Crash 'n Burn

Crash 'n Burn was the first game most 3DO owners ever saw, since it shipped bundled with the console. It's a futuristic armored-vehicle racer where speed isn't the only thing that counts — weaponry does too: cars carry machine guns, rockets, and mines, and opponents can be destroyed outright. Tracks run through tunnels, over bridges, and across industrial landscapes, with ramps and shortcuts along the way, and prize money between races upgrades engines, armor, and weapons. Damage affects how the car handles, so longer races force a choice between aggression and caution, since a wreck halfway through the track means the end of everything.

This particular game was meant to showcase 3DO's strength in an area other consoles of the time couldn't touch — playing video straight off the disc. Live-action cutscenes with actors ran between races, framing the whole thing as a broadcast TV show, and even the track itself combined polygon objects with scaled sprites. The sound leaned on harder rock motifs and a commentator's voice announcing the race. The split screen for two players also demonstrated that the console could render the scene twice without the pace completely collapsing, which was also part of the demo pitch in the year of release. The overall impression was genuinely striking at launch, though from today's perspective it's the video footage that has aged the fastest.

Reception was mixed: reviewers praised the presentation, smoothness, and sense of speed, while criticism pointed out that the game itself was shallower than it looked and that opponents lacked convincing intelligence. As a pack-in title, though, it did its job, and for many players it remained their first personal encounter with the disc-based console. Today, Crash 'n Burn is interesting mainly as a period piece — it shows what manufacturers at the dawn of the disc era promised themselves from the new medium, and you can still run a few races that entertain with raw simplicity and a pleasant sense of speed.