Blur

Naughty Dog tried this Twitter business with Uncharted 2, and it annoyed people so much the studio disabled the feature. How will Blur be any different? "One thing we didn't want to do was turn it into some spam factory," reassures Wilson. "That's not what social networks are about." He's clearly never followed me on Twitter. "It's about bragging and you only post when you've got something to say." He's clearly, etc.

It works like this: at any point out-of-race you can press the Share button - mapped to a bumper on Xbox - and a menu pops up asking what you'd like to share. This could be rank, number of fans, cars, position and so on. This creates an auto-generated message with the hashtag #blurthegame. Crucially, you can edit it before sending. "The game never automatically sends stuff. You decide when you want to send it out," says Wilson.

Beyond Twitter there will likely be support for another social networking service which I'm not currently at liberty to name, but you don't need to be Mystic Meg to hazard a guess.

Friends Challenges are a further string to the community bow. Bizarre says these are a response to the changing face of gaming, catering to those who find it hard to find time to play together. Complete a challenge, send a message to a friend via, say, Xbox Live telling them how well you've done and ask them to try and beat it.

The message pops up in the dashboard and the exact challenge can be loaded up direct from that screen for your friend to tackle. They send it back to you with improved stats, and on it rolls. Whether it lives up to Wilson's lofty claim that "single-player really never ends" remains to be seen, but it's clearly a clever way of engaging friends and promoting competition.

It'll also be available to Xbox Live Silver users and, even if you haven't unlocked the challenge content in your own game you'll still be able to play, so it doubles as a teaser of what's to come.

Blur, then, has finally revealed itself as a ferocious, enormously fun and deceptively simple arcade racer with tantalising depths lurking under the bonnet. But there's an elephant in the room: Black Rock's Split/Second, a Hollywood-style street racing game, built around power-ups and inspired by the studio's boredom with a stagnating genre. Sound familiar?

Both Wilson and fellow lead designer Ged Talbot are understandably evasive, claiming ignorance and citing the usual excuses of being too focused on their own project to worry about what anyone else may or may not be doing. Hmm. (Incidentally, having the LA Docks stage in the beta is an interesting decision.)

Anyway, that the delay gods have ordained the two games will release within a week of other surely cannot have been something either studio had envisaged. To be fair to both, the experiences they offer beyond back-of-box bullet points differ in important ways, with Split/Second focusing on large-scale environmental destruction versus Blur's car-versus-car carnage.

Regardless, come May gamers will be presented with two visions of the future of racing both of which revel in their destructive action focus. It may not quite be Street Fighter, but in the battle for the streets it's the head-to-head to watch.