The Greatest Racing Franchise EA Abandoned

in my last video I talked about the burn and rubber series which was one of my favorite browser games to play during the Twilight years of The Flash era they weren't the most technically or graphically impressive games and they didn't set the world on fire with Innovation but they were enjoyable simple games that were easy to get into without also treating the player like a child throughout that video I didn't just talk about the series but also the numerous games that inspired it like Twisted Metal Need for Speed and in particular a series I alluded to at the end of the video burnout burnout was such a unique singular experience in the 2000s there have been few games before or since which have captured that feeling that the burnout games gave off the perfect balance of Good Vibes immense speed and impeccable destruction all paired with mechanics presentation and gameplay that still hold up immensely well today the only question I have now is what happened to burnout and how did we get the acclaimed excellent titles we did well for that I'd say we need to look back at where the series started [Music] [Applause] to start us off we have to go back to the beginnings of the game where a team of developers working at a British technology development subsidiary of Canon began in 1996 under leadership from representatives of Canon but soon they brought on figures who had become pivotal to the company's success like Alex Ward later in 1996 and Fiona spey in 1997 as well as the general team expanding going into the New Millennium they also started game development with Scorch planet in 1996 which was a simple little Doss 3D flying shooter I don't know why but this game heavily reminded me of cybermorph from the Atari Jaguar where did you learn to fly where did oh come on it's also interesting to me that Criterion started on PC seeing is after 2000 they wouldn't touch PC again until 2008 meaning the vast majority of the games we're talking about today aren't natively available on PC they then started working on other projects including a number of racing games like speedboat attack Suzuki star extreme racing and trick style and also a couple submarine s simulators I I don't know why but early Criterion devs must have just really liked submarines or something but a commonality in almost all of their games minus the subsims is that they were heavily influenced by the waning Market of arcade games from around this time and I don't mean arcade like how I describe an arcade racer now I mean arcade cabinet arcade the thing most of us under 20 probably won't recognize outside of that thing every Chuck-E-Cheese has 30 of on the back wall but back then arcades were heading towards a significant decline in popularity at least in the Western Market only matched by the Apple named video game Crash of 1983 which most historians call one of the biggest shakeups in video game history but at this time almost all developers especially those making non-pc exclusive games were heavily influenced by or had even worked on a number of arcade games up to this point including many of the Criterion devs that kind of arcade DNA can be felt throughout a lot of their early titles and even into the first few burnouts speaking of which the earliest bits of information on the origins of burnout come from Fiona spei where she describes it as originally a game meant to show off the power of their ever evolving renderware engine as they now are working with the much more advanced and complex Hardware of the PS2 the initial Concepts had much more in common with Crazy Taxi or driver than what we ended up getting but they also started drawing from outrun and the earliest need for speeds when coming up with ideas both of which can be felt in the handling of the burnout games they also Drew heavily from film going back to watch car chase thriller films like Basic Instinct or car culture cult classic short films like which gave them a feel for how they wanted the driving racing and especially the crashing to feel once they had started development the next problem was getting the game published they began pitching the game around although to many at the Time arcade Racers seemed like a pretty saturated Market with Sega GT Metropolis Street racer outrun Ridge Racer Mario Kart crash team racing and of course Need for Speed not to mention a number of other more obscure titles so many Publishers felt the game wouldn't have anything to compete in the space or new to add to the experience not seeing the fresh ideas the team was bringing to the table one interview with THQ was later seen as a complete joke by the developers as THQ suggested they turned the project they were working on into a Hot Wheels game and I'm going be honest I don't know if we would have gotten any of the other releases if that had happened but eventually they got an audience with Rod CS cowon CS they got an audience with Rod cson of Acclaim entertainment Europe who having already worked with the studio with trick style was an easy pick to work with all the information on this and more can be found in Fiona's right fighting in the three Fields entertainment blog on the history of the series remember them because they are going to come up later actually but finally in 2001 we got the first entry into the burnout series and it was H you remember whenever I talked about the first Midnight Club and how it wasn't very good I will argue that burnout one is a much much more enjoyable game than midnight club one was but it's unfortunate that with the hindsight of where the series will go it reminds me a lot of my thoughts on the first three Midnight Club games that being the first was a decent Commercial Success which brought new ideas to the genre whilst also showing the beginnings of the presentation and gameplay present in all the future titles the second is the answer to what if the first game was good while also fleshing out some mechanics and making a couple smaller additions and the the third game is the massive stylistic shift which also came with some major gameplay changes that added to the overall experience while eventually becoming the commercial and critical peak of the series and looking at it like that burnout one looks like it's not that impressive but for its time this was actually something really significant starting with the base points and going deeper the physics feel mostly fine being very much in the same vein as games like outrun Ridge Racer although it has its own unique brand of break to drift which I really like because it's basically break to drift that doesn't feel like break to drift like when entering most Corners you have the ability to still do them without drifting which can be advantageous on some tracks and breaking and losing momentum isn't the only way to initiate a drift those same principles will apply to basically every burnout going forward and it's good to see them starting all the way back here but burnout one's interpretation of it is significantly slower the crashes and destruction were one of the main selling points of the game and while I can't think of another racer especially from this time with comparable damage it's still a bit disappointing knowing what they'd go on to do they're also all covered in that classic PS2 blur that all the games of this era were so fond of this wouldn't really be that big of an issue if the crashes weren't uncommon occurrence unfortunately they're not you'd honestly think they'd just add a crash mode if they like them this much you often times get really BS crashes where it looks like you barely tapped anything and your car has no physical damage yet the game counts it anyway these break the flow of gameplay often and remind me a lot of the crash cams in later Need for Speed titles I've even seen the AI get in [ __ ] crashes like this also semi trcks are death not just from being big but because all the individual Parts have separate Collision so it's basically the [ __ ] you obstacle when it comes to the campaign the races are long like the first few races in the game vary between 7 and 10 minutes per race and the weird bit is the races actually get shorter as the game goes on especially in the second half another thing is it took me far longer than it should have for me to realize the only way to get new cars is to do the faceoff challenges that are separate from the campaign and that you unlock after every tournament this would be fine if the game communicated to this to you in any way but it doesn't it only tells you about it in the manual which I sort of get because on one hand having to read a manual or something like this was definitely a more present thing back in this era of gaming but on the other hand you should not have to read the manual to figure out a game that's this simple the game is also really hard for no reason because the difficulty isn't actually in how fast the cars are or and how much grip they have because every car goes basically the same speed with only a couple except ceptions that barely go any faster and the handling of the cars is only affected by their wheelbase but the difficulty is instead based on how large the car is and the game knows this because it literally ranks the difficulty of cars in increasing order of size this is because the opponents the track design and the physics aren't your biggest obstacles in races it's the traffic which seems like it wouldn't cause many issues but the problem with that being the sole challenging factor in races becomes apparent after only the first couple championships where you often times get a very boxy straight wide track where traffic is extremely easy to dodge while still charging boost followed immediately by the exact opposite a tight windy complex track with no room to run nor hide meaning the difficulty varies wildly through a playr however burnout one did introduce a number of series Staples like the Boost bar which recharges by performing dangerous driving and decreases dramatically after crashes it only had unlicensed cars because initially the publisher didn't have the budget to even remotely consider getting licensed cars and later on because car companies saw it as bad for their professional reputation insert that one Ford executive quote here it also introduced crash cams which at this point were more of an annoyance than anything else ah how could I forget the crashes the thing you spend a quarter of your time in this game doing when it comes to the audio the music is generally fine nothing too spectacular here and the general audio design isn't that great but it's one of the few games that has a fully adjustable sound slider this is the best way to adjust audio and if your game doesn't have this I'm deducting five sound points as a final note burnout one looks average to slightly below average for its time graphically and I think that's basically my opinion on this game as a whole fine but nothing super impressive although definitely an innovator in its space my question now is why go back to burnout one when you already have a better burnout one that game being burnout 2 or burnout 2 point of impact is literally the better burnout one right off the bat this game looks better than burnout one and feels so so much better to drive in this driving field is much more in line with what we'd come to expect with the series in later installments but with a couple major differences I'll get to later the car list is much larger and more varied than in Burn out one the game's presentation is much better too with more interesting menus and a much better soundtrack composed by the prolific Steven roote although in my opinion it's still a far cry from the licensed soundtracks at the later entries on the topic of audio this game sounds a lot crisper than burnout one did with the engines the Collision sounds and this really cool feature I found with the audio that I don't see many other racing games doing which is the gamees semi adaptive music by semi- adaptive I don't mean it's on the level of something like the grid race music or the Need for Speed Most Wanted Pursuit music where the game has layers that individually fade in and out in relation to what's happening on screen here burnout 2 just turns down the music and to my ear slightly reduces the low and highend frequencies of the music basically the bits that give it punch and energy then when boosting the game cranks the volume up and brings up those frequencies again giving it a much greater feeling of power and speed than without it I really like this because it gives a feeling that adds to the sense of Speed without having to do too much extra with the camera work or driving feel although slight note about the audio there was this weird buzziness in the engine sounds which I think I can chalk up to emulator issues but I've seen weird stuff like there's this video comparing the various versions of the game and the PS2 version has some of this scratching and crackling but the backdoor emulated ps4 version has way more and it sounds a lot closer to what I'm hearing on my emulator so if you all have any definitive answers on What causes this and how to fix it please let me know and I'll probably add a note to the description the collisions were also improved in a way that would carry over into the later installments now you have to hit the cars more directly in order to crash out and they also have this weird Quirk that I would best describe as a grace period SL Zone basically if you just graze something while your car's momentum is moving away from wherever you're hitting it's not likely that the game will count it as a crash this is a little inconsistent in terms of use which sounds like a bad thing but it comes in handy on so many occasions that it becomes a key part of driving quick in this game also the crashes were improved across the board with their frequency greatly diminished in two to the point where finishing a race without a crash is less of an unattainable pipe dream and more a practical goal that players could actually achieve but that doesn't mean this game is a cakewalk because you could easily lose time to the far more varied track design the faster and more competent AI or even just mistaking where the next part of the track goes the CRA crashes are no longer the sole defining point of difficulty and even then they're still improved in the best area the spectacle as Now crashes are more violent kinetic destructive and borderline explosive although that bit would come later in one if you crashed out it usually looked something like this he's burnout too [Music] [Applause] it's night and day and two shows definitively how much improvement was being made in the series the new crash mode puts these improvements on full display as you watch your car launch into a moving intersection and you get scored based on pure destruction these can be a little tedious in the early game and the majority of the events are locked until after you beat the main campaign but this was at the very least a strong proof of concept that had massive potential all in all this was an enjoyable experience and I see why people still say this is one of the best entries in the series but to me it does have a few problems as much as the physics are an improvement over burnout one they still feel a little stiff to me and this isn't actually exclusive to this title many of these games including my favorites have a slight slightly stiff feeling which can make split-second changes in Direction hard to execute now you might say well yeah that's realistic Cars Moving that fast aren't exactly going to be easy to turn and while I would agree with that I counter with does any of this look realistic to you when turning at high speeds in this game especially when drifting I usually have to hit the brakes while turning then wait for a second for the car to respond and certain cars like the superar completely change the handling meaning you basically have to relearn how to drive in the later races that actually brings me to another problem this and to a lesser extent the other burnouts afterwards would have that being that many of the cars feel too similar to drive but in Burnout 2's case you spend hours with cars that all feel roughly the same and have then thrown a completely different feeling car near the end so you basically get the worst of having a lot of variety and very little Variety in carfield at the same time lastly this was one of the three burnout games that use the classic burnout boost gauge which basically means you can only boost when the meter is completely full and the best way to play the game is to try and chain as many boosts together as possible I don't know what it is but I've never been big on games that limit when you can use boost or not I think I got that from playing Need for Speed both because a lot of those games rely on the quicker decisions that can be made when you can choose both when and for how long you can boost and that throughout its history Need for Speed has never fully decided which one it was going to have like the blackbox era had it the normal way except Pro Street then they went back with Hot Pursuit until payback then in heat they ditched it for a stage system then Unbound got funky with it and said well why not both but either way I'm not too big on burnout 2's boost system and I'd much prefer the more conventional setup but despite my criticism I still enjoyed this game a fair bit not on the same level as some other titles that would come later but it's still a good time and it demonstrated that this series could properly succeed and innovate its ideas and the next entry would solidify it as a genre classic [Music] this time the background behind the game's development was a bit different going back a couple years before burnout was initially released Criterion had developed an in-house 3D API and rendering engine which they would use on all of their projects and would grow in scope and usability over that time this simple tool set and render would eventually become what we know now as the renderware engine and it would become one of if not the single most popular game engine of the 2000s as Criterion licensed out their engine to companies like conami vicarious Visions Ubisoft heavy iron Studios and Rockstar among others this and their continued success of the burnout series got the attention of Electronic Arts who negotiated with Canon to buy Criterion in July 2004 for an estimated $48 million this was perfect timing for the burnout series as it not only gave the company an influx of cash and resources for their upcoming projects but it also gave them a new publisher as their previous publisher for the burnout games Acclaim would go under less than 6 months later this game would also have the longest development cycle of any burnout to that point starting 15 months before its final release in September 20 4 early Concepts and demos for the game suggested it was originally supposed to have a much darker tone and some like fellow racing gamist race driver 43 have even suggested it was supposed to be a horror game showing the terror and brutality of the kinds of crashes the game has back when it went under the development name Burnout 3 Crash and Burn I feel like some of this horror energy is still in the game because while the final game generally has a much brighter and upbeat tone sometimes and crashes the game will play sounds like this I remember even as a kid thinking these were a bit unsettling and I think that theory gives some Credence as to why but finally in late 204 we got Burnout 3 takedown like burnout 2 this game looks and feels better than its predecessor but in a more subjective way than the improvements from burnout 2 this change in feel is less from how different they are on a purely technical level and more on how the rest of the game is built around it the general track design and increased difficulty of effectively linking drifts together and the over-the-top camera effects add to the already intense sense of speed I'm going to get a little bit meta for a second and say something about how this game looks YouTube's low bit rate compression has always been unfavorable to racing games because of their constantly shifting backgrounds more so for Burnout games and even more so for Burnout 3 and after so if this game looks a bit muddled try watching the video in 1440p if you have the internet to even if you only have a 1080p screen because you get that extra crispness of the higher bit rate either that or follow my recommendation and actually just going out and playing the game yourself to me this has one of the best best implementations of sense of speed in a racing game other games may be faster and other games might be more violent but of the games that are known for their intense sense of speed like Need for Speed Shift 2 Forza Motorsport 4 or Most Wanted this is tied with prostrate for my favorite sense of speed and I mean that very literally because I think sometimes people forget what sense of speed actually means sense of speed isn't just do you feel feel like you're going fast it's also do you intuitively know how fast you're going that's why it's called sense of speed a lot of racing games nowadays are really good at getting one of these right but not both modern racing Sims are often criticized for not having a great sense of speed and while many of them don't feel fast a lot of the time they do give a very real feeling of how fast you're going which makes sense given the function of those games and on the other hand I think a lot of arcade Racers now struggle with the opposite problem pushing 200 or higher in Horizon 5 or Need for Speed Unbound feels genuinely quick but it's often hard to judge how quick when breaking entering Corners which can mostly be laid at the physics for me the games that hit the balance perfectly are pro street and this it's the combination of blistering speed Nimble yet weighty physics and extremely welldone blur and lens effects for the time and like Pro Street very real consequences for failing to realize just how fast you're going the game also has much better presentation all around like the two previous games look like adaptations of ideas and design from the arcades and to an extent that's what they were but three looks much more like it was built solely as an atome gaming experience and it Nails it while also being unique to itself maximizing the spectacle without ever making the game feel overwhelming or too grandiose almost like a massive evil coneval stun the game was also paired with an iconic soundtrack of pop punk hardcore and classic Punk all of which just add to the pure aggression of the game like how could you not Vibe out to Smashing muscle cars together while listening to this you Brea and keep or drifting sports cars down a European Villa with [Music] this for piloting an F1 style rocket ship with this the music perfectly complements this style of gameplay although I will say the tambal pallette of the full OST is a little limited like the only song I wouldn't describe as some kind of punk or rock is the main theme which was one of two contributions by Steven route featured in the final game the other being the theme that plays when unlocking new cars speaking of the cars they both added a bunch of new cars to the game as well as dividing the cars up by their type and adding in a handful from burnout 2 for good measure it also noticeably improves my critique about all the cars feeling Samy in too by having most of the cars in a single type drive very similarly with only minor variations but having separate types drive vastly differently from each other especially in the late game they also fixed another one of my issues with two in that they made the boost gauge function like it does in basically every other racing game at this point so now I have a much easier time controlling when I use my Boost the crash mode was marketly improved Now featuring way more events giving the player the ability to control their car during the crashes and being more tightly integrated with the career mode although not in an overly intrusive way also paired with a damage model the quality of which we could only dream of in the modern day its function in the campaign is basically the same as how the cop and racer missions were in Hot Pursuit 2010 which makes me think now that this was the inspiration for that seeing as they were both done by Criterion what I mean by that is both show up equally on the map but you never never have to interact with one to complete the other so you can play the game for hours at a time and never touch a crash event and vice versa I feel like I'm forgetting a feature oh yeah uh how could I forget takedowns it's literally in the name takedowns were finally added to the game which makes complete sense given how the last two games felt it was a bit odd that you couldn't do proper takedowns in those games and you had to actively fight against the game systems to cause your opponents to crash here it's as smooth as butter and looks amazing while also keeping the takedown cam from breaking the flow of gameplay with a perfect combination of short length impactful sound design and Immaculate Transitions and these are all best shown through one of the new game ones that was added road rage you may be able to guess the premise yeah it's literally just a score Target of how many takedowns you can get in under a certain time and an AXS is a perfect reprieve from more difficult events as it's basically the most enjoyable turn your brain off game mode I've seen in basically any game another thing with the takedown mode is how it fixes one of the most subtle yet important problems with the first two burnouts see in Burnout 1 and two one once you crash you lose control of your car and have to wait a couple seconds which makes sense you were just in a car crash but also this is a video game and at that it's a burnout game so how do we correct for this well you make it to where you now have the same aftertouch ability you do in crash mode allowing you to steer towards opponents coming the other way and possibly score an aftertouch takedown this both gives you an opportunity to recover your L Boost from a crash while also ensuring that the player is always in control and basically always active so instead of the crash is acting like a hard break in game play they act as a small Valley in energy to the takedowns Peak giving the player a simple reprieve before revving right back up to 100 now with all these positives this game sounds absolutely amazing and it is it currently stands as not just the most highly rated burnout game but as one of the most most highly rated racing games period but like everything it has its issues for starters this game is significantly longer than the last two games put together with easily over two dozen hours of content for a first time player looking to beat the full campaign that sounds like a good thing and in some ways it is but a game this simple can get more than a bit repetitive 5 10 and especially 15 or more hours in although I think this is is also a part of the game's Core Design I have a feeling that this game wouldn't seem nearly as repetitive to me if I wasn't making a video on it I say that to mean if you play this game for a couple hours at a time then go off and play something else or do something else then come back after say a few weeks this game would deliver Peak enjoyment rather than what I'm doing which is playing the game for several hours at a time or for a few hours over several days back to back and based on how I hear people people talk about it most people don't play Burnout 3 like how I did here they spread the game out more and in that case its repetition is far less noticeable another thing I noticed was the track design now for the majority of the game the tracks are made in a way that complement the handling very well with most tracks having fast flowing corners and lots of elevation changes to make the driving even more enjoyable however there is an area of the game which was actively designed to punish the player for driving how the previous tracks had incentivized the Europe map which is many areas where bits of walls and fences stick out further than normal meaning you're quite likely to crash into something that looked fine to slide by on the other two maps this can be particularly annoying on road rage events where your car could lose all of its Health long before you get close to finishing the level and in races where it's easy to lose a sure win because of a loose brick in the wall and a small final note as much as I enjoy the game's soundtrack it is more than a bit limited genre wise so if you're not big on 2000's Punk or the punk that influenced it you're probably not going to be too big on this they also removed the semi-adaptive music feature from two but even taking this into consideration I still think this is where the series peaked and it's where the foundation for all the future titles was laid but unlike a lot of the series Peaks I talk about I don't think three stands a alone as a great of the genre hold on boys before we keep going allow me to fulfill a contractual obligation that's right I've partnered with gamer Subs the drink from jebadiah J Jonah Jamerson Jared schlapman himself I've partnered with gamer Subs to bring you great flavor and caffeination or a lack of caffeination if you choose a caffeine free variant as a college student and Creator I genuinely use this to keep me alert and awake on a couple late night essay and video essay writing sessions and I really enjoyed their dragon fruit punch and pineapple cocktail flavors during those late nights and their caffeine-free lemonade flavors during the day and if you don't like a normal cup for your drink and you're a socially isolated ginch and impact Reddit moderator you could also look at getting one of the many waifu cups on offer so if you're interested go to Gamers subs. gg/ fast Miner and use code fast Miner for 10% off your purchase and now back to burnout I've never been able to fully pin down why but when I was growing up Revenge always seem like a different kind of game compared to something like three and while now I can tell just how similar they are especially in context with the whole series I still get some unique vibes from this game a contributing factor to that quality could be partially down to how I played it see this was the first burnout game that was made available for seventh gen consoles namely the Xbox 360 but notice I said made available for and not made for because Revenge shares a common trade of many games from this transitional era in that it was released for two different generations of Hardware but the next gen version is really just the original but with better textures and the only bells on whistle is a team dealing with brand new hardware can learn in like 8 months I've played both versions so I should be able to comment accurately on both if you're looking to get the game the 360 version is basically the definitive edition as long as you like the taste of aerosolized ultra bright piss covering your screen and can deal with the most grading boost sound in racing games but I actually wouldn't recommend getting the game on the 360 because if you own any Xbox console from the last decade you can just buy it right now from the Xbox store and play it on your one or series console that's how I played the 360 version a few years back and that's the way I'd go if you have one of those systems if you want to stick to PC I'd say go with the PS2 version because a lot of the difference in the graphics can be made up for with higher resolutions and actually now Community made texture swaps so you can get the 360 quality textures on the PS2 version but enough about the differences between the various versions I think it'd be better to show the differences in this and the other burnouts you may have noticed with the last two games that each installment in the burnout series comes with its own thing that it adds to the gameplay formula burnout 2 was the crash mode burnout 3es was the takedown and revenge's thing is traffic checking it's basically having the aggro ability from Midnight Club but on any car that is either stationary or moving away from you and that isn't a semi-truck or bus now this is a good idea in concept but there's a problem see if I showed someone the first burnout and asked them what they thought the game was missing they'd probably recognize that the game is focused around crashes and the spectacle with them along with the races so they likely suggest a dedicated crash mode and in Burnout 2 they likely recognize how the track design and handling works best when fighting with your opponents on track so an easy addition to make would be to allow players to more easily crash out other drivers but for traffic checking it's a little more indirect on how they got to that and it kind of shows now I'm not going to say it's a bad feature or that it was poorly implemented because generally it wasn't slash isn't that but it's also not without issue this is no better exemplified than with a new traffic Attack Mode which takes the princip of the road rage mode but replaces the opponents with packed double lanes and these events are really cool for the first couple minutes and for about 30 seconds in every subsequent traffic attack because unlike the opponents there's usually not much challenge or Nuance to these events opponents swerve out of the way SLAM into you in order to crash you out and also drive at a comparable speed to you while most traffic usually just kind of sits there and while yes there is the occasional bus or semi in your way it's usually not an obstacle because either the traffic is so dense that whatever you just hit can be used as a barrier to block the bus or the traffic is so sparse that you can see it coming a mile away and miss it easily I'm sorry rvic there's just no tension here although I will agree with you that one of the best parts about traffic checking is using it in races because there are few things cooler you can do than SL slamming a van or taxi cab into an opponent like a cruise missile and this is why I say it's not a bad feature because of moments like this especially in road rage events where the AI is a lot more aggressive and inyour face and it's always nice to take them out at a distance speaking of road rage I'm really not as big on road rage and also the crash mode here as I was in Burnout 3 because they switched their functions within the campaign see in Burnout 3 the most events were the burning lap events I.E time trials because they often times required you to beat an entire race without crashing for gold and select race events where the AI forgot to stop rubber banding after they passed you but it's flipped in Revenge now the crash events are some of the trickiest events to get a full score on especially in the early game and road rage events which used to be a fun fairly easy reprieve from the general races now are some of the more difficult events from a combination of both way more aggressive Ai and tracks that have way too many little bits and pieces that you can get stuck on like what I said before about the Europe map in Burnout 3 and in general I think the track design is a bit weaker than two and three as well mainly because of its increase in straight grid-like roads which clash with the flowing and free form handling not to say there aren't still some high-speed s bins and tight hair pins but there's noticeably less of them than in two or three although to make up for this they introduced shortcuts which I'm more neutral on sometimes they're really engaging giving the player A New Path with some added boost at best or an easy crash at worst and sometimes you question why they even bothered for a final note on new additions they added crash Breakers to races but not super effectively see the crash Breakers themselves are great giving the player the ability to explode their car to take out their opponents after crashing effectively taking the feeling from the aftertouch takedowns and cranking it up to 11 the problem is they limited it to select races meaning that you don't get to experience stuff like this super often if I was pacing out the career I would have had a handful of normal races at the start then switch to predominantly crash breaker events which they actually do in the game but only past the halfway mark if it were up to me I would have started them around the first quarter of the game because they make the racing just that little bit more engaging because in most race cars your crash breaker is also very weak which means there's actually some really nice strategy involved in exactly where you're going to pull the trigger on your two-ton bomb speaking of the cars this is another area where the game is pretty weak but the solution is already in the game because the majority of the cars use in races are just variations on a few cars most of which are just imitations of real life Vehicles like the Pagan Z TVR NSX Seline S7 and for some reason several 300 C's but this time they basically feel all the same the vast majority of the car list are just sports cars with a lot of reused body shapes and Chassis but the thing is the game has more varied cars but only in cra mode if you wanted to race a Rena 5 turbo a truck or a classic American Sports Car well too bad idiot now you might think after all that that I don't like this game but that is far from the truth because outside of the things I mentioned I'd say this is the closest game in the series to competing with three the game looks and feels a bit more polished than three especially on the tracks that that are more reminiscent of Three's design although on the visual front everything does look a fair bit more yellow compared to three's more balanced color palette also in terms of presentation I really like these cool little golden statue cinematics that the game has for completing certain objectives which effectively replace the signature takedown scenes from three I also really liked how the soundtrack was now a bit more varied and of the time and while I might have disagreed with Ray on the traffic attacks I can't help but agree in saying that this game sounds like nothing else especially on the 360 version there's also a bit more content than in three but it still comes with the same caveat of adding more of the same content to a burnout game but even with that this is still an amazing game with most of the same polish and Care found in Burnout 3 so I hold it near that same level and if you can go and pick it up while it's still in the store if only the servers were still up now that would be something [Music] else now these next couple games are going to be a bit confusing and to start off that confusion I don't really know how to feel about burnout Legends because it isn't a Mainline game and nowadays doesn't really leave much of a reason to go back to because on the one hand this is an effective combination of the tracks and cars from the first three games crammed onto a 2.52 in UMD and on the other hand it's basically a very low resolution game of Criterion playing the hits because nothing in this game is original Sans the physics that just feel like slippery Burnout 3 but is that really a bad thing it is just a PS SP game and having what is effectively portable Burnout 3 sounds like it would be really great especially since it has all the cars people like from burnout 2 brought over but that's also about it like there's not many other ways I can say that there's not much here I could see how this would have been a great title to have on the go and I'm not disparaging the idea that the game is good or that you can't like it like if you had this growing up you probably really enjoyed it but there's just not much else to say except for be glad you didn't have the DS version I like how this and Most Wanted are considered the worst DS racing games I guess the better the main console game is the worse the DS Port is I don't know [Music] I almost don't even know if I should consider this an actual entry into the burnout series seeing as Criterion didn't even make it it was actually outsourced to a studio that almost entirely made Harry Potter and sports games and Need for Speed Shift on the PSP so I don't really know how to feel about this as a burnout game then again it actually does have something to offer besides just rehashing what the previous games did like in Legends instead of this game being built around crashing and takedowns as the main component along with the racing it focuses more on getting as high a score as possible in both of the new challenge and Maniac modes challenges are usually divided by a certain type of skill like drifting near miss or burnout and it's basically just a test to see if you can hit a skill Target in the allotted time it's a lot like the offensive driving courses at the start of burnout 2 but this time it's a game mode in the career rather than just a tutorial Maniacs function very similarly but you just have to hit a score Target and you can use any skill to achieve it and burnouts multiply your score oh yeah I should probably talk about burnouts they sort of brought back burnouts from the first two games but with a bit of a new spin on it in Dominator you can still boost when you've got any in the tank but recharging an empty boost bar takes a while so instead you can just fill up the Boost bar and activate a burnout so while you're boosting you can fill a burnout meter which is that little thing behind the Boost bar which is much easier to fill so when your burnout runs out you can immediately start another one if the burnout meter is full effectively chaining them together I like this idea in concept but but I don't like how the game relies on it to do so much of the heavy lifting gameplay-wise because it's not just the fastest way to get around the track but it doubles as the best way to hit score markers in challenges and Maniacs as each burnout you chain together increases your point multiplier for all skills you do so you're going to spend the vast vast majority of your time either using burnouts which feels great or trying to survive while not boosting despite having plenty of usable boost which feels stupid on a similar note the cars have been changed slightly with a solid number of new additions along with some returning favorites from burnout 2 3 and revenge and physics wise especially at low speeds I really like the handling of the cars I like how immediate they feel at low speeds but at high speeds it's basically the same as we've come to expect at this point the method of unlocking cars has also changed Around The Game's new mechanics instead of cars being unlocked from standard race wins you now have to complete certain skill and score targets to unlock cars or take the car down a given number of times in races to unlock it why did I think that said jcole but there's just one tiny problem with the cars they're held together with duct tape and chewing gum the cars in this game getting crashes when hit with a light Breeze I've gotten taken out by me hitting another driver if that happened in Burnout 3 or Revenge I'd assume my game was broken and it's not just the opponents the tracks are also actively out to get you so if you don't know exactly what you're doing this game has some ridiculous difficulty spikes for no reason and this genuinely made me quit the game early because from what I've heard about the other races it only gets worse with faster cars and needing to basically string burnouts together for an entire Race So if you're desperate for more burnout I I I guess give this a try but I generally wouldn't advise it they didn't even include a crash mode hopefully Criterion can bring it [Music] back Burnout Paradise marked another massive shift in the series both in it moving entirely to nextg hardware and to a new style of gameplay in its massive open world in a retrospective at the 4C Prague conference development director and artist for Criterion Jack Griffin talks about the planning and development that went into Burnout Paradise in the talk Griffin shows what influences and changes they were looking at When developing paradise and how a shifting landscape both culturally and technologically led to a wildly different experience than with previous games Griffin talks about how games like Most Wanted 05 Test Drive Unlimited one and Tony Hawks Pro Skater influenced the game shift to an open world which as you may have guessed was paradise's thing like how takedowns were to three or traffic checking was to revenge and on a surface level this was done extremely well and that would only become more apparent over time as it influenced many of the open world racing games that would come after especially in the Need for Speed series although that bits partially down to Criterion taking over from blackbox in the coming years the problem is much of the design both environmental and gameplay-wise fails to understand what made the previous burnout games work for many players but not in the way that you'd think unlike what we would see from Criterion later where a lack of Direction and the pressure from Big EA made it nearly impossible to make a proper followup to a racing classic with Most Wanted 2012 Burnout Paradise reminds me more of something like Grand Turismo sport in that the changes made don't feel like they've come down from a corporate directive or out of sheer Financial desperation but out of an established Studio's desire to try something new and experiment while also focusing in on the ideas they liked like for an example let's start with the most fundamental part of any racing game the physics the physics in this game are interesting in that they are almost nothing like the physics of the last three Mainline games for those familiar with them this game basically serves as a middle ground between the physics of the earlier burnout games and the physics Criterion would develop for the Need for Speed games they would work on it sort of has the general blueprint of classic burnout handling but with the weightiness and arguably sluggishness of the need for speeds especially at lower speeds the game actually did something really annoying physics wise with ties into another Point I've been making you know how I keep bringing up the game's cars and how it's nice to have each car feel distinct from each other but when we're talking about Arcade Racers I'd say you don't want them to be so different that you have to effectively relearn the physics in order to drive them see the superar from burnout 2 now Burnout Paradise is a special case because I drove around in the basic Burnout Paradise starter car and I thought it felt way too slow sluggish and heavy but my first thought on that was well it's a classic muscle car of course it's going to feel like that then I unlocked the si7 which looks like a mix between a Delo and fto and an S14 but under steer like it's a Honda Odyssey and so this feels just as sluggish in the corners as the muscle car did and that had me concerned and made me think that all the cars were going to be like this and then I drove a big SE SUV and that was the most agile of the three what how does this feel better to drive than that I eventually figured out through both online play and progress in the single player that most cars did not handle like those two at the start which I'm very glad about but there's another issue that the physics play into that I'll talk more about later another example of unique and unheard of ideas was their style of races now most open world RAC games have races that fall into one of two categories either checkpoints or roadblocks basically races that either have specific distance markers along the track allaf fors a horizon or midnight club or races that have anywhere outside of the race area sectioned off notably found in the Need for Speed games Burnout Paradise chose neither of these and instead went with a completely open approach which means you have to find your own route to the the Finish Line sounds really interesting and it can often lead to Unique path finding and Corner cutting in order to win but there's a few problems one there are only eight Finish Lines on the main map so it's very likely you'll just drive a route until you hit a relatively familiar line then just stick to that known path until you hit the Finish two because of the lack of Direction you're going to have to check the mini map and Compass often to have a good idea for where you're going and like how looking at your phone IRL would it often leads to and three as you get quicker and quicker cars you start to have a much harder time maneuvering them in what is the busiest map of any burnout game which brings me to that note I mentioned earlier about the physics that being that there's what I could best describe as a pseudo input delay with the physics what I mean by that is pretty hard to describe but if you've played the Criterion and later ghost Need for Speed games you're probably very familiar with what I'm talking about it's basically a lack of response and immediate feedback when turning the car which makes it very difficult to make split-second Corrections before a crash visually and audio wise they made some massive improvements with the car models and environments being far more detailed now that the team had fully been able to utilize the new hardware of the seventh gen consoles although due to the extremely dense map design and combo Bloom covered and heavily filtered lighting this is the most visually cluttered of any burnout game almost making it hard to tell certain parts of the map apart or even traffic right in front of you apart from the road ahead although on the audio front this is probably my favorite in the series if Revenge sounds powerful Paradise sounds dense and crunchy the sound design was done immaculately and I seriously think it's the best sounding game in the series from the Roar of a musly V8 to the crushing impact of a hard crash to the squeal of tires moving at over 100 mph there are elements of the audio here that sound better than a lot of racing games out today speaking of modern racing games Paradise was also a Trends Setter in one of my my least favorite trends of modern racing games but not one that's inherently a bad thing see much of the game was designed around open world exploration and checking all the neat little additions as well as the unique environments and varied settings the game has to offer which is fine in and of itself but something that the developers found out later is that the majority of players weren't doing the races so we had a quite a powerful Telemetry engine we knew where people were playing what they were doing really understand where they were crashing and we found out that 90% of our players weren't even kind of doing the Races they were just kind of driving around focusing on the social features so early on we added a whole um new load of hundreds of challenges making more of the social aspects of the game of the kind of Hub areas uh for people to kind of get together rather than adding new events um where places where you could just be meet meet up and kind of like mess about like a playground which is kind of what we wanted um anyway which to me is a bit telling because while yes those aspects of the game are enjoyable what that stat tells me is that the players found it more enjoyable than most of the actual events this is what I have an issue with because from my perspective this is one of the earliest major racing games in a category I call racing games where racing is one of the weakest parts of the game and you may notice that a lot of modern open world racing games fall into this category although to be fair just good racing does not a good racing game make fora Motorsport has some incredible racing and that game is so I'm not going to sit here and act like that's the only factor to a racing gamees quality because it obviously isn't but I would argue it's an important one and this isn't a Sim versus arcade thing either because a lot of Sims have some boring ass racing and a lot of arcade Racers have some of the best racing in the genre even in the burnout games but like many of the racing games Criterion would work on soon after Paradise there is a major saving grace to the weaker single player experience and that is the multiplayer the multiplayer in this game is so much fun especially with a fuller Lobby whether it's racing trying to hit objectives and score targets or just smashing into each other while trying out different cars one of my personal favorites was trying to get about four to eight people together getting all of them parked up at an intersection and starting a game of Marked Man well Marked Man is a fairly one note mode in the single player basically just being hunted down by Heavy Muscle Cars and like an inverse road rage in multiplayer it becomes a super engaging game of getting everyone to chase down a single out player with no boost who can't see their Hunters on the map basically like a combination of hide and seek road rage and Halo Oddball and it is great and I think stuff like this is what really works in this game I put out a poll a few weeks back asking my audience what they thought the best burnout game was and despite expecting a landslide victory for three Paradise was the one to win it and yes I can chalk up some of that to it being the most recent and most readily available of the series I think stuff like this also plays a massive role in why the game is remembered so fondly and I think despite my issues this is one of the best games I would show to someone getting into racing games for the first time if there's someone into online multiplayer communities large open worlds where they can go anywhere and do anything and games that are best experienced by just [ __ ] around and finding out then I'd say Paradise would be a great game to start them on although if there's someone who prefers more structure focus and immediacy three would probably be the best for them although despite burnout paradise's success it remains to this day the last burn wait hold on I'm getting a phone call here wait a minute that's not a phone call that's burnout crap oh well I actually had played this game before on Xbox Live arcade and while it was something I did enjoy the fact that it was basically just a downsized version of the crash mode made to fit onto 2011 spec phone screens although if I just wanted that I had about half a dozen options on newgrounds.com but discounting burnout crash and unknown to players at the time paradise would end up being the last proper burnout game we got but why is that well there's a few reasons why but the biggest of which was a little franchise that EA had been working on in the background nothing major just the best selling racing game franchise up to that point yeah at the time Need for Speed was in its major flux State as their main game leaders in blackbox had been slowly floundering in sales and receptions since Most Wanted and EA's attempts to throw smaller and less experienced Studios at it hadn't exactly been super successful so they DEC decided to take Criterion off of burnout and get them to lead Need for Speed into its new era and to start them off they decided to reboot the oldest subf franchise in the series giving us Need for Speed Hot Pursuit in 2010 this was seen as a major success by the studio which Vindicated EA's decision even more when black Box's final entry the Run underperformed critically and commercially leaving Criterion as the primary development studio for Need for Speed I would go into more depth about the first Criterion era of Need for Speed but I've got something big plan for that later so the tldr is they would also go on to make Most Wanted 2012 and sort of Rivals both of which were not nearly as well received as Hot Pursuit was and I say sort of there for a reason because in 2013 EA gothenberg recently renamed to Ghost Games was brought on to head the need for speed franchise which was immediately followed by 80% of the Criterion staff moving over to ghost which itself was immediately followed by a classic of the games industry Mass layoffs this meant many of the former Criterion devs were no longer under a Criterion or even EA studio and things weren't going too great at what was left of Criterion either as leads Alex Ward and Fiona spey along with programmer and technical director Paul Ross left the studio in early 2014 and would go on to form three Fields entertainment three Fields is a bit of an interesting story that I'll probably cover in more detail if and when they finish their newest title but as of now they're a studio which is so far made fairly simple games with the same ethos as the burnout games starting with dangerous Golf and lethal VR in 2016 and danger zone 1 and two along with dangerous driving in the following years both danger zone and and dangerous driving draw heavily from the burnout games with danger zone taking from the crash mode featured in most burnouts although without anything that would still fall under EIP and dangerous driving which takes more after the races and takedowns despite generally positive critic scores these games haven't been particularly well received by longtime burnout fans which is a little unfair given the scope of these games and the team size and budget they have to work with but these games Al aren't exactly hidden gems either although I do have some hope for improvement given the increased development time for Dangerous driving 2 later renamed to Recreation because this game gives me some real burnout me a Hot Wheels inspired fh5 track editor Vibes which already sounds like a really cool idea for a burnout game when it comes to burnout proper yes we haven't gotten a full game in over 15 years but we did get Burnout Paradise remastered in 2018 a faithful if unremarkable remaster of the game with better graphics and lighting as well as all the DLC that was available for the base game they also removed almost all of the at the time advertising including but unless you have to have 2008 era advertisements in your burnout game I'd say it's a more than fine way to play the most recent burnout and that's basically where the story ends for the franchise there have been murmurings here and there but a possible return for the series but as of now it's all just smoke without a spark in sight but from a purely corporate perspective why would they need another arcade racer when they already have the single most recognizable name in the space And while I understand the initial logic in that from a pure business perspective I still take issue with it I take issue with it for the same reason I wouldn't want EA to just throw out grid because it's an arcade racer variation is good and compared to where we were in the 2000s we're basically in a drought of new arcade racer game releases especially in the double and AAA spaces so I think now would be the perfect time to look at a proper burnout successor especially with it still being as relevant as it is in the racing game Space hell while I was working on this video Burnout Revenge was featured in an episode of smiling friends one of the best shows out right now burnout is still relevant and to many still holds an important place as one of the greatest racing games of all time and we'd all love to see it come back [Music] [Music]

Channel: Fastminer07

Views: 34,390

Keywords: memes, burnout, burnout revenge ps2, burnout paradise, burnout revenge, burnout paradise remastered, burnout 3, burnout 3 takedown, burnout 2 point of impact, burnout 3 soundtrack, need for speed, criterion games, electronic arts, racing games, classic racing games

Id: fJKwqymOXEE

Length: 68min 6sec (4086 seconds)

Published: Tue May 28 2024