DJ Automica from Crash FM here
January 23, 2008
Burnout Paradise is insane. Literally, as in this game was made by lunatics. I now fully understand how genius and madness form a fine dance on a razor's edge: every brilliant design decision is adjacent to a bizarre choice. As a whole it delivers the most white-knuckle driving on any system ever, with crashes that leave even this hardened gamer gasping for breath. But to reach that chewy core you'll have to gnaw through some unfamiliar fruit.
Believe it or not, I'm trying to be fair to the developers. The decisions in Burnout Paradise are not bad, not Mass Effect's inventory screen bad, but they require a radical shift in how you approach a game. For one, there is no usual menu system. After the endless procession of EA's text-heavy loading screens you're dropped directly into the game proper with not so much as a "Continue." During play the start button displays a summary of your license rank and some details on what you've accomplished. Don't look for an options menu. It isn't there! Up in the top left part of the screen, an area busy with graffiti, are symbols representing the Xbox 360 controller's left and right bumpers. Press RB, just once, and there is your traditional menu. Why is it buried? The developers (wisely) don't want you turning off autosave, or (unwisely) limiting the chatter of the delightful DJ Automica.
I wonder how far I am from my idol, Tycho from Penny Arcade, when I say that I don't mind DJ Automica. He's loads better than Stryker from Burnout 3, and frankly I miss the bile spewed by Razor Callahan in Need for Speed: Most Wanted. I'm not gonna subscribe to the Crash FM podcast for the chance to hear this guy outside the game, but I'm not clawing my ears out every time he announces a race or notifies me that I won a new car. He has a smooth voice and doesn't pipe up nearly as much as he did in the demo (which was tuned to match your engine's RPM, apparently). So I give DJ Automica a pass.
Instead of looking for a menu, Criterion wants you looking at the road. Really looking at it, because any car smaller than a semi truck has its camera situated so low you're barely able to see above the cigarette lighter. You start in a junkyard where you pick a car and hit the road. All the intersections are valid starting points for races. Just come to a stop, spin your tires and the event begins. Here's where the genius/madness duality kicks in.
The genius is in how the races are structured. Starting off at any intersection in the city, your destination is always one of eight locations corresponding to a point on the compass. "Drive northwest to the country club," they'll say. There's a high value on you knowing every road in the city because a wrong turn can take you completely off course. Unlike the last four Need for Speeds (excluding ProStreet), you don't get guard rails to keep you going straight. I've never played Midnight Club but I understand this is their formula. It's very enjoyable in Burnout thanks to the steady frame rate, fantastic sense of speed and glorious crashes.
So you race and race and make it to the finish line. If you're first: congratulations. Here's a point for your license (a good thing) and some pleasant music as the game briskly cleans the city of debris. If not, if you lost: well, too bad. Ran into a rough crash and want to try that race again? Or swap vehicles and see if you do better? Tough. If the finish line was west, you're in the boonies with minutes of travel back to the city. Then you have to find a junkyard to change cars and try to remember which one of the dozens of starting points was your origin. You can open your map to look for it but you can't place a marker and have a GPS system guide you.
In all fairness, the game tries hard not to make this a problem. Burnout's rubberband AI will always give you a good opportunity to win even if you took a left turn at Alberquerque. If you finish on the east side of town you can probably get to a similar race before your car drifts to a halt. The races themselves aren't anything special - after all, you're the one creating the route - so losing doesn't feel like a crushing defeat (though DJ Automica will pipe up to try and change your mind). To a seasoned gamer this flippancy feels like madness, given that I can't think of any racing game newer than Pole Position that didn't let you instantly retry a race you lost.
Despite legions of whiners, I don't think anyone will really mind. There are some true innovations that preserve the feel of Burnout while making it seem like a huge upgrade from Revenge. For one, the cars feel great. Really great. Even the rear-wheel-drive-soap-bars-dipped-in-butter are drivable. What's more, the ownership you feel of each car is remarkable. Some cars you win immediately after a race or when you get your license upgraded: good. Others are upgraded versions of old cars that you win when you complete a special burning lap with its predecessor: great. And my personal favorites are the ones you're told about after a race and have to find and take down in order to add to your garage. They make it fairly easy to find these cars (which is to say they appear in front of you if you drive idly for more than 20 seconds) but taking them down in a congested urban environment is an epic hoot. I swear they could make a whole game with that mode, call it Burnémon: Exhaust Black and I would buy every copy I could get my hands on.
Once you get a car it arrives in junked mode, a pulped pile of metal barely able to stand the pressures of a drive-in movie. So your first task is to take it to an auto repair shop and have it fixed. Like everything in Burnout Paradise it happens instantly. Just drive through the wide gates (if you're me this would occur after you've rammed into the divider once or twice) and your car passes through the other end all shiny and new. From now on when you select that car it'll come up fresh as a daisy with your choice of decals, paint styles and colors. I imagine this forced repair was a simple programming task, but the effect is to bond you to your car, just like calling your puppy's name for the first time in Nintendogs. Take heed, Bizarre Creations: this is how you give players vehicles. Forcing us to "buy" car packs from an in-game marketplace is both nauseating and aloof, like deciding between steak or chicken by pointing at an animal's frozen head.
One thing that really upset me in Burnout Revenge was the disappearance of the instant action mode. They removed the ability to choose Road Rage, pick a car, and (in seconds!) plop you down in a random city with the goal of running your opponents into a wall. We loved that in Burnout 3. Instead you had to carefully navigate through their ten step difficulty meter, then pick a city, then hope that within the difficulty and city you stumbled upon was a Road Rage event. If not, back up one or two levels and try again. Suffice it to say that Burnout Revenge never lasted more than one Friday night party.
Paradise doesn't fix that completely but it's a step in the right direction. All you do is pick your car, find a red dot on the map, spin your tires and enjoy the fight. Since the entire city is available from the start you can lead your prey anywhere without grumbling "I hate this level." A good thing too, because during Road Rage you'll have your jaw on the floor. At your car's top speed (reached at a normal pace instead of the previous games' 0-60 in a handful of milliseconds) the wrecks are outstanding. Cars flip end over end, shatter, crumple and pile up in amazing ways. The camera isn't the bullet time orbiter from Burnout 3 or the zip-a-dee-doo-da neck snapper from Burnout Revenge. It is, finally, a true Hollywood camera. Sometimes it follows the car at a distance during a barrel roll. Other times it observes at a fixed position, or does a half orbit, or will place itself exactly where it knows the car will stop just like a carefully staged Die Hard stunt. All with genuinely painful audio, intense motion blur and a particle system that spews screws. As Crysis is the ultimate new technology shooter, so too does Burnout Paradise leave the competition (also known as the other EA racing titles) with their pants around their ankles.
So goes the genius, but the madness is that there's no way to capture this intensity. No replay mode, no screenshots, no Burnout TV. I can't show you that awesome bit where a car knocked me so hard I flew over the beach and into the ocean. There's no doubt that Criterion used every byte of memory in the Xbox 360 to deliver their HD city, but I thought the replays from Burnout Revenge were a sign of the future. Their replacement is a seamless online mode full of wonder and joy that every non-jaded friendless misanthrope game reviewer adores, but all my online friends want to play are Call of Duty 4 or Phantasy Star so I can't tell you about the great online racing.
Go past the madness and the genius shines with such brilliance that I can give Burnout Paradise four stars and a hearty recommendation. If you see me gleefully jumping the bridge in southern Paradise City... well, bring a wrench. I rarely nail the landing.
