"I took 'shock' instead of 'last stand'"

I was fortunate enough to win a beta key to Blur, Bizarre Creations’ next racer. You may know them from Dreamcast’s Metropolis Street Racer, or the Project Gotham series. If you’re a fan of what they accomplished in the realistic racing genre, you may not be of Blur. However, if you’re a fan of Mario Kart, Burnout, or Modern Warfare 2 (what?!), you’ll find a lot to love here.

Yep, Bizarre is competing with Treyarch for “Game That Rips The Most Off from Infinity Ward” this year. And it’s shaping up to make for one of the best racers to come along in years. Hit the jump for the deets!

Blur is like Mario Kart on steroids. Gone are the cartoony graphics, replaced with photoreal images that have been tweaked over the top with insane effects. The effect come up on the powerups: missles, mines, shields, and the like. The game is smooth as butter, and after a few laps around the tracks, you’ll come to know what powerups are best used when. You can hold up to three at a time, which lends a nice “hold or use now” strategy to the game. And if Blur stopped at a photo-real Kart racer, it might be enough to be interesting. But it goes beyond that.

Where Blur rips off the Infinity Ward games is in the progression. Yes, racing gets you XP (er, fans!) that help you to level up. Levelling up gets you new cars, game modes and perks (er, mods!). The mods let you tweak your abilities (start each game with a powerup, earn more xp, shields heal your car, etc) which makes for a MW-like mod customization for each race. There’s also challenges for winning races, getting kills with the power-ups and the like. Between rounds, lobbygoers get to vote on the next track to be raced. Sure, these ideas aren’t necessarily original, but in applying it to the racing genre, Bizarre has added an addictive customization and carrot-on-a-stick in a genre that typically doesn’t have a compelling progression.

The racing is silky smooth and addictive

How’s the racing? Fantastic and silky-smooth. The tracks in the beta are varied, with multiple paths and shortcuts a-la-Burnout. In a few hours with the beta, I didn’t notice any slowdown or networking issues. This is a good thing since Blur is due out at the end of May.

Blur may not have been on your watch list, but make no mistake: This is shaping up to be the best multiplayer “fun” (as opposed to “realistic”) racing game to come around in years. Hopefully the beta will be made public, and more people can get a hold of Blur and make their own minds up. But me? I’m putting my $60 aside for this one now. I’m sold.

EVEN FLIPPIN RATS!!!!!! (image courtesy Joystiq)

So, Rock Band Network. Long time coming self-creation tools and store for additional, non Harmonix produced tracks and game files. Well, 360 owners rejoice! Your chance to spend more money on 105+ Rock Band songs is now live. Songs range from free to $2, similar to the Harmonix-powered store.

We’ve got the launch list o’ tracks behind the cut, but more importantly, check out that image above. EVEN RATS. (and the underrated Children of December!).IN ROCK BAND. What else need be said… How about 3 new Coulton songs? Some KMFDM? Steve Vai? Yeah, it’s a pretty good fuckin day.

Full track list, with my picks highlighted, post jump!

Now with less creative firepower!

Wow, what an interesting couple of days out there for Call of Duty fans! Earlier today, Infinity Ward (the people who make the good CoD games) heads Vince Zampella and Jason West updated their various social networking sites to reflect that they no longer worked at IW. This led to rampant speculation (on the internet?! Shocking!) as to the future of the CoD games. Activision has since announced:

• Activision is planning on turning Call of Duty into “high-margin digital online content and further the brand as the leading action entertainment franchise in new geographies, new genres and with new digital business models.” In English? Expect Call of Duty: Pay to Play MMO edition (a la World of Warcraft), or perhaps a Call of Duty RTS game? Or third person action game? Or some such crap.
• Before you get excited about the above, remember that Activision, fresh off purchasing Guitar Hero, made such wonderful games as Guitar Hero: Aerosmith and Band Hero. Mmmmmhmmmm. Classic entertainment!
• There will be a Treyarch-made CoD game this year, and an unspecified developer will put one out in 2011. (Ruh Roh!)
• A third CoD game will be made by Sledgehammer Games. If you’re not familiar with them, it’s because they’re new! And it’s a studio formed by the creative leads that created Dead Space! The game will, and I quote, “extend the franchise into the action-adventure genre.” So, a Resident: Call of Duty mashup! Yay!
• IW’s leads were canned for “insubordination” and breach of contract. I read this as “IW didn’t feel like driving their core franchise into the ground”.

Remember: the team at IW was responsible for Medal of Honor before EA fucked that franchise into the ground. And here they stand where Activision is ready to run CoD into shitty-game-ville. So, I for one can’t wait to see where the team ends up and what they create.

One of many new enemies.

Borderlands newest DLC is entitled The Secret Armory Of General Knoxx, and is going to be easily the biggest of the batch. How big you ask? Well, you can read a majority of details right here.

Highlights include new weapons (some very rare with new colors), enemies, lands to explore, and a new “megaboss” who’s going to be 3 levels higher than you. There’s also a level uncap from 50 to 61.

Definitely sounds like a better bang for your $10 than the Moxxi DLC which was critically panned for lack of overall content.

So who’s getting this besides me?

I put the over/under on the amount of breaths Trev takes laughing at this guy’s randomness at 4.

Seriously though, this is pretty damn funny.

I deeply suspect that the majority of the gaming public are letting this game sit under their radar, with Beyonetta taking the lead in intrest for carnage and orb collecting, thanks to their cool soundtrack on the commercials. But I won’t let a commercial sway MY intrest, ever since I realized Gears Of War was advertised with a song that wasn’t in the game. Worse still, it was used in the movie Donnie Darko, which made me want to kill myself for a while.   

Thankfully, I didn’t. Otherwise, I would not be here to tell you what I think of this game! Read on for the full review!   

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OMG Grappling hooks OMG

This game truly IS one of the most unoriginal games ever, at first glance. Just about every element of another title is lifted right off the ground and placed into this game’s formula.  What is suprising once played is how much the game follows the vein of The Legend Of Zelda for the N64, rather than God Of War, Devil May Cry, or any other game that rips off the other game.  

I mean really, DMC was the first game like it in MY book, but that game might’ve ripped off another game too, who knows?  

And I know what I know: Performing 20 hit combos on demons, with a geyser of blood spewing from their head holes, following them turning into various colored orbs that I collect is ALWAYS fun, so I don’t give a shit!  

So for comedic and informative puropses, I’ll list EVERYTHING that this game “rips off” of other games, followed by why you should’ve already bought this game.  

The Feature: You start off with every power in the game, but quickly lose it.  

The Game: Metroid Prime, I’ll have to award you with that title. In the next game Samus will trip over a curb and all of her powers will fall into a sewer drain.  

The Feature: Hack n’ slash combat, complete with a “combo meter”.  

The Game: Hard to award a single game here, but the combat is mostly that of Ninja Gaiden. Yeah, Ninja Gaiden. With about 10% of the difficulty intact, making The Darksiders a fairly tough game.  

The Features: Grappling hooks, a leniar series of dungeons to progress, a steed to ride long distances complete with 6 boost carrots, and a Z button targeting system. Oh, I mean Left Trigger targeting system. And not carrots, I meant “power boost indicators” that regenerate over 5 seconds. Oh, and a life bar that looks like THIS:  

When your health bar reaches 0, you lose a "heart", I mean green symbol. Huh.

The Game: Huh? What? You’re still here?  

The Feature: Slowing down time to solve puzzles, like out-running giant worms  

The Game: Prince Of Persia stuff right here. Don’t worry, this feature is mercifully underused in this title.  

The Feature: Weakening enemies to display a button prompt for an instant, bloody kill.  

The Game:God Of War. While it’s not as intricate as GOW, usually requiring a single button press, it’s necessary for the hundreds of kills you’ll rack up in the first hour playing. They’re mostly really satisfying as well, using War’s brute strength to annihilatethe enemy in the most effieint way possible.  

The Feature: Using a barter system to upgrade War and his equipment.  

The Game:Well, there’s too many to count here. It’s a good feature regardless though. You also use this character to travel from area to area, but not without traveling through a “loading zone”, as pictured heah:  

Even traveling from zone to zone, the loading is seamless. Bonus.

I really could go on and on here. The game lifts everything from something else, it really does. But what none of the previous titles has, is everything listed above.  

So sit back for a minute and dig this in: A game with no original ideas, but stiched together in a beautiful, colorful bloody cloth with perfect (PERFECT) controls. Does that sound like a bad time? It shouldn’t.  

What’s more, is the storyline is superb, with a slight Biblical tone. It certainly strays far enough away from The Bible to not piss off those that would be offended, but has enough quality voice acting to pull it all together and give our protagonist the punch he needs. By the end you are waiting for more, but the game ends, just when it should.  

All that wage war know my name. Bitch.

Hi Res: Just about everything, honestly. It’s one of the most enjoyable games I’ve played in, oh, 5 years. 

Lo Res: No multiplayer. I’m just kidding, I’m trying to sound like an asshole from IGN that needs to point out flaws that don’t exist. 

Verdict: A visually stunning masterpiece that’s flying all under your noses. Overrating? Play the fucker through and tell me otherwise! Cheers! 

Play free-for-all? Hate seeing douchebags in a corner boosting with their buddies with tac inserts? Then watch this video to see some Booster Justice. I encourage everyone to try this themselves. Nothing’s better than ruining a douchebag’s day. Nice music and Duke Nukem editing as well.

Thanks to Vin Phx 602 for sending me this.

Go buy me. I'm fun!

Splosion Man is $5 on XBLA this week, so if you haven’t played this one, it’s recommended here at SHR that for $5 you really can’t go wrong. Fun game, go check it out.

Best news evar.

From the completely badass news dept, comes word that Tecmo Bowl is returning! Not much is known about the game, here’s what I could steal shamelessly from Joystiq on the matter:

–Dubbed “Tecmo Bowl Throwback,” the game is a remake of the NES classic, complete with HD graphics and an updated soundtrack — it also retains the original plays and team stats. And for those of you who fear the fancy-schmancy graphics of high-def games, Tecmo is also including an option to play Tecmo Bowl in its original state. There’s even team customization.—

No news on release date or price. But you can guarantee when uncle Loco finds out, you will. Yes, oh yes.

Not really MW material. I just wanted to upload this image.

Since IW decided to nerf the model 1887 shotguns, making them about as accurate as real 1887’s held in each hand, I had to discover another way to piss off players. The solution: Another shotgun class!

Here’s how it works: Tube 20 players on any assault rifle class. Set up your custom class to have the Shotgun attachment. For your 2nd perk, you MUST use Stopping Power.

The result: A shotgun that has a longer range than the old-school 1887’s. Its range is so ridiculous you’ll have players dash-boarding out  in no time at all!

While this is a very satisfying way to shotgun players, it’s balanced compared to what was being done before: You lose your cold-blooded, and the reload is a pain. But try this and you’ll see, the dickliness of this class is hard to beat! Thank you, and good day!

I LOL'd

Well, the internet photoshop machine at Something Awful has done it again! Today, they take movie posters that actually existed, and Photoshop game titles in instead of the movie titles. Hit the jump for a few more of my favorites, as well as a link to the epic thread that has the full collection. A general knowledge of movies and games will be helpful for these.

Something Awful Thread: Movie Gaming Posters