Sports: November 2008 Archives
I've been playing a lot of Burnout Paradise lately, for PlayStation 3. What a great game. You drive cars and motorcycles around the fictional city of Paradise, and the goals are to get fastest times on roads, compete in races and other events against the computer, get a lot of cars by winning races/stunts and so on, and go online and compete against, or with, other cars.
I've completed everything in the offline mode of the game, including winning all the events and awards.
There's four types of event: Race (get from point A to point B fastest), Stunt Run (rack up points by performing tricks), Road Rage ("take out" other cars before time runs out, or your car is destroyed), and Marked Man (combination of Race and Road Rage: get from point A to point B before other cars destroy yours).
I have all 76 cars, which range from vans to sedans to hot rods to pure race cars. The one I use the most if the Carson GT Flame -- a very fast and versatile stunt car -- but I also really like the Krieger Paradise City Police Department Special. Not what you want to see in your rear-view mirror.
Playing online is fantastic stuff: you just hit the D-pad to the right a few times and you're online, in the same car and same location on the map as you already were. Now you're just playing with 2 to 7 other people, doing competitive races and events, cooperative challenges, or just trying to take out each other's cars. When you do that you can get a mugshot from your friend, and then post it online so you can mock him later.
The cooperative challenges are the most fun. There's hundreds of different challenges to perform, such as, "every player get 300 yards of jumps" or "every player jump over the other players" or "every player drive backward into oncoming traffic for 3000 yards" or "meet on the roof of the building across from the car park" (which requires jumping from one building to another, over the street). And you can use a microphone to talk to the other players.
It's a $30 download on the PlayStation Network (also available for Xbox 360, and soon for Windows). They've added bikes and other events for free, and are planning other upgrades, at least some of which will be for pay, including a whole new island added on to the city, a bunch of new cars, and a "party" (pass-the-controller) game mode. It's one of the best video game values out there: you can get dozens, if not hundreds, of hours of gameplay out of it.
"It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt."
