Going Against The Grain

Sometimes you just have to wonder whether you’re getting a little curmudgeonly in your old age. With review code for Colin McRae: DiRT 2 and Need For Speed: Shift flying around our office like the vehicles contained therein, thoughts turn to the argument I’ve been pursuing for some time now. Namely, what exactly do gimmicks such as blurred vision and power-ups add to the racing genre?

It’s not that I’m particularly allergic to change, it’s just the shoe-horning of ‘drama’ into what is essentially a sport seems either to suggest that tearing down the world’s greatest tracks with equally amazing cars isn’t exciting enough , or that gamers don’t have the miniscule amount of imagination required to watch images on a screen and imagine being ‘there’. Heck, if I could do that when playing Super Hang-On, I can sure as eggs is eggs do it now.

You know when you watch American sports via foreign cable networks that introduce players via such an embarrassment of graphical razzamatazz you’d be forgiven for thinking they’re superheroes? That’s how this kind of stuff makes me feel. Manufactured, fake, and just a little empty. The underlying titles of course may yet offer as engaging and measured an experience as Forza 3 shortly will, but for me DiRT 2′s blinding windscreen splash effect seems a much more sensible way to set about immersing your audience in what’s going on.

That’s my tuppence’s worth, what’s yours?