I’ve been playing Burnout Legends the past few days, going through the Tour and Crash modes, unlocking new events and cars. And unfortunately, it’s started to feel like work. It’s highly addictive work, but at the same time that I feel compelled to play another round, I feel somehow obligated to do so.

This is heightened by the need to replay even nominally successful events. In several of the crashes, while a high dollar figure is not difficult to achieve, a high ENOUGH figure is elusive. I’m pretty sick of replaying Fear Factor and Paradise Peril levels trying to chase the gold medal. I’ve gotten within a couple dozen thousand dollars on each, and would like very much to move on.

This is compounded by the fact that, while Legends is widely described as a “Best of Burnout” game, it is pretty much Burnout 3, minus crash multipliers, plus the unfun Pursuit mode from Burnout 2. So the crash mode is all the same levels I slogged through a year ago on my PS2, and I never had as much fun with those as I did with Burnout 2’s glorious, wide-open crash events (in which it was not uncommon to do more than $50M in damage).

So, if you like Burnout a Whole Hell of a Lot or haven’t played Burnout 3 and own a PSP and are looking for decent games for it, check out Legends. Otherwise, if you have any questions, I’ll be hard at work playing the Leap of Faith crash until I can break $600k.