Burnout, Sony Playstation

If you're a thrill-seeking, racing game fanatic, then Burnout for the PlayStation 2 is your kind of game. Gran Turismo 3 this is not. Burnout is an arcade-style racer with a big emphasis on spectacular crashes. Simple controls, massive powerslides, and delicious visuals. If that sounds good, you have to play this game. There are sixteen unique courses to race through in Burnout, and each circuit is loosely modelled on real locations. One track resembles Monte Carlo and another is reminiscent of New York City, for example. These levels are massive environments filled with different kinds of vehicles to avoid, which is easier said than done, as pelting through an intersection at 140 miles per hour can often end in tears. Trying to win is one thing, but avoiding dozens of other drivers is another. Burnout actually encourages reckless driving. If you want to fill your Burnout meter, then driving towards oncoming traffic and nearly missing other cars is the way to do it. Your Burnout gauge is similar to a boost of nitrous oxide, a healthy turbo charge with which you can surge into the lead at the last second. A change of depth of field plus a motion blur effect gives a great sensation of speed. At the end of each race, you can replay the crashes from a variety of different angles and adjust the replay speed. Crashing while turbo-ing yields the best results. You can almost imagine the insurance guy with his head in his hands. Burnout has a good feel to it, an important aspect of any driving game. It is twitchy, but in a good way. You often have less than a split-second to react to a given situation, so concentration is important: blink, and you won't see that truck. You really feel the pressure of racing, especially on the last lap, when it you're almost guaranteed a clip from one of your opponents. By turns a delight and an infuriating experience, Burnout plays with your emotions as well as your body chemistry. Seat of the pants stuff, then, and that's the major appeal of this game.

Buy Burnout for 7.99 GBP

WRC II Extreme
The original WRC made some of the biggest, boldest promises ever seen in the world of interactive entertainment. Sony's in-house development team, before previewing the title at E3, assured us that massive, free-roaming environments would be accompanied by the most realistic set of physics ever seen in a car game. This turned out to be a slight stretching of the truth. Drunken, bitter developers f...
Pac-Man World 3
1980 was the year that Pac-Man exploded onto the videogame scene and has never looked back. Since then, the yellow dot-muncher has starred in countless games and has been the inspiration behind many different products, from breakfast cereal to air fresheners. In Pac-Man World 3, it is up to you as Pac-Man to save the world from the evil genius Erwin. With a desire to rule the world, the latter has...
Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Lockdown
A best-selling novelist whose books have been the subject of many a Hollywood blockbuster, Tom Clancy now seems to like nothing as much as the array of storytelling options offered by video games. Ubisoft develop his Splinter Cell games in-house but the popular Rainbow Six and Ghost Recon games are developed by Red Entertainment. Clancy's baptism into the world of video games began in 1998 with th...
Lego Island 2
Although Lego's infamous coloured bricks have entertainment children for many years, the young population is now more interested in computers and the likes. Keeping up with the times, Lego's media division has produced many Lego-based games for entertainment platforms and home computers. Continuing the trend, Lego Media has now released a sequel to the popular Lego Island, shockingly titled Lego I...
Dark Summit
Following the popular releases from the CoolBoarders series, the snowboarding genre is moving onto next generation platforms in the form of Dark Summit. Already released on Xbox, Dark Summit is now available on PlayStation 2. It may be slightly less impressive in the visuals department, but it packs in all the gameplay of the Xbox version, and then some. There is something different about this mou...
EyeToy: Monkey Mania
Sony Europe's EyeToy series has made huge strides in the field of fun and accessible party video games. The games come packaged with a USB camera and allow the player to project his or her image onto the screen, and - facilitated by relatively simple digital technology - use their very likeness to interact with objects in the game world. It's a wonder nobody had thought of it before! The first ite...