Blur’s about indiscriminate action. About going, faster and faster, using Mario Kart items in a Camaro. A more playful joy ride for the car game enthusiast. I’m not a fan of the genre, I find racing games to generally be boring, Cruis’n USA and Outrun aside. Blur captures a feeling of speed and a total lack of control, and somehow the name becomes indicative of the experience you’re having. Every now and then, there’s a brief moment in the race where the feeling melts.
When that occurs, some kind of candy-wrapped ball of indiscriminate joy is licked for a little bit. The flavor is goopy, a hard-candied pudding, an experience that has less worth in words than in the moment. Blur is about those moments, where the end of the race occurs and there’s just an endless amount of problems and everything falls into a groove, clicking and locking, an ecstatic feeling of connecting the drive to the driver.
And for me, it’s a hard feeling to deny, but harder still to explain. To explain driving is easy, to explain the rush from a sense of speed is another thing entirely. Even on an airplane, the sense of speed is enveloped, never feeling the hundreds of kilometers per hour, and speed itself becomes an exotic temptation. Not because there is something so unknown about speed, but because the feeling of controlling, or losing control of that speed has an exhilaration, a press and a release, that all racing games, and all games, attempt to capture.
Blur, in those moments, fulfills its namesake, yet my lack of awareness makes me wonder about the justification for the interaction itself. Because I am caught unaware, there is difficulty in describing the situation, and similarly so in that situation’s ability to be related. One pulsating, stressful moment can instantly appear and disappear, and sitting there behind the desk, I can only be left to wonder whether something astonishing happened or simple dumb luck. Probably a combination of both, given my propensity for interest in the only medium no one cares about.
In moments like these, I do find myself reflecting, or relaxing, or just doing less. There’s a feeling of acquiescing to play over my need to moronically try to read every little action that’s occurring, controlling the system, as if someone could have a god complex in a game that’s manipulating the player who claims godhood. The feeling’s a bit like navigating a particularly good Cave shmup, or any game that’s got a meaty action system like Demon’s Souls. In the clutch interaction, things begin to fade away, moving away from even success or failure and into degrees of conceiving speed fluidly.
Recommended: Yes