Oh, Axl, you’re such a poet.

Burnout Paradise has proven me wrong and is totally fantastic. Almost all the misgivings I had about the demo are still valid, but the core design and philosophy behind the final product is so focused and perfect that they don’t matter. You can’t pick events from a menu, but that’s okay because the city is small enough that it’s not too difficult to get around, and interesting enough that you want to explore it between events. This also helps you learn your way around the city.

It’s also a new standard for online integration, as well as the perfect system for online in an open world title. I’m going to be disappoint when GTA IV doesn’t work like this. You can invite a friend or be invited from an easy-to-use D-pad menu, and then the world you are in becomes the online world seamlessly. The host can then decide to make a race event and can set the start and end points anywhere on the map. There’s also challenges, which are just little goals like “boost 400 yards on this street” or “do three barrel rolls on that jump” but when four or five people are all trying to do that, hilarious things occur. This also forces you to learn the nooks and crannies of the city. The design is all-encompassing in its scope, and it’s far more than the sum of its parts. It actually feels astonishingly new – the series has totally reinvented itself for the second time. That said, it’s not perfect. The crash mode replacement sucks really bad and the soundtrack thankfully allows you to toggle off individual tracks. Still, it’s great.

Other than that, I got alien laid in Mass Effect. It’s starting to wear thin; I’m glad I’m near the endgame. I also played Pokemon Pearl a bit on a car trip.

This game – EA’s SSX Blur – confounds me. It’s not just the controls. I’ll freely admit right now that I don’t feel like I’ve mastered the controls. I’ve almost completed every event on the first section of the game, but I continue to improve in my handling of them. They are really complicated, but, for the most part, feel more and more natural the more you use them. However, I just feel like I personally suck at them.

SSX Blur uses a nunchuck attachment. To steer, you use the analog stick, and to make sharp turns you tilt the nunchuck while using the stick. This is called “carving” and it feels very nice once you get the hang of it. Jumping is accomplished by moving the nunchuck up quickly, and spins and grabs are then accomplished by spinning and tilting either the nunchuck or main remote. There’s also ubertricks, but I’ll do that later.

Here lies one of the primary advantages in control in comparison to the traditional older games. It is also one of the more confounding parts, at least for me. You see, all this motion, well, it just confuses me. I don’t have the coordination to spin two different things in different directions while still using buttons. This is probably bad for a Wii owner. I can just randomly spin and grab, but doing anything specific is now impossible, at least for me.

I don’t really feel like I can rate these controls, though. Some people I’ve had play the game seem to pick up on them naturally, and do pretty well on their first few races. Some people are just utterly confused like myself and put down the controller after a few minutes. The opinion on the Internet is a wider range than this. All I can tell you is rent it and reiterate that Nintendo needs to put up demos on the Wii Shop Channel.

But, back to the controls themselves. Ubertricks are accomplished by drawing a shape on the screen. This is so cumbersome there is actually a training mode so you can practice it, and I cannot do it regularly even in the training screen. This strikes me as an order of magnitude worse than the regular controls, which really feel like they should work if I wasn’t such an uncoordinated clumsy geek.

This still leaves us with the actual game, which unfortunately, is merely good at best. SSX3′s wonderful artwork, course design, characters, and advancement system add up so that it remains the pinnacle of the series. SSX On Tour threw most of that out the window, and SSX Blur, which is actually a sort of mash-up of those two titles, comes out appropriately between them.

Unlike SSX On Tour’s generic dudes, you get to play as a classic SSX cast member. Unfortunately, there is zero customizability, unlike SSX3. Also, there characters really end up being flat skins with no personality, as there is no voice acting. No insane British accent screams from Moby or quickly dispensed Japanese from Kaori. They’re just kinda there. In the end, they might as well be Miis or other user-created characters, as they really have no personality at all.

The courses are a mix of retooled SSX3 and On Tour courses. Unfortunately, they lack the solid art direction of the courses in 3, which had a certain je ne sais quoi in their design that isn’t replicated here. (Yes, I just used a French phrase to describe a racing game.) They look OK, but not as good as 3. This is a common theme in the game.

I don’t know if I can recommend SSX Blur. Maybe you will get the controls. Maybe you will not be a pretentious and picky gamer like myself. Maybe you won’t. I do know that you should rent it if you’re a fan of the series; otherwise, it’s not the next great Wii game we’re all waiting for, but it still might be worth a try.

Excite Truck is a racing game that very loosely draws inspiration from Nintendo’s own NES classic, Excitebike and its criminally underplayed N64 sequel. I say “loosely,” because, well, these are trucks, not motorcycles, and the scoring system is, shall we say, unique.

Excite Truck’s control scheme deserves mention, as it probably will end up as the blueprint for every racing game in the Wii’s future. Control of your most exciting of an array of generic trucks is accomplished through tiling the Wii remote, which is held horizontally like an NES controller. The 2 button is the gas, 1 is the brake, and any direction on the D-pad is the boost.

Ideally, for future racing games, we’d see an attachment similar to the gimmicky plastic steering wheel Ubi Soft released, only this one would actually plug into the Wii remote and feature analog triggers similar to the Xbox controller’s triggers. Brakes and gas with exactly two settings – on and off – is jarring after years of playing racing games with analog controls on the Xbox and Gamecube.

The tilting control, though bizarre at first, works well once you adjust to it. It’s extremely sensitive – most people tilt the controller way, way too much for the game, and thus drift all over the road. Excite Truck takes tilting to another degree and allows you to control exactly how your truck is positioned in the air. This controls how fast you fall, among other things, and I’d like to see a sequel to fully explore the idea – it’s very cool.

The scoring system, as I mentioned, is not the conventional ranking system that is pretty much omnipresent in racing games, even ones with trick systems like Excite Truck. Taking a page from Burnout and SSX, you have to do stunts to win, but in this case, rather than boost, you earn stars.

Stunts include tree runs, or not hitting a tree but coming close a lot, smashing opponents, big jumps, spins, and perfect landings. The truck with the most stars wins. Getting first is not an entirely pointless endeavor, though, as the rank comes with a substantial star bonus. It’s a weird system, but it works pretty well.

Excite Truck’s Achilles heel is the mutliplayer – it’s almost non-existent. You get a basic versus mode, with no options. Worse, it’s only two players. If this game had four player support, it might be a must-have. As it is, it’s merely pretty good. Buy it for less than $30, or rent it and enjoy it for a bit.