Burnout Paradise

In preparation for another part of the assignment (uploading a video to Youtube), we've been asked to go out and acquire video footage for editing. I unwittingly blurted out "Superheroes" when asked to pick a topic - much to the delight of the rest of the class. I blame Facebook, because I was busy looking through my notifactions only to find about 6 from "My Heroes Ability", and that was the first word that came to my head. Seeing as how everyone had left the room really quickly, I was left working on my own, so I made a still-image montage using the PG Tips monkey and Mr Flibble. It does not look good.

In yet another attempt to "revolutionise" the racing genre in gaming, EA have presented the world with Burnout Paradise; where all the track racing has been replaced with one single city, the idea being you can drive and play around as and when you please.

Being allowed to play and drive as you is please, is as you obviously all know, a fantastic new feature which I personally welcome with open arms having spent the last decade or so being forced into playing racing games at damned inconvenient times against my will. Sarcasm aside, Burnout Paradise is in a nutshell a racing game with free roam. And big crashes.

I remember playing the first Burnout on the PS2 and found myself ooing and aahing at the, well, ability to crash into stuff. Lots of stuff. After failing to scrounge enough cash together to buy the game, I only briefly looked at a demo of Burnout 2... oohing and aahing quite a lot more. Again, no money. Then the third was released and made me cry. From past experience, I knew I'd never actually own it, but always want to. But no! I actually managed to buy my first Burnout game! And Takedown was by far the most insane take on racing I'd ever experienced - being encouraged to crash and do so spectacularly.

I somehow missed the launch of Revenge completely, so I was never actually too bothered about it. And that's that for a brief history lesson.

I think I should get it out of the way now, this is the first and (God willing) only time you'll catch me comparing the same game on the PS3 and 360 with any level of praise for Sony's blasted monolith.

Having managed to completely overlook Revenge, I wasn't psyched about Paradise at all, probably down to the fact that at this point I'd realised they'd given up with simple names like Burnout 4, 5 or 18 trillion and 3 point 2. Alright, not that simple, but God dammit, the weird new names just keep reminding me of the world's most irritating radio DJ. And I swear, Mr Automica, or whatever your real name is; if I ever see you walking down the street, I will bludgen you to death with a damp cricket bat.

Where was I? Ah yes, I wasn't psyched about Paradise, even after it was released, until I saw my flatmate playing it on his PS3 (forgive me while I go brush my teeth) and it looked amazing (and now I feel unclean). Now, let's put things into perspective here, while my flatmate has a pretty decent Samsung HDTV, my poor 360 is hooked up to my relatively measly 19in PC monitor. And I will admit, from memory, the P...S... I can't do it. From memory, the Monolith version did actually look marginally better, but I firmly grasp to the hope that it's down to the better TV... even if there appeared to be more debris.

That felt sick and wrong, and I will never do it again. Promise.

As anyone who has played the game (at all) will have noticed, while Paradise City is a very lovely and diverse place, with only an obscure desert of some description finishing the illusion of "micro world", it's not actually that big. And to silence your protests, here's some perspective. A "burning route" involves taking your car from one random corner of the map, to what usually works out as the opposite corner in a time limit... of about 1 min 30 secs. Yes yes yes, the cars are very fast, but that still means that when you think about it, the city is only about 3 by 2 miles. That's only 6 miles of city, before taking into account all the places you can't go (most places with grass, quite a lot of buildings...), and this is sold to you as "over 250 miles of open road".

Excuse me, 250 miles? If that's true, then about 200 of those miles are the bloody shortcuts littered across the city as if an executive's child was given string and a paper shredder to play with while he walked around a scale model of Paradise City. Then got bored and took a massive dump on the western side, leaving the finished game with about 4 roads in total on the entire western side of Paradise City.

But let me get back to that 3 by 2 miles lark. I specifically remember playing GTA San Andreas a couple of years back, and I had to get from somewhere in the middle of the map, to the south east. Even travelling by motorbike, as the crow flies, it still took me about 3 minutes. So EA, remember that next time you try using the words "massive" and "open".

I degress. Burnout Paradise is in fact a fantastic looking game, with crashes more eye popping than the 30 bloody second car chase in Casino Royale. The idea of having every even start from intersections not only gives the impression that the councillors for Paradise City hired an eight year old as their transport minister, presented him with a bag of cheap lollies and told him to come up with a traffic solution. I suspect that poor child is still bouncing around a room somewhere shouting out "TRAFFIC LIGHTS!" day and night. ...but this whole event fiasco also means you pick one route and go like stink, some back, go around the corner and do pretty much the exact same route again, only you inevitabley get cocky and are immediately punished by the game sending a rather large bus in your direction/face.

To sum up this game, all I can say is...
CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH CRASH TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS TRAFFIC LIGHTS CRASHY CRASH CRASH.

Enjoy.