Official Burnout Paradise Thread
 

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Coming next week. What does everyone think about the new style? Supposedly lead SKU on the PS3. Do people think the PS3 version will be technically better? Suspect more people playing on XboxLive, but I want the best technical presentation of the game...

The good news is from the reviews the PS3 version is at least as good as the 360 version and that hasn't happened enough.

I loved the demo and think it will be one of the best games of the year. It is definitely on my buy list, but I may have to wait for a sale. I haven't dropped $60 on a game in a long time.

Since my wife likes racing games I am thinking this might be a game we can both enjoy. I let her try the demo and she had a good time just roaming around. I do fear that the new way of entering races will become annoying and tedious in a real hurry but I have bought every game in the series up to this point and I would hate to live without the newest version.

I played both the PS3 and 360 demo and didn't notice a difference between the two. Supposedly the ease of online play is built into the game negating any advantage Live has over PSN.

I hated the demo. Played around in it twice, once on each system. Hated it both times. It's not the franchise that I've been with since the beginning. I want to start a race, drive ultra fast and crash. Wash, rinse, repeat. I don't want to drive around an open world looking for shit. There's enough of that in other games. I want a fast menu system and the ability to reboot races after I'm done. Oh well.

That being said, I will still give the full game the benefit of the doubt because Criterion hasn't let me down yet. I used GCs costing me nothing out of pocket. If it sucks I'll just sell it pretty quick.

Can't wait for the game, I have played all the Burnouts except Dominator and the portable games, and I really enjoyed the Demo. I'm happy they took the game in a new direction, with the open world gameplay. I think peoples main problem with the demo comes from there being only 3 events to chose from. This won't be a problem in the full game when every intersection is an event.

Can't wait. Played the 3rd one for months back when I first went to College. Also got the first game they released on the PSP when I was disabled for nearly a year. Friggin awesome series. Loved the 360 demo.

It's pretty well known that the fans hate the game. I thought it was pretty shitty.

I'm a big fan of the Burnout series and I loved the demo. While I'll miss the Crash mode and the ability to jump to any race, I really like the huge open-ended city. I thought it was really well designed.

Usually, I don't buy games for full price. I'm willing to wait a few weeks and get a good sale price or a cheap used copy. This will be only the second PS3 game I buy at release day (R&C was the first).

I also bought a PS3 Eye camera to go with Burnout. I think it's going to be a lot of fun with the online play. Playing the demo, I put someone's car into the rail, and got a snapshot of their reaction. It was hilarious. And apparently, when you win a race, all the losers get your victory snapshot.

I saw one review (I think it was the 1Up Show) that said it was the first game where they felt the PS3 version was better than the 360 version.

That's part of it. My big problem is that when I want to retry a race, I want to be able to do it with a click of the button. I don't want to have to drive back to the start line. That's fucking retarded, and that's putting it nicely. When I play Burnout I want to ace an event, which means lots of retries. Sure an event at every light is nice, but I want the ability to "do-over."

Hopefully they will have a similar system to Test Drive: Unlimited where once you drive on a road you can open the map and select where to spawn to save time.

Well IGN's review is up. 8.8

A couple notable negative points:

• ...it also means that you'll be stopping the action and referring to the map fairly often to make sure that you don't take any wrong turns. Since there are so many different tunnels, highways and such to take, it can be easy to make a wrong turn and wind up going off course for a bit. Until you've memorized the bulk of the map, which given its complexity, will take quite a long time, you'll likely have to pause and check the map two or three times during a race to make sure that you're on the right path.
  
• Another downside to the overall design of the open world setup is that you cannot simply pause and restart an event. This means that if you race from one side of the map to the other, which you will often do, you'll need to turn around and drive all the way back to the starting point to try again if you lose.... Playing this way makes for a much more organic experience and will help greatly in lessening the annoyance of not being able to quickly restart, though if you're aiming for a 100% completion rating then you will inevitably have to drive back to the starting line when you're down to the last few events in the game.
  
• The Crash mode of old is essentially gone, replaced by Showtime events. ... there isn't a whole lot of skill involved in the Showtimes
  
• When you "unlock" a car after an event, it will then appear somewhere in Paradise City and drive around on its own. In order to fully earn it, you have to find said car and then take it down.

I was wrong about this. The 1Up Show said that the game was equally good on both platforms. If anyone wants to watch their video review, you can find it here (at the 21:35 mark).

http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3165033

Yeah Sith. Those two points you highlighted will be a dealbreaker for me. Referring to a map when driving as fast as you do in Burnout is just silly. It will take a crazy amount of times to memorize your way so you can ace it (unless the race is just really easy). But guess what...those crazy amount of tries to memorize will be hampered by you having to turn around and drive all the way back every time to restart the race. That's just dumb.

I can't tell you the amount of time when doing a time trial on the other Burnouts that if I crashed or screwed up and knew I wasn't going to make it gold, I would pause, hit restart and do it over (that still was shitty sometimes with Burnout's history of long load waits) but this takes it to the extreme.

I was surprised by the high marks given by EGM and OXM for this game but I plan to wait until it hits the $20 range. Those two important points make it easy for me to wait for it to become a budget buy.

But I will be interested in hearing the opinions of those here who go ahead and pick it up regarding these issues.

Hmm, I don't like the sound of some of that. Still, Burnout is the only racing game I can really get into anymore, so I'm definitely going to get this. A lot of the new stuff I can get used to, but I really did wish there was a quick restart button for races.

It's also kind of dumb to think you're being forced into finishing a single race. If they have races at every intersection, why would you persue the one you just failed immediately? Go after some of the ones on the way there as well, it's kind of interesting conceptually and seems like it'd work just fine in the final product.

Though I'd also prefer a retry feature, that's hardly a dealbreaker.

Referring to the map while racing I kind of assumed would happen, I wonder if there's a way to blow up the on-screen map at all... I used to have problems with Midtown Madness because of that, haha.

EGM gave it 9.0, 9.0, 9.0. It was their Game Of The Month for 2/08.

Playing the demo, I had this problem at first. But there are so many unique landmarks that it's fairly easy to find your way around after you drive past everything once or twice. I think it'll probably take a few hours of roaming around to get the entire layout of the big city. But I learned the whole demo layout pretty quickly.

This'll be a bit of a pain. If it's really annoying and there are enough complaints, hopefully they can develop a patch that'll add this feature.

I'm gonna miss the old Crash mode. Like it said in EGM's review, I'm hoping they can add traditional crash mode via downloadable content.

This'll probably be fun the first couple times, but it might get annoying if you have to do it for every car.

Why? Uh...because going back and redoing it right after you failed is the best way to learn every nook, cranny, shortcut, turn, etc. I figured that was obvious from my initial post.

Going and doing different races inbetween other races is just going to confuse the best ways to win and will just end up taking you long to master them. Maybe that was their intent?

Seems like it, seems kind of cheap to be able to restart immediately after or during a race just to be able to "master" a track. (Maybe there's a cheat code in there somewhere, *shrug*)

Alas, not defending their move, I just don't see it as a big deal as others seem to.

I'm buying this regardless because I'm a burnout maniac but I also think the 'open world' aspect of it sucks ass... I like picking events/races off a menu and just doing it. I thought the demo was decent enough but found watching the map and driving was tough to do at the same time.

Exactly. As someone who aced the single player portion of Revenge, restarting is essential. Especially considering the crazy ass "Burning Lap" time trials. Speaking of, I guess those are gone? I haven't seen them mentioned.

i didnt play the demo

i got a question
is there like a arrow thingy to direct u where to go during a race
so then a map is not really needed during a race
no?

No arrow. "You'll be at the mercy of the pause screen" looking at the map, which is an atrocity for a game whose focus is 200mph racing through a city.

Man... that sucks!

i just saw the video review on ign
damn the pausing thing really sucks that just ruins the flow of the game

but man the game looks fun if i can get it on sale ill pick it up

I've probably logged the most hours on my 360 with Burnout Revenge, or at least a close second to Madden, but I'm not digging the open world idea. Part of the reason why I love Burnout is that there was no downtime, no searching for useless crap, just great racing with little loading or downtime.

The idea of driving around intersections looking for races that I can't restart sounds frustrating as hell. I thought this was what PGR, Midnight Club, and all the other millions of racing knockoffs were, not Burnout. Even still, I've plopped my $60 preorder with Xmas gift card money and I'll have it next Wed. I just really hope it's not as frustrating as it sounds.

[SARCASM]Probably is a bunch, and EA will be nice and put them up on Xbox live for 200 ms points each.[/SARCASM]

I fall in the camp of loving the others, but the demo just didn't click for me. I have it pre-ordered but at this point still unsure if I'm going to pick it up right away. Hopefully the demo was just too constricting and the full version will be a lot more enjoyable.

The release date is the 22nd, so you should get it next Tuesday. I heard one store already got them in, I wonder if people will be playing this weekend?