Burnout 3 takedown custom music
Not only that, but the actual Burnout mechanic is gone completely! No more earning extra boost and chaining Burnouts by driving on the edge for extended periods of time. While it works extremely well for what it’s trying to do, it also reduces the importance of driving skillfully to earn boost since you can just ram your nearest rival into a big rig to fill the bar. I am somewhat torn on the Burnout 3 boost system. On the other hand, crashing will reduce the multiplier and visibly destroy a chunk of your boost bar. Now, you start each race with a boost bar roughly the size of Burnout 2‘s, but as you ram your rivals off the road you can earn up to a 4x boost multiplier which gives you a massive boost bar and a ludicrous amount of boost power. Burnout 3 changes all of that by tying your boost bar to the Takedown mechanic. While you were able to sometimes push opponents into traffic or obstacles in the previous games, it was never a core aspect of the gameplay.
Enter the titular Takedown.īurnout 3: Takedown transforms the game from a pure arcade racer into a combat racing game. The old Burnout formula was basically perfected in Burnout 2: Point of Impact and Criterion could’ve just made an upgraded version of that game for their first big-budget EA release, but they decided to change things up instead. The gameplay is what’s important, and Criterion has once again nailed it.
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Burnout is now well and truly a mass-market entertainment product geared towards the extreme sports audience of 2004 that loves the likes of SSX and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, and only Stephen Root’s title screen music is there to remind you of the more humble origins of Criterion’s series.įortunately, the try-hard “extreme” presentation is only one aspect of Burnout 3: Takedown, and one that can be rather easily ignored. There’s an obnoxious American radio DJ (“ DJ Stryker on Crash FM”, apparently a real-life DJ on KROQ FM, whom you can thankfully shut up in the audio options although he’ll still narrate the occasional tutorial and annoy you immensely in the process), product placement for AXE body spray and various EA games, a licensed soundtrack featuring a couple of gems (including The Ramones’ classic “I Wanna Be Sedated”, “This Fire” by Franz Ferdinand, and the delightful “Hot Night Crash” by Sahara Hotnights) but mostly consisting of generic mall punk and butt rock, and constant text pop-ups telling you how EXTREME you are. (EA Enlarged? EA Embiggened?) At first glance, Burnout 3: Takedown is barely recognizable as a Burnout game. When Burnout 3: Takedown arrived on store shelves in September 2004, it could be described as “ SSX on four wheels.” This was obviously not meant as a knock on the game’s (near-perfect) quality, or SSX‘s for that matter – the point was that despite Burnout 3 lacking the EA Sports Big branding on the box as it technically isn’t a sports game, it has a completely different style than its predecessors and has been thoroughly EA Big-ified. Basically, SSX was the quintessential EA Sports Big game. The original SSX was arguably the best game in the PlayStation 2’s launch lineup (although I do like me some Tekken Tag Tournament, and Ridge Racer V is no slouch either), and it received a number of sequels that were even better. The EA Sports Big label would be used until 2008, and in those eight years the branding would appear on various releases such as the Street spinoffs of EA’s FIFA, NFL and NBA titles, but by far the most popular and enduring EA Sports Big releases were the SSX snowboarding games. It’s tricky to rock a rhyme, to rock a rhyme that’s right on time, it’s tricky! Image credit: MobyGames – SSX Tricky (GameCube) Obviously, all the swear words and other questionable lyrics were cut out of the songs so as to avoid being too extreme, and more importantly to keep the ESRB age ratings low to maximize profits. The trademark EA Big style featured all sorts of EXTREME catchphrases, product placement from popular real-life brands, and a lot of early 00s rap and nu-metal. Well, some middle-aged Electronic Arts executive’s idea of attitude, anyway.
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Back in the year 2000, everyone’s favorite evil software giant EA introduced a new publishing label named EA Sports Big, intended for distributing various arcade style and extreme sports games dripping with attitude.