Burnout: Championship Drag Racing (PC)

GameSpot editors' review

• CNET editors' rating: 3.5 stars Very good
  Detailed editors' rating
  Overall score: 7.3 (3.5 stars)

• Reviewed by:
  Stephen Poole
• Reviewed on: 04/28/1998
• Updated on: 05/01/2000
• Released on: 03/31/1998
• Originally published on GameSpot: Burnout: Championship Drag Racing (PC) Review

It's been a strange year for PC sports fans. First we get Deer Hunter, a game that's managed to become one of the year's best sellers despite pedestrian graphics and minimalist options (not to mention a subject matter that I was sure would arouse howls of protest). But before I'd even finished scratching my head at the notion of a deer-hunting sim, along comes another sim with an unlikely subject matter: Burnout: Championship Drag Racing.

I'm sure drag racing fans have been dying for a PC sim of their favorite motor sport for years, but I can honestly say I never expected anyone to simulate drag racing: As it says on Bethesda Software's Burnout web site, what kind of a racing sim can you produce when the actual race lasts only eight seconds? A pretty damn good one, it turns out. I'll be the first to admit that the game's got some problems, but sometimes a game succeeds in spite of itself - and that's definitely the case with Burnout.

If you're not a fan of drag racing or have only watched it casually, it all looks so simple: Two cars line up and when the light turns green they go tearing down a quarter-mile track hell-bent for leather. But there's a whole lot more to it than just those few seconds of incredible acceleration and raw power, and Burnout re-creates this part of the sport about as meticulously as you could hope for.

Nearly all of the game's real-life tracks are home to 1998 Winston Drag Racing events, and while it's obviously easier to render a dragway rather than ovals and road courses, the 3Dfx tracks and surroundings in Burnout are much improved over those in Bethesda's first racing sim, X-Car. (Bethesda still needs to do something about the trees beside some of the tracks, though - they look like gigantic versions of those pine-tree aerosols some folks hang in their cars.) The addition of a late-model Mustang (available as a patch at the Burnout web site) brings the total number of chassis to 22, and what a list it is. Muscle-car fans will jump for joy at getting to hop into cars like the '72 Barracuda, '55 Chevy, '34 Ford Roadster, a '71 Roadrunner, a '59 Eldorado, '66 Mustang, '72 Charger, and more, not to mention several funny cars and rail cars.

But choosing a chassis is just the start. Burnout features the same mind-boggling array of customizing options as X-Car (it also seems to use the same physics engine), and maybe a few more. It'd take all day to list everything that can be tweaked and adjusted, so I'll cut to the chase and say this is, plain and simple, a motorhead's dream. And the numbers you're fiddling about with have noticeable results on car performance, as I found out after fiddling about with my suspension and wings and finding myself getting airborne about two seconds into my run. About the only problems with the whole setup section are the tiny fonts that can make it hard to read just what you're doing to your car and the lack of more predefined car setups that would help newbies at least get pointed in the right direction.

The same sort of realistic options are found in the various play modes, too. Quick races pit you against an opponent in an unknown car, while the standard race mode lets you practice, run single heats, join a single event, and even create an entire season of events using whichever of the game's 20 tracks suits your fancy. Don't feel like sitting through all the qualifying and elimination rounds of a 64-team event? Knock it down to 16 or even lower if you like. (You can also bypass each race you're not taking part in to keep things rolling right along.) And should you find yourself kicking the computer's butt just a little too often, you can always try racing against your best time.

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