You’ve never heard swearing until you’ve lived next to me as I played Burnout 3 or Revenge. It’s particularly aggravating when I can’t tell if what I just hit was sun-glare, or a bus that didn’t turn its lights on quick enough while the sun glared off of the highway. Playing on a 4K TV that is about triple the size of the TVs some of us were used to playing on in the mid-00s, I can’t help but yell at the lack of definition.

With modern hardware and even a few games, it is clear to see the spotty and angry 18-year-old screaming My Chemical Romance lyrics in the room. That isn’t to say Burnout 3 hasn’t been dated. That and the soundtrack grew up a bit in that year, featuring The Doors, of all bands. Takedown gave birth to my love of the racing genre. Of course, Revenge goes a touch further to refine the racing, the crash events, and the takedowns. With whiny pop-punk, angry racing, and a whole lot of pixelated sparks as you speed down the highway, scrubbing the barrier on the wrong side of the road, I was in heaven. That is when Burnout 3 came along two years later, tightening up the crash events, refining the racing, and of course (with the help of EA) creating a soundtrack that ruined my music tastes forever. While Point of Impact does improve on its predecessor, it never perfected itself into creating a whole new mold. Burnout 2: Point of Impact added a little more into the mix, creating a puzzle game out of crashing a car and killing several hundred civilians with the aim of bankrupting your insurance company. Burnout (1) was just a typical racer by most accounts, not breaking the mold but not filling it enough to get there either.

Yet, some mental cases in Australia rated it M, because the nanny-state thinks a game is irresponsible but drive-through bottle shops (liquor stores) are fine.Īs a series, Burnout is the greatest example of a series building on what came before it, all within 4-years of each other. In America, it was T for Teen, but in the realistic parts of the world, it was 3+. I am honestly surprised there wasn’t some sort of campaign by some bubble-wrapping psychopath turned talking-head on Fox News yelling “think of the children,” when it came to Burnout 3 ‘s rating. With pirouetting corpses of non-branded cars flying by as you speed into 1st place, nothing beats the true spirit of racing, killing other people so horrifically the only way to identify them is with their dental records. I recently returned to the series exclusive to the PS2’s generation, and it is every bit as beautifully satisfying and aggravating all in the same breath. It has been 18-years of swearing at those damn pillars, busses, and every time I’ve missed the multipliers for the crash events. The ultimate “blink and you’ll miss it” racer, Burnout 3: Takedown is the reason I don’t think I am allowed to drive.

Burnout 3 takedown pc version