FlatOut

A leisurely saunter through the UAC base lets you casually get attached to the game world, before the thick sense of impending disaster explodes in the most horribly visceral way imaginable. You’re suddenly alone in a dark and noisy world of fear and confusion. The people you met earlier are dead, dying, and torn to pieces.

Mental stock car pile-up FlatOut is released for PC, PS2 and Xbox this Friday and it's already been met by a slew of positive reviews. But what's it like working on a game during its very final stages of development? 3D artist Ilari Lehtinen talks us through it...Here's the good news: this is it. Or very, very close to it. No, we're not gold yet at the time of writing but all the to-do lists on our project server are showing 'OK' or '95%' for almost all tasks. We'll have fierce competition in

Bugbear's 3D artist on FlatOut, lari Lehtinen, talks about a crash-test dummy's worst nightmare, alcohol-inspired petrolhead mentalism and Ragdoll Olympics in the penultimate part of our exclusive developer diaries.In this part I'll fill you in with one of the most talked about aspects of FlatOut. As you can probably guess by now, I'm talking about the poor ragdoll driver who gets flung out of the car when the player crashes badly enough. Seatbelts in FlatOut are for wussies, and following that

Developed by Finnish petrolheads Bugbear Entertainment, mental stock car pile-up FlatOut is not for the faint-hearted Sunday driver. Thanks to completely destructible cars and worlds and persistent, dangerous debris, each and every lap is more fraught than the last. In the second of a series of exclusive developer diaries, Bugbear's Ilari Lehtinen - the game's 3D artist - talks us through the creation of the game's environments...Last time we gave you a and now it's time to look at the

Developed by Finnish petrolheads Bugbear Entertainment, mental stock car pile-up FlatOut is not for the faint-hearted Sunday driver. Thanks to completely destructible cars and worlds and persistent, dangerous debris, each and every lap is more fraught than the last.In the first of a series of exclusive developer diaries, Bugbear's Ilari Lehtinen - the game's 3D artist - talks us through flattening cars and driving them into telegraph poles...I'm a 3D artist in the car team - smack in the middle

"It's the Half-Life 2 of racing games." Okay, stop right there. Edge can see a press-baiting headline a country mile away. But Aki Jarvilehto, director of business development at Bugbear, has a point. He doesn't mean it in the sense that his game could be qualitively as good as Half-Life 2, but more that it shares many of that game's design principles."Gamers should be playing on the edge," continues Jarvilehto. "They need to be on the limit and feeling each impact. Our environments are