The day has come! Burnout Paradise hit stores yesterday. I had called one Gamestop that day and they said they were already out of unreserved copies on the 360 so I left school early to make sure I snagged one of the other two Gamestops in my area. Damn. As I'm writing this I remember my last year decision to always go to Gamecrazy and to only support Gamestop when I needed to . . . whatever happened to that?! Anyways, long story short, Burnout Paradise is pretty awesome. It hooked me from the very first time I loaded it up and saw that the Start screen hits you with a wide shot of Paradise and the cool sounds of Guns 'N Roses' "Paradise City" (what else?). This is opposed to the usual Burnout fair of some sort of heavy metal remix of the orignal Burnout theme set over shaky-cam shots of cars driving really fast.
In a way that start screens sets the tone for the whole game. That isn't to say it's laid back or anything, only that it generally feels very different from the usual Burnout games. I feel like this gam's title still kind of keeps me from falling in love with it. That is to say, on it's own merits, this game is amazing, but the fact that it's called "Burnout" makes me feel like it's too much of a change. It's silly of course, because Burnout 3 was already made, and let's face it, that game can't be improved upon. ;)
It hits so many of the things that other open-world driving games have missed - For one, you're never far from the next event. That's important. Everyone knows the worst thing in open world games is having to trudge over to mission start point, But in Paradise, they're litterally everywhere and they never get taken away. The world is actually fun to drive around in and finding hidden routes and billboards give it an actual purpose. Remember NFS Most Wanted? It was a great game, but did you EVER drive around in the world? I sure as hell didn't. Like anyone else who played it, I just used the menus to instantly skip to the next even I wanted to do. But not in Burnout.
Criterion also made some great callbacks in Paradise that give the cars a lot more variety. Not every car uses the same boost mechanic. Some use the normal Paradise model of having one long bar that never changes that you can activate whenever you want, but others follow the Burnout 2 philosophy of needing the boost meter to be filled before you can boost. The game balances this by giving cars that need full bars to boost shorter bars, and more powerful boost jets.I don't know how many different boost methods there are but I've seen about three or four already.
The soundtrack has a mix of liscensed music (as usual for Burnout games since #2), some of it from older Burnouts, but it also includes a lot of the old unliscensed music from Burnout 1 & 2 and the menus in Burnout 3. It's actually a pretty cool, and as long as it has Beautiful Ruin, My Curse, and Block Out The World from Burnout Dominator, I'm happy.
Holy **** I just pretty much wrote enough for a review. It must be this coffee sitting next to me. Maybe I'll just copy and paste this into a user review. I need a new one.
By the way, in case you didn't catch it, the title of this post is a reference to High Fidelity.
On a side note, No More Heroes came out today and I'm overjoyed to see that it got a 9. A combination of SUDA51's craziness and actually compelling gameplay sounds like the reese's cup of video games. I was so worried it would miss the mark! Of course I was always gonna get it anyways. I adore Killer7. hope to go pick it up tonight.
EDIT: Speaking of supporting GameCrazy, they didn't even have No More Heroes. On the day it was released? Wtf?
