History Videogame / SplitSecond

[[quoteright:350:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/bigbaddaboom_5586.jpg]]
[[caption-width-right:350:Bridge goes: Big Badda Boom!]]

One day, the fine folks at Creator/DisneyInteractiveStudios, after watching a 10-hour marathon of Creator/MichaelBay movies, picked up their copy of ''VideoGame/BurnoutParadise'' and thought, "This is a fun game, but it's missing something... something ''[[BuffySpeak explodey]]''." And with that, the game ''Split/Second'' was born.

''Split/Second'' (''Split/Second: Velocity'' [[MarketBasedTitle in Europe]]) is a racing game set up like a [[RealityShow reality]][=/=]GameShow (not to be confused with the [[Series/SplitSecond1972 Tom Kennedy quizzer]] from TheSeventies[[note]]which aired on, ironically, Creator/{{ABC}}, owned by Disney since 1996[[/note]] or its [[TheEighties 80s]] revival with Monty Hall) in which racers compete through 12 episodes of an internationally broadcast television series, also titled ''Split/Second''. The racing is much like it is in any arcade racer, with one key difference: at any point, after accumulating enough energy (through drifting, drafting and jumps), racers can set off "Power Plays" in which bombs are dropped from helicopters, cars and trucks on the side of the track are blown up, overhead cranes and bridges are blown up and fall onto the track, ''the road itself'' is blown up to change the route of the course, buildings fall over, planes fall out of the sky... yeah, it's basically ''Burnout'' turned into a SummerBlockbuster.

However, racing isn't the only mode available.
* Detonator has you do a timed solo lap of the track while [[EverythingTryingToKillYou pretty much every Power Play on the course gets set off to try and kill you]].
* Survival has you racing semis against a time limit while they drop {{exploding barrels}} at you, which either slow you down or wreck you, depending on the type of barrel.
* In Air Strike, you earn points dodging an attack helicopter firing missiles at you; better evasions earn more points.
** Air Revenge is similar, but drifts and successful dodging allow you to gain power to shoot the missiles back at the helicopter and destroy it.
Why, yes, ''all'' of the game modes directly involve explosions in one way or another.

All it's missing is Creator/MeganFox and Music/LinkinPark[[note]]or not, considering the fact that she wasn't in the third ''Film/{{Transformers}}'' movie[[/note]].

A sequel was in development, but [[http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2011/05/04/split-second-2-canceled-layoffs-at-black-rock-studio.aspx Disney cancelled the project]], [[http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-07-01-split-second-dev-black-rock-to-close leading to the studio's ultimate closure.]]
----
!!Tropes:
* AttackReflector: You eventually get the opportunity to destroy that damn helicopter by sending its missiles right back at it.
* AwesomeButImpractical: The Elite Goliath. Good lord, is it built like a tank, but reaching top speed is not easy. Almost all of the other trucks suffer a problem in that it's easy for them to ignore shock effects, but if they're shoved far enough off course, they won't be able to recover in time and crash anyway.
* BigDamPlot: One of the Route Switchers involves the collapse of a dam, with the old route running along its inside wall.
* BoringButPractical: The helicopter-dropping-a-bomb Power Plays are easily the most boring ones in the game, both visually and conceptually. But they're reusable from lap to lap, are a near-guaranteed wreck if timed correctly, and most tracks have one just before the end, letting you destroy the car you're right behind in the race's last seconds.
* BraggingRightsReward: Getting achievements causes them to show up on your car as decals, as a way of showing people online just how much of a [[BadassDriver badass]] you are.
** One of them, "Untouchable" (win a race event without crashing) has ''two'' spots on the rear of every car. That should give you an idea of how often you can expect to crash in this game.
** Also, the Ryback Firestorm car, awarded when the player reaches 3600 credits (meaning you have finished ''1st'' in '''''every single event in the game'''''). By that point, you don't really need it for anything anymore. Even if you want to use it for multiplayer races, it'll only come in handy if you can drift well. In contrast, the penultimate car, the Hanzo FX350, is a very fast and controllable car that is much easier to drive than the Firestorm overall.
* CliffHanger: For a racing game, interestingly enough -- [[spoiler: after the championship race, you're doing the winner's podium shots when things start being blown up, even though the power plays were already deactivated, and then an army of rogue construction vehicles with mysterious "SƧ" logos on them show up, and soon after, the scene cuts to black with "TO BE CONTINUED" on the screen.]]
** [[spoiler:If you listen to the guy on the mic, it sounds like he's talking about a now-defunct company that ran an earlier season of ''Split/Second'' until 1982. Apparently the company wasn't as dead as the current ''Split/Second'' team thought.]]
** LeftHanging: Due to the cancellation of the game's supposed sequel.
* TheComputerIsACheatingBastard: In quite a few ways.
** On each track on the hardest difficulty (which kicks in somewhere around season 7) there are one or two AI opponents who can (and will) drive the track with 100% precision, meaning the only way to slow them down is to hit them with Power Plays. If you let them overtake you and get out of sight, they'll have a 10 second lead on you in no time flat. This is exceptionally noticeable in the Elite Races, where Torpedo, Vixen and Raptor are the major offenders, and can rack up a ''20-second'' lead if left to their own devices.
** On Elite Races, the other Elites will hardly ever use Power Plays on each other, and have a seemingly infinite Power Meter, which they will use to throw every single Power Play on the track at you if you're in first place. Good thing they can't use them too well and that most are really easy to recover from.
** Also on Elite Races, Raptor will ''always'' come at least second. At least, the results board will say so. This makes coming in first in every Elite race almost necessary because Raptor will always get the full 9 points in the championship standings and makes it a major pain in the ass to come back, as even if you win the race, Raptor will ''still'' get 8 points and make the gap the race should have made almost nothing again.
** It's a small blessing that the AI ''really'' cannot handle being on the receiving end of Power Plays; if they start going off course the drivers seem to panic. Sometimes a shockwave-based power play (gas stations, tanker trucks) can cause the built-like-tanks trucks to outright ''fall apart'', even when it'll do hardly anything to your probably fairly flimsy supercar on a direct hit.
*** An exception to this exists in the gas station Power Plays; if timed right, your car won't make it through in one piece. The window to wreck AI opponents in gas stations is, however, much larger.
* CoolCar: Plenty.
* DeathFromAbove: Air Strike Mode, in which you are being chased by an attack helicopter that fires volleys of missiles at you.
** One of the Power Plays on the "Airport Terminal" level causes the air traffic control tower to topple over, crushing any racers beneath it and rerouting the course onto the airport runway. During the next lap, a jumbo jet comes in for a crash landing on said runway--[[OhCrap while you are racing on it]].
*** That one is pretty easy to avoid (just stick to the far left of the track and watch the incoming jet engine) and is actually a separate Level 2 Power Play. But still. ''Crashing plane''.
* DeathIsASlapOnTheWrist: If your car gets wrecked, you simply respawn after a few seconds without a scratch. On the other hand, considering this is an action-packed racing game, those are still precious seconds being wasted. However, this is averted in certain game modes, where death is permanent, automatically ending the round for the affected player.
* DeathWorld: In the 'Detonator' mode, the player has to complete a hot lap of the track while the majority of the offensive Power Plays trigger in front of them. Every barrel, fence, car, train, building and bridge[[note]]with the exception of helicopter bombs and exploding tankers[[/note]] can and WILL explode as you drive past it in an attempt to throw you into a wall and explode. In short, this mode could be renamed EverythingTryingToKillYou.
* DifficultButAwesome: The Level 2 Power Plays can be completely ineffectual if you time them wrong or if there aren't enough cars to be hit by them when you fire them off. On the other hand, if timed near-perfectly, it's entirely possible to wipe out the entire race in one fell swoop (and get an "Ultimate Wreck").
* DontTryThisAtHome: In no small part, the developers and the game itself make quite the effort to tell you that everything portrayed within is entirely fictional, and should NOT be attempted in real life for any reason. This is ''Disney'' we are talking about.
* DownloadableContent: In addition to several car packs, there are three packs that each include a new game mode, a new track, and a few cars. The new modes are Survival Race ([[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin racing in Survival mode]]), Deadline (Detonator with timer-pausing pickups), and Onslaught (racing in Air Strike mode).
* DisasterMovie: Many of the Level 2 Power Plays look like they came out of one of these.
* EpicFail: You know you (or the other AI cars) are doing terribly in an Elite race if ''Rigg'' is in first place, because he drives the Elite Goliath mentioned above. Even under AI control, Rigg is basically the ButtMonkey of the Elite team and will almost always come in dead last regardless of everything that happens in the race.
* EverythingTryingToKillYou: Detonator events, where the course's Power Plays trigger by themselves, forcing you to outmaneuver them and keep your speed. During Season mode, these must be beaten in a certain amount of time (which is ''ridiculously'' unforgiving; scraping by with mere milliseconds is par for the course and you ''will'' restart most of the time).
** Even more so in multiplayer when you're driving ahead of the pack, bombarded with the combined power (and bodywork) of everyone behind you. And with drifty cars like the Firestorm, power flows in like water.
* ExcusePlot: It could easily be argued that the whole "reality TV show" thing is an excuse plot for racing with gratuitous explosions.
** The developers flat out admitted that they came up with the StuffBlowingUp concept first and only later asked "OK, how do we justify this?"
** Was intended to be subverted, as the ending of the Season Mode suggests that more is taking place than meets the eye, but that's never gonna happen.
* ExplodingBarrels: Survival mode has you dodging as many of these as you can. You get bonus points for overtaking the trucks dropping them.
* {{Fauxrrari}}: The vehicle companies seem to be pastiches of real companies.
** Ryback has many chunky vehicles that bear a strong resemblance to modern American muscle cars and trucks (Camaro, Mustang, Ram, etc).
** Cobretti cars are sleeker, with a name evocative of Italian manufacturers (Ferrari, Lamborghini and Pagani). Their lineup, however, also encompasses ostensibly German[[note]]GT RS (Porsche), Nero GT400 (Mercedes-Benz), Centaur (Audi)[[/note]] and British[[note]]GT500 (Aston Martin), Severus (TVR)[[/note]] cars.
** Hanzo is of course a Japanese company, with a name close to Mazda and Honda and a car resembling the Nissan GT-R.
* [[InfinityPlusOneSword Infinity Plus One Car]]:
** The Cobretti Slipstream is an amazingly good car for drifting (and thus racking up power), and works well on almost any track.
** The Elite S510 is a close second (until you get to the next tier of cars anyway). The other Elite cars however, are not actually that practical despite their awesomeness or good looks. The description for the Le Mans-esque Elite [=GT12=] won by taking 1st in the final race lampshades this a bit:
-->The [=GT12=] is a pure-blood race-car: built for the track. Which is great, except that we're going to make you race it down a storm drain, through a hail of explosions!
** The Cobretti 530 GTS. It's among the fastest cars in the game, and by the point you get it, you can pretty much just zoom through every race.
** The Ryback Titan, the hardest truck to get, is a surprisingly good vehicle for races despite being a truck. It has the ''same top speed'' as the 530 GTS above and the highest acceleration among all the trucks. Moreover, being a truck, it's also quite tough and stable to handle, leading to very few slowdowns.
** The Hanzo [=FX350=], awarded for reaching 3300 credits and likely the penultimate car you will unlock. It's the second fastest car in the game, ''but'' it doesn't have paper armor, is very driftable, ''and'' has a good grip for all those tight turns or for when you just don't feel like drifting. That says volumes about its practicality, considering how the fastest car in the game (the [=GT12]) is pretty much just a LeeroyJenkins and the ultimate car (the Firestorm) is just a pure-bred drifter.
** While the Firestorm isn't perfect, the sheer ease with which it can drift (''without losing speed'', at that) makes it worthy of being PostEndGameContent. Enjoy topping up your power bar in a matter of seconds.
* ItsGoingDown: If you see anything big, tall, and cool-looking in the level scenery, there's a pretty good chance that it will be sitting on top of a car at the end of the race.
** Or several cars. The more that aren't you, the better.
* LimitBreak: Level 2 Power Plays, which use your entire energy bar and often have a far greater impact on the race (changing the route or taking out several racers at once).
* MacrossMissileMassacre: You are on the receiving end in Air Strike mode. Air Revenge mode turns the tables on the chopper.
* {{Minimalism}}: The HUD lacks any unnecessary elements, such as a speedometer or track map, and is kept fairly small. Otherwise, you'd miss all the explosions.
* NintendoHard: Get ready to tear your hair out trying to win the Detonator events. The times you're required to beat feel as though the developers took the best time from their team, rounded it down to an even value, then subtracted one second and expect you to beat that time. Very often, you'll find that the biggest obstacle in these events is not the automatic Power Plays, but the car's own top speed and acceleration.
* OldSaveBonus: The "Have We Met Before?" decal, which shows up if you have save data from ''Pure''.
* OneHitKill: In Survival Mode, some of the ExplodingBarrels launched from the semis are red rather than blue and will wreck you instantly. Once time's up, you enter SuddenDeath and the trucks ''only'' drop reds. [[OhCrap Good luck.]]
* PlayerExclusiveMechanic: As noted above, your non-player opponents have a much greater chance at wrecking from just explosion shockwaves.
** The shortcut in [[spoiler:Construction Site]] is practically unknown to the AI. Justified in that [[spoiler:they'd give it away otherwise]].
* RecurringRiff: There is a very distinctive melody that plays throughout many of the game's pieces, from the intro to the Elite Race themes.
* RubberbandAI: Two-way until the higher difficulties. No matter which car you pick for any race in any season, you can easily manage to pull middle of the pack at the very least, unless you drive atrociously and crash into every Power Play on purpose. The AIs will rarely get too far ahead or behind. This means you can't take a supercar back to the first episodes and clean house[[note]](although differing handling/acceleration stats and more experience with a vehicle certainly help)[[/note]] by zooming into the lead far ahead of all the other cars.
* RuleOfCool: The reality TV premise would be impossible in RealLife; it's more or less just an excuse to blow as much stuff up during a race as possible.
* RunawayTrain: One Route Switcher sends a train careening down a track next to the course before being blown sky-high. You can get a [[CosmeticAward decal]] for taking out three or more racers with this: [[IncrediblyLamePun The Pain Train]].
* SceneryGorn: The likely state of the course after a few laps.
* ShoutOut: The entire game is one long love letter to {{summer blockbuster}}s.
** Survival Mode, in which you have to overtake a series of semi-trucks that are dropping explosive barrels to stop you, is lifted almost directly from similar scenes in ''Film/BadBoysII'' and ''Film/TheIsland''.
*** One of the Survival courses takes place in a storm drain, evoking a feel very similar to a ChaseScene in ''Film/Terminator2JudgmentDay''.
** The achievement/trophy names have shout outs to ''WesternAnimation/{{Hercules}}'', of all things-- the ones named ''Going the Distance'' and ''Zero to Hero'' specifically. Yeah, Disney ''Interactive'' published the game, but still.
* ShowWithinAShow: Within a game, but you get the point.
* StuffBlowingUp: Have we established this yet?
** No better way to take in this trope than by setting up a Detonator event. Bask your car in flame and explosions as you charge through the course with just about every Power Play triggering by itself.
* VariableMix: The menu music when you advance past the title screen and select an event.
** Each theme during a race has three variations which play at different stages in the race. Each mix adds more instruments and changes the pitch in order to ramp up the intensity as you close in on the finish. The music segues whenever it's forced to pause (such as a noteworthy Power Play or if you crash). On three-lap courses, each mix plays on the start of a new lap, while two-lap races begin on the second variation. The easiest way to force the game to switch music is by pausing and unpausing the game as long as you know the points at which the theme changes. If nothing forces the music to pause, it'll just keep playing the same theme (so if you're driving a particularly fast vehicle on Easy difficulty, you can keep the music the same for the whole race by outrunning everyone and never triggering a Power Play).
* WreakingHavok: What do you expect from a game that actually uses the Havok physics engine?
----

''Split/Second'' (''Split/Second: Velocity'' [[MarketBasedTitle in Europe]]) is a racing game set up like a [[RealityShow reality]][=/=]GameShow (not to be confused with the [[Series/SplitSecond Tom Kennedy quizzer]] from TheSeventies[[note]]which aired on, ironically, Creator/{{ABC}}, owned by Disney since 1996[[/note]] or its [[TheEighties 80s]] revival with Monty Hall) in which racers compete through 12 episodes of an internationally broadcast television series, also titled ''Split/Second''. The racing is much like it is in any arcade racer, with one key difference: at any point, after accumulating enough energy (through drifting, drafting and jumps), racers can set off "Power Plays" in which bombs are dropped from helicopters, cars and trucks on the side of the track are blown up, overhead cranes and bridges are blown up and fall onto the track, ''the road itself'' is blown up to change the route of the course, buildings fall over, planes fall out of the sky... yeah, it's basically ''Burnout'' turned into a SummerBlockbuster.

** The achievement/trophy names have shout outs to ''Disney/{{Hercules}}'', of all things-- the ones named ''Going the Distance'' and ''Zero to Hero'' specifically. Yeah, Disney ''Interactive'' published the game, but still.

** Also, the Ryback Firestorm car, awarded when the player reaches 3600 credits (meaning you have finished ''1st'' in '''''every single event in the game'''''). By that point, you don't really need it for anything anymore. Even if you want to use it for multiplayer races, it'll only come in handy if you can drift ''perfectly'' well. In contrast, the penultimate car, the Hanzo FX350, is a very fast and controllable car that is much better to drive than the Firestorm overall.

** Cobretti cars are sleeker, with a name evocative of Italian manufacturers (Ferrari, Lamborghini and Pagani). Their lineup, however, also encompasses ostensibly German[[note]]GT RS, Nero GT400, Centaur[[/note]] and British[[note]]GT500, Severus[[/note]] cars.

** The Elite S510 is a close second (until you get to the next tier of cars anyway). The other Elite cars however, are not actually that practical despite their awesomeness or good looks. The description for the Le Mans-esque car won by taking 1st in the final race lampshades this a bit:

** The Cobretti 530 GTS. It's among the fastest cars in the game and by the point you get it, you can pretty much just zoom through every race.

** The Hanzo [=FX350=], awarded for reaching 3300 credits and likely the penultimate car you will unlock. It's the second fastest car in the game, ''but'' it doesn't have paper armor, is very driftable, ''and'' has a good grip for all those tight turns or for when you just don't feel like drifting. That says volumes about its practicality, considering how the fastest car in the game is pretty much just a LeeroyJenkins and the ultimate car is just a pure-bred drifter.

* TheComputerIsACheatingBastard: In quite a few ways.
** On each track on the hardest difficulty (which kicks in somewhere around season 7) there are one or two AI opponents who can (and will) drive the track with 100% precision, meaning the only way to slow them down is to hit them with Power Plays. If you let them overtake you and get out of sight, they'll have a 10 second lead on you in no time flat. This is exceptionally noticeable in the Elite Races, where Torpedo, Vixen and Raptor are the major offenders, and can rack up a ''20-second'' lead if left to their own devices.
** On Elite Races, the other Elites will hardly ever use Power Plays on each other, and have a seemingly infinite Power Meter, which they will use to throw every single Power Play on the track at you if you're in first place. Good thing they can't use them too well and that most are really easy to recover from.
** Also on Elite Races, Raptor will ''always'' come at least second. At least, the results board will say so. This makes coming in first in every Elite race almost necessary because Raptor will always get the full 9 points in the championship standings and makes it a major pain in the ass to come back, as even if you win the race, Raptor will ''still'' get 8 points and make the gap the race should have made almost nothing again.
** It's a small blessing that the AI ''really'' cannot handle being on the receiving end of Power Plays; if they start going off course the drivers seem to panic. Sometimes a shockwave-based power play (gas stations, tanker trucks) can cause the built-like-tanks trucks to outright ''fall apart'', even when it'll do hardly anything to your probably fairly flimsy supercar on a direct hit.

* FollowTheLeader: It's ''VideoGame/{{Burnout}}'' [-WITH TRAPS INSTEAD OF BOOST!-]

** Air Revenge is similar, but drifts and successful dodging allow you to gain power to shoot the missiles back at the helicopter and destroy it. Why, yes, ''all'' of the game modes directly involve explosions in one way or another.

''Split/Second'' (''Split/Second: Velocity'' [[MarketBasedTitle in Europe]]) is a racing game set up like a [[RealityShow reality]][=/=]GameShow (not to be confused with the [[Series/SplitSecond Tom Kennedy quizzer]] from TheSeventies {which aired on, ironically, Creator/{{ABC}}, owned by Disney since 1996}, or its' 80s revival with Monty Hall) in which racers compete through 12 episodes of an internationally broadcast television series, also titled ''Split/Second''. The racing is much like it is in any arcade racer, with one key difference: at any point, after accumulating enough energy (through drifting, drafting and jumps), racers can set off "Power Plays" in which bombs are dropped from helicopters, cars and trucks on the side of the track are blown up, overhead cranes and bridges are blown up and fall onto the track, ''the road itself'' is blown up to change the route of the course, buildings fall over, planes fall out of the sky... yeah, it's basically ''Burnout'' turned into a SummerBlockbuster.

However, racing isn't the only mode available. Detonator has you do a single lap of the track alone while [[EverythingTryingToKillYou pretty much every Power Play on the course gets set off to try and kill you]]. Survival has you racing semis against a time limit while they drop {{exploding barrels}} at you, which either slow you down or wreck you, depending on the type of barrel. In Air Strike, you earn points dodging a helicopter firing missiles at you; better evasions earn more points. Air Revenge is similar, but drifts and successful dodging allow you to gain power to shoot the missiles back at the helicopter and destroy it. Why, yes, ''all'' of the game modes directly involve explosions in one way or another.

A [[http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2011/05/04/split-second-2-canceled-layoffs-at-black-rock-studio.aspx sequel was in development but Disney canceled the project]], [[http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-07-01-split-second-dev-black-rock-to-close leading to the studio's ultimate closure.]]

* AttackReflector: You eventually get the opportunity to destroy that damn helicopter by sending their missiles right back at it.
* AwesomeButImpractical: The Elite Goliath. Good lord, is it built like a tank, but reaching top speed is not easy. Almost all of the other trucks suffer a problem in that it's easy for them to ignore shock effects... but if they're shoved far enough off course, they won't be able to recover in time and ''crash anyway''.
* BigDamPlot: One of the Route Changers involves the collapse of a dam, with the old route running on the outside of it.
* BoringButPractical: The helicopter-dropping-a-bomb Power Plays are easily the most boring ones in the game, both visually and conceptually. But they're reusable from lap to lap, are a near-guaranteed wreck if timed correctly, and most tracks have one just before the end, letting you destroy the car you're right behind in the race's last seconds.
* BraggingRightsReward: Getting achievement points causes the logos of said achievements to show up on your car, as a way of showing people online just how much of a [[BadassDriver badass]] you are.
** One of them, ''Untouchable'' (win a race event without crashing) has ''two'' spots on the rear of every car. That should give you an idea of how often you can expect to crash in this game.
** Also, the Ryback Firestorm car, awarded when the player reaches 3600 credits (meaning you have finished ''1st'' in '''''every single event in the game'''''). By that point, you don't really need it for anything anymore. Even if you want to use it for multiplayer races, it'll only come in handy if you can drift ''perfectly'' well. In contrast, the penultimate car, the Hanzo FX350, is a very fast and controllable car that is much better than the Firestorm overall.
* CliffHanger: For a racing game, interestingly enough -- [[spoiler: after the championship race, you're doing the winner's podium shots when things start being blown up, even though the power plays were already deactivated, and then an army of rogue vehicles with mysterious logos on them show up, and finally the scene cuts to black with "TO BE CONTINUED" on the screen.]]
** [[spoiler:If you listen to the guy on the mic, it sounds like he's talking about a now-defunct company that did a show similar to ''Split/Second'' until 1982. Apparently the company wasn't as shut down as the ''Split/Second'' team thought.]]

** One of the Power Plays on the "Airport Terminal" level causes the air traffic control tower to topple over, crushing the racers beneath it and rerouting the course onto the airport runway. During the next lap, a jumbo jet comes in for a crash landing on said runway. ''[[OhCrap While you are racing on it]]''.

* DeathIsASlapOnTheWrist: If your car gets wrecked, you simply reappear after several seconds just fine. On the other hand, considering this is an action packed racing game, those are still precious few seconds being wasted. However, this is averted in certain game modes, where death is permanent, automatically ending the round for the affected player.
* DeathWorld: In the 'Detonator' mode, the player has to complete a lap of the track while the majority of the offensive Power Plays trigger in front of them. Every barrel, fence, car, train, building and bridge can and WILL explode as you drive past it in an attempt to throw you into a wall and explode. In short, this mode could be renamed EverythingTryingToKillYou.
* DifficultButAwesome: The Level 2 Power Plays can be completely ineffectual if you time it wrong or if there aren't enough cars to be hit by it when you fire it off. On the other hand, if timed near-perfectly, it's entirely possible to wipe out the entire race in one go.

** Even more so in multiplayer when you're driving ahead of the pack, bombarded with the combined power (and bodywork) of everyone behind you. And with drifting, power flows in like water.
* ExcusePlot: It could easily be argued that the whole Reality TV Show thing is an excuse plot for car racing with gratuitous explosions, admit it.

** Was intended to subverted, as the ending of the Season Mode suggests that more is taking place than meets the eye, but that's never gonna happen.

* {{Fauxrrari}}: The vehicle companies seem to be pastiches of real companies. Ryback has more chunky vehicles that bear a strong resemblance to the modern versions of classic American muscle cars (Camaro, Mustang, Challenger, etc). Cobretti cars are sleeker, with a name evocative of Italian manufacturers (Ferrari, Lamborghini and Pagani). Hanzo is of course the Japanese company, with a name close to Mazda and Honda.
* FollowTheLeader: It's ''VideoGame/{{Burnout}}'' [-WITH TRAPS! AND NO BOOSTING!-]

** The Cobretti Slipstream is an amazingly good car, especially if you love drifting, and works well on almost any track.
** The Elite S510 is a close second (until you get the next tier of cars anyway). The other Elite cars however, are not actually that practical despite their awesomeness or good looks. The description for the Le Mans-esque car won by taking 1st in the final race lampshades this a bit:
-->"It's a purebred track car. Great! Except we're going to make you race it down a ''storm drain'', through a hail of ''explosions''."

** The Ryback Titan, the hardest truck to get, is a surprisingly good vehicle for races despite being a truck. It has the same top speed as the ''Cobretti 530 GTS'' above, and also has the highest acceleration among all the trucks. Moreover, being a truck, it's also extremely tough and stable to handle, leading to very few slowdowns.
** The Hanzo FX 350, awarded for reaching 3300 credits and likely the penultimate car you will unlock. It's the second fastest car in the game, ''but'' it doesn't have paper armor, is very driftable, ''and'' has a good grip for all those tight turns or for when you just don't feel like drifting. That says volumes about its practicality, considering how the fastest car in the game is pretty much just a LeeroyJenkins, and the ultimate car is just a pure-bred drifter.

** Or ''several'' cars. The more that aren't you, the better.
* LimitBreak: Level 2 Power Plays, which use your entire energy bar, and which often have a far greater impact on the race (changing the route, taking out several racers at once).

* NintendoHard: Get ready to tear your hair out trying to win the Detonator events. The times you're required to beat feel as though the developers took the best time from their team, rounded it down to an even value, then subtracted one second and expect you to beat that time. Very often you'll find the biggest obstacle in these events is not the automatic Power Plays but the car's own top speed and acceleration.

* RubberbandAI: Two-way until the higher difficulties. No matter which car you pick for any race in any season, you can easily manage to pull middle of the pack at the very least, unless you drive atrociously and crash into every Power Play on purpose. The AIs will rarely get too far ahead or behind. This means you can't take a supercar back to the first episodes and clean house (although differing handling/acceleration stats and more experience with a vehicle certainly help) by zooming into a lead far ahead of all the other cars.

* RunawayTrain: One Route Changer sends a train careening down a track next to the course before blowing up. You can get a [[CosmeticAward decal]] for taking out three or more racers with this: [[IncrediblyLamePun The Pain Train]].

* ShoutOut: The entire game is one long love letter to popcorn {{summer blockbuster}}s.

** The achievement/trophy names have shout outs to ''Disney/{{Hercules}}'', of all things-- the ones named ''Going the Distance'' and ''Zero to Hero'' specifically. Yeah, Disney Interactive published the game, but still.

* TheComputerIsACheatingBastard: In quite a few ways;
** On each track on the hardest difficulty (which kicks in somewhere around Season 7) there are one or two AI opponents who can (and will) drive the track with 100% precision, meaning the only way to slow them down is to hit them with Power Plays. If you let them overtake you and get out of sight, they'll have a 10 second lead on you in no time flat. This is exceptionally noticeable in the Elite Races, where Torpedo, Vixen and Raptor are the major offenders, and can rack up a ''20 second'' lead if left to their own devices.
** On Elite Races, the other Elites will hardly ever use Power Plays on each other, and have a seemingly infinite Power Meter, which they will use to throw every single Power Play on the track at you if you're in first place. Good thing it can't use them too well and that most are really easy to recover from.
** Also on Elite Races, Raptor will ALWAYS come at least second. At least, the time board will say. This makes coming in first in every Elite race almost necessary because Raptor will always get the full 9 points in the championship standings and makes it a major pain in the ass to come back as even if you win the race, Raptor will STILL get 8 points and make the gap the race should have made almost nothing again.
** It's a small blessing that the AI ''really'' cannot handle being on the receiving end of Power Plays; if they start going off course the drivers seem to panic. Sometimes a shockwave-based power play (gas stations, tanker trucks) can cause the built-like-tanks trucks to outright ''fall apart'', even when it'll do hardly anything to your probably fairly flimsy car on a direct hit.
* VariableMix: Each theme has three variations which play at different stages in the race. Each mix adds more instruments and changes the pitch in order to ramp up the intensity as you close in on the finish. The music segues whenever it's forced to pause (such as a noteworthy Power Play or if you crash). On three-lap courses each mix plays on the start of a new lap while two-lap races begin on the second variation. The easiest way to force the game to switch music is by pausing and unpausing the game as long as you know the points at which the theme changes. If nothing forces the music to pause, it'll just keep playing the same theme (so if you're driving a particularly fast vehicle on Easy difficulty, you can keep the music the same for the whole race by outrunning everyone and never triggering a Power Play).

One day, the fine folks at Creator/DisneyInteractiveStudios, after watching a 10-hour marathon of Creator/MichaelBay movies, picked up their copy of ''VideoGame/BurnoutParadise'' and thought, "This is a fun game, but it's missing something... something ''[[BuffySpeak explodey]]''." And with that, the game ''Split Second'' was born.

''Split Second'' is a racing game set up like a [[RealityShow reality]][=/=]GameShow (not to be confused with the [[Series/SplitSecond Tom Kennedy quizzer]] from TheSeventies {which aired on, ironically, Creator/{{ABC}}, owned by Disney since 1996}, or its' 80s revival with Monty Hall) in which racers compete through 12 episodes of an internationally broadcast television series, also titled ''Split Second''. The racing is much like it is in any arcade racer, with one key difference: at any point, after accumulating enough energy (through drifting, drafting and jumps), racers can set off "Power Plays" in which bombs are dropped from helicopters, cars and trucks on the side of the track are blown up, overhead cranes and bridges are blown up and fall onto the track, ''the road itself'' is blown up to change the route of the course, buildings fall over, planes fall out of the sky... yeah, it's basically ''Burnout'' turned into a SummerBlockbuster.

** [[spoiler:If you listen to the guy on the mic, it sounds like he's talking about a now-defunct company that did a show similar to ''Split Second'' until 1982. Apparently the company wasn't as shut down as the ''Split Second'' team thought.]]

* EverythingTryingToKillYou: Detonator events, where the course's Power Plays trigger by themselves, forcing you to outmaneuver them and keep your speed. During Season mode, these must be beaten in a certain amount of time (which is ''ridiculously'' unforgiving; scraping by with mere miliseconds is par for the course and you ''will'' restart most of the time).

** It's a small blessing that the AI ''really'' cannot handle being on the recieving end of Power Plays; if they start going off course the drivers seem to panic. Sometimes a shockwave-based power play (gas stations, tanker trucks) can cause the built-like-tanks trucks to outright ''fall apart'', even when it'll do hardly anything to your probably fairly flimsy car on a direct hit.

One day, the fine folks at Creator/DisneyInteractive tudios, after watching a 10-hour marathon of Creator/MichaelBay movies, picked up their copy of ''VideoGame/BurnoutParadise'' and thought, "This is a fun game, but it's missing something... something ''[[BuffySpeak explodey]]''." And with that, the game ''Split Second'' was born.

** [[spoiler:If you listen to the guy on the mic, it sounds like he's talking about a now-defunct company that did a show similar to Split Second until 1982. Apparently the company wasn't as shut down as the Split Second team thought.]]

** Might be subverted if there's a sequel, as the ending of the Season mode suggests that more is taking place than meets the eye.

** The achievement/trophy names have shout outs to ''Hercules'', of all things- the ones named ''Going the Distance'' and ''Zero to Hero'' specifically. Yeah, Disney Interactive published the game, but still.

One day, the fine folks at Disney Interactive Studios, after watching a 10-hour marathon of Creator/MichaelBay movies, picked up their copy of ''VideoGame/BurnoutParadise'' and thought, "This is a fun game, but it's missing something... something ''[[BuffySpeak explodey]]''." And with that, the game ''Split Second'' was born.

''Split Second'' is a racing game set up like a [[RealityShow reality]][=/=]GameShow (not to be confused with the [[Series/SplitSecond Tom Kennedy quizzer]] from TheSeventies (which aired on Disney-owned Creator/{{ABC}}), or its' 80s revival with Monty Hall) in which racers compete through 12 episodes of an internationally broadcast television series, also titled ''Split Second''. The racing is much like it is in any arcade racer, with one key difference: at any point, after accumulating enough energy (through drifting, drafting and jumps), racers can set off "Power Plays" in which bombs are dropped from helicopters, cars and trucks on the side of the track are blown up, overhead cranes and bridges are blown up and fall onto the track, ''the road itself'' is blown up to change the route of the course, buildings fall over, planes fall out of the sky... yeah, it's basically ''Burnout'' turned into a SummerBlockbuster.

* CliffHanger: For a racing game, interestingly enough- [[spoiler: after the championship race, you're doing the winner's podium shots when things start being blown up, even though the power plays were already deactivated, and then an army of rogue vehicles with mysterious logos on them show up, and finally the scene cuts to black with "TO BE CONTINUED" on the screen.]]