Test Driven: Burnout 3, SLUS-29113

Welcome to Test Driven, a look at previews, demos, and unfinished builds of racing games new, and old. It's the amuse-bouche to understand what the chef is going to serve you when it comes to the full meal, and a deeper dive into history if it calls for it. It can be a demo found on a disc in a magazine, an official press preview, or tucked away in a full release to show off what else the publisher has on offer.

And if you developing a game and want me to try and then write about it, you can always drop me a line.

To start off, we are looking at the demo for Burnout 3 with the internal PlayStation ID SLUS-29113.

Summer, 2004. School may be out, but Saturday night is still a school night because you have Sunday School tomorrow. You just need to make it through the dry scripture and the murmurs the adults claim to be hymns, because after church the family is going to Walmart. You keep on your best behavior, because the reward is the glow of a CRT and a chance to play a new game in the electronics section. You deal with having to strain your neck while looking high in the sky with the TV up above the walls of new games, because this was the payoff of having your Sunday being taken away from you before getting your Happy Meal on the way out.

On the Gamecube, there was Mario Power Tennis. While just on the standard court, the power-ups and special abilities more than made up for your relative inexperience at tennis games. You did just enough to eek out a set against Waluigi, but needed to keep moving along to the next system before it was time to go. It felt good though, and you always make sure to try the Gamecube demo since you don't have one at home.

Next in line was the Playstation 2, and the blue background with gameplay behind the solid red text that simply said Burnout 3. That gameplay looked crazy to you; and a remarkable change from when you saw Burnout 2: Point of Impact in passing on the Electric Playground. The carnage in the crashes was spectacular from the kid ahead of you, but you still had a race to run when it came to your turn.

You struggled off the line in your classic muscle car, but immediately got the memo when the car behind you boosted alongside before making it to the first turn. He got a boost from slipstreaming behind you, but now you had the chance to make them pay. Before entering the split tunnel you target fixate on their door and slam them into the wall, their car crashing spectacularly. Woooaaaahhhhhh. In that moment of shock and awe, a mail truck is unsighted in the right lane and you drive straight into it. Your muscle car is launched into the air and skids on it's roof as the rest of the field drives by. That sequence was all you needed to see to know what you were getting into, before doing two more races before being scurried away by your parents. They were only one lap anyways, they didn't take long but you were still thinking about what you just played while having your cheeseburger and fries at the McDonalds in the Walmart.

By Summer 2004, Burnout 3 was already well on it's way to becoming the best racing game ever made. This early alpha demo, compiled on May 29th, 2004, was already an incredible proof of the work done by Criterion Games to make the game they wanted to make. It's just one lap of the downtown track in the muscle cars, but the core of Burnout 3: Takedown's fantastic racing and driving are in tact. A lot of that comes from the foundations already in place from it's predecessors allowing development priorities to be shifted towards redefining what it meant to be a Burnout game. It was a change that was a long time coming.

The original Burnout is a curious game when looking back on the franchise as a whole. Though there was never explicitly an intention for it to be a arcade cabinet racing game, it feels like it was built to be a cabinet racer first and then be ported over to the home consoles. The fairly strict timer, the comically low top speed, the relatively punishing penalty to the crashes, the game's more in-depth stat tracking plus the very long track lengths gives the impression of needing to push in a couple quarters for the privilege to be the one who causes those crashes. The actual single player campaign was incredibly dry, splitting time between tournaments on those lengthy tracks and the one-on-one faceoff races to unlock new cars. But even in this relatively dry shell, there was something there to build up from; which was fully exploited come Burnout 2: Point of Impact.

B2 reveals itself as less compromised by the original's perceived mixed intentions. Refined across the board, this is some of the best pure, raw, action-focused racing you can do on consoles. It's still tied to the foundations and tenets of it's predecessors in terms of having a countdown timer and the more in-depth score tracking, but it doesn't feel like a detriment with B2 not bogged down by potential compromises that exist when pushing quarters was the goal. It resulted in a more complete set of game modes and tracks with much more reasonable lengths. The first edition of the now iconic crash mode was in B2, and you did need to run into the escaping vehicle to damage them in the game's hot pursuit mode. There wasn't any positive response from you running into their car beyond parts flying off, but there was something there that could be seen as leading to what Burnout 3: Takedown would become and eventually leading to the fantastic Road Rage mode.

This demo of Burnout 3 sans the Takedown sub-title is a crossover point from where the franchise was, to what it would become in 2004 and beyond. The start of the race is still a standing start, and you can get a boost start from doing a burnout on the starting grid. Though only accessible through GameShark cheats, the game still had the option to run with a manual transmission; though it, the rev bar and the gear indicator would be scrapped in the final release with the explosive nature of the boost on demand requiring a more simplified driving experience in that regard. Being more simplified in that regard was the way to go, with the emphasis then placed on not holding back when it comes to aggressively driving into your rivals and maximizing the dangerous driving that you could do with the new boost system. They were building upon what already worked in B2, but giving it a new lease on life having reached the ceiling of what was previously possible.

Though it plays exactly as it would in the full release, you can tell this is still not yet ready for it's time in the spotlight. The full suite of graphics in crashes and takedowns wasn't incorporated yet in this build and there was no music in the game period. Considering this demo's probable purpose, it's unlikely that the tvs would have had audio turned on in the Walmart or a Circuit City anyways. But visually, the sound effects, the gameplay and driving controls are all there in the way you would know as being Burnout 3: Takedown. The sense of speed and the overbloomed sparks and neon lights are on full display in the downtown track; a track best built for this purpose with the relative simplicity and short track length. If you were on the fence after reading previews in a magazine or watching shows like the Electric Playground, your mind would certainly be made up after a race or two in this demo back in the day.

The fortunes and the direction more action-oriented racing games would take would not be the same after the full release of Burnout 3: Takedown the September after this demo was compiled and released. The complete change in direction and focus that was at the forefront of Criterion's first release published by Electronic Arts set the path the Guildford-based developer would then go down for the rest of the decade, and even beyond with how they would treat Need For Speed in their first two cracks at that iconic franchise. Even their first person shooter release BLACK had to be marketed as Burnout with Guns after the success of Burnout 3, Legends, and Revenge.

This PS2 demo of Burnout 3 Takedown may be just one race, but it's one race that led to a lasting legacy that cannot be understated.