Burnout Paradise

[David Carlton]

I'm hosting our weekly game session this week (Thursday, 1/21), and I've chosen Burnout Paradise as our game. It's a game that took me a while to warm to: it seemed like a pleasant enough racing game, with a particularly friendly online mode, but its open-world design occasionally frustrated me, because I would lose a race, end up in the middle of nowhere, and have a long drive to get to where I could repeat the race or a medium drive to get to someplace else I found interesting.

It wasn't until I played its Big Surf Island expansion in one of our earlier VGHVI nights that the game really clicked for me. That expansion put so many different aspects of the game in such a compact space that I couldn't help appreciating just how many different options the game had to offer, and how much fun they were. I later explored the island thoroughly, and then went back to the main game; looking at it through my new lens, it's not any any sense primarily a racing game (I came up with a list of thirteen different ways to have fun in the game, and it's amazing how well balanced those modes are, that none of them feel like afterthoughts), and I very much like what I see.

But the game has fallen out of our rotation in recent months, so I haven't gotten the chance to explore the online modes as thoroughly. So that's what I'd like to do this Thursday: go through the online possibilities somewhat systematically, to better appreciate what playing online makes possible that isn't available when playing the game solo, and how common modes differ between the two contexts.

Hope to see you on Thursday! It's at our usual time of 9:30 Eastern / 6:30 Pacific; send a friends request to "a VGHVI" if you haven't done so already. (You might also want to send me a friends request, too.)

[Roger Travis]

Do we want to think about trying to record the chat? Despite my disconnects, Skype did work pretty well, and we got a usable recording out of it.

[David Carlton]

I'd vote for no - for one thing, it would limit the play to people who are willing to simultaneously set up XBL and Skype, and, for another thing, I'm not convinced the result would be as good with a multiplayer game where there's a whole other mode of interaction going on that wouldn't show up in the recording.