Demo: Burnout Paradise

More like Burned Out.

This is one my favorite franchises. Burnout. Incredibly fast cars. Amazingly devastating crashes. Really fun online gaming. So when I heard it was going to be put in an online world, people coming and going as they please as if to live in a real city, my hopes shot sky high for what could be the best Burnout ever.

But now, Burnout is a marriage of two games that is teetering on the edge of failure: SSX (collecting stuff, EA Radio) and Test Drive (mapped events to drive to).

The core enjoyment of Burnout was a fight to the finish, kill-them-all-let-God-sort-them-out themed race game. It was simple. Easy to understand. And a hell of a lot of fun. But now you have to find all billboards and gates to crash through and find all the big jumps. Seriously, I'm so tired of games that involve collecting stuff. Why does every game seem to have that these days?

The EA Radio...it was turned off in 5 minutes. I don't care if you turn a hint system or game updates into a radio station. I don't need it.

And sadly, my dreams of the game being a completely open playground for crash scores and races were crushed. You have to drive to all the events on the map to initiate them. This idea was copied from Need for Speed: Underground 2 and Test Drive: Unlimited. Well, everything was copied except for the ability to warp around the map. So if you fail that race that took you 4 miles away from the start, you have to drive your sorry ass back to do it again. That isn't what I call fun. That's rubbing alcohol into the wound.

In the end, this game lacks any imagination on the developers part. There's no reinventing the wheel here, they just took off the stock 15" rims and put on chrome 22" spinners. It still rolls down the road, there's just more flash. When you see it, your only impressed the amount of money the idiot spent on them.

Hey EA, I want my next car to fly. Understand me? FLY! In the air!

This is a typical EA screwup. They make games more intricate, more complicated, and reuse features from other games until they're all the same. Maybe I had too high of hopes for the game since Burnout 1-3 have such a high regard in my mind. People are going to have fun with the game, I'm sure. But I'm tired of the same mechanics that other games have already beat to death.

Paradise? Maybe Spring break in Florida. And there are hardly any virgins there.