Burnout 3: Takedown

You just made a wrong turn, clipped a guardrail, gone spinning into a city bus and into the air, after which you brushed against a tree, hit the bonus cash, and now you've landed roof-down on Hardcore's Hardcorner. I simply can't stop playing Burnout® 3: Takedown™, the latest incarnation—and the perfection … at least until there's a Burnout 4—of Criterion's ludicrous-speed arcade crash-racer. The game is broken into racing, crashing, and game types that mix and match the two, like Road Rage. You can keep your detail-oriented Vin Diesel wannabes, your perfectly authentic real-world cars, and your roundabout circuits. Takedown, as the kids say, is where it's at.

Prepare for ludicrous speed!

Please check your lunch at the door, if you want to keep it. This game is fast. F-Zero fast. Star Wars Racer fast. We're talking Quantum Redshift® on crack with cars. In fact, scratch that—Burnout 3 actually is crack with cars, except no nasty health side-effects, even when your ride explodes in a fiery ball of, er, fire. Here's what a solid week of playing Burnout 3 has taught me about real hardcore arcade racing. And you thought Hardcore didn't have anything to learn …

Tap the left trigger to begin drifting.

Brake Before the Turn and Boost Out
If you learn nothing else about race modes in Burnout 3, learn this: Unlike previous games in the series, there is no manual transmission to abuse here—no downshifting into second, out of fifth, to take that next corner. Instead, you've got three "pseudo gears": brake, boost, and not-boost (usually pedal, or in this case trigger, full on the gas). It sounds simple, but at the speeds you're going, "brake, boost, and not-boost" are about as complicated as you want things to get. Use your brake going into a corner to start a drift, which should also give you just enough boost to get out of the turn, if you've run out. About halfway through the turn, your car should be sliding enough that you're more or less pointed the way you want to be. Now, slam the boost—if you time it right, you won't lose valuable milliseconds sliding up against a wall, or worse, turning right into it. In general, the faster the car, the less brake you need to apply to start the drift.

Drive Angry
In competitive races (as opposed to Burning Lap mode, in which your only enemy is the clock and one crash can keep you from the gold medal), you need to go after the other guys with fury—that goes for Xbox LIVE® online play, single-player Grand Prix, or any variation thereof. There's three reasons for this:

• It's fun to watch other cars crash, explode, and fall behind.
• You're guaranteed to wind up ahead of your fellow competitor.
• Your boost meter instantly goes from zero to insane.
  
  

There are lots of ways to get boost, but this one is the fastest.

Drive in First-Person
How can you make the ridiculous velocity even more challenging? Tap Y and switch to a first-person view to see the entire road. The trade-off is that everything will seem to be coming at you that much faster, and since you have a much lower angle on the action, it's tricky to see what's coming. But, you know me … I wouldn't have it any other way!

In crash mode, multipliers are a must.

$1,000,000-Plus Crash
Why settle for barely making the total for the gold when you can blow the record out of the water, lane, or freeway overpass? Never settle for anything less than the x4 multiplier. Unfortunately, it doesn't "stack" with the x2 bonus, if you get both, and the first few crash junctions don't even include one. But soon you'll have trouble getting gold without it (and forget about a million-dollar smash-up). If you're having trouble hitting it, try using a different car, if you have that option (this mostly applies to Xbox LIVE crash modes, as the single-player game generally locks you into one car). Use Aftertouch to reach the multiplier, if you didn't hit it the first time. If you still don't hit it, wait for the Crashbreaker and try again. Why not be content with just the gold? Because Burnout 3 is keeping track of every single dollar you make in crash mode, and you'll win new crash vehicles (like the bus, big rig, and delivery van) when your total reaches certain benchmarks.

Hardcore Crash Challenge
On the other hand, here's something that will prepare you even better for Xbox LIVE play, in which case you don't get a preview of the crash junction before you hit it: Skip the preview. Go in blind and learn the junction in mid-air, as your side doors get snapped off by a telephone pole. Try to get the gold medal with just an x2 multiplier. It's not easy, but it can be done, if you're careful to touch every car you can, triggering their doom.

Purist? Try the Burning Lap
If this game was nothing but Road Rage and Crash modes, I'd still love it more than several members of my family and most of the Judeo-Christian pantheon. Still, sometimes you just want to race, especially if you've been playing this series for a few years. That's when you go looking for the Burning Lap. It's all about beating the time, and in this case, you don't want to crash, like, ever. One blown corner, and it's time to start over. Frustrating? Occasionally. Will you keep reloading until you get it right? Certainly. Will Burning Laps make you a brutally efficient racer, especially when it comes time to take your game online? Hell, yeah.

Earn points and crash bucks to unlock new vehicles.

Get Circuit-ous
Holy $#@+! This is by far the most challenging class of racer in Burnout 3. It'll make old men cry, young men old, and everyone else scream for something, anything to put out the burning in their eyes. The circuit racer is your basic Indy car race, and in this game, it's the fastest thing going. All 10 bars are full on the speed side—though it's mighty light (making it a mercifully bad choice for online road rage games … it just can't take the pounding, which is good because otherwise they'd dominate). Try it in first-person, and you'll actually travel backward in time, according to our own Xbox.com relativity expert, Hank the Chimp. Hank and Hardcore agree: The circuit racer is the ultimate hardcore race machine.

A Word that Starts with "F"
You can't take a circuit racer to a crash junction. It's like bringing a phaser to a fistfight. You, sir or madam, want the fire truck. (What did you think I meant?) It's fast, which is crucial for reaching some of the power-ups and multipliers you'll need to hit. (The big rig and the UPS-like delivery van are lousy on jumps). And, of course, it's a big freakin' fire truck that will smash across as many lanes of traffic as you can find. It's also nice and intimidating when you head online.

Well, we've tallied up the damage, and it's time to close down the Hardcorner for repairs after that last pile-up (or maybe it was that terrible fire truck joke). I'll be back once my bones knit. Until then, this is Hank the Chimp and Hardcore, signing off …

Article by Hardcore