Blur Review

This game is fun. I want to get that out there and make sure it is known from the start. It may sound like I am ripping this game up at times, but it truly is fun. I am also attempting to make my reviews a little more concise as my RDR review was very long winded, and doubtful anyone will read that much. I may try to do addendums to a review for some added thoughts, but I will try and keep the main review short and sweet.

The Good:

Driving Mechanics. The cars all feel pretty good. There is a racing system here, that is not just balls to the walls, crash to turn racer. There is a drift mechanic that also works to some extent. I personally never really bothered too much with it, but it is there, and the fastest cars are all labeled as “Drifty”. I steered clear of these. The cars all handle fairly well, and you feel in control of them.

Insanity: The game doles this out by the truckload, and it keeps the tension high in most races. If you play on medium difficulty or above, no race is safe. I put this game down to easy about 5 hours in as racing the same race for the 5^th time is not attractive to me. There a ton of weapons to cause havoc and destruction both to you and your enemies. Add to this the added goals of each race where you need to earn fans by doing cool shit, and then having a “fan run” of running through gates, all while getting shot and going as fast as possible, you ratchet up the insanity level. This does increase the frustration though as you can be stopped from getting other goals because of oh let’s say losing the race because you were trying to hit gates like a slalom skier, while assholes are shooting you.

The Bad

Graphics. While the graphics are not horrible, they are not good either for what he 360 is capable of and has been seen in other racers. This game feels like it was built with the same kind of engine as their last game some 2 or 3 years ago. The cars all look pretty good, but there tracks are rather bland, and the effects seem somewhat toned down from what you would hope when you blast a 3 foot glowing globe up another cars ass.

Mods. When you first load up your car, you see a screen that says mods on it. This gets my heart aflutter as I am hoping for money, and customization, and RPG kind of elements to leveling up my cars ala Forza. Alas this is not to be. This is merely a cock tease, as your mods are a simple one trick pony that is useful for only one type of power up, which you may or may not even get very often in a race. The best one I found was 3/4ths of the way into the game, and it made my nitro push cars away. Cool yes, but not what I had in mind about Mods.

The UGLY

Variety. If I were to tell you that a $60 game released with 5 tracks, would ask if this was an EA game and you were expected to become a VIP to get the rest, which were done they just didn’t give them to you yet. Unfortunately this is not even the case, you actually only get 5 tracks, with different variations of those same tracks, some longer some shorter. This leads to boredom as you are racing the same basic pieces of the same tracks over, and over, and over, and over. And OVER. It seems like Bizarre is flat out telling you, WAIT THERE WILL BE DLC!!!. This is fucking bullshit and give me a full game, then make the DLC EXTRA content please.

Social Interaction: This seemed to be Blur’s catchy back of the box bullet point, share your experiences with your friends while playing the game, YOU DON’T EVEN HAVE TO LEAVE. In reality all you get is annoying as hell posts that are canned you can send to facebook or twitter. I did this my first night to annoy and nothing else. I mean seriously Bizarre, do you think my friends give two fucking shits if I am looking at a 2050 Nissan P with a flashy spoiler? I hope to all that is holy they don’t give a shit, or I don’t need to be friends with them any longer. If you had spent this much time giving me more tracks I might have spent the last third of the game not just finishing it, but rather playing it.

Closing:

Overall this game WAS fun, it had a bunch of the pieces to make it challenging and make it fun at the same time. It was also missing some pieces that would have made it infinitely better. The game does so much right it is almost annoying at times when you are missing pieces that could have propelled the game to a whole different level. This will be billed as a streamlined racer, but I tend to think of it as a stripped out racer. I did not hate my time spent with it, but I also don’t find myself wanting to play it now that I have sent it back to Gamefly. I constantly think back to the strip that PA did though when thinking about this game because it is just so fitting, believe me the expletive they call a power up, is a phrase you will exclaim many times.

I would rate this $25 fun, or if you can find it cheaper.

Transformers WFC

I was reading the new article from PA, and they stated what I had realized was going to be a trend in my short play of only the first chapter of this game. That is, this is going to be fucking difficult. I very may well have to turn it to easy. My rule normally goes, that if i die more than once on the first level, then I had damn well better go to an easier level, or risk losing my mind, or some piece of electronics will lose its life in the process of me screaming at the cheating ass computer.

As a note, I died 4 times in the course of the first chapter. Now that I think about it more, I am changing the difficulty the very next time I play that shit, or if it is very mean spirited and doesnt allow a mid game change of difficulty, I will simply replay the first level. I don't have enough time in my life to replay the same portion of a game 50 times because the developers decided to make it impossible. I just don't get that sense of satisfaction from beating something that has punished me repeatedly. I instead want to sodomize it with a broom FOR punishing me.

I play games to enjoy them, not to climb Mt Everest and proclaim to the world I am the greatest for beating a game. I am glad I read this PA article or I may have trudged on longer than needed down the path of medium difficulty.

From Kotaku

Blur

Just finished the single player of Blur. In a vacuum and not comparing blur to anything else, it was quite fun. People seem to complain about the graphics but i think they are pretty good. The cars are fun to drive, the controls feel tight, and the racing is hectic. This single player has a few twists but nothing groundbreaking. I will try to write a review tomorrow or Tuesday.

Games I am Playing This Week

I am about 3 hours into Alpha Protocol. So far this game is pretty fun, not the best game I have ever played but so far it is quite fun. My only major gripe is the controls aren't as tight as you would hope for a game that spends most of its time as a shooter. But this is actually more of a RPG than it is a shooter.

Blur is loaned out to a friend, but that will get played later this week as well. I am enjoying its single player quite a bit. the multiplayer is hectic and fun, but it feels like i need friends to play with, racing solo against 19 other people isnt all that fun by myself.

Review: Red Dead Redemption - The Ugly

Here is where I think RDR falls short. I have two major gripes here that stand out. I separate out these two parts because they are the pieces that I think would have made this a truly great game. I know it has gotten great reviews and sold a ton of copies, but I personally don’t see how it is getting reviews as good as it is. I don’t find it a bad game, as I have said but these are pieces that could have made this an amazing game instead of a good game.

· Storytelling. This only becomes apparent when you reach the supposed culmination of the story that you have been presented with for nearly 20 hours. The makeup of the story feels wrong, and put together weakly. It feels as if they weren’t sure how to tell a story. Instead of the story feeling emotional and attaching you to characters, they throw you into a character they have constructed and assume you’re going to care about your family because Rockstar deems it so.

All this game needed was a rearranging of the pieces of the story and this could have felt totally different. The problem is that this leads you in with 20 hours to no climax, and then forces you into about 2 more hours to reach a final climax. This is an aborted story arc that feels unnatural, and feels poorly told. If you were a freshman in high school and wrote a short story in this method, you would be reprimanded for breaking a tried and true method of telling stories. I wish they would have taken a queue from great RPG’s (read Bioware) in their ability to tell a story.

· Multiplayer. I feel like the free roam was a great direction. What this game needed was to take this ball and roll with it. They needed ways to make this a sort of co op campaign. Instead they chose to try and include all the normal game types for multiplayer that you have played a hundred times. The problem is that this isn’t a shooter and doesn’t control like one. It needed to take its strong points and focus on that, instead of the mess of modes it attempts and doesn’t do very well at. The free roam is fun, but could have been fleshed out to be a standout, it feels like it was tacked on.

Score: FAT.

· Fun at times, problems distracting (FAT)—Rent, avoid buying unless you really dig what they dug.

My Scoring Scale.

Review: Red Dead Redemption - The Good

Review: Red Dead Redemption - The Bad

Please make the game a fraction this cool Bioware

OMG Please be Awesome, please.