Driving Strategies

Burnout® 3: Takedown™ sees the Burnout name and license move from Acclaim Entertainment, Inc. to the monolithic Electronic Arts, and the move means much more than the (long, long, loooong-awaited) Xbox LIVE® debut of the beloved crash-obsessed racing franchise. It also means even more rewards for driving like a complete freakin' maniac. Since I already do this in real life, my humble editor asked me to share some Burnout-style driving tips.

Takedowns interrupt the action … beautifully.

Don't Lose Focus
This is harder than it sounds. Picture this—you're driving along and trading paint while dueling with another driver. You succeed in running his nose into the front end of an approaching semi. Suddenly, your eyes are pulled from the high-speed warp effect in front of you and snap into a slo-mo view of an opponent crashing all to heck. Where did you go? Just be ready for it.

Beware of the Blind Hill
The blind hill is the bane of many a Burnout 3 racer. The most exhilarating part of the Burnout experience is hitting your boost and launching yourself over a blind hill, with up to four lanes of oncoming traffic possibly heading your way, trusting to luck and fate that you'll land and live to near-miss that bus another day. This was always extra nasty on Burnout and Burnout™ 2: Point of Impact—Director's Cut, as multiplayer was primarily split-screen and your view of the hill was necessarily cut off. With Xbox LIVE-enabled play for Burnout 3, this is no longer a problem, but you should still switch to first-person view (no car) to get the best look at what's ahead.

Watch Out for Oncoming Traffic
It's still the easiest way to build up boost, but don't be content with just barreling past trucks and cars going the opposite way. Rack up as many near misses as you can, too, but watch for those blind hills. You'll never run out of boost this way, since it will constantly replenish. Risky? You bet. Rewarding? Just try it.

Fly the unfriendly skies of Burnout 3.

Go Ahead and Abuse that Transmission
Don't treat the car like you're driving Sega GT 2002 or something similar. Brakes are okay for getting the drift started, but some corners demand that you abuse the manual transmission within an inch of its life. You'll only go so far using an automatic tranny.

Fastest is Not Always Best
You don't always want to go straight for the muscle car or one of the faster unlockables that will open up for you. Boost speed can make up for a lot. So, if you value cornering or control more than acceleration, go with that feeling. (And, let me know what your Gamertag is.)

Rear-ending Isn't Always a Recipe for Disaster
You'll have to practice a bit to get the hang of nudging a car out of the way, if you don't want to crash into it (forcing the racer next to you to crash into the nudged car instead). As a rule, though, you can manipulate cars that are headed the same direction as you as long as you try to match speed. But, be careful. A sharp angled bump, even if you're both accelerating along at the same pace, can trigger your own crash and put you in last place pretty darn quickly.

Light Cars Can Fly
And, I mean that literally. That means one car can trigger an accident in one place, bounce out of the crash, tumble end-over-end like Erik Estrada's worst nightmare, then crash down in another cluster of cars and trigger another massive pileup. The physics of Burnout are a little fantastical, but once you figure out their basic rules, you can use them to your advantage.

Dueling for last place.

Boost is Finite
The way the boost works is a little different than in earlier Burnout games. In the first two, you had pretty much one shot to trigger a boost by pressing and holding the A key. If you weren't heading into oncoming traffic when the meter ran down, that was it, you had to start rebuilding boost from scratch, even if you hadn't crashed into anything. In Burnout 3, leftover boost remains in the meter, and as long as it's fuh-laming, you can tap A for as many speed bursts as you can get out of it. Crashes, however, still force you to refill the meter.

Article by Ben Barker