From the archives

I’m not the greatest fan of racing games. Actually, scratch that – I’m not the greatest fan of racing games that aren’t Outrun 2. Yet I still end up buying them. Clearly, I’m not right.

Just a quick glance at some of the stuff I’ve bought over the past 18 months or so and I’ve somehow ended up with a disproportionate amount of the buggers. I think it’s because I eternally hold out hope that there’ll be the one, the one, that comes along and sits alongside Outrun 2 in my cold gaming heart.

I picked up Burnout Paradise and sort of loved it for a while then I noticed that I was just doing stuff for no particular reason. It became a bizarre procrastination aid. “Ah, I could do something now but I think I’ll just see if I can bounce this car from one side of this road to the other”. Which would have been alright except for that I wasn’t really enjoying bouncing cars from one side of a road to another, I was just watching a number go up. Well, quite a few numbers go up. So I wandered off. Besides which, I fucking hate Guns ‘n’ Roses and having to endure that monstrosity of a song every time I load the game was starting to send me a little bit more loopy than usual. Not something I can afford, that.

I grabbed FUEL as the idea of a massive open world seemed like quite an attractive proposition. Only it’s a massive open world full of hills. It’s got so many hills that perhaps they should have called it HILL instead. So I spent some time climbing the hills and not really doing much else. In fairness, they were rather pretty hills but still. Climbing hills. In a car. In a game. I could just walk up one and at least increase the chances of seeing something else interesting or different along the way. Like a human.

I got GRID. That didn’t last long at all. Once I’d driven my brick into a wall a few times and realised that it wanted to play into some sort of OCD-ish bizarre-o-thing and wanted me to try and perfect my runs by undoing my crashes via the power of dark computer magicks, well, I’ve no time for that sort of tedium. No hills, see. That and like FUEL, it wants you torture you before it lets you have any fun. “Here, have a shit car”. “Here, meet my dustbin”.

The only other game in recent times to come close to Outrun 2 in providing me with my racing entertainment was Excite Truck. It’s a massive bag of silly. I guess, when it comes to racing games, all I want is a big bag of silly.

Split/Second is incredibly silly. It’s stupendously silly and you should probably buy it right now because it’s not only silly but fantastic, exhilarating fun.

You can forget about the set up, it’s guff. You’re in a TV series it would seem and the show revolves around people racing cars really fast whilst things explode around them. Obviously. It’s not quite Year Of The Sex Olympics stuff here but I dunno, if you can get I’m A Celebrity, Let Me Out Of Here on air this probably isn’t quite as far fetched as I’d like.

But that’s all you really need to know about Split/Second right there in that set up. You race cars really fast and things explode around you. There’s even a button you can press to make things explode around the other racers and try and blow them off the track in a ball of flame. Ah man, now we’re talking videogames. I like videogames.

It’s a game I’m banned from playing whilst the kid is around. Mrs Bob says that muttering the sort of swear words I have been is possibly not the best language to be teaching a young child and that’s not something I can really argue with. Split/Second makes me swear like a sweary man but y’know, it’s a good swear. The kind that you utter when a fantastic Geometry Wars:RE run gets brought to a sudden halt by you doing something incredibly idiotic like walking into the black hole as you were too busy looking over there. Yes, over there. See, you missed that didn’t you? 

It wants you to win. Which is, seemingly, in stark contrast to most racing games made in the past couple of years that want you to work instead. Split/Second isn’t about realistic racing, realistic crash modelling or as my brief experience with one of the Need For Speed series shown, tattoos, emo street kids and tits. It’s about having some screaming fun and getting to see the next track and the next bag of tricks it’s got up its sleeve.

And yeah, there’s a point where you spot the mouse in the mouse organ and realise how much the game wants you to win and progress and in many games, that’d be enough for me to put it right down the moment it dawned. I’m having way, way too much fun though to care about what’s going on under the hood. I was having so much fun during my time with Split/Second that it could have thrown a picture of a haddock up on the screen, called my mother a rude name and shot my cat and I’d probably still sit there going “oh go on then, I’ll just do this next race and see what I can bring down onto the track next”.

Not all of the game modes are an out and out success, there’s a mixed bag of attempts at fucking with the game’s formula of which, the helicopter runs are easily the weakest. A bland “avoid the target” session around the track that on paper, reading “you’re being pursued by a helicopter trying to bomb your face off” sounds far more exciting than it actually is in practice. I can forgive that though. I can forgive anything for the moments I was near out of my seat, ducking between exploding barrels dumped from the back of some sort of Mad Max meets Duel nightmare truck at supermassive speeds getting what I believe might be termed as “the fucking claw” from the controller. 

The stuff that works far outweighs the stuff that doesn’t and heck, at least Split/Second bloody well tries to mix things up. It’d be rude not to applaud that.

And applaud Split/Second I will. Big cheery sweary sweaty applause. With an owl.

It’s probably my game of the year so far and the first racer since Outrun 2 I’ve wanted to just play and play again. That it seems to have slipped between the cracks amongst a fuckton of other big releases this year is a damn shame. It’s bloody brilliant and doesn’t deserve that fate.

Go on, give it some love. 

Rutger Hauer/10 -1 point for orange & teal.

Originally posted on We Make The Cops Look Dumb, November 9th 2010