I was watching one or another LGR Thing when he brought up the Burnout games, which reminded me that I do in fact own a copy of Burnout 3: Revenge. I decided to pop it into my PS2 and play, and after a few hours of gameplay I have a lot of thoughts on it.
The game overall is great. The whole takedown mechanic works quite well, and getting takedowns on opponents that have been harrassing you all race is quite satisfying. However, there's one mode of gameplay that stands out as incredibly frustrating and un-fun: Burning Lap. It takes many forms, sometimes it's a "Preview Lap", sometimes it's a "Special Event", and sometimes it's actually referred to as a "Burning Lap". Regardless, it's a simple time trial at a given location, with times to beat for bronze, silver, and gold medals. Some of them are clearly intended to be far more challenging than others, and have less room for error in their gold medal times.
The thing that makes Burning Lap not fun? It's actually several things.
First, sometimes the location you start at is terrible. The Coastal Dream Preview Lap starts you just before a corner that you need to drift around, so you have to hold gas+boost for about a second and then immediately brake to start a drift. Just start me a bit further back so I can have time to figure out when to turn in for the corner.
Second, you have to listen to the radio DJ guy's random dialogue every single time you retry. As a whole, the DJ is funny and/or interesting for about the first hour or so of gameplay, then he just gets old and unfunny in a hurry. He constantly chimes in with some useless line of dialogue, cutting out the music in the process. Not like there's much loss there, since the game's soundtrack isn't exactly stellar, but I'd rather hear a less-than-stellar soundtrack than the stupid DJ. You can disable him in the options, but there's still the same retry-induced delay as the game reminds you of your objectives.
Third, there's still traffic. I get why it's there for all the other gameplay modes, but why is it there for Burning Lap? The gold medal times often have so little leeway that you're basically forced to retry if you crash even once, forcing you to listen to the DJ again. Also, the traffic is placed such that you always have to reconsider what line you're taking because it's in the way of the optimal line.
Fourth, Impact Time is still usable after a crash during Burning Lap events. Why? There are no competitors to aftertouch into for those sweet aftertouch takedowns. This is compounded by the fact that the Boost button and the Impact Time button are the same button (R1), and that there's no way to skip or otherwise shorten the crash cutscene. All you want the game to do is reset you on the track so you can get going again, so you want to hold R1 so you're boosting as soon as it does, but holding R1 during the crash cutscene activates Impact Time and makes the crash cutscene take longer.
Fifth, there's no track map. For other modes this matters a little less, but here, the only focus is speed. You barely have time to process your surroundings as-is when you're holding both gas and boost. Your surroundings also happen to be incredibly busy, which makes it very difficult to tell which way the track is going.
Sixth, if the intent is to be constantly on the boost, then why do I not start with boost? Why does it still need to be earned? The boost quantity should just be infinite and active all the time. It would save many a hand cramp from holding both X and R1 as tightly as possible.
Seventh is the game's use of darkness to hide obstacles. This affects all game modes, not just Burning Lap, but it's silly to have to turn up the brightness on my screen just to be able to see things that I need to avoid slamming into at 170mph.
The rest of the game is not without its flaws, but it's far more fun than Burning Lap. A particularly large annoyance is that selecting Retry is always detrimental. You lose whatever points, takedowns, or crash money you earned if you select Retry. It's always better to just finish an event with a subpar result, select Continue, and bank whatever points you earned. You then get to cope with how slowly the event selection menu cursor moves from one location to another, because this menu doesn't remember the last thing you selected.
I'll address the music and why the soundtrack is completely wrong for the game in a future post.
