I have played what is perhaps the most purely joyful video game ever created, and I must continue to play this game, or my life will become much more sad and lonely, and I will not feel like quite the same person. It’s almost like I would feel like less of a man if I did not continue to play this game.
Burnout 3: Takedown has won me over, and it didn’t take all that long. I got a hold of the game last Thursday, and popped it in that night to check it out and see what all the buzz was about. I knew that the reviews were very well-scored, and I hadn’t actually read much of their content, but the numbers, as always, stick in my brain and influence my decisions like some kind of high-potency intoxicant. I had seen some gushing about it on Penny Arcade, which is usually a much more reliable source of this kind of information.
So, I stick in the game and give it a go.
Supports Live. Cool.
Supports custom soundtracks. Always a bonus.
Bad, bad licensed music - but you can turn it off. Nice.
I start racing and playing some normal street race modes, and it’s fun, but not overly, drag-out impressive. It’s much more fun than Gran Turismo for my money, because not only do you have to win the race, but you also have to play stupid, or you’re not going to win. And you can ram other cars off the road, which is always good. Other than that, it was a very good, easily impressive on a graphical level, arcade-style racer. It won’t win realism points from the GT crowd, but I don’t care.
And then, I started up Crash Junctions.
And with that, I found a pure fountain of joy and wonder. I played the game for the next 2 hours, laughing in a rather giddy fashion, gasping for breath in some cases, while I whittled away on bonus cars and unlocking even more crash junctions. I am now on the fourth lap around the world in finding new and interesting ways to create massive amounts of vehicular property damage and manslaughter. I still play the game in my mind.
To give you an idea of what it’s like, imagine a world with no real consequences - which covers most video games. Then, imagine very busy intersections, with traffic flowing in up to four different directions (maybe more, I haven’t unlocked them all yet). Then, imagine that a good deal of that traffic consists of large vehicles, like buses and trailers and petroleum tankers (those are the best).
OK, now hop in your car, take off at 100+ m/h, and then try to create the most amount of damage possible. It doesn’t matter how you do this - head-on collision, near misses causing other people to crash into each other, hitting a ramp and then bouncing off the top of other vehicles - you name it - while bouncing your little car all over the road. Then, you get to set off the car in a rather spectacular explosion - provided that you’ve crashed enough cars so far - in order to create more damage and to make this really, really cool looking flash explosion that sends other vehicles flying through the air, with no regard for safety or any other real-world concerns, save the dollar value of damage involved.
The thing is that there are little pickups on the road, tiny little reminders to you of the arcade nature of this gameplay. Much of the skill of the game comes from aftertouching your vehicle into those pickups and through traffic, which is a little tiny bit of Bullet-Time-like slow-mo you get right after either crashing, jumping, or exploding onto the scene. It turns into some development team’s sick (but yet, strangely fascinating and exciting) version of a puzzle game, where people like Ken and I sit around and talk about the best way to rack up enough damage to score a gold medal and move on to the next junction.
And now that I’ve been playing for a while, I’m starting to appreciate the other modes all the more - especially Road Rage, where the goal is to take out other drivers, not to win the race.
I haven’t even taken this game onto Live yet, and I’m already gushing about it. I’ll have to say more when I do take it online and see what kind of quality people are playing this little masterpiece of gaming.
And, oh yeah, Amanda totally doesn’t get this game. I can’t understand why.