Posts Tagged ‘Blur’

Here I am again for another dip back in to the games 2010 that left a mark on me. It was a bad year for me, and while gaming was not to blame but it did provide emotional touchstones, both good and bad. These posts are not a summery of the year’s best games, nor are they in any order or relevance, they are simply the titles I remember and the emotions I will forever connect with them.

After a lifetime of sharing apartments and houses with friends and family I finally found myself alone. Indeed more accurately I found myself homeless, lost and emotionally empty. It is no exaggeration when I say that I was riding the streets calling friends to ask them for a roof for the night. Riding my bike through the dark night I called, and when someone finally I answered I went to his sofa.

I took comfort from having a friend willing to put me up, and in no small part I was relieved to have company. But my luck was not to endure so completely. Not that I was again about to find myself riding the streets looking for a room, but instead that my friend was to go on away for the weekend leaving me to fester in my own numb melancholy.

This would be a quiet moment for Blur.

Come that weekend, with nothing planned and little money, I found my options limited to the entertainment available in the apartment in which I found myself. Fortunately my friend was well equipped being a gamer himself. Surrounded by games I looked at what was on offer. I had some specific requirements for my selection, a title that I couldn’t taint for myself, which I could leave and never look back at if I had to, and something I would be able to just slip into the mindless repetition of. I picked Blur.

I don’t mean to suggest that Bizarre Creations street racing game is dull by calling it mindless, but like many racing games Blur’s controls are relatively simple (with a few easy to pick up tweaks) and demands replays and perfection of tracks to advance.

Zooming around the exploding colour filled tracks Blur felt surreal with its glowing HUD beneath my car, red and blue explosions filling the screen, but real cars and locations. The vehicles even handled in a manner more akin to a simulation than an arcade racer, but I was armed. Collecting Wipeout style weapons and blowing up part of Brighton or Tokyo in my attempts to gain an advantage over the other cars I found it possible to push to the back of my mind concerns about my life as I jostled for position up the pack.

Amazingly for this day and age Blur features four player split screen.

Sat on the sofa/my bed for the two days of the weekend, some two meters from the screen on which the neon racer was displayed, the flashing greens and pinks burned my eyes as they shoot past at incredible speeds. Tactics and strategies all bubbled in my mind as I fought for the required stars that would unlock advancement through the competitions. I played levels repeatedly, unwilling to move on until I had perfected it. Able to lose myself in this, my mind became slowly anesthetised. It was much appreciated.

Blur’s soporific effects remain with me. On my return to the UK I bought it again and still find it akin to a comfort blanket. I can sit and play, almost without thought, advancing or not with very little passion but none the less happy. Even abject failure elicits little more than a shrug from me as I happily… or at least contentedly replay the race.

I couldn’t honestly say if Blur is good game, or even a good racer. It certainly possessed more replay value for me than any games that could reasonably be considered its competition. But for me it is now more like medicine, a painkiller. A game I played with the express purpose of losing myself and then abandoning found a place in my heart from the medicinal service it provided.

So yeah, remember that post about the triumphant return of DoFuss? It not far back, maybe four posts… and two months ago. Not so successful I am sure you will agree. It isn’t that I have stopped gaming, in fact I have been playing more, its just the little time I have had in my last months in Japan are being directed at enjoying my time rather than maintaining the site. My editors on other sites however have still been requesting content so out of a desire to keep them happy I have some writing has been dabbled in (and because if I did nothing there it the possibility I would either drink myself to death or fall in to a pit of self pity at my inability to fulfil even my own mediocre goals) so here are links to a few of them.

With that said there is a podcast here waiting to be edited, and a string of articles planned that I may find time to write as soon as I ship all my consoles back to the UK later this month leaving me with little else to do. So if you are interested in DoFuss content keep an eye on here. If, however, you are interested in any of my digital scribblings cast your eyes over the links bellow to catch up with some of the games I have been playing and my opinions of them. Also you may notice among the below links a portal to the Independent’s website, funny story there, my work on Gamepeople was quoted but I don’t honestly know if the quote makes any sense or if I simply was drunk/having a dyslexic moment when I wrote it, I mean, ‘convincingly scary’?

Yakuza 3, Death Spank, Blur, Contra 4, Limbo, Otomedius Excellent, Split Second, Sonic 4 – Episode 1, Vanquish.

Alan Wake – The Signal, Demon’s Souls, Death Spank, Limbo, Halo Reach, Castlevania – Harmony of Despair, Marvel vs Capcom 3, Ni No Kuni, Castlevania – Lord of Shadows.

Deadly Premonition

Life may be busy but that hasn’t stopped us here at DoFuss, so here for your entertainment is the latest show. If you have been counting (and I don’t know why you would have been) you may have noticed this is the thirtieth show since we rebooted last year, which makes it as old as us, kind of.

With E3 coverage drawing to a close Darren and I dedicated this show to looking back on the announcements that caught our shared eye. Of course Move, Kinect and 3DS dominated discussion but we also indulge in some of the games that stood out to us, such as the beautiful Journey and Lost in Shadow. And we like Pierce Brosnan.

Enjoy and check back later this month for the second anniversary of the DoFuss Show.

The DoFuss Show – Some thoughts on E3 and Pierce Brosnan. [ 59:00 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download