Give a little boy a pair of toy cars, and he'll kneel on the floor and vroom-vroom them around for a bit, pretending he's all grown up and heading off to work at the cowboy astronaut fireman company.
But within minutes he'll inevitably make squealing, crashing noises and ram the cars together head-on. Again and again and again. Because it's an undeniable aspect of the male psyche that we are fascinated by - nay, hopelessly in love with - car crashes.
Burnout 3: Takedown is a game that will open a conduit of sheer joy to your five-year-old soul and let you create the most brain-explodingly cool and hysterically over-the-top car crashes you can imagine. Take the freeway chase from The Matrix Reloaded, multiply it by the freeway chase from Bad Boys 2 (dude, you have crappy taste in movies), then point at the result and laugh mockingly, because it doesn't come close to the priceless vehicular carnage that is Burnout 3.
For those new to the series, the original Burnout's spectacular car crashes were simply a nifty byproduct of its high-speed, higher-thrills racing. In Burnout 2, causing massive pileups was broken out into its own separate play mode, and gamers rejoiced.
Burnout 3 takes it a step further, giving you more control over crashes while ramping up the already ridiculous level of destruction. There's nothing else like it - not just in racing games, but in video games, period.
Having said that, Burnout 3 is a typical racer in many respects, in that it has various one-off events as well as a career mode that sees you competing in races in locations across the U.S., Europe and Asia.
There are your basic six-car races, one-on-one races, elimination races and so on, with good results earning you points, cash, medals and better cars. Taking risks during races - driving on the wrong side of the road or missing civilian cars by a whisker, f'rinstance - juices up your turbo boost meter and allows you to take the game's already heady sense of speed to dizzying new heights.
But where Burnout 3 distinguishes itself from the racing game masses is - you guessed it - the crashes. When you inevitably hit a bridge support, brick wall or oncoming city bus doing 300 kmh, the game snaps into a letterbox display mode and allows you to watch the crash unfold in spectacular slow motion, as chunks of car fly every which way to Sunday and your prized ride skids, rolls, grinds, sparks, smokes and cartwheels with an almost artistic beauty.
New to Burnout 3 is the ability to tweak the direction of your wreck as it rockets along post-impact, allowing you to rack up collateral damage by sending your car smashing into other vehicles and even wiping out opponents who are desperately trying to avoid the explosion of chaos that just unfolded in their path.
As with the last game, Burnout 3 has a separate crash mode that's an entirely different beast from the racing. Here, you're set up with a car, a busy intersection/freeway/traffic circle, and a simple goal: wreck as many cars, buses, semi-trailer trucks and so on as you can with one spectacular crash. There are new tweaks here, too, including the ability to self-destruct your car after a set number of vehicles have plowed into the pile-up, increasing the mayhem even further.
The game boasts enough tricky goals to achieve and unlockable goodies to strive for (gotta love playing smash-up derby with a fire truck) that there's always plenty of reason to keep racing and crashing. My favourite racing variation is the road rage mode, in which you try to rack up "takedowns" - ie., forcing your opponents to crash in spectacular fashion. It's intensely satisfying to watch a foe's car go airborne in a spray of metal shards and tumble over a guardrail into a deep gully. So long, sucka.
Splitscreen and online play is excellent on both the PS2 and Xbox, and offers a bevy of competitive and co-operative race and crash modes. The one and only heartbreaking flaw with Burnout 3 is you can't change the camera view during the crash replays, and you can't save the replays after watching them. It's too bad because a fella could sit back with a cold one and some nachos and watch his favourite pileups all afternoon.
You know, like NASCAR. But without all that dull driving stuff in between.
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BOTTOMLINE
Even without the car crashes, Burnout 3: Takedown would have been a superb arcade-style racing game. But the incredible vehicular carnage makes it a thing of profound destructive beauty.
