I drove back into "Burnout Paradise" last night, but refused to try one of the game's new features.
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I downloaded the "Burnout Paradise" party-pack expansion last night, bringing my all-download PS3 version of EA and Criterion's open-world racing game up to speed with last week's new content release.
I have to start negatively. The game's re-revised front-end made a poor "first" impression. Seeing an analog-stick controlled web browser on a PlayStation 3 brought back memories of the original, horrid PlayStation Network store. I've praised Criterion for the team's embrace of Facebook-inspired front-end design. And I can tell that that's what they're getting at here. But a mouse-pointer on my TV, moved by my left thumbstick is a little too PC for my tastes.
A better impression was made by the new Party mode, which is designed for single-TV, single-controller multiplayer play. I subjected my wife to a test of it. We played a five-round match that she won and then I took a four-round bout. The Party mode is based on rounds of challenges. Some challenges were easy, like seeing who could drive further against oncoming traffic. Others required us to drive down a curved road toward a jump -- but with the accelerator automatically floored. In another, the truck we each had to drive handled like a fat beagle. The game crafts the challenges and decks them with party sounds of cheering, booing and lots and lots of noisemakers and horns.
I thought this mode was a good addition to the game. It completes a smartly different take on pleasing groups with one game: casual offline multiplayer and hardcore online multiplayer, all in one game -- any other developers out there taking notes on this?
There was one new "Paradise" feature I refused to test: the game's retry option. " Burnout Paradise" originally lacked a retry option, forcing players who started and failed to win a cross-map race to drive back across the map to start it again. The intention was for people to drive and forget, or to drive and get distracted. Instead of going cross-map to start over, the player was supposed to find a new race to try in the region they had reached.
Many racing fans protested. They wanted to be able to press a button and retry the race. Criterion's developers resisted for a year. But with the new addition, they relented and introduced the feature.
In theory, the customer's always right. And, also in theory, just because an option's there, you don't have to use it.
Well, in one of my theories, the developer is often right. I trust that, many times, a decision I'm not comfortable with in a game is justified, the product of whatever values the developers poured into their game during their years creating it. That is how I had long felt about the lack of a "Burnout Paradise" restart. With "Paradise," the "Burnout" design had been changed from a game of menu-selected races to an open-world game of discoverable competitions. The ability to restart a challenge seemed contrary to the values of discovery and serendipity that defined progression in "Paradise." You were supposed to wander. You weren't supposed to stress about failure.
I bought into into, and I've decided I still won't use retry.
Overall, I was impressed. Few non-MMO's have evolved in their first year of release to the extent that "Burnout Paradise" has. Imagine a gaming world in which series like "Mario Party," "Madden" and "Street Fighter" got such treatment.
It's good enough for "Paradise." I hope it will be good enough for others too.
Next: It's a Tuesday. I don't think I'll be playing.