You might remember reading a little news blip earlier this month about a mysterious Australia ratings board submission from "Burnout" developer Criterion Games for a game called "Burnout Crash." No details were revealed, but some additional sleuthing uncovered mention of the title on several Criterion staff members' LinkedIn profiles. Now there's a little more information to fill in the blanks with, which you can read about after the jump.
The good folks at Joystiq did what any good reporter should do: they followed up. An inquiry was made to the Australia ratings board to tease out some more information, and lo and behold, those efforts were rewarded with a description, albeit an admittedly brief one:
"An action arcade style game set in the fictional world of Crash City. The aim of the game is to cause as much damage as possible to traffic and buildings by crashing a car into them."
"Paradise" had a similar mode called Showtime, though activating that one would essentially launch your car into the air and allow you to bounce it around the city, causing destruction along the way. It was and still is plenty of fun, but can you really imagine building an entire, multi-hour game around just this.
Okay, stupid question.
In all likelihood, however, this "Burnout Crash" game will feature some actual driving. "Burnout" games prior to "Paradise" featured a Crash Mode, in which players rammed one car or another into a traffic-dense space to cause as much destruction as possible. These were all discrete setups though, with all cars positioned and timed in a specific way. Based on the description above, we can probably expect (hope?) that "Burnout Crash" is a fusion of the two ideas, an open space to drive and create wreckage in.
Joystiq also (probably rightly) notes that because of the seemingly limited nature of the gameplay described in the ratings submission, "Crash" will likely be a downloadable title. Really though, it's all just speculation at this point, and it will remain that way until Criterion steps up with a formal announcement.
