In a fitting salute to a key concept of the racing genre, Disney Interactive Studios and Activision unleashed their latest racing games upon the world within a week of each in a race to the highest place in the game charts.
The decision between Mario Kart-style powerups and high-octane explosions was a difficult one, but fond memories of the Burnout series drew me in favour of the Disney release. The concept for Split/Second is quite simple- a racing reality TV show with explosions, traps, sneaky shortcuts and locations of epic proportions. When it comes down to the wire, it’s ‘blow up or be blown up’.
Like children with new toys, developers can excitedly overdo it with visual effects until good sense prevails - here are five examples of exactly that from across video games history
Dirt on the lens (and JJ Abrahms style overuse of lens flare) is the worst, especially in war games like Battlefield. We're not supposed to be a camera! Way to ruin the illusion of actually being the player we're controlling.
Most soldiers today wear goggles or tactical glasses so dirt on the lens isn’t that much of a stretch tbh
Vignettes, chromatic aberration, and that annoying thing where they blur the corners of the screen. Also film grain.
All those immediately get turned off when I load up my settings haha. Unless I’m going for screenshots it’s more than annoying
You are mostly stuck with whatever terrible effects on console. There are some options like motion blur that can switched off but it's not common
Depth of field is annoying. Along with most camera or lens effects.
But DoF will be cool in the future when they can track what you are looking at and apply DoF accordingly.
The Syndicate reboot had the absolute worst bloom I've ever seen. It literally hurt my eyes and gave me a headache just from playing. I could never finish it.
Absolutely. Beyond the distraction and obstruction, it looked unpleasant a lot of the time.
Racing games, on the outside are very attractive propositions to gamers and non-gamers alike. You don’t have to explain to somebody what the object of such a game is. You get in a car and try to get to the end of the course before the other racers, simple.
One of my fave racers of all time. Such a cool concept. Gut wrenching knowing there will never be another one 😭
I know I'm with you on that. One of the best racing games last gen. Love to see someone buy this IP and give it another go but I feel this game this gen with cross play would of had better legs and for me mp was the issue because it sold low on both consoles.
Easily one of the best on last gen. Such a good concept. I hate the fact we haven't really had any arcade racers this generation apart from NFS and that's fallen in quality.
James Pettegrow talks us through an arcade racing title that didn't get as much credit as it deserved.
As it was said, Disney shut it down due to it not being successful enough. With that said, a sequel could definitely have improved on Split Second's arcade madness.
Split/Second and Blur were the two most under rated racers last gen. They were great games and wish there were potential sequels.
Personally, i prefer games like that, more so Split Second than Blur. I also remember when i was playing Destruction Derby Raw back in the day.
GRIP is a game going to early access on Steam, because there wasn't enough people backing it on Kickstarter (unfortunately).
That's one of my only hopes for racers i enjoy.
Hoping for BC as I still got the XB1 disc and still play it time to time. This and Midnight Club LA along with Project Gotham Racing 4 are hidden racing gems from the X360 days.
