E-Mail This Article to a Friend Crash and Burn A noble effort by an old friend BY AARON SOLOMON
	Burnout Revenge For Xbox + PlayStation 2 | Rated E10+ for Everyone ages 10 and up | Developed by Criterion Games | Published by Electronic Arts

Warning: playing Burnout Revenge may cause you to experience severe Grand Theft Auto-itus. You may feel the sudden urge to hop into a car — yours, Granny’s, that police cruiser that’s been chasing you around — and let the rubber fly. The idea of T-boning that upcoming DHL truck is not unexpected, nor is the feeling that the yellow dividing lines in the road are merely suggestions — burdens, even — in your quest to get where you’re going. Remember, it’s only a game (and a crazy one at that).

Burnout Revenge is the latest in the wildly successful, if largely indistinguishable, Burnout racing series, which has always been more demolition derby than Pimp My Ride — in fact, just about the pimpest thing you can do to your ride here is change it to a blazing yellow. The folks at EA wear this all-killer-no-filler attitude like a badge of honor, and it actually makes a lot of sense: who wants to spend hours choosing the right rims for a set of wheels that you’re encouraged to wreck? It is a refreshing attitude in a racing game, one that takes the piss out of the snobbish nature of a Gran Turismo, and allows for the greenest of car enthusiasts to get their kicks.

In Burnout Revenge, you are encouraged to crash into your opponents, and cannot improve your boost bar — thus preventing you from burning some serious ass — unless you do. They will come after you, too, and most of the time this results in a grudge match between you and the offended driver. Checking rivals into walls, trading paint, and grabbing major air also contribute to your boost bar, but driving too long with little action will cause it to drop. Basically, the only way not to boost your ratings is to drive the way you’re supposed to in real life.

As always, the main modes in Burnout Revenge are the racing and crashing events, which are combined in the single-player World Tour mode. You also can go online with five other people and compete in most of the single-player races, as well as in a few multiplayer exclusives, such as the aptly named Crash Battle. Each stop on the tour has its own set of challenges and chances to win medals, the completion of which unlocks a seemingly unlimited amount of goodies. Before a crash event, you are given a fly-by of your route, enabling you to plan your most destructive path — somehow, this feature is missing in the multiplayer modes, but the set-ups rarely change, meaning if you’ve crashed it once, it won’t be any different the next hundred times.

For a game that prides itself on cartoonish mayhem, Burnout Revenge has a fairly straightforward racing aspect. The right and left triggers (on Xbox) act as the gas and the brakes, respectively, and steering is done via the right toggle. All the old racing tricks I remembered from my days playing Mario Kart 64 — the power slides in particular — came back like second nature a few races in. There’s also an "aftertouch" mode, in which you can steer your flaming wreckage into oncoming traffic with a touch of the left toggle, or the D-pad, and while cool in theory, the execution of these moves leaves a little something to be desired.

Burnout Revenge isn’t particularly sophisticated, but it doesn’t need to be. It’s simply a fun smash-’em-up with a small-enough learning curve to be accessible to just about everybody, and playing it is one of the few times when "don’t try this at home" is the worst advice you could ever get.

Grade: 8.0