Price: £44.99 Players: 1-2 Burnout. Sounds a bit similar to Wipeout and the principle is similar as you drive, not from A to B, but from A back to A again as the track takes you back to where you first started from for lap after lap of racing for as long as you can stand it with several different cars. For a typical racer there are the typical options - a single race, a multi-race (known as 'Championship' here), a head-to-head for those with more than one joystick to waggle at once, a time-attack for those who like the solo action, a 'Special' section for crash replays and a music player. However, whereas the PS2 version had problems which annoyed me to the point of giving up, the Xbox release is a different kettle of fish altogether.

The game has two main selling points, the first being a sort-of adrenaline meter such that as you drive close to the knuckle through the traffic, so does this meter increase and so your speed will be upped along the way. This is the first difference I noticed from the PS2 version as on the Xbox your car zooms along at such an intense speed, giving you an adrenaline rush and making you actually feel as if you're there, that you could almost be Elliot Gould in Capricorn One when someone's tampered with his brakes. The other thing of note is the crashes which some will have seen from the game's previews on TV. In contrast to the PS2 original, where the crashes didn't enthrall and just enraged because they looked like tacked-on extras that had no part in the actual gameplay, here they feel a damn sight more meaty and you can really enjoy them. And here, after a crash it doesn't take half as long before you're back up to full speed and during a crash I take this time out to see how close behind me the other racers are. Now choose the first-person view so you're racing head-on at the other traffic and feel your pants fill up.

Speed is definitely of the essence here. The graphics are insanely fast, almost like running the gauntlet in a Tron race in terms of the pace and this time round you have much more realistic control of your car. Also, with this game there's actually a chance the CPU cars will falter and crash too, unlike most offerings out there. It's a major improvement over the PS2 title with Dolby Digital 5.1 sound in-game and while I had my doubts on trying the same game on a different machine, they were soon put to rest during the first lap of the first race. Just after I finished writing the above, the Xbox crashed while I cornered in the hard mode on the first race. The picture froze and the roar of the engine sounds like ongoing crowd noise. Anyone else experienced this?

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Review copyright © Dominic Robinson, 2002.