Official Burnout Paradise Thread

Burnout Paradise
Developer: Criterion Games
Publisher: EA
This game has two official sites: This is the EA site, and here is the Criterion site.



For those of you keeping score, Burnout is now on its 5th game. The last thing that I enjoyed that was on its fifth part was Rocky. (Shameless plug. Excellent film, kids). Burnout as a game has always carved out its on path. Adding the idea of proactively causing crashes has always satisfied the inner boy racer in me. The ability to weave in and out of traffic, nudging people into oncoming traffic and getting rewarded for it has been one of the highpoints of my videogaming life. And to be able to do it again, for the fifth time, on my lovely Xbox, is nearly persuading me to camp outside my local Game store to get the first copy in the country.



As always, you are asking yourself, why. Why should I spend £44.99 on this game, when there are so many other games that deserve my cash, time and gamerscore pursuit? And the short answer is, because of past history (apart from Burnout Revenge on the Xbox360. The Xbox 1 version was superb, but the 360 version sucked). Past history shows that high speed, in conjunction with insane crashes that get played out to you in slow motion is simply the best way to spend your spare time when sitting on your sofa and holding a control pad. Jumping into a Burnout game is like welcoming an old friend. And the major innovation this time seems to be a Burnout take on Test Drive Unlimited. Test Drive Unlimited, if you remember, allowed you to race over an entire hawaiian island. And in this game, you will have an entire city to crash around to your hearts content. A city which has individual named streets. (Why, EA? Are we going to see the symbiotic relationship between poor driving and postal strikes? Can we stop outside a certain address and order a pizza? Bizarre)



But yes, as always, the emphasis on this game is speed, destruction and loads and loads of fun. Perennial favourites like crash junctions make a welcome return. In this mode, you basically run headlong into a preset traffic situation and cause as much destruction as you can in a certain time limit. After your moment of madness, you destruction is tallied up into dollar values so that you can see how much destruction you have caused. And nothing raises a smile more to see that 45 seconds of mayhem has caused $8m of property damage. So, all in all, it is fair to say that 2008 is starting on a bright note.

Bring on the destruction.