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Dom Robinson reviews
Acclaim
- Price: £44.99
- Players: 1-2
Burnout. Sounds a bit similar to Wipeoutand the principle is similar as you drive, not from A to B, but from A back toA again as the track takes you back to where you first started from for lapafter lap of racing for as long as you can stand it with several differentcars.
For a typical racer there are the typical options – a single race, a multi-race(known as ‘Championship’ here), a head-to-head for those with more than onejoystick to waggle at once, a time-attack for those who like the solo action,a ‘Special’ section for crash replays and a music player.
However, whereas the PS2 version had problems which annoyed me to the pointof giving up, the Xbox release is a different kettle of fish altogether.
The game has two main selling points, the first being a sort-of adrenaline metersuch that as you drive close to the knuckle through the traffic, so does thismeter increase and so your speed will be upped along the way. This is thefirst difference I noticed from the PS2 version as on the Xbox your car zoomsalong at such an intense speed, giving you an adrenaline rush and making youactually feel as if you’re there, that you could almost be Elliot Gould inCapricorn Onewhen someone’s tampered with his brakes.
The other thing of note is the crashes which some will have seen from thegame’s previews on TV. In contrast to the PS2 original, where the crashesdidn’t enthrall and just enraged because they looked like tacked-on extrasthat had no part in the actual gameplay, here they feel a damn sight moremeaty and you can really enjoy them. And here, after a crash it doesn’t takehalf as long before you’re back up to full speed and during a crash I takethis time out to see how close behind me the other racers are.
Now choose the first-person view so you’re racing head-on at the other trafficand feel your pants fill up.
Speed is definitely of the essence here. The graphics are insanely fast,almost like running the gauntlet in a Tron race in terms of the pace and thistime round you have much more realistic control of your car. Also, with thisgame there’s actually a chance the CPU cars will falter and crash too, unlikemost offerings out there.
It’s a major improvement over the PS2 title with Dolby Digital 5.1 sound in-gameand while I had my doubts on trying the same game on a different machine, theywere soon put to rest during the first lap of the first race.
Just after I finished writing the above, the Xbox crashed while I corneredin the hard mode on the first race. The picture froze and the roar of theengine sounds like ongoing crowd noise. Anyone else experienced this?
SOUND EFFECTS AND MUSIC
PLAYABILITY
ENJOYMENT
OVERALL
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.