Intelligent Game Reviews

Even if you’ve never been to a drag race it’s nearly certain that if you live in the United States and listen to rock and roll music stations you’ve heard advertisements for one. Sunday! Sunday! Sunday! is burned into more than one set of frontal lobes to be sure. Still, Bethesda took a risk with Burnout: Championship Drag Racing. At first glance it doesn’t seem like a game topic that would be all that popular, or all that interesting. How’d they do?

Light Up the Tires

Did you know that drag racing has the largest participation base of any motor sport? It does. Any car with basic safety equipment can participate in what is known as “bracket racing”. In this form of racing the participants race against their ideal time, known as the dial-in, which can be different for each car. It is this type of drag racing that Burnout simulates.

And lets be very clear, Burnout is a simulation and not an arcade racer. It takes great pains to model engine performance, tire grip, environmental conditions, and a host of other factors into account for each run down the track. It is, if you will, the Nascar Racing of drag racing games.

However, unlike Nascar Racing, you can make the game as simple or as complicated to play as you like. There are options to allow you to have the computer automatically warm up your tires and stage you to the line. You can use a delay to time your starts and an automatic transmission if shifting gives you the willies. This helps make the game approachable to the drag racing newcomer and reduces the learning curve to nearly nothing.

You also don’t have to be a gear head to have fun drag racing with Burnout. Far from it. In drag racing the goal is really to be consistent. While there are standard elapsed time brackets there is also an open division. In the open division you are racing against the clock. Each racer defines his target time. The closest driver to that time without being under it wins the race.

So, in theory you could run your 1962 VW Beetle against a top fuel Rail Car and still win. What that means in game terms is that you don’t ever actually have to touch the car setups. Just find one you like and practice so you can run a consistent time. Then use that time as your Estimated Time in the open bracket.

One thing here that annoyed me about the interface. There are a variety of ways in which to get disqualified in a race. These include starting too early, crossing the finish line under your estimated time, and crossing the center line. When you do get disqualified the game doesn’t tell you why. In certain cases you can figure it out (such as when you make a run that is too fast.) But I was mystified as to why I was DQed on several occassions. The run summary just says “Disqualified” without explanation. Bummer.

That’s how I got started with Burnout. I was a bit daunted by all the ways you could adjust the car. But it was still fun racing in the open division. Once I’d gotten into the game it was just a short step away to decide to drop a monster V-12 into my GTO. Of course the first time I tested it I literally flipped as the front end came up. What fun!

The Tracks and Races

Burnout includes a wide range of race tracks. Each is modelled faithfully in terms of scenery. It was fun to see the different tracks and to see my home town raceway (Seattle International Raceway) modelled in all of its pine tree lined glory. In all there are 20 separate tracks to race on, with most of the major tracks represented.

There are several racing modes. You can run practice races which are just you against the clock to test out your setup or just to get your timing right. If you prefer you can run single heat races against the computer to get the hang of running against an opponent. Finally you can run a full elimination race and even an entire season of races.

And for each race you have total control over racing conditions. These include the wind speed and direction, humidity, and temperature. All of these can have a major impact on a race. You can specify them exactly or choose random weather. But be careful, random weather can be extreme. I had one race with 60 MPH cross winds! It was rather difficult to stay on the track to say the least.

The Cars

You can choose from several different chassis to used as a basis for setting up your car. There are 21 in all. Bethesda has also released another car on their web site. You can choose from classic cars like the GTO and 1956 Corvette or go to the more exotic styles like a funny car or a Rail Car. It’s really up to you, since you can tweak each car as much as you want to get exactly the performance you want.

Customization Possibilities

Most of the default car setups are rather slow over the quarter mile. Well, slow is a relative term of course, with an untweaked setup anywhere from 12-14 seconds being normal.

But of course we won’t leave the setup that way will we? Of course not! Half of the fun of Burnout is trying different setups for your car. You can adjust virtually every variable you can think of. From engine displacement, number of cylinders, tires, spring tensions, etc. Indeed, it can all be a little baffling at first for the uninitiated.

But you’ll get the hang of it. I took the stock GTO and tweaked it down into a pretty consistent 8.9 second bracket racer. But that wasn’t the limit of what I could do. With a few tweaks here and there you can run 5 second quarter miles. Cool.

The only thing I really wished for was a mechanism to import my own chassis. I really wanted to tweak out a 1991 Acura NSX and run it against these American Muscle Car bad boys. Team Acura Drag Racing would be born! Alas, there is no way to paint your car or personalize the look in any way.

As you practice you can record all sorts of telemetry data to help you decide how best to change your setup. You can also record your runs using the VCR for playback and analysis. It’s quite fun to save your spectacular crashes or a perfect ET run and play them back later from multiple camera angles.

Racing Online

At the time of this writing you could not play Burnout over the Internet directly. The game does not support a direct TCP/IP racing mode. Bethesda and Mplayer will be offering racing on the free Mplayer service soon. This will allow races with up to 32 players.

In fact, there is a Bethesda sanctioned racing league forming now called the Simulated Hot Rod Association that will be racing full seasons over Mplayer. In the mean time Burnout also supports racing over an IPX LAN and direct modem connections.

Graphics, Sounds, etc.

Graphically Burnout is attractive. The backgrounds includes tunning photos of race cars. You’ll see random backdrops on each menu. Just clicking around can be a treat!

In the race the game looks great with a 3Dfx card, and the frame rate was silky smooth with every option turned on. It wasn’t as nice in 256 color SVGA, but it still worked well. You can tweak the amount of detail to get your frame rate where you want it if need be.

On the sound front the engine sounds and crashes are convincing if nothing like as loud as you’d expect in real life. Of course, your speakers would probably melt if that were true!

There is a wide range of multimedia used throughout the game. From the opening, and very long, movie to race result videos. The videos were nice the first few times, but I quickly wanted to find a way to shut them off. There wasn’t a way within the game itself.

Burnout is a DOS game. Surprised? I was. It tries hard to convince you its not, but the sound card setup is a bit of a giveaway. Aside from that the game ran flawlessly in Windows 95.

The manual describes the interface well enough and
gives a brief, but helpful, introduction to all of the ways in which you can adjust the performance of your car. But, realistically a full treatment of that topic would take a pretty serious manuscript. One area that was sorely lacking was documentation of the command line switches available. These include turning on a screen capture utility and suppressing all of the videos in the game.

The Verdict

I enjoyed Burnout and to be honest I really didn’t expect to… I’ve never been a big fan of drag racing. Burnout succeeds in being approachable for the drag racing newcomer and has all the bells and whistles to keep even Shirley Muldowney satisfied.

Burnout: Championship Drag Racing Screenshots

The engine customization panel.	Staging to the line in a 8.9 second bracket race.
A VCR replay of my latest win!	A Winner!

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