This was originally posted by me on March 10th, 2008 for a short-lived and soon-returning series of posts entitled DS on DS, for the site I write for, www.DigitalSomething.com. I will be posting the rest of the articles throughout the week leading up to the return of DS on DS on Friday.

Burnout is often regarded by many as one of the best series of racing games available. I agree with that. In fact, I think I actually logged more hours on Burnout 3 on my Xbox than I did Halo 2. Scott and I usually played every day over Xbox Live. You should be able to imagine my excitement when Burnout Legends was announced for the DS. The videos and screenshots looked pretty good. I was actually excited all the way up to the release of the game. Then I got it.

At first, it had me fooled. The opening video. The menus. The sfx. Everything was fine. Then I got to the car selection. So, the cars look a little blocky. I can deal with that. The race started, and all of a sudden, it felt like I was playing something that was originally destined for the GameBoy Advance but at the last minute got switched over to the DS and they didn't bother to change anything. I mean, sure, they added local wireless play. That's it though.

And the controls are horrendous. Good driving controls can be done on the DS with a d-pad. Mario Kart DS and Race Driver both proved that. I don't want to tap left on the d-pad and make a hard left. They also needed to implement a proper drift. In the real Burnout games, you had to execute a drift. In this mockery, you just hold right or left, and if you don't slam into a wall, you drift a little bit.

There are also some major graphical problems, and I don't just mean how bad everything looks. The collision detection is a joke, and so is the framerate. For both of those reasons, they should have ditched Crash Mode in this game. Crash Mode is such a mess, it makes Uwe Boll's grasp on the English language look like Shakespeare.

The bottom line here: STAY AWAY FROM THIS GAME!!!! It will only make your brain cry and your eyes bleed.