Burnout

"Burnout...Hmm. What an interesting title for a fresh idea."

The first time I saw this game was in Nintendo Power Magazine. Everyone praise it. Everyone said it was a good game. Apparently, the crashes made the game great. I, being a fan of every Bruce Willis movie, thought, ''Why not get it for my GameCube?'' I tried getting off of E-Bay through one of my teachers. In the end, the teacher got in trouble and I never got the game. I then saw the PS2 version in a used game store. $17.95. How could I resist?

Opening Statements

Burnout is a racing game. How does is separate itself from the others? Well, its both a blessing and a curse. Attempting to appeal to the crowd that buys the Tony Hawk series for the shear thrill of simulating tricks you could only do on methanthedamines, the game was publicized to have the best crashes ever in a video game. I thought that was a funny notion. How do you have the best crashes? Besides, you can't type into a C++ programming line, ''Make the crashes look cool.'' You can only program realistic physics into the game. And if you were really cheap, you would exaggerate the physics. Another twist is the Boost Meter. I'll comment on that later. You get the opportunity to crash until your heart is content because you're racing through the traffic of American and European-style cities. The latter made me cringe in excruciating pain.

ESRB Rating: E for Everyone

There's nothing offensive in this game, really. If you're against your kids seeing cars in a destructive manner you might not want to get this. You might also want to chill out.

Graphics: 8/10

The player's car looks great. The lighting effects are superb. However, I was obligated to say that because of chrome. As you pass though a tunnel the reflections of the overhead light curve and swing around the car's contours like lost souls trying to escape an alternate reality (eat your heart out, Dean Koontz!). Everyday traffic cars look moderately okay. The only game I can think of that has this case would be Wreckless, The Yakuza Mission (also published by Acclaim). When you crash, the car dents in multiple spots that looks good pretty good. Glass shattering is really crappy, but technology in a few years will cure that. The environments look excellent. The American tracks are a parody of New York City, and not a bad parody at that. European tracks...look...well, European.

As a side note: I'm only mean to Europeans because they are mean to me. You can quote me on that. In fact, I encourage you to quote me on that.

You are taken through streets adjacent to sky scrappers and countrysides. My complaint is that when you stop for what ever reason (crash, slow down for a curve, stop to pick your nose), the surroundings looks stretched out. I suppose that if you're going through the sights at a billion miles per hours, the stretching isn't so obvious. And one more thing. The cars do have reflections, but its not the caliber of, say, Project Gotham. The reason is because these are fake reflections. No matter where you are on a track, or what track you're on, your car is reflecting some kind of white structure (probably a European house). The only time the reflection changes is when you are in a tunnel, which is explained above. I just realized that its not very healthy to stare at my television so closely. Where my Visine?

Sound: 7/10

Sound FX
Tires Squealing. Metal Crunching. Glass Shattering. You crying in frustration. All of the those except for the last are standard for this type of game. They sound pretty good. They sound like the ones that are dubbed onto the video clips of the FOX television show Worlds Wildest Police Chases. What? Is that a bad example? Fine. Earlier in this school year, I was in a horrible bus accident. A hay truck met my bus with extreme prejudice and my face was slammed into the seat in front of me. The bus was totaled and my face bled in several spots. But the sound of the semi's trailer plowing into the bus' front end reminded me other the sounds of Burnout. Is that good enough?

Music
Well, I liked two particular songs. They went with two American tracks. If I had to give them titles, one would be ''Truck Drivers' Anthem,'' and the other, ''Shaft's Adventure Begins.'' The creators of Burnout had the decency to make up their own titles, which I don't care for, and included a menu option with a list of them if you ever dared to listen to them individually. The music is okay. I usually listen to my George Carlin tapes while playing this game, though. But a neat feature is each song is complimented with, what I call, ''Brainvein Music.'' What is Brainvein Music? Well, have you every made someone really angry and the person starts yelling at you real, real loud (believe me, I've made a lot of people angry in my 18 years of life)? Sometimes, the vein on their forehead pops out. You know, the brainvein. That's because the person is under a lot off stress, and the heart rate increases. Okay, back to the review. When you crash more than, oh I don't know, five times, the nice pimpin' music ends and they stick you with some high tension violin, fast beats, ''don't screw up again'' music. I don't know whether Criterion (the game designer) wanted the Brainvien Music to increase your anxiety and give you a stroke or just to annoy you, because it accomplished both. Except for the whole stroke thing. I'm going to die of diabetes instead.

Control: 9/10

In my honest opinion, I like the GameCube controller better than the one in the PlayStation franchise. But that doesn't affect the score any. The control is tight. The two sticks respond the slightest touch and you accelerate as fast as you want depending on your thumb's depression on the X button. And there are different control styles. One is like Project Gotham. Okay, that's the second time I mentioned the XBox game in this PlayStation review. Enough. I think it's better than Gran Turismo 2. Ha! A PlayStation game! I didn't give it a ten because then I would be saying it's perfect and then I would be obligated to explain my reasoning. No, thank you. I'm too busy looking for my bag of Fritos I bought a week ago.

Gameplay: 6/10

This is sort of a lesson in life. If you are a reckless driver you will hate this game. You will hate the binary
coding burned into the DVD Rom disc. You will hate the poor sucker that stayed up five nights in a row, doping up on brownies and Code Red, forgot about his dry cleaning, programmed VCR, and pets, and never even thought about the radiation being poured into the ever gapping eyes, just to put a mere increment of the game engine together. Yeah, you'll hate that guy most of all. Because everything will be fine and dandy while you're trucking along in your Supermini when...BAM! An oncoming semi just decides to pass another vehicle and plows into you. No big deal. Twenty thousand dollars of damage just happened. Shake it off. You're Social Security Check will cover it. You start up again with hope on your shoulders. Then...BAM! You have a fender bender with the car in front of yours. Urge to kill rising. The next time you start up, you're already on a corner and can't speed up and CPU racer are laughing their asses off as they pass you. There are just too many minor crashes being counted in your driving. Now, on the other hand, if you are very careful, only being reckless to the point of filling your Burnout (or turbo) meter, this will be a fun experience and the guy who put together the engine won't be as annoying.

One thing thing that is very wrong with this game is the attitude it assumed. The game case cover, the magazine advertisements, the synopsizes of online reviews. They all exclaimed that the game is one of those ''adrenaline drenched'' or ''heart pounding'' or some other cliche that was wasted on the remake of Pong. Then I buy the game and what do I get? The title screen is a slide show with lame beats. Only a few of the cars are stylish. And the European themes are too fruity for a hard core racer (there I go again, attacking the Europeans). Come on, people! These are bone crunching crashes at neck breaking speeds! The best crashes ever? GTA3, a PlayStation 2 and PC game, had crashes of the same caliber, in my opinion. It's not the attitude that I dislike. It's the lack of attitude. Couldn't the title screen be a FMV of two cars with their accelerators jammed to the floor and one crashes into an object close to the camera? The glass splinters into hundreds of pieces and flies forward into a gray space. Then just before it bounces off the camera lens, the broken glass reverses in direction and reforms into those bold red letters that spells ''Burnout.'' All the while, someone could be rocking out on an electric guitar. I don't know, I'm not an expert on animations. I can only make lengthy suggestions.

Overall: 8/10
(Rounded up from 7.5)

I like Burnout. Most of my ex-friends (that's all I have these days) don't. And it's all because they're reckless drivers, in the game and in real life. It literally took me a couple of months to beat this game, which is good when you consider I was on the rebound of a failing non-existant relationship. Most of my time was spent squeezing the controller with white knuckles and my bloodshot eyes were bulging out while I cried from the inside, ''Why did she leave me for that lard-ass?'' As you probably guessed, that isn't too great for gameplay. But it honestly made me like racing games, a genre I used to view as comparable to the fun of a swift kick in the groin.

Buy or Rent?

Nothing about Burnout really screams ''Buy me! Buy me!'' If you want to try a racer that is a little different from the pack, go ahead and rent it. But if you are easily agitated or currently out of Ritalin, go ahead and look over it.

Closing Statements

I'm not much for saying good-bye. So I'll end the review with two twisted stories of relation to the PlayStation 2. First of all, when I saw the title of the game, I thought, ''What a strange name. What does Burnout mean?'' My older sister used it once when I told her that I was planning on working every day of the summer (this was the summer of 2002). She said I would Burnout. And I did. Seeing me crash on my couch at end of the day was quite a show. I'll give a second to relate that to the game. Second, the same day I was in the bus accident, a girl in my class asked my if she borrow my PS2. This is the same girl that hooked up with Mr. Lard-Ass. She knew that just six hours ago I was holding my face together and she had nerve to ask for one of my most expensive pieces of electronic equipment? I let her anyway. By the way, she was European.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 06/02/03, Updated 06/02/03