97,35%

Phew... I finally reached 97,35% (that's 9735 dominator points for the uninitiated ;-)) complete in Burnout Dominator. I only have the gold medal in the final event (1.000.000 maniac points in ONE event?!?!?!?) and ~1500 near misses left to complete, and both of those will come in time.

However, I have had the opportunity to refine my first impression of the game somewhat (found more annoying things etc...).

I still think that Burnout Dominator is the best Burnout game to date, but still a few things just baffle me..

• The insanely annoying "freeze bug" which happens to me several times a day. For those of you who can thank your lucky stars that you haven't seen this yet, what happens is this: At random times during gameplay, the entire game freezes completely so that you have to hard-reset the psp to get it going again. More often than not, this happens just as you are about to crash or score a takedown, but sometimes it just happens when you're driving along safe and sound (ehem...) minding your own business. This bug made a nervous wreck of me when I was running road rage events through all the tracks to open up all the signature shortcuts. When I finally had opened the desired shortcut, how could I ensure that the freeze-bug didn't happen and I would loose my hard earned unlocked signature shortcut? I couldn't - and that made me nervous beyond the capacity to enjoy the game at this stage.
• I am sad to announce that the Explosive Payback counter is bugged. When I first checked my Driver Details more closely and found that this counter was suspiciously low (it was 8 at the time), I set up a road rage event and counted the number of Explosive Paybacks the game reported to me (I got 5 of them during that event - and no, I didn't mistake any Instant Paybacks for Explosive Paybacks). After the event, I checked the driver details again, expecting the number to have increased to 12, but can anyone guess what the counter showed? Thats right! Not 12, not 11, not even 10, but 9 - NINE! That made me wonder if any of the more important counters in the game was similarly bugged. Not a good thought wouldn't you agree?
• Have any of you jumped through the roof of a tunnel and fallen through the ground as a result in any of the earlier Burnout titles? Well, you can now rest assured that this glitch hasn't been fixed for Burnout Dominator as well... Nearly cost me the last race in a Grand Prix event aswell... Nearly ;-)
• I am also amazed at the ease of which one can ram right through the "solid" big yellow turn markers which adorn many of the larger turns preventing you from entering off-limit areas of the tracks. Just hit one of them straight on as hard as you can, and you have, in my experience, a roughly 50% chance of driving straight through them. My personal best was achieving a speed of 740kph and an Extreme Air bonus falling off the end of the track after driving through one of these barriers.

The entire game leaves me sitting with a feeling that the game was rushed through QA without proper testing, probably to meet some EA regulated deadline, and thus released to market with some serious issues which sadly takes some of the joy out of this otherwise magnificent game. This saddens me immensely and I can't help thinking how much better the game would have been, had it not been for these bugs and the list of annoying things in my previous post.

I sincerely hope that Criterion Games will take these bugs to heart, fix them and release a patch for the game through Burnout HQ. I don't know if the game ever was intended to be updated in this fasion, but as a computer programmer, I know that technologically this isn't hard to achieve. They just have to make a new executable, and new version of any other files which have to be corrected to fix these issues, put them in the Game-directory of the memorystick on the PSP and get the user to start the game from memory instead of directly from the UMD. The rest of the files for the game will still be loaded from the UMD, so they don't have to worry about this being an opening to piracy, and the number of affected files should not be large, so this solution would not eat up a lot of space on your memorystick. This is my desperate hope for this game, although I know that this hope is probably in vain.

As I said earlier, all things considered, I still think that Burnout Dominator is the unequalled best Burnout game made to date, but it still struggles with too many superfluous flaws to be considered a truly great game. Had the game not had these flaws, it would surely have gone down in history as one of the greatest racing games of all times. It saddens me that sloppy QA-testing has bereft this game of that achievement.

Sincerely,

Jasman - saddened burnout(dominator)aholic