Dangerous Golf. Not your traditional Golf game. Humorous destruction and over the top trickshots are the way to score big. Smash up the toilets.

The medium of video games can be exceptional at making the mundane exciting. For me, two of the most mundane things on this planet are driving and golf.Even racing/driving games themselves are far from my favourite genre, but when Criterion thrust the Burnout series into PlayStation 2 disc trays nearly fifteen years ago, I found the series that spoke to me, that made driving a joy. A heady mix of arcade thrills and smash-happy crashes that evolved into two of the best racers ever in Burnout 3: Takedown and Burnout Paradise. Now, a group of eleven former Criterion employees have returned to try and spice up the sport of golf with the very Burnout-flavored Dangerous Golf. Each hole is set in realistic locations (powered by Unreal Engine 4) such as a palatial French building, a US Restaurant kitchen, and a stuffy English castle among others.

The basic objective for each (with some exceptions later) is pretty simple: smash the designated items, cause some extra damage, and sink the putt. There are, however, some layers to this formula, as well as a few twists on it to keep things interesting.For instance, there are areas where you need to rack up enough damage in order to reveal the hole, while another variation sees you sink as many putts into a whole bunch of holes with a limited number of opportunities. Even these get further spins put upon them to differentiate the holes enough, throwing in time limits, hazard areas and the like. It’s essential because the stages are limited to just a handful of areas, albeit with secret rooms to uncover.In fact one of the criticisms of Dangerous Golf has to be that limited stage set. The ones that are there are perfectly fine, it’s not the number of areas so much as the sheer amount of holes you play on them. All the variant holes and different objectives don’t do quite enough to mask the over-reliance of a few places for far too little variation in gameplay.

It needs a better balance, and that may come in time given Three Fields’ serious commitment to taking criticism on board.The orchestra of smashing the place up is a fairly pleasing sight to behold. Seeing toilet stalls crumble, paint get flung onto walls, and neatly-stacked shelves get obliterated is satisfying, if lacking a little impact to really emphasize just how much damage you’re doing.

For all the crashing, smashing, and exploding on screen, the lack of rumble from your pad to give those collisions a bit of grunt somewhat takes away from what could be a ridiculously pleasing smorgasbord of utter chaos. Caught in a Sand TrapControl had been an issue in the previous build of Dangerous Golf, but it does seem to have been tweaked to within an inch of its life now.

Setting up a shot is fairly straightforward stuff, with a little hint of vagueness in the early stages before you acquire new abilities such as pistol shot (sort of self-explanatory). This is when Dangerous Golf is in its prime, a striking reminder of what made games like Burnout so thoroughly compelling. It’s this that also leaves you feeling a little glum about the game when it isn’t hitting these heights.

Because, for a concept with such potential to be the craziest of crazy golf courses, and a creative team involved that has the pedigree to make that happen, Dangerous Golf feels a little too much like a prologue to greater things. It was the same with the original Burnout after all, a game that had the concept and the basic structure of what it was to become, but still more of an evolutionary step rather than a fully-fleshed out experience.That’s not to say there’s a lack of content in Dangerous Golf, there certainly isn’t. In addition to the score-chasing and the 197 stages of the solo tour that build up your abilities as you go, there’s also a pleasing co-op variant, a party mode that only requires a single controller (great fun), and an online version of that. While the tour is pretty good, it does suffer for having no real structure to it outside of what you learn. It’s a tour, yet you constantly hop back and forth to the same locations. It’s like walking into all of the rooms of an apartment over and over and calling it a door-to-door building search.

It’s not the end of the world by any means, just puzzling.In Off the Rough. While the Unreal Engine visuals do look quite lovely, and make for a smooth game generally-speaking, Dangerous Golf is unable to handle too much going on, resulting in some tremendous slowdown and on a couple of occasions freezing. It’s not as bad as it had been in the original build released last month, but it is something that still needs to be worked on. I’m also not entirely sure the realism afforded to the game helps. Does Dangerous Golf needs a more cartoonish slant maybe? Or a bit more in the way of overblown physics perhaps? It’s almost there, but something just feels the tiniest bit off about it currently.The flaws are ignorable to be fair, underneath them is a pleasant enough puzzle sports game that is split up into sections just small enough to keep you interested for bursts of an hour at a time, which is perfectly acceptable, if not quite the ringing endorsement Three Fields might have hoped for.

Dangerous Golf is fun, but the spectre of the studio’s heritage lingers in the corner of your eye every time you start a new hole, reminding you that Dangerous Golf could be more than just ‘fun.’ The potential is there, whether that be in more updates and fixes or in a whole new game. Despite the experience at Three Fields, this still feels like a studio trying to find their groove, and when they do, the results will probably be far more magical than this. Still, as first cracks of the whip go, it’s a decent start.

Burnout - from Takedown onwards, at least - was always defined by its focus, its unshakeable sense of what it was, and what it should be doing with its players. This was a driving game in which driving badly rewarded you with the magic juice that allowed you to drive even more badly. And when you finally crashed - from all that bad driving you'd been doing - you realised that there was nothing remotely final about this kind of crashing.

Rather, you ascended on impact, shifting from the status of car to the status of holy wreckage - wreckage you could steer through wonderfully thick, staticky air, and then barrel into your oncoming enemies as the sparks slowed to become individual twills of golden confetti.In this respect, Dangerous Golf has as much a claim to representing that beloved series' final form as the glorious, if peculiarly expansive, Burnout Paradise. Paradise blew Burnout upwards and outwards, offering an entire city of havoc. Dangerous Golf - which is made by a team of core Criterion vets - shows what might have happened if the series had instead retracted, drawing in its fearsome energy until it dropped cars and wrecks altogether and reduced players to a single pinprick of destructive light, trailing fire and smoke, blasting through a world heaped with clutter, and leaving beautiful destruction in its wake.In other words, it's a golf game that you play indoors. In fancy ballrooms. In France there are halls of mirrors and baby grands.

In England there are suits of armour to topple and bash. In the US and Australia there are burgers to upend from serving tables and gas station forecourts to reduce to flames. And you do all this with a wonderfully pared-back sense of what a golf game needs. No arcing arrows that show your potential path, no wind to take into account. No three-click ritual to calculate swing and force. Just aim with the camera and then push forward to fire the ball. Burnout fast.

This unfolds just as you might expect.What happens next is Crash Mode, basically, right down to the look and feel of the UI and menus. Once your initial swing has knocked down that hole's requisite number of items, you can trigger Smashbreaker - not Crashbreaker, okay? - and this is where Dangerous Burnout Golf really finds its soul. Smashbreaker sets your golf ball on fire, which is always money in the bank, but it also allows you to steer it in slow-mo through that same, thick, Burnout air, with that same sense of wilful resistance as you nudge it back and forth while aiming.

Largely, you're trying to bash it into as much of the environment as you can - plates in the kitchen, vases in the ballrooms, all of which shower you with points - while ensuring that once you run out of Smashbreaker juice you're not too far from the hole to putt neatly in.On top of this, though, there are high profile targets that turn certain levels into puzzles. Knock down all the pots in the kitchen. Smash all the urinals. (Hopefully not in the kitchen, that one.) Stop all the clocks. Throw in Hazards that you have to avoid, and you have a game that scales from nailbiter to zen-like destructive delirium and back again depending on what you are after from moment to moment.

I like to squeeze the right bumper as I play, slowing things down even further, and watch as busts, cabinets, and shelving comes apart, as oranges scatter into the air, as paint leaps and clumps. It is pure destructive beauty. It is the old trailer from Black - also by Criterion. (And also due a revisit?)How can this carry a whole game?

Words with friends rules cheat. Matching words include begems, brummagems, dodgems, gems and stratagems. Find more words at wordhippo.com! Find all words ending with GEMS. Brummagems, dodgems, gems, stratagems. Win against friends in word games with this full list. Words With Friends (change) Search. List all words ending with gems sorted by length or by how common the words are. Words formed from any letters in gems, plus an. Ending Older Games. So, your opponent lost interest and the game is just sitting there, eh? Or you don't like completed games cluttering your screen? Deleting Stale Games. If it's your turn, you can tap the 'Resign' button at the bottom of the game board. If it's not your turn, you'll need to wait for the other player to make a move first. Gems With Friends is an all-new, fast-paced social puzzle game that is easy to learn and difficult to master!

The answer is: gimmicks - which, in a game that's as mechanically focused as this one, is a pretty good answer. Each location has its own flavour, of course, but then there are modifiers. A time limit. A level filled with nothing but putting holes and flags. A glue mechanic which sees you bouncing back and forth, sticking to walls and taking down targets. A bucket doohickey, which launches you from one destructive spot to another and encourages you to chain blasts together.

Avoid the chocolate cake, and take out the oranges. Golfing is really not complex at this level.While all this is unfolding you can marvel at the physics as rooms full of chintzy crap turn to dust. All is vanity!

You can enjoy the odd glitch, as a vase or a milk carton hovers in the air, as a burger chatters away to itself like a giggling Muppet. Or you can even feel out the nuance that you know must exist within these simple controls: triggers which allow you to vary the amount of bounce in your smashbreaker ball, a pistol-putting laser-sight aim that allows you to jump over objects as you head for the hole. Secrets: bonus score flags, signature smashes that see you taking out a specific object like a microwave or a chandelier, and best of all the secret sauce bottles, one of each hidden in every location.

I am going to spend the rest of my life hunting those guys down. And then smashing them. Or maybe I'm going to spend the rest of my life putting the perfect ricochet to build up score before sinking the ball. The rise and fall of a British institution, as told by those who made it.Okay, I'm probably not going to spend the rest of my life in Dangerous Golf, but it's tempting. Alongside a lengthy and inventive campaign, there's campaign couch co-op for two and competitive couch play for up to four, in which you compete across playlists of favourite holes, passing the pad.

Online multiplayer scales to eight, and wisely sees everyone competing simultaneously. It's not the most advanced selection of features, and the matchmaking screen is as limited as the rest of the front-end, but it's enough. Dangerous Golf is clearly made on a limited budget - as semi-regular audio glitches, particularly in online multiplayer, attest to - so it's spent its energy where it counts: physics objects, level name puns, references to Hong Kong Phooey (number one super guy) and a Clarksonian title screen complete with cheesey guitar riff.And, as with Burnout, all that chaos can have a lovely calming effect on the soul. Midway through campaign I found myself above a table loaded with cupcakes, around which seven skeletons stood, metal goblets raised in a toast. I'd just completed a level whose theme was a champagne-lava mashup, so I was all but prepared for this strange and sinister vista.

Ultima online 20th anniversary. Resolved issue where Doom artifact collection could result in erroneous error messaging.We have also migrated the Vendor Search server and performed maintenance to improve search performance with named searches and to deal with the high volumes of searches we are experiencing.We will be taking Vendor Search offline prior to performing maintenance to implement this improvement which will then require the re-population of all vendor search data over a 24 hour period.

I teed off and bounced around for a happy ten minutes at least, taking out cupcakes and skeletons, skeletons and cupcakes. My head was wonderfully empty. I had zoned out completely and let the world drift away, lost in a landscape of slow-motion catastrophe.And then, when everything was rubble, I sank the ball in a perfect dropping arc, straight into the hole in the middle of the table.

The dust settled. A broken skull leered at me from the floor.