Physics engines and chaos go hand in hand. Everything dissolves into chaos, so why not just factor chaos into your game in the first place? Burnout games involve lots of crashes and collisions that absolutely batter your car, but what if your car was already a beaten up wreck to begin with? Then we can just immediately get to the smashing and be done with it.
Such is the philosophy of FlatOut: Ultimate Carnage, an Xbox 360 remaster of sorts of Xbox title FlatOut 2, or Burnout meets banger racing.
Purchase a heap of junk, race it through all the debris, and work your way up to better cars to crash in a whole load of environments. Sounds good to me.
Frustrations
I first played FlatOut: Ultimate Carnage back in 2015, as one of the first games played on this PC. No reason why it was chosen above anything else. I guess I just wanted to race something, no matter what kind of race it was.
Two hours later I finish playing it, and five years after that I find 4 screenshots, which are supposedly the best of the bunch.
It took a short while to even get running this time around, thanks, presumably, to Games for Windows Live, or whatever it is calling itself these days. A little forum digging, a .dll from Bulletstorm, of all games, and just like that, I'm watching the intro video at last, full of generic shouty music and 'splosions and carnage.
Fun Times
Hang on. Giant human baseball and rings of fire? I don't remember that from my first time playing. Hmm. Suddenly Ultimate Carnage got a lot more interesting to me.
The game is split into two main modes, FlatOut and Carnage. The FlatOut mode is the racing side of things, where you get to spend your starting allowance on one of three somehow functional wrecks and take them through cups to earn you more money to spend on upgrades and new vehicles.
The engine is put to good use by basically everything beside the track being destructible. Tyre barriers will immediately cover the first corner, alongside fences and posts. Cars will regularly be seen pushing something along the track, or have something stuck on their bonnet.
Your car doesn't handle like a finely tuned super car, partly becase it isn't, but partly because the controls are a bit of a weighty affair. I had trouble cornering, though a loading screen tip suggests you learn how to powerslide around corners instead of brake for them.
I suppose it is in the spirit of the game to use whatever passes for a wall as a brake, but often the only available walls are destructible, so that's not ideal. It's still plenty drivable, though, and even with bits of your car falling off and littering the track like everything else, you can still put in decent performances with high chances of winning.
You're given bonus credits if you achieve something of note during a race, and a lot of these involve damaging other cars to the point of causing their drivers to fly out of their seats. Nobody seems to wear any sort of protection, either. How they're still alive is anyones guess.
You're not immune to this either, though on this occassion, I did this to myself by finding the one bit of the barn that wasn't destructible. A quick restart and you're off and running again, and a crash like this didn't appear to be any kind of setback at all. I went on to win this race with such ease that I was able to admire the view.
It's a nice looking game indeed. It's 12 years old now, but feels closer to only 6 in some places. Water reflections, dust, and screen blur to emphasise the push of the Nitro button for a pathetic little spurt of speed. I hope you can upgrade that, at least - not that I'm in desperate need of speed right now. Early days mean easy races.
There are more disciplines to race in (if that's the appropraite word for such a redneck sport) but they require you to own the right kind of car, and even the cheap race cars are out of my budget right now. It's time to churn out some victories and see what else Ultimate Carnage can throw my way.
I mean, it's not like this affected my driving...
All of my competitors are characters in themselves, some much better racers than others. Now and then they're introduced in a loading screen, and Frank's here would turn out to describe not only me, but FlatOut itself. Little did I know what was about to unfold.
Further Frustrations
New places to race and cars to race in, great news. Low on storage and need to stop capturing footage, not so great news. Still, this is a good time to check out Carnage mode for all those weird baseball mini-games I saw in the intro video. Let's quit the game and just sort out this recording before we get back to the action...
The action never appeared again. I cannot, for the life of me, get FlatOut: Ultimate Carnage to start anymore. I've taken out what I put in to fix the problems with loading the game in the first place, and I've put them back in. I've verified the integrity of the files and all is well. The launcher to select screen resolution is the only thing that works, as FlatOut is now just a black screen and a 'Not responding' tag in Task Manager.
Ultimate Carnage is as dead as its drivers really ought to be, and I never got to play human baseball by crashing my car and hurling my driver through the windshield in an abuse of the physics engine - but a mighty fun abuse it would have probably been.
What are my options? Reinstalling the game? Maybe. Hunting down an Xbox 360 version? Possibly. What's this? A PlayStation Portable port? You're kidding me. What does that look like?
Final Word
The PSP port is not how you should be playing FlatOut: Ultimate Carnage, and thanks to the inclusion of Games for Windows Live, the PC port is also probably one to steer clear of. It does work well, but that's assuming you get it to work in the first place. I might get it to work again in future - my PS2 still lives, after all. Anything is possible. But now the words FlatOut Ultimate Carnage are associated with 'faff to get it running' and I have to ask if its worth the effort.
If you've never seen a racing game with this much destruction before, then yes, you're missing out on a game that revels in it. Other games have since done it better, of course, but for the time this would have been quite the show. Not the flashiest of presentations, but a gritty, grubby, dirty depiction of the chaos you can get up to if little things such as preservation of life didn't get in the way.
For the two and half hours I played, I enjoyed it, but knowing that I completely missed out on the absurd mini-games, like human bowling, I'm left a little disappointed. Who or what is to blame, at the end of the day? Me? Technology? I'm not really sure.
I got more than I expected I'd get from FlatOut: Ultimate Carnage, which is something, and something that is perhaps a reason to look into it yourselves. It's not the best in show for what it does, not these days, but I know the racing games I was playing back in 2007 didn't offer me what this game does.
Here's hoping I get another shot at playing it before finally leaving it to the history books. I'm not finished with you yet, FlatOut.
Fun Facts
Cars are made up of 40 seperate destructible parts. Let's see now. Four wheels, a couple of doors, body panels...
FlatOut: Ultimate Carnage, developed by Bugbear Entertainment, first released in 2007.
Version played: PC, 2008.