Dcubed Posted Tuesday at 01:15 PM Posted Tuesday at 01:15 PM 2 hours ago, Cube said: Just the GameCube port. Also, looking them up just now... They did the Switch port of Breath of the Wild? Yeah, I saw that some time ago. They’ve worked with Nintendo for a long time, so that didn’t surprise me one bit. I just assume that they’re responsible for like 99% of all Japanese developed multiplatform ports.
Cube Posted yesterday at 08:41 AM Author Posted yesterday at 08:41 AM Burnout Race at breakneck speeds through packed city streets in this high adrenaline car racing game. NA release: 30th April 2002 EU release: 3rd May 2002 JP release: N/A Developer: Criterion Publisher: Acclaim NGC Magazine Score: 86% Mods Used: None Burnout is my favourite racing franchise, and it all started with this game, which was quite likely my most played GameCube game as a kid. And while it may feel a bit more pedestrian now, due to many games having similar mechanics, it was also something quite unique when it came out. Burnout doesn’t just encourage you to drive dangerously, it’s required to do well at the game. Burnout takes place in busy streets, with some tracks based on the USA and others based on Europe. There are only six distinct tracks in total, however, as the flow of traffic is so important, the reverse tracks really do feel quite different. There are also two epically long tracks that combine the three of each region together, making them feel like a connected area. While the tracks themselves are nothing special, they look really nice for the time and have set traffic patterns that ramp up with each lap. In order to win, you need to use your boost, however, your boost metre can only be filled by driving dangerously, by almost hitting other cards, drifting and driving on the wrong side of the road. You can only use your boost when fully charged, and if you let go before the bar is fully depleted, you have to charge it up again. However, deplete the boost bar in a single go and you’ll automatically recharge half of your boost. If you do enough dangerous driving within this time, you’ll be able to continue boosting with an entire full bar. This means that taking risks at high speed is incredibly rewarding, as long as you don’t crash. The time it takes between crashing and respawning could have easily been a massive flaw with the game, however the crashes themselves are satisfying, with all the card crumpling and distorting, and a tally of how much damage is caused is shown to you (which would become its own mode in later games). You can even save replays of your biggest crashes at the end of a race to watch in more detail. Going back to the original Burnout after later ones, it definitely feels more muted (the sound effects particularly aren’t as strong), but the deformation is still great. While Burnout definitely improved in later games, the original is still a great game, with extremely satisfying racing and the traffic junctions greatly enhancing the tracks. You can even unlock a bus for a bit of extra challenge. There are loads of nice additional touches, such as your car indicating before turns and the AI racers making mistakes and crashing, which was really nice to see. Burnout was also my introduction to the now standard way of controlling racing games: using the left and right analogue shoulder buttons for acceleration and braking. It doesn’t seem like much now, but it was a big change to using A and B. Fave Quote Just as you’d hope, it all works wonderfully. This system pushes players to take more risks on the road, as the more near-misses and insane cornering manoeuvres you pull off, the faster you’re able to go. The thrilling experience of successfully weaving your way through a packed tunnel before skidding through a crossroads and into first place is thrilling to say the least, and it’s perhaps for this reason more than any other that we enjoyed Burnout so much. Geraint Evans, NGC Magazine #67 Remake or remaster? A remastered collection is very much needed. I’d love one that lets you mix and match the modes, features and gameplay styles of the first three games. Official Ways to get the game There is no official way to get Burnout. 1 3
Dcubed Posted yesterday at 09:48 AM Posted yesterday at 09:48 AM (edited) Hell yeah! Burnout is the real shit! I'm still bitter that 3 and Revenge never came to Gamecube... What a tragedy. An even bigger tragedy is how EA killed the series as a whole... and the engine that powered both it and the grand majority of the entire 6th generation of consoles, the mighty RenderWare. Burnout was the first in-house game that utilised the engine, and was Criterion's first ever commercial video-game project; they were previously a division of Canon (yes, the camera manufacturer), and RenderWare started out as a suite of CAD software. It was only in the late 90s that RenderWare started being retooled into a video game engine; directly in response to Argonaut's B-Render engine. And while Criteron did put out a demo game (CyberStreet) for developers to base their games off of, Burnout was the first in-house commercial game to use the first finished release version of the engine that we know today as RenderWare. And what an engine it was! It powered no less than 300 games! Including literally the biggest series of the entire generation, none other than Grand Theft Auto 3/VC/SA. RenderWare was highly versatile, very well documented and very performant. Even Japanese developers made heavy use of the engine; as seen in games like Sonic Heroes and Persona 3/4. Unlike modern middleware engines such as Unity and Unreal, which offer complete all-in-one solutions, Renderware was more of a malleable set of tools that could form the basis of any given game engine. But it was fast, and its malleable nature meant that it could be used for any type of game. When developers saw what Criterion were pulling off with Burnout? It quickly became the industry standard thereafter. If Gears of War was the game that sold Unreal Engine 3 in the PS360 era? Burnout was that same game for RenderWare on the GCN/PS2/Xbox. But Burnout happened to be more than just a fantastic tech demo, it also happened to be a BANGING arcade racing game! An utterly simple and brilliant concept (drive dangerously to win!), executed perfectly! The concept literally sells itself! It would of course go on to produce bigger and better sequels, but Burnout is one of the single most important games of the entire generation, because it sold the engine that powered it by proving its worth to developers around the world. Without Burnout, there is no GTA 3. An engine so powerful that EA bought out the studio and their tools, in order to kill it off. Edited yesterday at 10:04 AM by Dcubed 3 1
nekunando Posted yesterday at 03:34 PM Posted yesterday at 03:34 PM Burnout was great on the GameCube 😀 It felt pretty fresh at the time and everything was even better with Point of Impact! I would definitely have been interested in picking up Burnout 3: Takedown if it came to GameCube but sadly it wasn't to be and, as such, I haven't ever really played it. I do own it now on PS2 but actually only recently took a notion to play it. Unfortunately, the image was so blurry that it was practically impossible to play 😕 I never had much interest in the series beyond that as, like with everything, they seemed to take it further and further away from what made it great. I picked up Burnout Paradise on sale for Switch a few years ago and, while I ended up beating it, I wasn't much of a fan of it at all. I never liked the open nature of it and feel like the racing, course design and variety of environments all suffer because of it. Hopefully Mario Kart World will be OK in this regard but it certainly seems like it'll be more than OK! 1 1
Cube Posted yesterday at 05:13 PM Author Posted yesterday at 05:13 PM If Mario Kart World can be half as good as Burnout Paradise, it will be a phenomenal game. That said, the main features I loved about Paradise back then (the online) are why I'll probably not touch MK World. 1
nekunando Posted yesterday at 05:20 PM Posted yesterday at 05:20 PM 6 minutes ago, Cube said: If Mario Kart World can be half as good as Burnout Paradise, it will be a phenomenal game. That said, the main features I loved about Paradise back then (the online) are why I'll probably not touch MK World. If Mario Kart World is only half as good as Burnout Paradise, I'll never play another game again 😂
Cube Posted 9 hours ago Author Posted 9 hours ago ZooCube Go Ape! NA release: 5th May 2002 EU release: 30th August 2002 JP release: 25th October 2002 Developer: PuzzleKings Publisher: Acclaim NGC Magazine Score: 50% Mods Used: Widescreen Hack With ZooCube first coming out on the 5th May in North America, it makes it the first GameCube game to not be released before the GameCube’s very late European launch. The GameCube already had a sizable library by the time it came out in Europe, but it also meant that some of them skipped Europe and others were delayed further (ZooCube itself took a few more months to reach Europe) so that not every game was competing for a spot at launch. On another note, ZooCube is alphabetically the last GameCube game. Now that the interesting stuff is out of the way, on to the game itself. ZooCube is an immensely bland puzzle game. You rotate a cube while blocks representing animals fall down. Match two and they’ll score points. And that’s the game. For how simple it is, having to use two sticks to rotate the cube in different ways is far too fiddly and, while the game introduces more animals and faster speeds, it never gets interesting. Other than rotating animals, you can reorder your stacks with the L and R buttons, and “lock in” a falling piece with the A button. So the whole game is just turning to the right side, pressing A and repeating. There’s no strategy or combo systems, it’s just look at the next bit and connect the shape. The game itself looks rather drab. The lifeless backgrounds are also unnecessarily busy and detract from the puzzle itself. They’re also strangely pre-rendered when they look like they could have been easily handled in real-time by the GameCube. It feels like trying to solve a Rubik’s Cube that you’re holding in front of a TV. Very bland and unappealing. Poor Quote Puzzle games should be instinctive and essentially straightforward – with Zoocube you’re having to content with a ludicrous premise, not-very-well-drawn animal parts, and the tiny central cube. And, worst of all, it doesn’t invite you to keep on playing. Quite the opposite, in fact. After a short time, you tire of that fiddly challenge. Jes Bickham, NGC Magazine #71 Remake or remaster? Not much reason to do much with it. Official Ways to get the game There is no official way to get ZooCube. (For an interesting statistic, we've just reach the European launch and I've covered 8% of the entire library). 1
Dcubed Posted 7 hours ago Posted 7 hours ago (edited) 2 hours ago, Cube said: (For an interesting statistic, we've just reach the European launch and I've covered 8% of the entire library). That's nuts! Just goes to show how incredibly late they were. They had absolutely zero chance of success in Europe. The console war was already over before the damn thing even launched here. The likes of MGS2 and GTA 3 had already been released for around 6 months by the time the GCN launched over here. It was completely DOA, and 90% of the reason why was because it came out far too late. Edited 6 hours ago by Dcubed 1
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