Archive for the ‘Racing’ Category

I’ve been playing the Burnout Paradise Demo on and off for the past week or so, and the first thing I have to say is that, while impressive, the entire impression of the game is largely lukewarm. Almost every good feature (and there are a lot of them) of the game has an annoying or downright frustrating feature attached to or resultant from it.

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Okay, seriously. The one single word that came to mind when I saw this track listing was “w00t”! This has easily got to be one of the best track listings for a game and any game that features a song by Killswitch Engage absolutely must deserve props.

The EA website has confirmed today that some of the tracks included on the new Burnout game include “My Curse” by Killswitch Engage, GNR’s “Paradise City” (how convenient!), Seether’s “Fake It” and Jane’s Addition’s “Stop!” as some of the tracks that will be featured in the game.

FINALLY!!

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Are you sick of being penalized even by your games for banging into other cars, or not sticking to the driving line? Are you fueled by a mad rage to empty that nitrous boost and go fast that you seem to be caught in a time warp? Do you have an insatiable need to crash your ride mercilessly into someone else’s and turn the most sophisticated speed machine into ten cents worth of scrap metal in 1.8 seconds? Is your middle name “Speed” or “Crash”? If you answered “yes” to any of those questions, then, Burnout is the game for you, my friend.

For years we’ve been driving like the crazed, dosed-up maniacs that we are in EA’s and Criterion’s flagship mega-destructive racer and starting today, we’ll finally be able to take the latest Burnout game, cheekily titled Paradise, out for a test drive. And no, we definitely won’t be bringing it back in one piece.

The demo is now available on Xbox LIVE Marketplace and the PlayStation Store and weighs in at lesser than 900 MB, allowing us hours of fun pulling off hairbrained stunts and the most spectacular crashes possible in both single as well as multiplayer modes. Showing off the new EasyDrive matchmaking service and the Burnout Mugshots with the PlayStation Eye / Xbox LIVE Vision cameras, the demo allows up to four maniacal speed demons to trade paint and other assorted car parts online in a sadistic orgy of screeching, rending metal across three FreeBurn challenges, before the full game crash-lands into our lap come January 22, 2008.

Stay tuned for our impressions on the demo tomorrow, provided we can actually take some time to put the controller down and spend some time typing them out.

Remember how it always feels good to discover a scrunched up, long forgotten currency bill in your dirty, old jeans that you had stashed away sometime back and then completely forgot all about it? Well, I had the gaming equivalent of that feeling when discovered that Burnout: Paradise demo is coming out on the PS3 and the Xbox 360 on 13th December, 2007. A quick check on Google confirmed the demo release date along with lot of details about the demo that will make all the Burnout fans out there mark the date on their calenders.

Here are some of the goodies that the demo has on offer:

• The demo map will be roughly 1/10th the size of the actual game map. Considering the fact the actual game map is gigantic in proportions, the demo map will be giving gamers quite a lot of area to explore.
• Three modes of racing will be available in the demo: Stunts, Burning Route and Race.
• Stunts mode, a new in the series, will involve you getting into all kinds of spectacular jumps, barrel roles and grabbing as much air as possible using the strategically placed ramps. Stringing together consecutive stumps will maximize your score and earn you bigger score multipliers.
• Burning Route will be a point-to-point race while Race will be the usual where you take on other cars in a battle to be the first to cross the finish line.
• If you are the kind that went crazy about the “Hidden Packages” in the GTA games, then you will have a whale of time discovering and smashing through “Burnout Billboards” and “Smashable Construction Pillars”. The game will keep track of how many you have found and taken down.
• Auto repair shops will allow you to simply ride through them to get back your ride in top-shape. Similarly, Paint Shops will paint your cars on the fly.
• Online feature of the demo has you and your pals joining in for a session of Freeburn Online where you can go all out on specially designed stunt sessions.

If this does not get your adrenaline all pumped up in the way only Burnout can, then we wonder what will. For those who had paused long enough from reading this, to mark there calenders, Dec 13th is sure going to be one lucky day!

When it comes to racing games, as far as the average Indian gamer is concerned, it’s Need For Speed that rules the roost. Even to the point of giving Counter Strike a run for it’s money, albeit in a different genre. Thanks to the numerous iterations that we have seen for this game, it has managed to get into a position where any racing game that would hit the market would have to be compared with Need For Speed.

Lately though, the situation has changed quite a lot. With the advent of other racing games like the superb Burnout series and the new contender, FlatOut, and I am only talking about the arcadish racing games here, EA had to do a serious re-think as to in which direction was the series heading. There was a flicker of hope in it’s outing as Need for Speed: Most Wanted but that gave way to a disappointing Carbon. So when we got to see the new, slick trailers for ProStreet, we were excited that maybe, just maybe EA is taking heed of what the fans have been clamoring for so long. When the demo finally showed up for Xbox 360, we eagerly downloaded it to check it for ourselves.

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Waiting for a game can be so tough, especially here where we’ve had to wait eons for some titles, or face the unhappy prospect of importing the damned things from Play-Asia. With Microsoft releasing all first party titles on Day 0, we were kinda surprised when PGR4 failed to follow in Halo 3’s release footsteps. With still no PGR4 on shelves, we contacted Microsoft for an official word, and while they haven’t mentioned a reason for the delay, they’ve promised that racing freaks should be able to get their hands on the game “by the end of the month or early next month.” Good news for those suffering from PGR withdrawal symptoms, I suppose, although we’re still waiting for an official comment on the release date of Gears of War PC. In the meantime, I suppose I can always amuse myself by riding around on top of a Ghost in Halo 3 co-op.

Yeah, so the last article I posted didn’t actually say Part 2, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t!

In part 3 of our WCG 2007 (and definitely our final article on this event, we bring you an interview with one of the WCG participants - Ajay Chekalia. We also interviewed another gentleman who pretty much kicked ass at Counter Strike : Amitoj Duggal, however, due to extremely fucked up audio, there’s no way we can put it up here.

We spoke to Ajay about the event and what he thought about it. He shared some interesting insights with us and explained the advantages of using a wheel for racing games, the super-quantum flux theory and why Freud dreamt of trains going into tunnels.

An interesting (but we found amusing) point he made, was the fact that once you’ve played 1 racing sim, you’ve played them all. Ajay came 2nd on day 1, in PGR3, considering that the only other contender was his friend, but overall he ranked 4th in the Delhi leg of the tourney - but this was the 1st time EVER, he’d played the game. So all his practice hours were pretty much spent with NFS Carbon. Yeah - you got it. NFS Carbon is the shit!

Overall, this guy pretty much knew what he was talking about and we found it quite a delightful experience talking to him. Good luck in Mumbai, old chap. Have a jolly good time and bring us back some goodies. Perhaps we’ll invite you over to a cup of Earl Grey, lad!

Download the video here.