Crash n' Burn

[Masquarr]

I've been thinking about buying this game, partially for it's online mode. I enjoyed playing Burnout 3 online, but EA took the master list down. Crash n' Burn looks like a good substitute, because it is a racing game in which players are encouraged to make other cars crash. (Although it still has no LAN mode, apparently.)

Lazybum, you mentioned that he had bought this game. What do you think of it, so far? I once watched a video of gameplay on youtube, but I wasn't able to get much of an impression about the game's quality, or lack thereof.

[lazyhoboguy]

I bought it a couple months ago, but I havent had time to play it all really. I know mytho used to own this game and doesn't have a high opinion of it.

[Scoopers]

I own it and still haven't played the servers are dead, as in NO one uses them not as in down. Then again its been a few months since I logged ins o that may not be true

[lazyhoboguy]

So I finally spent some time playing this game and I am not very impressed. It feels like a poor man's Burnout which wouldn't be a dealbreaker by itself, but I just find the gameplay boring.

Sure you can ram into people, but the game pretty much encourages you never to do that because you have a health bar. If you ram people it hurts you too and it takes a zillion hits to actually kill another car. So there really is no point in the races to crash into anyone. It hurts your car and slows you down.

The racing just feels like way too simple as well. You can slide through turns with the handbrake and that is a bout all you can do in races. You can use nitros, but you only get nitros on the second lap and once you use up the nitros you cannot earn anymore easily. The only way to get more nitro is to kill another racer. This is a rare occurrence because you have to be the one who makes the last hit on a car before it dies and as I mentioned before each car takes a ton of hits before it dies. The cars in this game controlled really odd to me as well. Might just be me, but felt really weird controlling them.

I tried some of the other modes like Kamikazee where you race around the track while other racers race in the opposite direction. I found this pretty boring after playing it once. There is also a "Last Man Standing" mode which is a destruction derby type of thing. you just all crash into each other until only 1 person is alive. Sounds a lot funner than it is. Even in this mode it's like the game punishes you for crashing into people since it hurts your car too. It is a much more effective strategy to avoid cars and let them kill each other until there is only a couple left. This is really boring. I wish they had thought out how combat would work a little more. Maybe if you got more boost simply by ramming cars things would be improved. Or maybe if you killed a car you could get more health. If you were actually rewarded for ramming and killing other cars it wouild make sense to do so.

I tried to see if anyone was online and couldn't find a game. It was very late at night when I tried though. You can have bots in the online mode at least which is nice. I cannot really imagine the online mode of this game being very fun since the singleplayer bored me so much. The whole time playing this I just kept getting the urge to toss this game out of my PS2 and pop burnout 3 back in.

Oh yea the game manual says that port forwarding is needed for this game to play it online:

In order to join or host... you will need to route, or forward, all data on port UDP 9103...

[Masquarr]

...The cars in this game controlled really odd to me as well. Might just be me, but felt really weird controlling them.

This reminded me of something I had considered asking about in the original post. In the youtube video I saw, the crashes appeared to be fairly realistic, at least in comparison to Burnout 3. (The cars merely rolled over and caught fire after being hit, rather than leaping dozens of feet into the air while doing somersaults.) Is this indicative of how the cars handle in Crash n' Burn? Is the handling in the game arcade-like, as in Burnout 3, or more simulator-like, as in say, Gran Turismo 4?