Burnout Paradise: F = MA

I forgot to take a shot of the title screen, I guess this is an okay replacement

God damn do I love racing games.  You get to drive around in cars you'll never drive in ways you never will.  Which is probably a good thing that I keep it in the game because if Burnout is any indication of how that would actually turn out, I'd be dead inside of a minute and a half from smashing into oncoming traffic going somewhere between 50 and 80% light speed and coming to a dead stop in about .1 seconds.  What I do not like is racing "simulators", sorry Forza and Gran Turismo, it's just not as fun.

I'm always very torn when it comes to my arcade racers.  On the one hand, you have Burnout which features ridiculous game modes, crazy crashes and over the top everything.  And then you have Need For Speed, which focuses on real cars, customization and slightly more realistic racing.  In the end I guess Burnout is more "fun" and Need for Speed is more "compelling", hell I don't know, it's not like I'm going to stop playing either any time soon, so it's kind of a moot point really.

Burnout Paradise is kind of odd in many respects actually.  First and most odd, there's no speedometer.  That's right kids, no numerical indicator of speed in a racing game.  Well, at first I thought it was kind of weird, but the game has such a good sense of speed that I really never missed it except when I wanted to see how fast I could possibly get a car to go.  Second, racing is kind of only one focus of the game.  There's a lot more types of events than just "race", although I didn't really bother since the races are kind of what I was here for.  But the fastest car is no where near being the best at everything.  Try taking your track car out for marked man and you're going to lose very very quickly.  And finally, kind of in the same vein as the speedo thing, there's no way to switch the gear shifts over to manual.  But I kind of forgot about that after a while.

The races take a very open ended approach to the actual track.  You start at intersections and they tell you to go to one of 5 or 6 diffrent end points.  That's it, first one to make it there wins.  There's no road markers, no compass pointing you to turn which way, you have to make your own route.  It starts out pretty simple but the final set of races is really going to push you.  The other events are based around the same idea, there's no barriers anywhere ever.  You can go anywhere at anytime which can really screw you over if you're not paying attention.

There's a nice selection of cars although if you know anything about cars, it's going to bother you that they're named wrong and don't look right.  If you don't care too much about cars, a small hint, either a car in the game is directly based off a real world car, or is two different cars smashed together into a frankenstein car.  For example, one of the last cars you get, the "Carson GT 500" is actually the body of a Ford GT 40 and the back end of a Ferarri 360, even complete with Ferarri tail lights.  It only bothered me a little bit when I was looking at them in the junkyard, but once I got rolling it wasn't a big issue.

This one's based off a Supra

All in all a very solid game.  The controls are wonderful on a controller, I don't even bother trying to play racing games on a keyboard, so you're on your own in that department.  It's an EA game so of course they ask you to log into their servers to "post times" or whatever, but since it's EA the servers are down about 80% of the time, but it won't stop you from playing even if you haven't logged in so it was only a minor annoyance.  And it didn't have steam achievements, sad, but not actually important.  It's a damn fun game and my finger is still sore from mashing down the gas with as much force as my fingers could muster because, as everyone knows, the harder to press, the faster it goes.