Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Here’s a peculiar trailer for Brit-based racer, Split/Second. It’s like a report for a gaming TV show, but without the gaming TV show. And it’s an American pretend TV show, which offers the rather hilarious opener that Black Rock Studio’s home town, Brighton, is “quaint”. But forget all that, because what you’ve got here is a neatly packaged explanation of what Split/Second is – a racing game where you blow stuff up – along with thoughts behind the development, and most crucially, lots of in-game footage.

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It’s been a while since we’ve heard from the slightly slipped Disney racer, Split/Second. But it’s reappeared at GDC ahead of what’s now a May release. It’s a trailer that asks that all-important question one should always raise at the car dealership: can it outrun a building?

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I’m not one to leap with joy at news of a new racing game, but when I see a trailer like the one below the joy-leaping muscles begin to clench. Proun, which is a splendid word, is a 3D obstacle-avoiding puzzly racing game set in a bizarre world of geometric shapes. You rotate around a cable, rather than steering, in a gorgeous looking environment. The project by Joost van Dongen is due to be released early next year, and will be freeware, according to IndieGames.

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Do you like France? Are you crazy-excited by Streets? And does the idea of racing send you a-shiver? Well, it’s safe to say, that today is going to be the most exciting day for you since that time you ran down a seedy rue in paris, naked, screaming, glad to be alive, just glad. Team6 have released a demo of their self-explanatory French Street Racing. It’s about the streetracing champions of Nice, Paris, Marseille, Toulouse and Lyon getting together and racing. In streets. And you have to beat them. In a Race. A Street Race. 230Mb. You can get it from here. And some grabs beneath the cut to illustrate the game’s Gallic charms.
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No-one at RPS is a great racing game aficionado. Is this because we’re all impossibly geeky men obsessed with science fiction worlds and the devoted worship of Horace the Endless Bear? Or is it because racing, once one of gaming’s main pillars, is growing ever more niche? Certainly, it has spent some years standing still, polarising into the opposing camps of simulation and mod-culture arcadey things, and in both cases avoiding the sense of whizzbang newness necessary to excite a mass audience. So will it go the way of the flight sim, making do with a small but impossibly devoted audience?

Clearly not. But it does have to change. And so Edge have rounded up some of the genre’s most luminescent luminaries – men behind the likes of Project Gotham, Colin McRae, Motorstorm and Sega Racing – to discuss racing’s future. It’s an amazingly frank chat, shining a light on some deep-running problems with the form.
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