Just last week, my husband was tossing trash into a garbage can from across a room. And to this day, remnants of Burnout 3 still permeate my life. No other game has turned me into a missionary, on a quest to spread the wonder and joy. I have loved a lot of games over the years, but Burnout 3 holds a unique place in my heart. That wasn't the last time I used Burnout 3 to convert non-gamers - later I hauled my PlayStation 2 on a family vacation and had the pleasure of watching my then-seven-months-pregnant sister screaming at the television as cars flew off the road in her wake. Oh,+the+memories.+(PS2+screenshot) But then, who was I to judge? I'd done exactly the same thing - except I'd easily logged twice those hours. "Um, we played the same Road Rage course from before." "You spent 10 hours playing the SAME RACE?" I exclaimed. When I got home the next morning he was sound asleep, and when he finally woke up that afternoon, he confessed they'd been up all night playing the game. BURNOUT 3 TAKEDOWN ALL CARS FULLNot long after the full game came out, I had to be out of town, so my husband invited his friends over for beer and Burnout. "It's a hot streak!" we'd all scream in unison with the on-screen text that popped up whenever someone took out three cars in a row. But since I don't make friends with stupid people, it only took a couple of rounds before they too were believers, feverishly side-swiping the other cars on the road and using up every last millimeter of the boost bar. I knew they would LOVE this game, and if they didn't, well, then they were just stupid. Our friends weren't gamers at all, but I had become a Burnout 3 zealot, burning to convert everyone over to my side. The next weekend was his birthday, and after we went out to dinner with friends, I hauled out the debug and Burnout 3 disc that I'd snuck out of the office. He wasn't buying it, but I promised him that as soon as we wrapped things up, I'd bring it home so he could see for himself. "Well you see, there's this new racing game that came into the office." I tried to explain. On Sunday night, he finally cornered me to find out what was going on, and I confessed. My husband started getting suspicious about the late nights, especially when I had to go into the office both days that weekend to catch up on everything I'd been putting off. Our asses stayed glued to the carpet in that cube, passing the controller. A mode where the whole goal is to run as many people as possible off the road?!? Yes, please. It wasn't until the third night of deadline that we discovered Road Rage. Instead, we were all sitting on the floor in a cube, passing a controller around and trying to beat the current high score in Crash mode. There was a lot of work piled up on all of our desks, but none of us was doing it. I started calling my husband in the early evening to tell him I wouldn't be home till very, very late because of the loads of work left to do. Everything was innocent enough at first, but it quickly led to bad places. BURNOUT 3 TAKEDOWN ALL CARS HOW TOWe also started developing strategies, learning how to get the x4 multiplier and the crashbreaker, plus timing it just right to get that red semi at the tail end to tip over and spill its cargo on the road. We quickly developed a set of rules: one turn per player, and one restart if you didn't like your launch angle off the ramp. "You want to cause as much damage as possible!" Is there anything not fun about causing mass mayhem and destruction? Those little dinging sounds as the dollar amount steadily grew were like the ringing of a slot machine - it made us want to play more and more. YES NO "What the hell is this?" someone asked. And then he he did it again, and again, and again. Within a couple of hours, however, we were looking over Joe's shoulder as he ran a car up a ramp and flew through the air, smashing into an intersection as cars from both directions plowed into him. (Of course, we would then turn around and do next to nothing the first week of the following issue, thereby endlessly perpetuating the cycle, but what can I say - we were slow learners.) It was getting close to Week 4 on that issue, so it took a couple of days before my coworker Joe popped the Burnout 3 demo disc into one of the PlayStation 2 debugs sitting around the office. In magazine-land - at least in our version of magazine-land - we worked like dogs during the final week of putting out an issue, staying past midnight every night in our frantic rush to get everything sent to the printer. PlayStation Magazine, I didn't pay much attention when a demo disc of Burnout 3: Takedown showed up in our office. So back in the summer of 2004 when I was working at the Official U.S. Sure, they're pretty, but drooling over virtual versions of real-life vehicles has never revved my engine.
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