First thing I did was finalise my choice of Great Gaming Moment. I went for Rainbow Road from Super Mario Kart, a moment as frustrating as it was great. Much like deciding which game I should write about…
After that I started on the task of collecting screenshots and artwork of various point-and-click adventures for use in a GamesTM feature on the genre. I spent the whole day with ScummVM and copies of Secret of Monkey Island 1 & 2, Day of the Tentacle, Sam & Max Hit The Road, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Beneath a Steel Sky, and Grim Fandango. I love these games so spending the day playing through various sections and just grabbing screenshots of characters and scenes was great fun. It really reminded me of how ridiculous some of the puzzles in Day of the Tentacle were, but there are infinitely worse ways to spend a work day.
During the afternoon and amid the continuing flood of WE9 matches going on (at one point they had three tournaments going on concurrently on WE9, PES4, and FIFA 2006), one of the guys from Play magazine brought in the near-finished build of Burnout Revenge on the PS2, and from what I saw (quite a lot) it’s going to be fantastic. Firstly, it looked spectacular for a PS2 game. I thought it was the Xbox version that they were running, so I can’t wait to see how that one looks. The thing that struck me the most about it though is how ridiculously, unbelievably fast it is. Seriously, if it was supposed to be a futuristic racer where things are running at 600mph I’d think it was fast, but this game just has road cars. Road cars that do 0-100 in about three seconds. One of the guys raced in a dragster and put it into first person, and ended up going so fast that he crashed because a small bump in the road bounced him up into the roof of a tunnel. It does look like it’s going to be very similar to Burnout 3 gameplay-wise, but it’s EA so what did you expect?
By far the best thing about Burnout Revenge? They’ve gotten rid of that annoying Striker idiot. You now should be able to play the game without wanting to gnaw on the disc.