The racing game Blur, from Bizarre Creations (of Project Gotham Racing fame) has a release date of November 3rd, 2009 in the USA and November 6th in Europe. Platforms include Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC.
This was announced at a post-earnings conference call by publisher Activision Blizzard. This is the first game from Bizarre Creations since they were bought out by Activision way back in September of 2007.
Blur is an arcade-style racing game with a party focus (ala Mario Kart) but takes that in a more realistic direction than is generally seen by arcade-style racers. It features 50 licensed cars and real-world locatiosn from Barcelona, Spain to San Francisco, California in the good ol’ US of A.
And like any good action racing game, the title will include numerous power-ups that players can acquire during the course of a race in order to obliterate their opponents. Power-Ups include: Shock, Barge (wave of energy knocks cars away), Shunt (lurches the opposing car forwards, flipping it over), Nitro, Mines and Repair. Additionally, up to three slots of power-ups can be stored and they can be mixed or matched for over 300 combinations!
In the single player career mode, players follow e-mail messages from various social networking posts (and parodies on popular web-sites like youtube, with Blur’s “Inner Tube”) to find races. Depending on your character, you will race against or as part of various teams. Teams have their own racing style, power-up matches, match types, locales and cars, as well as their own fictional servers/social networking web-sites.
Like in Project Gotham Racing, players can earn “Fan Points” (Blur’s version of “Kudos”) by performing stunts, using power-ups effectively, and beating the other racers. As you build up your fan-base you will progress in the career mode.
The game can also be played online in multiplayer with up to 20 people (as well as 20 cars on-screen at a time, both offline & on), as well as offline in four-player split-screen mode. The online mode is enhanced through a “social-networking”-style set-up, where players create an account and join the fictional servers from the single-player game. Bizarre Creations has dubbed this the “Facebook of racing”. In multiplayer races you can fully customize the match, including number of laps, assists, power-ups, teams, etc. You can then share this and other information with friends over the social network.
Here is a behind-the-scenes video of this absolutely beautiful awesome looking racing game. And this is coming from someone who is not a fan of racers.