Not long ago, publisher Empire Interactive decided it was time for them to step in the next generation of consoles, and announced their Xbox 360 debut with FlatOut - the franchise that practically saved them from bankrupcy last year. The new project is (tentatively) called FlatOut: Ultimate Carnage, and it's currently being developed by the same team from Bugbear Entertainment, with a June 2007 release in mind. That's one year after FlatOut 2 came out on the PC, PS2 and Xbox. The new Xbox 360 version is said to be a re-imagining of FlatOut 2, "rebuilt from the ground up and specifically developed to utilize and take advantage of the additional feature sets and improved processing ability of the Xbox 360".

Although we already had a couple of images from Flatout: Ultimate Carnage more than a month ago, today Empire issued a new batch of "first screenshots", as they call them, showing even more destructive madness a la FlatOut. Accompanying this release is a brief description of the game's basic features, as follows:

"Some of the many brand new design and gameplay components featured in FlatOut Ultimate Carnage include 12 cars racing on screen up from eight in FlatOut 2, five all-new single player and two all-new multiplayer game modes over Xbox Live, over 8,000 dynamic objects per track up from 5,000 in FlatOut 2, widescreen High Definition resolution (720p), dynamic lighting and shadowing all with proper real-time environment mapping on all vehicles, downloadable content via Xbox Live, and 20,000 polygons per car up from 7,500 in the previous generation."

Even if the content will be similar to that from FlatOut 2, we're hoping to see this visually-enhanced version of the game crashing on the PC as well. Figuratively speaking, of course.

(N.B. Archive text, links removed)