Q: Who has the honor to talk to us? State your name, rank and position!

My name is Nick Channon. I am the Senior Producer on Burnout Dominator.

Q: Burnout Dominator serves as something of a halfway release between 2005's Burnout Revenge and the forthcoming Burnout 5. Tell us a bit about the decision to take another stab at a last-gen Burnout title – when did the idea first come about, and at what point did EA UK begin the development process?

NC: The game has been in development for just over a year, and basically it's all about making the best games we can for the individual platforms. We wanted to create a game that was all about testing the user's dangerous driving skills, and felt that PS2 and PSP were the best platform to do this kind of a game on.

Q: How involved was Criterion in the actual development of Dominator?

NC: Fully.

Q: Burnout Dominator puts more of an emphasis on the racing elements of previous series entries, eschewing the Crash and Traffic Attack modes in the process. What was the driving force in redefining the focus of the series for this particular entry?

NC: We've been looking for an opportunity to bring back the idea of "Burnouts," and Burnout Dominator felt like the perfect opportunity to do this. We wanted to make sure we built the game around this great feature, and as such the focus of the game had to be all about driving as dangerously as you could and avoiding the crash. Thus creating a game that really captures the essence of Burnout, the thrill of weaving in and out of traffic, doing huge drifts and generally driving like a Maniac.

Q: Using Burnout Revenge as a basis, tell us a bit about how the racing experience has changed in Burnout Dominator.

NC: The races themselves haven't really changed, you can still drive aggressively and take down your opponents, however the introduction of Burnouts has changed the boost mechanics , and as such changes the way you use boost, which really gives a cool new feel to the races.

Q: The ability to check traffic in Burnout Revenge fundamentally altered the core experience, which sometimes made it tough to go back to the previous Burnout titles. With that element missing from Dominator, do you anticipate that gamers will have trouble adjusting to the modified experience?

NC: No I don't think so. The important thing for us was to create a game that felt very fresh and new. This game's focus is on avoiding the crash and testing your driving skills to the limit. The ultimate pay-off is the Burnout and chaining these together and fighting to avoid the traffic.

Q: On that same note, will elements of the core Dominator experience make their way to Burnout 5? If players adjust their style of play for Dominator, might they have to do so again when Burnout 5 hits later in the year?

NC: You'll have to wait and see. Burnout 5 is an all-new game with a completely different design.

Q: What can we expect from the new tracks in Dominator? Will they be like the winding, multi-path courses of Burnout Revenge, or more like the straightforward tracks of previous entries? Will any "classic" tracks from the previous titles be included?

NC: All the tracks are brand new and unique to Burnout Dominator. They have been built from the ground up with the new game modes and mechanics in mind. They feature big sweeping drift corners and wide motorway sections for weaving in and out of traffic. They do feature alternate routes, some of which you need to unlock with the new Signature Shortcut feature.

Q: Will there be any considerable non-visual differences between the PlayStation 2 and PSP versions of Dominator? Will the two interact in any way?

NC: The big difference is that the PSP version will feature ad-hoc play for up to six players, with Race, Road Rage and Maniac modes being available. Additionally, the user will be able to upload their high scores to a central web site to compare how they rate against other players from around the World. They will also be able to share their scores with friends through ad-hoc, and we will be releasing two unique tracks through download post-release.

Q: Sony is currently pushing its PSP downloads, offering demos for various titles. Any chance there will be a downloadable Burnout Dominator PSP demo? If so, what would it include, or why not ?

NC: As mentioned, there will be two tracks available for free post-release.

v.1.12 (02-27-2007)

Top 5 internet leaderboard is now sent to the nds so can view the top 5 scores right after you post your score, whether it makes the top 5 or not. please note tho you gotta reset your ds if you wanna connect again, havent figured out how to close wifi the correct way yet, sorry

First, this release has full DS support. The annoying issues of the borders of the screen have been fixed. Save game support should be present. I have mapped X & Y buttons to Start and Select as those buttons are a bit out of the way in the DS. As an added bonus, there are character dump files generated and the second screen is used as a message history! Admittedly, this is not as good as I'd expect a roguelike designed ground up for the DS to be. However, as a port, I feel it is now possible that DS owners may prefer it over running the GBA version.

Second, this release should fix the late game crash bugs! Yes, bugs, because I found quite a few of them. I ran extensive stress tests by creating a late game character, randomly creating a map, and running it for a hundred moves with the standard mob AI controlling the avatar. I then simulated a few hundred THOUSAND games this way. As you'll see from the bug descriptions, some of the found errors were very esoteric.

Third, I also managed to sneak in some features (which, no doubt, have introduced new bugs :> I am very happy with the addition of the Dark Ritual spell that I feel fits well with the goal of the Necromancer: spells that are situation dependent and require controlling your environment to gain full effect.

* [DS] Save game support works if your card supports libfat (which should be most cards). The save game is stored as POWDER.SAV so should work across platforms. Doing a character dump on the DS will also save a NAME.TXT file of the dump, just like it does in the SDL build.
* [DS] Screen is now centered around DS actual screen, giving you a half tile extra visibility in X and a full tile in Y.
* Fireballs will always hit those in their range of influence when they explode. The spell version has been nerfed in damage while the red dragon variant has been boosted.
* Casting reclaim soul on oneself no longer can get the unusual message "Yourself is not in control of you." Instead, one is referred to the laws of thermodynamics.
* New spell: Dark Ritual.
* A new room.
* Zapping wands of Create Monster has a chance of creating a tame monster.
* Living Frosts have a better death message.
* Maximum AC bonus for artifacts is +99 to avoid possibility of infinite loop.
* Maximum enchantment for generated items is +/- 50 to avoid possibility of infinite loop.
* Add a stress test mode to try and track down rare occurences.
* Semantic error meant that creatures would wake up and you would wake up whenever any noise occurred, not just 10% per noise level. Sleep is made even more powerful.
* Fix crash & possible infinite loop in the code to find if one mob is a tamed creature of another. I'm hoping this was the late game crash...
* Fix crash if a creature died due to teleport during its heartbeat or died due to automatically searching during its heartbeat.
* Fix crash due to buffer overrun with the message: "You parry the very scary creature's poisoned silver dagger with your holy +2 flaming sword Whizshock." I had to increase the global temp buffers as well. One would think I would have learned by now not to use fixed buffers?
* Fix crash when someone zaps a wand of ice, killing themself in the process, but then hitting someone else.
* Fix corruption of mobref tables if you died of poison, but your life was saved by an amulet, but you suffered from a temporary intrinsic that is cleared by death (strangle, aflame, etc), but you had another intrinsic that timed out that very turn and occurred immediately after the cleared intrinsic. How is that for a rare edge case?
* Fix a crash where you die due to worn silver damage, but your life was saved, but your life was saved by the very item that caused you silver damage.
* Fix a bug where if you had life saving by carrying an item, life saving would not be granted as I'd fail to find the item to delete.
* Fix a bug where if you died due to falling into the pit created by a greekfire potion, one would still be affected by the actual greek fire itself.

I maked a stable version of my game.
I have still to :

make the menu to ask the name of the player.
green background.
help screen.
etc ....

List of changes:


Display of screen "Quit&Save" by pressing "start" touch.

Change file to add save information.

Delete a save game.

Finish graphic of all atoms.

Display solution in the right place (not too on left or right)

make level 12 and 24.

Finish graphique bloc of all level.

optimise code about display some graphics.

Display more information about which touch to press in game or menu.

some minor change