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Burnout Review
Chris Leyton
00/12/0000
The PS2 racer flies onto the GameCube, we CHECK it out.
Burnout impressed us mightily when it first appeared on the PS2, the mix of high speed and old-school gameplay kept us coming back for more months after the games release.
For those that didnāt get the chance to see Crieterionās Burnout on the PS2, at heart itās a very simplistic racer, players have to race through a variety of courses against three other opponents, the drawback youāll have to avoid hundreds of pedestrian traffic in the way classic racers such as Outrun and Hang-On pitted you against. Passing through gaps and overtaking results in your boost meter rising, activate this and you can definitely say goodbye to your lunch. Of course eventually you will crash, and get to see it over and over again, as the game replays your crash from three different angles, eventually youāll pop back on the track and itās off again to try and catch up with the competition. Burnout is an old-school racer for the next-generation.
What made Burnout so good to play was the tight controls, players only have an accelerate button, one for braking and one for turbo, however they were so tight and responsive that the thrill of powersliding round a corner at 120MPH, into a pack of oncoming traffic produced a rush that many racing titles fail to match. Thankfully the controls work better then ever on the Cubeās pad, so youāll be whizzing through traffic and sliding round corners in no time at all.
Originally developed using Crieterionās middleware package, RenderWare, this has allowed the developers to port the PS2 version over relatively quickly and easily. The GameCube version benefits from improved car models, realistic lighting, and cleaner textures, however the game was impressive from the start due to the number of polygons this engine is pushing around and still moving around at a solid framerate. Literally hundreds of cars occupy the screen at one time, whilst there are several occasions that youāll screech around the corner and be able to see for miles down the road. Lacking the detail of most racers, itās left to the crashes to really make you go wow! The physics engine allows for an almost infinite number of crashes to occur, cars will spin on their roof and fly into the air. However itās the little touches in the damage system that provide the most impressive moments, windows shatter into little pieces before smashing out, body parts bend realistically, it seems that Criterion have realistically modelled every car component there is, ensuring that no crash will ever look the same, a good point considering you cant skip the replays.
