names of the countries have never been fictionalised in those games.

One of the themes that becomes more prevalent as Red Dead progresses is the encroachment of civilisation and order onto the chaos of the West. Our protagonist John Marston is the last of a dying breed as both a cowboy and an outlaw. Even though the player never ventures outside of the West it still becomes apparent, through visitors, newcomers and their attitudes, that the rest of America views them as a curio. The cowboy becomes labelled as a ‘noble savage’ in places and is increasingly lumped in with the Native American ‘Indians’ by the somewhat patronising heralds of progress. It’s an omen that foretells their marginalisation and eventual irrelevance.

Morality

The game doesn’t have a rose-tinted view of the cowboy lifestyle however. The law men that force Marston into hunting down his criminal former-comrades are certainly antagonising towards him but it becomes increasingly hard to sympathise with our supposed hero as he rails against them. The agents’ method of keeping Marston in check – keeping his family away from him – are hardly admirable but on the other hand we see more and more of his former gang’s atrocities and crimes first hand, yet John somehow remains reluctant to bring them to justice. Mostly he wants to be left alone but he has no answer to the charge that there must be consequences for his previous crimes.

He still seeks to avoid moral judgements throughout. Nowhere is this more apparent than when in Mexico. John has obvious distaste for the behaviour of the ruling General – the treatment of women or burning of villages for example. As a player though you are forced by the designers into performing missions for both the rebels and the General. To justify it from a plot perspective, Marston ends up portraying himself as almost amoral – willing to do anything for anyone if it furthers his aims. The lack of choice between the two sides also makes the limited honour system of the game seem more irrelevant. Barring some small cosmetic changes and the odd friendly nun, the changes to your experience are very small whether you’re considered honourable or not – but on top of that, there’s only the randomised game events and a handful of side quests that actually have any effect on your honour ‘rating’. Most importantly, after Mexico I really felt like I had no control over Marston’s moral decisions. This is fair enough in most games, particularly when you want a strongly defined character. But the morality meter gives an illusion of choice that is a little galling.

[Warning: From here on there are small spoilers for what is nominally the final part of Red Dead Redemption's 3rd act, the mission titled "And the Truth Will Set You Free". No major plot points are revealed and only the setup and first part of the mission are covered.]

In Blackwater the lawmen argue that the order they bring might be imperfect but it is better than the rule of the gun. Even playing as a virtually superhuman gunslinger, at this point the player’s probably seen enough to agree that the arrival of modernity can’t come soon enough.

Relentless Technology

Blackwater itself is the local epicentre of that coming change, dust roads suddenly giving way to brick buildings and asphalt roads as you enter the town. It’s in this town, for example, that Red Dead makes a direct link between the old 19th century outlaws and what would become their glamorous criminal successors: bank robbers. There are more than a few hints signposting the coming of the Prohibition movement as well. Blackwater represents the future as the residents of New Austin hope and fear for, presented through our current perception of the history of that time.

At the start of the mission “And The Truth Will Set You Free”, Marston joins the bureau agents in the back of a new machine – an armoured automobile with a machine gun mounted at the back. The citizens of Blackwater greet the sight of this contraption with a mixture of open awe and horror before, a little while later, John Marston ends up reluctantly enacting the clearest symbol yet of the death of the Old West – mowing down waves of both outlaws and their horses with the terrifying power of technology. It not only makes it clear that things could never be the same but the sight of cavalry stubbornly charging at a stationary machine gun brought to mind the senseless carnage of the First World War, a mere 3 years away from the events of Red Dead. Rockstar seems to be referencing this – as well as the sense of arrogance that the machine age brought – when one of the bureau agents says moments earlier, “You think this is something, you should see some of the stuff the army is making…Soon there won’t be a war we cannot win.”

There is a problem with this mission though, which occurs once the car starts moving again – it becomes too difficult. Through out the game the number of missions I’d failed was very small and I’d taken 2 or 3 tries to complete the most difficult. For this section I ended up repeating the same part 7 or 8 times and it undermined the message behind this particular section.

Challenge, Fun & Plot

It is a fairly entrenched and traditional viewpoint that says games must become more challenging as the player progresses – but at times no one seems to consider the possibility of letting the player experience moments where they are completely mismatched and over-powered compared to their enemy. In moderation this can be done to show how far they and their character have progressed in terms of skill – whether those are actual skills or statistical skills from character levelling up. One of the biggest gripes players had about Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, is that the enemies always levelled up with the player character so that, despite all the spending on stats, you never felt powerful. Going from Level 1 to Level 6, you’d find the same world and locations were now populated exclusively with Level 6 goblins while Level 1′s had become mysteriously extinct. The designers at Bethesda went, to an absurd degree, towards the extreme of turning the difficulty curve into a flat line.

An entirely different game that touches on this point from another angle is Gears of War 2. Right before the end you get to ride and control a giant Brumak. After grinding through waves of Locust, enemies that pretty much define the term ‘bullet-sponge‘, turning the tables on them with their own weapon and destroying them at will is purely intended to be fun and, at least for a short while, challenge is forgotten about.

In Gears 2, riding the enemy Brumak is meant as a reward for the player.

Moving back to Red Dead, the purpose of making the armoured car section easy would not be as a reward but to bring home how effortless and horrifying the business of killing had become. The agent driving the car expresses a rather vicious satisfaction throughout as he states, “We should have done this a long time ago”. Bearing in mind that pretty much all the people you’re killing are also Native Americans that are often referred to as “vermin”, it could be taken as the agent endorsing genocide, especially considering some of the attitudes expressed throughout with the Natives (whether outlaw or not) thought of as inherently savage and annoying obstacles to progress.

This is all undermined by the needless restarts, difficulty and repetition. There is though, one small argument for making this part suddenly more difficult. The car starts moving off the road and traversing over rough hills, with the agent saying it’s becoming hard to drive. Here, away from the tendrils of civilisation, the horse may still be king and the automobile may be out of its depth.

It’s still hard to argue with a machine gun though, so the designers decided to equip the outlaws with remarkably accurate throwing arms and dynamite. One enemy in particular must be killed almost as soon as he pops up, or else his thrown explosive will always result in a game over. It’s player punishment that dates back to a 1990′s school of game design and is entirely out of place for both the game and, in this case, its message.

Bizarre Creation's Blur

With the recent and unfortunate news that Activision have closed down Bizarre Creations, now is a good a time as any to look over a couple of their games, starting with the recent Blur.

Closure seems like a strange decision from the point of view of Activision’s portfolio – the largest games publisher in the world is left with no developers that have any significant experience of making driving games. EA, their biggest competitor, have an abundance in that particular area while the only remaining quality racing game developers are at Sony, Microsoft, Codemasters and relative newcomers Disney Interactive. Bizarre seem to be suffering the fallout from recent releases that were at best mediocre  – The Club and their latest game James Bond 007: Blood Stone both suffered critically and in terms of sales. These two games were also both 3rd person action/shooting titles that were far removed from Bizarre’s usual driving or downloadable arcade games. When the studio stuck to what they knew best, as with the recent underrated Blur, they could still produce excellent games.

Blur was sadly overlooked when it came to sales though. New IPs, without a huge marketing spend, tend to struggle these days. The racing genre is much like the sports one – newcomer titles have a doubly difficult time. Creating a straight sim-racer to go up against the big three of Gran Turismo, Forza and Need For Speed would be the same as trying to make a non-licensed football game to compete with FIFA and Pro Evo. One solution to this problem is the route Codemasters have taken – create specialised realistic games that focus on one particular real-world racing code such as the recent F1 2010 or the off-road-centric Dirt series. By releasing games regularly and basing them on their Ego engine,  they spread the risk across titles. On the other hand, there’s the expense of the license(s) and the work involved in having to realistically model the cars and real-life tracks.

The other approach to take is to create new twists in the genre and rely on gameplay innovations to sell the game. The Burnout series is perhaps the best example of this being done successfully – beyond the general car-wreck mechanics Criterion introduced, each title in the series has seen major gameplay changes when compared to the previous ones, which keeps the franchise fresh. Genuine ‘innovation’ in straight racing games is fairly hard to come by though so in this context we’re talking pretty much exclusively of the racing/combat hybrid genre.

Original ideas, well executed but sadly ignored by consumers

Blur definitely belongs to that genre, mixing the formula from Bizarre’s Project Gotham Racing games with the pickups and combat of Mario Kart. As a result the game is the first car-combat game to feature real cars or real locations. True to Bizarre, the car handling isn’t throw-about go-karting or arcade floaty-ness – it’s more nuanced than that. Your left trigger finger isn’t idle – there is a need for braking and, importantly, driving skill is valued over what power-ups you have or how well you can use them. Primarily this is a racing game, but the power-ups are needed to make your way through the pack and fend off others.

Aesthetics

Take away the power ups and Blur is, in theory, Bizarre’s Project Gotham Racing. The visuals seem to place the emphasis squarely on the power ups and their effects though, to the point of down-playing the many licensed cars and real-world locations and cities. Races take place almost exclusively at night or in the twilight hours, with city backdrops becoming curiously anonymous through the use – or rather lack – of lighting. The one exception to this is probably Brighton, where the pebble beach has been replaced with sand you can race along and the sky is permanently alive with fireworks.

Blur's weaponry provides the bulk of visual interest

The cars themselves seem to have been muted too (both in character and sound), which is at odds with the varied and lively handling they have. This all comes together to give a deliberately slightly drab canvas onto which the luminous neon colours of the super-natural weaponry are liberally splashed. They spark, crackle and warp the screen, giving Blur a unique look and bringing to mind a 3D version of Bizarre’s Geometry Wars shooter. It’s a brilliant effect but when the firing ceases, the game can look and feel surprisingly pedestrian – fortunately that rarely happens.

Bizarre jettisoned two tropes of the Mario Kart series – rubber banding and random, weighted pickups. By “random, weighted pickups” I’m referring to the way Mario Kart‘s fruit-machine inevitably gives the best weapons to those further back, again in an attempt to help them catch up. Both these characteristics are central to Mario Kart and often criticised for either being unfair and/or handicapping better players. It’s hard to argue with the first point when it comes to single player – blatant rubber banding simply feels like ‘the computer is cheating’, and the only recourse you have is to stop playing or put up with the frustration. Good AI – even rudimentary AI – should focus on making the game feel fair first, before making the opponent feel intelligent.

Power Ups

On the other hand, distributing ‘random’ pickups to favour the racers further back is not only better for competition but, counter intuitively, seems fairer to the players. Why? In a fully random system it’s entirely possible that the racer in the lead might get a run of good items and at that point it doesn’t matter if the lead racer is player- or computer-controlled – for any players behind, having bad performance compounded by bad luck, it feels unfair and could be conducive to a rant or two from even the most good tempered loser. Instead, by having an obviously weighted distribution, everyone is aware (or quickly becomes aware through play) that there is a system in place and there is an implicit agreement between the players and the game to abide by this: as long as the computer keeps to this, the players won’t, for the most part, complain.

Blur does away with this system by replacing it with something far more straightforward – pickups are shown and always in the same place for everyone. Want the ‘shunt’, the game’s homing missile? You just have to drive through the right icon when you see it. Since you can also carry up to 3 weapons and switch between them, there’s far greater scope for planning ahead and strategising. What makes this approach viable though is that none of the weapons are particularly over-powered when compared to each other. For example Blur‘s equivalent of Mario Kart‘s infamous blue shell is the lightning bolt, which drops a series of what are effectively speed bumps ahead of the lead player. Ploughing through them holds you up a bit more than driving around them but they are very avoidable – they’re just an extra challenge for the leader. Also since the obstacles stay for a little while, they affect any other racers near the front rather than just the leader, so there’s no incentive for suddenly giving up first place.

Rubber Banding

Coming back to rubber banding, in Blur if it is present it is so light as to be almost unnoticeable – I certainly haven’t been able to decide one way or another if it is present. There is more of a justification for including it though, at least in multiplayer. To begin with, the idea of artificially helping players in multiplayer, particularly online multiplayer where the ‘purity’ of competition is often valued most highly, seems something akin to blasphemy. But with online racers that might have 8 players in, particularly with weapons involved, there are a few issues that could be remedied with a small amount of rubber banding.

Firstly, in games like this the starting grid positions assigned are often random. Sometimes it’s according to points accumulated within a session but many people are often dropping in and out of a particular session so this is just rewarding whoever’s managed to stick with the group the longest. Once the race starts the grid can quickly segment into groups of two or three, with the back and forth of racers squabbling with those near them keeping rivals close together but often making it hard to focus on catching up with those in the group further ahead. If the groups get too far from each other along the track it becomes virtually impossible to escape your nearest rival without completely wrecking them (which in itself isn’t easy).

Battles can end up reinforcing starting positions

Multiple branching race tracks can help alleviate this – racers can take a different branch to get some respite, regroup and focus on gaining speed. While this grouping phenomenon can make for fun battles, conversely it discourages close and fair competition since the benefits of each racer’s random initial starting position simply becomes magnified – in other words, it makes it much harder for the cars starting at the back to win, which is doubly unfair on someone who simply drew the short straw. A small amount of rubber banding though can ensure that groups don’t become too separated from each other, making it easier for racers to make progress through the positions and also stopping anyone from being stuck out on their own – online this can quickly make the game feel pointless.

Secondly, accessibility is particularly important in online games that don’t have the benefit of a recognised name behind them. The likes of Halo or Call of Duty are always going to have a huge pool of online players of all abilities so that, no matter what you’re own level of expertise, it’s never hard to be matched up with people at a similar level. For any online game there is always the trepidation of being a rookie not knowing what to expect – if the experience is too dispiriting it’s all too easy to discount multiplayer and scuttle back to single-player, tail between your legs. With games like Blur that have a smaller audience, the players that stick with multiplayer, rather than going off to play the next racer or FPS-of-the-week, are going to be more dedicated. The experience then becomes more niche, the step-up for beginners becoming more off-putting. Rubber banding though can, at the very least, ensure that the cars at the back don’t get left too far behind – if they can at least see some of the players they are competing against while they learn the ropes, they can believe that improvement is, given time, within reach.

Other games that aim for accessibility in multiplayer (I’m thinking of Nintendo’s notorious Mario Party series) can end up randomly bestowing points on players and succeed only in patronising them. It’s an important point to remember when considering ways of levelling the learning curve but, by and large, consistent and well thought rubber banding is not mutually exclusive with fair competition.

Split/Second

The game that Blur was consistently compared to was Split/Second: Velocity – Disney Interactive’s  game that come out at roughly the same time – since they had many superficial similarities. Both were racing games with combat, from British development studios (Brighton’s Black Rock, in the case of Split/Second), new IPs and released at roughly the same time. Split/Second seemed to garner more hype and interest from critics before release and it’s not hard to see why. Aside from the novelty of a relatively new publisher muscling into a genre it hadn’t previously explored, the game’s premise was genuinely original rather than a hybrid Game-A-meets-Game-B. In Split/Second you’re racing in a game show that allows you to, in-race, trigger explosions, implosions, collapses, crashes and general disasters along the track scenery, in the hope of destroying or catching out your opponents. The game, by it’s very nature, is full of impressive set pieces to shock and surprise anyone playing for a short amount of time. For critics playing many games on the E3 show floor (for example) the games that can grab attention quickly are naturally going to gain ‘buzz’ as a result, so Split/Second generally got a positive reception in the lead up to being released. What was a little surprising though was hearing many industry commentators being dismissive of Blur directly as a result of previewing Split/Second.

Split/Second had a distinctive look

The final game certainly followed through on its promise of ‘wow’-moments – I can remember shouting an involuntary yelp the first time I was greeted by a jumbo jet crashing head on towards me. The ‘game show’ might provide a rather flimsy narrative pretense for constantly throwing spectacular explosions at you, but racing games have never had a need for story. Split/Second is constantly compared to a Michael Bay movie and like them, the experience quickly brushes away, or rather blows up, any need for coherence beyond the moment-to-moment sensations. Black Rock deliberately grasp this to provide a strong visual identity for the title, marrying the premise with the aesthetic – the Bay-isms come thick and fast. Helicopters are always whirring overhead, ready to drop more fire and smoke when necessary. The cars, unlicensed artist creations, are exaggerations of well known archetypes – the low-riding pickup, the mid-engined exotic, the classic muscle car. They’re never caricatures but the exaggeration makes them fit perfectly with the rest of the game’s hyper-reality. Then there’s the constant blurring sensation of speed; the screen is saturated in as much colour as possible; the scenery always seems bathed in the orange glow of a never-ending glorious sunset, interrupted only by the jarring screen-shakes of another near-miss explosion. In HD one of the things Split/Second really does well is bring home how important good artistic direction is, with or without technical achievement – I was surprised to find the game ran at 30 frames per second while seeming to fly by at break neck speed.

Sales and Reception

When the two games came out, the general consensus seemed to be that they also cannibalised each others sales. Since both were new properties, the average consumer is going to have a hard time deciding which, if any, would be worth a punt on. In spite of the pre-release critical swing towards Split/Second, the two games ended up rating similarly well. This is probably because Split/Second‘s appeal waned somewhat with prolonged play, since the same set-pieces were bound to crop up again and lose their impact. Its driving model, closer to Burnout‘s knockabout, twitchy but simplistic fun, ends up putting closer scrutiny on those same set-pieces as well.  Interestingly, the game’s own rubber-banding system came in for some criticism. Blur, focused more on competitive multiplayer, is in many ways a very different game that reveals some of its depth through prolonged play. Unfortunately Bizarre’s approach, coupled with a lack of publisher backing, didn’t bring enough sales to keep the studio alive.