Sweet. Two things, though:

1) Slightly misleading title

2) Despite being pretty much an EA hater, played BO:R today and was stunned by how good it was. The gfx are stunning and the gameplay's far superior to the other games. I liked it so much, I ripped it to my Xbox HDD on the spot

That is all.

______

♦
A serious house on serious Earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognised, and robed as destinies.

~Philip Larkin,
Church Going

nice.

Treb can you comment on how the whole hitting traffic thing works in Revenge. It concerns me that you can now blat into traffic heading in the same direction as yourself. To my mind this has the danger of watering down the Burnout experience.

I still despise B3, it's a game that is riddled with randomness and horrible difficulty spikes. It just left me cold . How does this new version stack up.

I had a brief go of 3 and didn't like it. I didn't like 2, either. This stacks up to the first in my opinion. Hitting traffic going in your direction is very odd - it wouldn't be if you got no boost power for it (and still had to dodge / skim to build it up), but this isn't the case. To be honest, though it's not a big issue. Because hitting stuff pushes it in front of your eyeline and obscures your driving, it's still best to avoid traffic unless the mission is to hit it. Works well as a combo multiplyer when in a battle, but is strange in race mode.

Overall, it's a weird addition that'll take some getting used to, and is definitely making things feel a lot easier in the early levels, but I'm doubting it's going to be a big issue.

The visuals are amazing, particularly for something built on middleware (I thought the last one looked too plastic-y), and has a gritty (yet oddly hyper-real) look. Lighting is far better. Yep, good game from what I've played.

______

♦
A serious house on serious Earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognised, and robed as destinies.

~Philip Larkin,
Church Going

Had a 10 minute blast on this today in Gamestation in Reading. I found it a little easy, but I suspect that I was somewhere near the beginning of the game. The races I competed in could have really benefitted from a few more cars. Racing against the circuit lacks the adrenalin of the previous games, because you can pick up little patches of boost and then play it safe by driving down the right side of the road. Once you've taken out two or three rivals and you're out in front it looses its edge.

I'm still intrigued by this, I have a fondness for what BurnOut was, and I don't think all of it was changed for "takedown".

I just get the impression the game is totally dumbed down, and any taxing tasks are presented in a long winded format, utilising the same skill level but with a longer attention span.

Because I'm such an "uber l33t" gamer, even BurnOut 1 had me crashing on purpose to make it more tricky. Some races I'd be so far ahead it was just tedious. And the same for the second title. I don't think the easyness has appeared from nowheare.

Once you got into the groove that was it, the tracks never questioned driving skill, just a question of learning them and the preprogrammed traffic patterns and avoiding complacency.

Because of the highened state of awareness you get from other games, and the way BurnOut eases you in hideously gradually its always going to feel a little dry. I dintinctly remember being dissappointed with the extended difficulty of 1 and 2 though, just as it was getting started, that was it finished.

I bought the PS2 version of this and it does seem to suffer from loading time (even from an HD!!).

I prefer a separate Crash Modeso will most likely be dusting off my Xploder so that I can try all the Crash locations with a more suitable car than the ones available initially.

The initial fun of (literally) driving through the other traffic soon became a little stale. I think in later stages you have to avoid the big stuff (buses and big trucks) so that could make life a little more interesting. I am not convinced by the fact that the only way to extend time is by hitting the other traffic going in your direction.

I did badly on the first race at the first attempt. Managed over 1,500,000 on the second attempt. Some of the crash areas strike me as being a little difficult.

This game is a hell of a lot of fun online, if you get a group of players of a similar standard you can get some extremely tense races going and some of the courses are really well designed for this.

You can take shortcuts to cut out harder sections of the track but these are invariably narrower with walls that can easily be hit - it mixes the risk reward system really well. The tracks remind me of some of the ones in San Francisco Rush on the DC with huge jumps to find if you look around a bit.