Following some discussion on the podcast recently, I decided to revisit some old favourite arcade racers, including Bizarre Creations’ swansong Blur.

For the uninitiated, this “powered up racer” features a delightful blend of real-world cars and locales with purely fantastic, neon-coloured power-ups. This makes the racing enormously aggressive and a huge amount of fun, and it’s a crying shame that Activision completely failed to market the game effectively.

But, well, the game still exists, so I’m damn well going to play it and enjoy it, and you can join me for the ride! Hit the jump for the first part of this new video series.

In this first episode, I introduce the game and play through some of the initial events. Blur has several progression systems to keep things interesting: earning “lights” by completing objectives (such as winning the race) and earning “fans” by pulling off various manoeuvres throughout the race.

Lights unlock new races, fans unlock cars. At the end of each “chapter”, if you’ve earned enough lights and completed several specific objectives, you get to challenge a boss character in a one-on-one race, after which you can take their car and proceed to the next tier of competition.

There was also an absolutely fantastic multiplayer mode that took heavy cues from Call of Duty’s player progression, including perks and experience levels, but sadly there’s absolutely no-one playing these days, so this series will primarily focus on the single-player mode of the game.

More about Blur

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