Jason’s babblings.

For those who are unfamiliar, the Burnout series is a racing game focused on being the first and, if possible, only person to cross the finish line. No weapons or anything, just good ol’ paint rubbin’.

For the previous iterations of Burnout, it’s had a more traditional racer look and feel; choose a track, choose a car, race in a circuit to the finish line. In Paradise City, they changed the format to an open city (aptly named Paradise City) where you drive around wherever you want and start races at the street intersections. You can choose any route to race from point A to point B in several game modes - reach the finish first, cause the most opponents to crash before the finish line, reach the finish line before crashing a certain number of times, and a few others. It’s about as arcadey as you can get in a racer, and it’s fun as hell, especially with other players.

Criterion has done a bang-up job supporting the game, putting out a few massive updates since the game was released. The most recent update advertises adding motorcycles, day/night cycles, and weather into the mix. In the end, it’s a very fun update, but a little unpolished.

Meh:

• The bikes don’t have show any destruction when they crash. When you crash in a car, the metal crumples, glass shatters, and wheels fall off, all in beautiful slow-motion. Similarly, when you graze lightly against something, paint rubs off the car and the glass breaks a little bit depending on where you hit. Bikes lack this sort of realism - when you crash, no paint is exchanged and no crumple damage is shown.
• Motorcycle racing is entirely separate from car racing. On top of that, when playing offline, you can only choose one racing mode: race against the clock - no other bikes are on the road. Apparently there’s future updates planned that will add more racing modes for bikes, including bike vs car racing.
• Rather small selection of bikes (four) and weather effects (just fog). Hopefully they have some updates in the works to beef up these options too. I like the idea of skidding around in the rain or snow.

Sweet:

• It’s free. This ultimately trumps all the above complaints. I’d have easily paid a pittance for the features in this update.
• Messing around on the bikes is fun, even if you’re not racing. Just seeing how fast you can go, dodging cars, listening to music is quite relaxing, especially in the rural areas. The custom soundtrack feature in a previous update is very nice for this. Also, if you switch into first person camera, your view tilts with the bike when you turn - a nice touch.
• The day/night cycles are a nice addition. You can switch between real-time and 60x sped-up-time for how fast the clock moves. The roads become gradually less crowded as evening turns to night.

Playing around with the bikes reminds me of Road Rash 3D - a game I used to play a lot back in the day. There was a mode in there where you could tool around the huge city on the bike of your choice. If Criterion were to take the bike mode from Burnout and toss it into a separate game with other bikes and weapons, I’d be a guaranteed purchase from me. Until then, I’ll be dreaming of the next update that brings some more options to the bike game.

On a side note, this week’s PSN update is going to be epic: another (albeit smaller) Burnout update, WipeoutHD, and Megaman 9… I think I need a clone.