Burnout Revenge
Eli 4.11 loved the crash mode of Burnout 3: Takedown, and we spent many funny hours crashing ridiculous numbers of cars and laughing our asses off.When Burnout Revenge came out, I made an exception to the "no purchase EA" policy because I wanted us to have more wreckage.
Actually, I buy Tiger Woods for the PC every year, because it's Headgate, and I usually buy NCAA because it's the least-sucking team sports title EA makes, but other than that, it's Gamefly for me. Which didn't sound very convincing at all, really.
Well, crash mode in Burnout Revenge for the Xbox sucked. They added the equivalent of some stupid swing meter to determine your velocity at launch, and the camera angles were just horrible--many times, you couldn't even see cars as they were werecking. So it got recycled to a friend within hours, because Eli said "Daddy, this isn't very fun, is it?" and he was right.
When the 360 version came out, I got several e-mails from you guys about how crash mode had been substantially improved--namely, the launch meter was gone. I was interested, but I'd already bought the damn game once. The price kept dropping, though, and when I saw it for $29.99 this weekend, I broke down and picked it up.
Good thing, because while crash mode is still kind of screwed up, the rest of the game is absolutely stellar. And at $29.99, it's a great deal.
Camera angles in crash mode are still hosed--sometimes you can manuever your view around, but Burnout 3 did a wonderful job of letting you see what was happening, and in Revenge they change cameras too often to non-functional angles for that particular crash. Still, though, crash mode is fun.
The other modes are where the game is incredibly fun. There are races where you're basically trying to rub out the other cars (and they're trying to rub you out). There are just single lap time trials. There's a mode called "traffic attack" where you have to keep hitting cars (and keep moving) to add time. Eli absolutely loves this mode--running into other cars is some kind of brilliant talent he has.
Plus there are ten different levels of accomplishment you can achieve, and a special list of "signature" takedowns that you can perform, and they created these funky trophies that actually animate before you see the final image, which is amazingly cool. And the game looks fantastic beyond all reasonable expectations. Phenomenal, really.
So except for lousy camera angles in crash mode, this is a fantastic game. And it's proof that EA can be involved with a great game. They should be analyzing what goes on at Criterion to help them understand why so many of their other studios suck.
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