2177: Black Screen of Death

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I’ve noticed something annoying about technology, particularly entertainment technology: the moment you want to revisit something you haven’t played/watched/listened to for a while, the technology that makes doing so possible is almost certainly going to fail somehow.

This has happened to me on numerous occasions ever since I was a youngling. From games that refused to boot on our old Atari 8-bit to… well, today, games that refuse to boot on my Windows PC, it’s an inordinately frustrating experience.

It’s more frustrating than something just normally not working, because the fact that you haven’t indulged in the thing in question for a while means that you build up a certain degree of anticipation in your mind for the first time revisiting it in weeks, months, perhaps even years. As such, it’s extremely disappointing when you find yourself unable to satisfy your hunger for the thing you were craving.

Today, I had an extremely strong desire to play Bizarre Creations’ swansong Blur, one of my favourite racing games of all time. I own both the Xbox 360 and PC versions of this game — the PC version being something that I’m actually seemingly rather lucky to own, since it has been pulled from the Steam store at some point in the last few years — but I was keen to play the PC version, since it runs at a superior framerate and resolution to the 360 version. Plus I’d been having idle thoughts about doing a “racing games supertest” series of videos, and Blur was one of the games I particularly wanted to highlight.

Blur has run fine on my machine before and I don’t think I’ve made any significant changes to it since the last time I ran it. I’ve perhaps replaced the graphics card in that period — which may be the issue, though I don’t see why — but that’s about it. But no; I was to be denied. I fired up Blur via Steam, saw the familiar noisy Activision logo followed by the now somewhat forlorn-seeming Bizarre Creations logo… and then the menu music started.

And then nothing happened. No spinny thing in the corner saying the game was loading. No main menu. No prompt to login. Just the menu music, and a Steam popup with the CD key that I was unable to dismiss.

I tried again on the offchance it was a random crash; no luck. I took to Google in an attempt to find the cause of the problem, or indeed if anyone else had had it — note to game developers: if you name your game a single word, please don’t name it after a common graphical setting, because it really makes situations like this a lot more difficult than they need to be — but I was ultimately disappointed, since this was, inevitably, one of those situations where lots of people in the last five years have had this problem, but none of them have come up with an adequate solution.

I tried the few solutions that were offered, and swore silently at Yahoo! Answers commenters making inane, generic comments about Windows updates and checking video drivers, but none seemed to work. As I type this, I’m restarting my PC — a rare treat for that machine, which tends to stay on most of the time — in a last-ditch attempt to see whether or not that works. If it doesn’t, I guess I’ll have to be satisfied with the 360 version; no great loss, since that’s the version I originally “discovered” the game with, but it would be nice to run it at 60fps and 1080p.

Oh well. It’s getting late now, anyway, so probably no Blur for me this evening. Fingers crossed I can get it working eventually though…

EDIT: Restarted computer. Game now works. Maybe those Yahoo! Answers idiots weren’t such idiots after all.

#oneaday, Day 49: In Memoriam – Bizarre Creations, 1994-2011

The UK game development community has a long and colourful history. Some of the most well-known and successful titles from gaming’s history come from UK-based developers, and it’s in part due to the active “bedroom programmer” community of the 1980s that gaming is in the healthy position it is in today. In short, although the big bucks may come from American developers and hugely successful properties like Call of Duty, the humble UK played a pivotal role in bringing us to where we are today.

And that’s why it’s always sad to see a UK-based developer fold under the pressure. But something’s different this time. The demise of Bizarre Creations seems to be affecting a lot of people on a much more personal level than many other similar announcements. I’ve been trying, with little success, to figure out why this is all day.

Perhaps it’s quite simply the fact that they have made some astonishingly good games in their time. Sure, they’ve made a few that are arguably duffers, too, but those games, personally speaking, just showed me that they were willing to try their hand at something different, even if they ended up being not that good at it. And Boom Boom Rocket was awesome, I don’t care what anyone else says.

Bizarre Creations was always about two things, though: racing and shooting neon shapes in space. These were their raisons d’être, if that’s the correct plural, which it probably isn’t.

The Dreamcast’s Metropolis Street Racer was an absolutely gobsmacking title upon its initial release. We’d seen racers with pretensions of “photo-realism” before—the PS1 Gran Turismo titles along with Namco’s Ridge Racer Type 4 and Reflections’ Driver had come pretty close in all their non-anti-aliased glory, but Metropolis Street Racer went one further. The sheer accuracy of both the car modelling and the streets through which you raced was astonishing. The fact you were racing through recognisable locales—and the fact that the system’s clock was used to make sure you were racing at whatever time it was right now—gave a pretty-much unprecedented sense of involvement in the races. Couple this with the fact that it wasn’t just another racer—it was an extreme sports game that happened to involve cars—and you have a winner on your hands. The ability to customise the in-game messages to hurl obscenities at you whenever you crashed was just the icing on an already delicious cake.

And that’s not even mentioning the soundtrack, extracts of which you may have noticed peppering this post. Completely composed from scratch rather than licensed, MSR‘s soundtrack perfectly captured a snapshot of how the year 2000 sounded in terms of popular music.

Project Gotham Racing was a similarly spectacular title showcasing the power of Microsoft’s new Xbox system. When I first saw the game, I didn’t immediately make the connection between it and MSR, but after a little bit of racing around I suddenly felt a sense of familiarity. It hit me hard—this was the next generation of the game I’d wasted countless hours on on SEGA’s doomed little wonderbox. Its sequel spawned my favourite use of Xbox LIVE—Friends leaderboards. I was never that bothered about online racing as I’m not anywhere near as good as some of the freaks out there, but being able to compare times and scores directly against friends without having to do anything special? That was a watershed moment for me.

Which, of course, brings us to Geometry Wars, formerly a hidden minigame that sat in the garage of your Project Gotham cars. The original Geometry Wars is, without a shadow of exaggeration, the reason I bought an Xbox 360. An early-adopter friend showed me a few games—Oblivion, The Outfit and Geometry Wars, as I recall—and while the first two impressed me a little with all their HD glory, it was the orgasmic explosion of colour and sound that was Geometry Wars that convinced me I needed one of these machines. Thus began a long campaign of battling against each other for high-score supremacy, punctuated by regular MMS messages back and forth each time we beat each other.

The sequel took this to a whole other level. There were some days when I wouldn’t play a “full” retail game at all, instead blasting away at Geometry Wars 2 for hours at a time in a desperate attempt to beat my friends’ scores on the various game modes. It became hugely, ridiculously competitive until I pretty much accidentally attained several scores that neither I nor my friends have been able to replicate since. Thus ended that particular battle.

And then most recently we had “powered-up racer” Blur. Blur came out of nowhere, thanks to Activision’s questionable marketing. But what a game it was. Taking the good bits of Call of Duty‘s multiplayer and inserting them seamlessly into a game that wasn’t brown and wasn’t about soldiers going pewpewpew was a genius move, and the fact it’s one of the few games out there you can still play in four-player split screen alone means it’s worthy of mention.

So this is why I’m sad that Bizarre Creations have closed their doors for the last time today. Some of my fondest gaming memories stem from Bizarre’s games. I sincerely hope that the team manage to find their way to pastures greener, and that they can once again get back to doing what they do so well.

Also, Microsoft, you are idiots for not picking them up to revive the PGR series.

So, if you’ll turn to your song sheet, we can sing today’s hymn, from the Metropolis Street Racer soundtrack, the lyrics of which are oddly poignant (if cheesy) today. Sing along. I’ll know if you don’t. SING, DAMMIT.

I wake up and it’s another day
Time to wish all my tears away
Every day and it’s the same old story
No more dreams, just reality

I should find a place I’ve never been before
Gotta see a place I’ve never seen before
Gotta go somewhere that I can still believe
You are there

Don’t know what to do
Don’t know where to go
How can I find you
Who’s to know?
I gotta know where you are
No matter how near or far
I’ll never get over you.

In my mind I know it’s just a game
But it helps to keep away the pain
People tell me that it’s all too easy
I don’t listen, how could they know?

So I’ll keep on running down this lonely road
‘Cause I can’t help thinking it’s the only road
Gotta stay right here so I can still believe
You are near?

Don’t know what to do
Don’t know where to go
How can I find you
Who’s to know?
I gotta know where you are
No matter how near or far
I’ll never get over you.

I cannot believe that you are gone
How can I carry on?
It’s so long ago that you were mine
Remember the first time?

In my soul I know that you’ll remain
In my heart I love you just the same
All the time I think about the day
You’ll return and say that you will stay

But I got to live my life without you now
Gotta get along but I don’t know how
If I close my eyes then I can still believe
You are here

Don’t know what to do
Don’t know where to go
How can I find you
Who’s to know?
I gotta know where you are
No matter how near or far
I’ll never get over you.

Don’t know what to do
Don’t know where to go
How can I find you
Who’s to know?
I gotta know where you are
No matter how near or far
I’ll never get over you.

Farewell, Bizarre Creations. Thanks for the good times. May your work live on.

#oneaday, Day 135: Blurred Socialization

“Social games” are crap. There, I’ve said it. Now everyone else can breathe a sigh of relief that the elephant in the room has been well and truly pointed out.

But why are they crap? Well, the main reason is that they just aren’t very fun to either play as games or use as a means of socialising. I’ve tried out Mafia Wars and We Rule in particular. And neither of them are very fun.

Both of them involve a lot of clicking and waiting. Click on a button to complete a task. Wait for something to happen… in real time. While you wait, why not spam your friends to “help” you by clicking on the same button that you did? You’ll both get XP! Yay XP! Of course your level means little more than how long you have bothered to waste your time playing what is basically an Access database, but that’s beside the point.

The social angle is flawed too. There’s no interaction. You can request “help” from other players but there’s no means of actually playing together concurrently. In some games you can’t even send messages to each other.

Then came Blur. Blur single-handedly shows the correct way to develop a good social game: by building a good game first, then a social network around it. Too many other titles do this the other way round, and that’s what causes them to be the shallow, meaningless garbage that they are.

Blur is different, though. Even without the social features it would be a great racer featuring the “why hasn’t anyone done this before?” combination of realistic racing and Mario Kart-style powerups. But add in the ability to taunt friends publicly via Facebook and Twitter, not to mention the incredibly solid “Friend Challenge” system, and you’ve got a winning experience on your hands.

Playing Blur is actually remarkably akin to logging into something like Facebook. Starting the game greets you with a “Previously on Blur” feature showing you the next milestones you might reach, a bit like Facebook’s News Feed shows you recent happenings. Then you might want to check your messages, so you look at the Friend Challenges screen. You see that three of your friends have challenged you to beat their times, so you while away a short while beating them senseless… or not. Then you take on some of the single-player, and achieve something you know none of your friends have, so you post it to Facebook. Then… the list goes on. All the while you’re having a good time playing a great game AND sharing the experience with friends.

So, social game developers? Please stop being satisfied with the derivative shit you’re coming out with. The shit you are deriving your new shit from wasn’t very good in the first place. So actually hire someone who has played a video game before to design your game, then build the social features around it.

Rant over. I’m off to play Blur.