Flatout Message Board

It’s been a long time since the FlatOut series last left a good impression. When development duties moved away from Bugbear, the franchise played a game of chicken with an eighteen-wheeler and turned into an unhappy metal pancake. Now, the originators of the smashing racing spectacle are back with the thrillingly titled Next Car Game. Having pulled into the pitstop of Steam Early Access yesterday, is the cars wot go smash simulator a bare-bones heap of junk or a rough but ready machine of destruction? Read on.

(more…)

FlatOut developer Bugbear Entertainment's Next Car Game is now on Kickstarter. The group aims to raise $350,000 to create what they call "Destruction Racing Perfection," with a next-gen console port of the game promised should the campaign manage to gather $1,500,000. You can take a look here.Read more...

BugBear’s Next Car Game is the spiritual successor to their FlatOut series. And by that I mean it’s covered in ectoplasm and knocking on the pipes and oh no it’s grabbed television’s Sarah Greene! But in another sense this is the game they’ve always wanted to make. One which conveys everything they’ve learned and put into their car crashing racing games, but in a new engine and without the FlatOut name. Up until a few days ago, the team had been attempting to fund it through their own pre-order website in a scheme that seemed like the spiritual successor to Kickstarter, but now they’ve moved onto an actual Kickstarter. Pitch is below.(more…)

Bugbear are the team behind the Flatout series, which were games built around the idea of smashing cars into scrap. So of course their next project has a great tech demo showing how the video game cars of tomorrow can be smashed into nothingness.Read more...

Bugbear Entertainment is independently crowdfunding Next Car Game, a smash-em-up, derby-style racing game due out in early 2014 for PC, and possibly headed to next-gen systems if the campaign raises enough money. Bugbear is a Finnish studio responsible for the FlatOut franchise and Ridge Racer: Unbounded.

Bugbear's site offers pre-orders of Next Car Game, which will drive development. Pre-orders get early access to the game this year and these players will provide feedback that will shape Next Car Game's final touches.

There's no set amount that Bugbear needs to raise to finish Next Car Game, but if it gets 10,000 pre-orders, it'll launch a playable "sneak peek." Right now the pre-order tiers are at lowered prices, starting at $25 for the game, early access and exclusive wallpapers, and topping out at $100 for an exclusive car, the soundtrack, your name in the game and other digital goodies. An alpha version of Next Car Game will be released regardless of how much money Bugbear raises.

The studio considered Kickstarter, but it ran into a few roadblocks.

"We wanted to do a Kickstarter!" Bugbear says. "But it turned out to be tricky for non-US citizens, and Finnish law prohibits raising money for commercial purposes. We still wanted to show everything we've got right now, so we chose to set up our own pre-order site immediately! If you're thinking of holding off purchasing until the possible, speculative Kickstarter - please don't! We're sure we'll make it worth to you to jump on board immediately."

The original developers of the FlatOut racing series have released an update on their new game. Apart from some (great-looking) footage of cars crashing into things (and each other), there's also the fact that even though it's still called "Next Car Game," there is now a pre-order option. You might wonder why.Read more...

Like a tyre rolling from the twisted, sad mess of a vehicle pile up, I shed a single tear at the awful state of the last FlatOut game. FlatOut 3: Chaos & Destruction wasn’t made by the original developers, BugBear, but its existence appears to have angered them into returning to the car crashing games that they love. It doesn’t have the FlatOut name, but Next Car Game (that’s really its name) is the sort of game that you’d imagine they’d make if they had all the physics and all the money. The appear to have the former, but the latter is up to the community.(more…)

#flatout Both the series and the studio kinda lost their way eventually, but for a while there, Bugbear's FlatOut - which combined ugly racing with brutal damage - was the most interesting thing in racing games. So it's nice to see them returning to their roots. More »

A portion of an iNintendo review… FlatOut certainly isn’t the best racing game on Wii, but for a $19.99 price tag, the game offers just enough to warrant a purchase by arcade-style racing fans.

Get a glimpse at the all-new version of the acclaimed Stunt Mode.

Racing game being reborn on Wii.