Curves matter less than traffic, I don't want to scratch my Red shiny Car.
driving at high speed through the traffic of C'était a rendez-vous is the spark that inspired a necessary aesthetic change, the enemy is the environment. It is no longer valid just to be fast, you have to have mischief. the first The Need for speed included traffic and police who fined you for speeding, but the aesthetics of the outlaw in a sports car was somewhat poor since nothing with enough force encouraged me to drive against traffic. Burnout rewards risk with its boost bar, a turbo that is only refilled by performing risky maneuvers, and here everything happens at the same time, it is a mashup of several driving games. You participate in races you have a route to follow, but its design does not resemble a competition track, and if it does, the suffocating presence of traffic reconfigures your route by force while offering a feeling of flexibility, passing at full speed between two cars that drive in parallel, get from behind a truck to an avenue in the opposite direction in a matter of seconds while overtaking a rival who crashes into a van, reach an alley where there are no cars but you must skid to avoid colliding with the corners ... god, the intensity.
this game has the effect The Fast and the Furious (the fourth); We stopped focusing on cars, and concentrated on creating action with those cars.
the bad thing: it's scarce. The superflexibility of the vehicles needs calibration, the slightest friction of the car with the traffic causes a beastly crash that placed us in a ranking of shame, and this would be great, I like it as a concept, but the chassis and the reward oscillate too much, it is very binary at times, and it's a shame, because ironically accidents are the best of Burnout
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Win your opponents by being faster on a closed track;
the aesthetics of the competition. That's what most racing games were inspired by. It makes sense, after all, video games have intrinsic sports qualities, the aesthetics of motorsport fits well with simulation or arcade, but curiously and probably due to technical limitations, much attention was never paid to the aesthetics of sponsor motorsport , pits (maybe?), the chassis, suspension, tires, fuel and telemetry until the arrival of games like Gran Turismo
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I think that the main attraction of videogames from the mid-90s to the late 2000s was to wrap the player through a more complex 3d space, the production was higher and more curious. Gaming began to be cinematic, but most games still did not have cinematographic language as such, rather they were inspired by the aesthetics of cinema in a more precise way (perhaps sick), or at least that is the feeling I have taking a look at the racing genre in particular.

Reviewed on Oct 17, 2021


4 Comments


2 years ago

you might like burnout 2 a bit better, or at least, i did. it's a more precise formulation of a lot of these key elements. i think the effect these first two outings have by focusing its fantastical lens on the mundane is really core to the series' conception of road rage and aggressive driving - the tutorial in 2 opening with you in a car that says 'student driver' and then advising you to drive directly into oncoming traffic kind of says it all

2 years ago

@kingbancho I'm going to play Driver and Ridge Racer V (a personal fav) first, but I'll definitely play all the Burnouts! I have decided to play games from the 2000s and make a list, so those are essential

2 years ago

i gotta get into ridge racer too...been playing a lot of racing titles lately. the vibes are immaculate

1 year ago

Did you ever play Top Gear? I think it's an interesting translation of the motorsport thing you mentioned without being dauntingly complex.