Please note that these are only my personal opinions reached after a week's gaming in Blur. When the Blur demo became available in our beloved store I was quick to dl it and I found that I enjoyed the vibe of the groups of players I was trying the gm out with. I bought the gm on the 21st, yet here we are only five days later and alas the Blur vibe I expierienced then has been jaded somewhat by issues with the lack of content in the game, my current perception of it's publisher and power-ups in particular. To begin with Activision were running a competition to win thousands worth in prizes of Blur peripherals. Mere hours before close off off the comp I was in site with my ps3 trying to find an enter icon so I could submit all the details I'd spent the last several minutes inputting into the fields in order to enter the comp. One would think Activision would have a site, any site that would work seamlessly with one of the consoles that they bring so many of their products to. No luck. So I wrote an email to the correct email given in site to contact them with. Fine done, I logged out happy that id submitted my codes and details to someone before the cutoff time. On logging into my gmail account a couple of days later, I found the email they gave out on their site was a dud and it had bounced back. by then the comp was nearly ready to be drawn so i rechecked with the site and resent the email. It bounced back on a refresh of gmail after sending. Youre probably wondering why I'm telling you this but these incorrect emails and disfunctioning websites are part and parcel of that company's problems. This is the minor, meh nothing major end of the problem, the infamous Infinity Ward Zampella & West firing the other end, with other intermediary devs like Blur's dev Blizzard for example's future level of quality possibly being negatively impacted & likely being affected by this Big Bro Activision stance. And we all lose out in the long run. Now what farther sent the doldrums swaying within my stomach really making me dislike the gm at times was or is the overuse of powerups. Another annoying feature of the game is commonly being shunted to an online lobby well before race start , only to be made to watch the missed race's progress as a line with dots, Mt Haruna being a perfect example. Typically a mid to high lvler gains on the pack and steadily increases his lead because the "losers" are automatically pelting each other with these overused mini cheat codes or powerups. Sometimes you will get a couple whom will manage to break ahead of the pack, but by then, our over-powered hugely over-resourced hero at the fore is merrily dodging the electrical attacks sent far ahead by the faceless plebians fighting it out cluelessly way back when. This same higer lvled "champion" then went on to win nearly all 10 races, whilst the usual other 2 top 3 placers won the couple he did not. And that brings me to a major stopping point for me, to liking or enjoying any achievements in the future if I was to keep this gm. Where's the fun in winning because you out lvl and out power the field(even a lvl playing field would be skewed once one person ranges far enough ahead of the ravening pack). What sense of integrity in yourself enables you to keep on keeping in chocking up wins not won due to skill nor cornering nor strategy, but because you have unlocked the perfect car for each race, have the pick of better mods to customise your car with because youre tens of lvls higher up the scale and the pick of tens of power up cheats because you're so far ahead of the competition, and ultimately dont have to suffer the moral guilt, if any, of your wins because you remain faceless and exist in a sub-culture where there is next to no com-uppance for your "achievements" or for any flashes of conscience that might embarrass you in real life(bare in mind, I include myself when I say your because I have benefited from all of the above in the past in playing CoD etc. And even if I had always maintained a veto on myself not playing the parts of games that have these features in the past, & I have not, I am still guilty for enabling it by my buying these games, signing up to psn, or even just switching on my ps3, just like we are all guilty for the oil spill in the gulf because we have allowed ourselves over generations to be dumbed down to the point where we say nothing and just shrug our shoulders at the monsters whom really run this planet, whilst we allow these secrecy types to feed off us and live in luxury with carte blanche to print our money without demanding of them why they are suppressing inventions that could end our dependance on oil, or for example, never ask ourselves how a caveman in Irak? Afganistan? arranged to ultimatly topple two buildings perfectly like a stack of pancakes or why is it that we have been conditioned to see extra terrestrials as 'fantasy' if not with utter derision then with abject fear or fairground freak mockery, no we'd rather play it safe with 'gossip' about manufactured Hollywood actors, and watch Blade Runner or Star Wars that try to deal with the fact that our neighbours aren't from a long long time ago nor are they in a galaxy far far away(for proof please visit
www.marsanomalyresearch.com or pm me. can pm official proof back to you from the public record)). But the truth hurtles forward. Avoid it, at all of our perils. I'm getting off track. Back to the obfuscation that calls itself Blur. Today I finished finding the last new area in the game and that's it. It really seems little larger than the demo. After I'd been racing online for an hour listening to a french bloke verbally sniping with a mumsy sounding midwest American whom sounded like Dorothy on valium(and with their social conditioning finally leaving them, I think they were flirting with each other at the end. Kudos to psn for making two adversaries inch forward to starting to like each other), but I'd had enough of the gm. It was draining the colour out of me. I think what it needs is what MCLA has, a free roam where racers can meet others they feel they might be happy racing with. Ill admit that Blur does have a non power up section but the onus is on the power ups whereas mcla is the opposite. For all of mcla's age, Blur feels very last gen. I would also guess that Activision will have Blizziard make alot of dlc to keep what became so stale for me so fast, nice & fresh.
