Burnout 3: Revenge, or why Burning Lap is terrible

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.

Super Mario Kart is frustrating

I didn't grow up with Super Mario Kart, I got into the series with the more modern games (specifically, Double Dash!!) and am only now going back to play the older games in the series.  Speaking of that, I own all of them except for Mario Kart 64, and the $60 DLC pack known as Mario Kart 8 Deluxe.

Everything is absolutely fine up until 100cc Special Cup.  The tracks are too narrow, the other racers' sprites are too big, and they drive right in the middle of the track.  It also seems like just about anyone is capable of knocking you clear off the track, regardless of weight.  Also, can we talk about the handling?  It sucks.  When you push a direction, half of the time you slide in the opposite direction instead.  It makes it very difficult to stay on the track.  A fair amount of time, neutral hopping can stop this from happening, but it's a gamble.

I loathe the coin mechanic in the older Mario Kart games.  In the newer ones (7 and 8) it's not as bad (they're pretty much just a really grindy kart part unlock mechanic), but here the coins tend to be out of the way, where you'd never want to actually drive your kart, and they have very small and precise hitboxes, which makes them incredibly difficult to pick up.  This wouldn't matter if your speed, number of retries, and ability to not spin out when something hits you wasn't dependent on you picking them up.

Also, the walls are terrible.  If you hit one, you might as well start over, because otherwise you're going to 8th place and there's no real way to make up the positions you lost.  "Just use powerups!", you say.  Yeah, I tried that.  I'm tired of getting bananas and green shells in 8th place.  Even the lightning, which is designed to let backmarkers catch up, isn't terribly useful because when it ends they all just barge their way past you again.  Red shells are almost pointless as when it doesn't just slam into the nearest wall, the CPU players have a tendency to jump them.  It's like there's a distance-based sweet spot where red shells actually function properly.  Also, the star doesn't last nearly long enough and ends instantly if you hit certain hazards that it sometimes auto-jumps you over.

Speaking of hazards, the very first track in 100cc Special Cup has the stupid bridges.  The first one is fine because it's pretty easy to hop the broken bit or go to the left of it.  The second one however, you either need to hop the gap, or be going fast enough to just sort of skid right over it.  However, the game just eats your input most of the time when you try to hop over the gap, so 90% of the time I end up in the water when I reach this part of the lap.  And when you're in the water, you go incredibly slowly, so by the time I'm back out of it, I'm in 8th place, from which there is no recovery.  After the bridges come the moles.  Even if you think you've avoided them, sometimes a mole will just fly at you from a mile away.  They instantly halt your momentum and you have to spam left/right to get them off.

If I could start the first track of 100cc Special Cup in first or second place, I might have a chance.  But you have to start it in 8th, which means having to navigate the other racers at the beginning and lose all your coins getting bumped around by them.  It's not exactly fun, and a lot of the time when I decide to try again at 100cc Special Cup, I spend my time doing the start and the first couple of corners, getting knocked off the course, and resetting.  Eventually I either give up and turn the game off or there's something else in life that I need to do.

No wonder all the speedrunners race time trials.  Time trials eliminate a lot of the bullshit this game is constantly flinging your way.

Related: If you want the classic Mario Kart experience, Mario Kart Super Circuit is an excellent game.