Crush Metal Replay.
By Rodentia

We were looking forward to this game here in the increasingly less imaginary Rodent Towers, we really were. So much so that we couldn’t wait to get our hands on it…

Matt: I've played the leaked version for a couple of hours. One paragraph review comparing to Wipeout Pure...

This looks like a PSone game, but it plays really well. Yes, there are visible jaggies, there are gaps bewteen textures and the textures are a bit shaky and blocky, but nothing too dreadful.

Menu system has lots of delays in it though. There's a 7-10 second delay before each replay starts and after each crash section can take anything up to a minute. This can irritate. Plays well other than that.

Ely: I half wish I'd not read that to be honest. Don't like the sound of the delays, BO3 was awful on the PS2 for this reason. I'm still going to buy it I think as I need something to play on me hols., but I'm less excited now.

Matt: It depends on how you play it. If you're playing crash mode, those delays will irritate you immensely. It’s not so bad if you’re playing races. Bear in mind that it’s loading from memory stick, so it's not a loading delay but more of a decompression/processing thing. The graphics are the thing that shocked me though. Not as good as they should be. Also, in game menus are really badly laid out in terms of text, font sizes are different between screens of the same type of info.

Also, i forgot to mention hardly anything deforms in this game. Your car – a bit – and perhaps the other car when in pursuit mode and that's about it. Definitely not in Crash mode, where the windows of the cars are just replaced by broken window textures.

Looks to be the same in the DS version, which only looks about 10% less great than the PSP version. That’s shocking considering the relative power of the two systems.

Ely finding something else to do on Holiday.

We haven’t actually seen Ely since his holiday. So we don’t really know how he got on – although we’re beginning to hope that he remembered to take Everybody’s Golf with him instead after Fuseball popped in, less than a day after the game was released…

Fuseball: God bless the GAME returns policy.

Burnout:Legends is Burnout 3. Only smaller and more difficult to make out what's going on. That's it. Burnout:Deja Vu, if you like.

Half an hour in and I'm bored shitless. And five minutes of that was spent turning off every single nu-punk shouty rock track (all of 'em) that EA assumes my demographic gets off on. At least the xbox one allowed custom soundtracks.

Ah, the joyous bounty that is an EA Soundtrack.

The one and only thing it gets right is that crash junctions no longer have punitive heartbreaker and multiplier bonuses. Shame the carnage is a bit feeble compared to the console pyrotechnics though. Doesn't help that you can't really make out what you're about to hit until you're on top of it either. The driving game tunnel vision effect means that you're looking at approximately a dozen or so pixels in the center of the screen just hoping to catch a glimpse of something resembling approaching traffic. Made my eyes go a little bit funny, truth be told.

As a port it feels incredibly lazy. There's seemingly no effort to make it stand out as anything other than BO3. At least Ridge Racers had the good grace to repackage the old so it looked like new. This is just old rope.

Matt: It's a 7/8 out of 10 rather than the 8/9 out of 10 that I think Wipeout Pure is. I mean - it's good, possibly very good. It's just not the best racer/game for me. It's nowhere near as good as IGN are saying.

Fuseball: It’s not even as good as Ridge Racers – although there's little new to that either, I felt that it had a clean look and a sheen of design that suits the PSP screen. Burnout:Legends looks identical to BO3, and thereby looks a mess. As you pointed out, the fonts are all over the place. It looks rushed. As if nobody bothered to optimise the front end. At all.

Matt: I know. Best racing game on the PSP? Not even close. Best racing game for teenage idiots? Maybe…

And then, just when we’d given up all hope for Ely’s sanity, he finds time to send in this from an internet café somewhere in the vicinity of Croatia.

Ely:Christ, it’s dull isn’t it? Do I really have to write 500 words on this?

Battle your way past heavy traffic.

Blimey. If even our resident petrol-head can’t find anything positive to say about the game, what hope does it have?

Well, maybe a little ray of sunshine courtesy of our resident Space-fiend Bog.

Bog:That’s really odd. I’m quite enjoying it.

Could it be that the massed Rodentia have got it wrong after all? Maybe they’re blinded by the shiny pixels – Bog elaborates in the way that only he knows how…

Bog:It’s a new experience in my gaming life to have a racer where the goal is to barge people off the road and cause huge pile-ups. It could be that, because apart from a few hours of Burnout 2 Crash mode at Markies and a similar amount of time with BO3 in the company of moobaa, Stevo, Zath, MadHippo and a bottle of 150-proof rum, I haven’t had the Burnout experience before.

See, I’m not a hardcore Muddafukka like Ely and Fuse. Go on, someone call me a dilettante…

To which, Rocky (ever the voice of reason), sensibly concurs:

Rockwaldo:That’s it in a nutshell. If you’ve played Burnout 1, 2 & 3 then there’s nothing new here – which is a shame given you’ve just splashed £35 quid at it. I think we’ll get this a lot with the PSP – nothing new but it’s handheld! That’s certainly a major pull for many of the PSP games on the way – if someone wants Burnout on the move then they have it. Why should they change anything on the way?

See, there are those who like it.

So, there you have it. Nothing special, but if you really feel that your life is incomplete without being able to play Burnout on the lav, then now you can.

October 2005

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