exacly whose idea of paradise is this? [games]

burnout paradise (xbox 360)

games for masochists
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when i first got an xbox 360 and excitedly popped in burnout revenge it was a pretty big disappointment to find that it was the exact same game i'd already beaten a few times over on the original xbox. no new levels or anything - it just looked shiny. so when burnout paradise finally came out i thought it was pretty much a sure fire great game. the concept is cool - an open, sandbox-like city that you can just drive around and do whatever the hell you want. for the most part it works, you can race around the city reliving your favorite scene from ronin, speeding head on into oncoming traffic, doing emergency break turns and sweet jumps off freeway overpasses. all that is awesome, but unfortunately you don't really get any reward for that (nor any achievement points), so you have to pull up to the various stoplights around the city and activate events. this is where the game starts to get sketchy though. most of the standard burnout style stuff is there in some form or another, but they just don't quite translate to the paradise concept.

instead of the standard race tracks you're used to seeing in games, the entire city is fair game for every single event. you can pick your own route to the finish lines, which sounds like a good thing, but it ends up being the game's most glaring and unforgivable mistake. the way you would determine your route to the finish line is by referencing the mini map in the right corner of the screen. unfortunately, this has got to be the worst map in a game i've ever seen. it doesn't orient itself to your position or direction like you would expect a map would in a game where you're driving at insane speeds and having to make split second decisions. no, it doesn't really do much of anything. it's just a little map and you're moving around on it. that means every time you want to check the map to see where you have to turn you have to find yourself on the map (because you're not always in the center), figure out which direction you're heading, scan the road ahead for turns and then orient yourself to figure out whether you need to turn right or left all in your head while you're driving around a 180 degree turn at 200mph*. what the fuck is that all about? can a brother at least get the option to have an auto-positioning map? for a game that's all about speed, stunts and jumps that is such a huge technical error that i can't even believe it made it past testing stages. it's hard for me to believe that nobody ever mentioned how detrimental it is to the game to have to be staring at your map so much. you're missing jumps and shortcuts, driving right into walls, taking wrong turns...it's ridiculous!

that brings me to another point. some of the level designs in this game are just plain mean spirited. you'll be slo-moing through an awesome "super jump" only to find yourself diving slowly into an inauspiciously placed wall. it's just rude. it totally kills the fun. there are literally walls at the end of every jump you could possibly take in paradise city. all roads eventually lead to a dead stop of some sort, whether it be an arbitrarily placed fence, an inviable-until-the-very-last-second wall protrusion, a late rendering tree and so on. the designers have taken player hatred to a whole new level. i can only imagine the development meetings they must have had to plan out how spiteful and infuriating they wanted the game design to be because there is no possible way all of this could have happened by sheer chance. it's too premeditated.

another huge issue is that unlike burnout revenge, you can no longer check traffic. considering how much i played revenge, it was almost impossible for me to reprogram myself to avoid tapping other players to knock 'em out of the way. this resulted in many unsatisfying crashes and some serious frustration. add to this the fact that whenever you crash, the game stops and proceeds to show you a slow motion montage of your pathetic accident, as if to rub your face in the proverbial dog-shit for being such an unskilled driver. these scenes happen every time you crash, they last about 15-30 seconds and you can't skip them.

i also feel the need to mention that there is absolutely no variety to the setting of this game. the city is the same...all the time. in paradise city there is no rain, no fog, no clouds, no dusk or dawn, no nighttime...just clear blue skies all day everyday. needless to say, this gets really boring, really fast.

if you've got grand theft auto 4 then there really isn't any conceivable reason why you'd need this game. gta does the same open world layout, gives you a wider variety of cars, a wider variety of settings and atmospheric effects, better level design, better graphics and is just all around a vastly superior execution of the sandbox driving game concept...and that isn't even the main focus of the game.

in short, skip this garbage.


*for factual accuracy, i should mention that this figure is purely an estimate, since the folks at EA were kind enough to completely omit the speedometer from burnout paradise.