Caltrops - Gamerasutra - Burnout 3 is awesome.

Forum Overview :: Gamerasutra

by Bodybag 09/10/2004, 7:56am PDT

It's given me a case of the "Nintendo thumb", only on my index finger. It's not so much that the refreshingly intuitive right-trigger-as-accelerator setup is uncomfortable as it is the primal urge to virtually stomp the virtual gas pedal through the virtual floorboard. Was I wrong to give either of the previous Burnout games a pass? Because HOLY FUCK is this some white-knuckle shit. The sense of speed is INSANE. Activating your turbo boost is nothing if not visceral; there's this satisfying rocket-booster sound effect that rumbles, along with your screen, and your field of view morphs into fisheye cam. WOO I AM FUCKING FLYING *VROOM*

I've been playing this the last two days and I'm still not quite used to the sheer velocity of the game, which more often then not has me flying into stuff like concrete dividers and oncomming traffic. The crazy part is I'm still winning the races. One super-duper cool feature in the game is that wrecking doesn't necessarily close the road to victory, but in fact opens the road to REVENGE. You can fucking control how you wreck, so if you squander an easy lead by slamming into that goddamn commuter bus, don't fret! Put some enlgish on your ride's flaming carcass and slide it into the path of your speeding rivals. IN BULLET-TIME. Or, if there's no opponents to wreck into, just try to bounce your car off of as many world objects as possible to rack up sick combo points and get a turbo-boost bonus for when your car respawns on the road. You can potentially come out ahead after crashing. Genius. Of course, the optimal tactic is to straight-up ram your opponents off the road, which is a whole game all its own.

The racing modes are wicked cool, but it's the Crash Junction mode that unquestionably validates the purchase. Objective: Speed into a busy intersection and cause as much mayhem as possible. GO!

The only real downslide so far is the game's soundtrack of about 30 or so NuPunk it-bands and The Ramones. Then again it's all fairly upbeat and driver-friendly, not to mention that the mixture of highway courses and assmetal eerily mirrors the morning commute into ATL while listening to 99X, all of which are conducive to vehicular homicide. It's like I've spent years training for this game!