Burnout Paradise The Ultimate Box
Burnout Paradise The Ultimate Box
Burnout Paradise has won over 55 awards worldwide and the PC version will combine new gameplay with all the open world racing, intense speed and action of the original game. Paradise delivers an open-world environment built for intense speed, excitement and exploration and sets a new standard in the seamless transition from single-player offline to social online gameplay.
User Ratings and Reviews
5 Stars Great fun, no blood, guts or violence
Huge world to drive around, it’s fun and challanging, but not impossible to win awards and get upgrades like cars. Graphics are excellent! Music and sound are great. Best part, although I like semi-violent games also, it’s nice to find one that isn’t!!!! Fun for all ages. Just be aware, it needs lots of PC power. It runs fine on my 3.3mhz chipset, 128 meg video card and 4 gigs ram, but I did try it on a 2.8mhz with 2 gigs and it didn’t like it at all. As for the drm - as much as I hate it also, it hasn’t impacted my system and being able to load it only 5 times should last me until I get bored with it.
5 Stars Awsome game
Fantastic game and very well optimized. A great PC port is rare these days. The only thing i would like to know is why the developers did not add text chat to the multi player portion of the game.
4 Stars Fun, awesome graphics, lengthy, needs police chases
Yeah I like this game, it’s another great Burnout that finally came to PC from a console only past. It features insanely fast cars and a good amount of various race types to go along with them. First and foremost the graphics are really pretty to look at as far as the cars are concerned with the environment being average this generation level. I had no problem with the default controls on my Logitech Rumblepad 2 and the game was smooth as silk on my system at 1680×1050 all high except the SSO or OCC or some such setting I can’t remember. My system is: WinXP, Q6600@2.4Ghz, 4GB RAM, 8800GT512.
The damage is pretty cool to look at as well with flying tires, crumpling sheetmetal, shattering glass and the like in a slow motion edited for maximum spectacle style with real speed action as well upon the fairly regular catastrophic crash. After a crash your car is automatically fixed and you’re on your way again. The sound is nice as well, I’m not a fan of the blaring music in most games of this type so I turn it off, the car sounds range from average to great in the higher level cars.
This game features a few different types of racing well known to most who have played the past burnout games, which in general in my opinion have always been the best arcade style racing games. The way to trigger a race is to look at the minimap and see what race type it is then stop at the intersection where the race starts and push both the accelerator and brake at the same time to enter the race intro info and then start the race.
The first type is the fairly standard race versus other cars to a finish line across the decent size Paradise City, you need to win and to do that you need to dodge traffic, make the appropriate turns as indicated on your HUD with flashing street signs right or left or via your cars turning signals. Also you will need to avoid being taken down by your competitors and them down if possible. By a take down I mean essentially making the other racer crash through “rubbin” or pushing the other car into other cars or objects which triggers a view of the take down and then return to your own car to continue the race.
Another type is marked man where you try to do nothing but avoid being taken down, with a maximum of 3, and get to the finish line. You can wreck a lot of times in most races until it tells you to go to one of the drive through car fixing places scattered around the city. You also can do the Stunt race type where you try to do as much drifting, jumps, near misses, oncoming lane, boost use known as burning as well as use the burning/NOS continuously until it is used up, AKA a burnout. Another type is road rage where you try to get a set number of takedowns of other racers in a specific time period throughout the city. These are the ones I can remember I may have missed some.
Once you win a race, which you must do to upgrade your license and get access to more cars, you are also invited to take down a specific car while free roaming to get it taken to the junk yard which is your base to change cars in your inventory.
Other things to do are use of various jumps to smash through the burnout billboards around the city, break through all of the 400 gates that lead to shortcuts or secret racing areas like a mine, stadium, dirt oval, waterfront, construction site and others. Your boost is replenished by near misses, oncoming, jumps and also by using the drive through gas stations. There are also drive thru paint shops. I liked just cruising around and discovering all this stuff with the occasional race, there are 75 total cars and 4 bikes to obtain. The bikes are faster and harder to avoid crashing. You can use the train tracks to get around with no moving obstacles to contend with.
The things I don’t like are the annoyingly long time it takes the game to startup, you are always prompted to create an EA online account etc and not to mention the various legal and publisher screens while having to listen to the otherwise good GNR paradise city song to the same point every time before game start.
The car loading junkyard screens are cool but take overly long and are clumsy to get to car view, paint selection and finally actually starting to play. Another thing is that the city is pretty small when compared to how fast you go around it, NFS has a much bigger area to race in by comparison. While racing the way it tells you where to turn, which is a must if you want to win the race, requires you to pay attention to the peripheral flashing street signs and sometimes seem to be triggered too early or late, I’d like to see a 3d minimap that gives you left/right arrows or HUD arrows in the middle of the screen so I don’t have to take my eyes off the insanely fast action.
Race starts require a full stop and button combo, just give me a single button to press while moving to start please. Another thing is that I wish I could select the amount of damage a car would take before it crashes, otherwise certain cars are just not used or even practical, it’s understood that this is built in difficulty though. Another one is the burnout radio guy who comes in with the same “great advice”, this is good at first as far as picking up how the game works but after that it’s just annoying, you can turn this down in the settings though.
I wish there would be race tracks to do more official races on in here as well with no traffic and a more predictable racing circuit but I suppose this is not that type of game. Another thing would be adding police chases and escapes to the race types a la NFS. I suppose what I’m saying here is that I wish other types of racing games would incorporate the mind blowing speed and damage physics as well as boost that burnout is known for, most more sim games just don’t do as good a job conveying the high speeds, although Grid was good at it but with too few circuits.
All in all it’s a really fun game to be recommended over NFS, but PC gamers didn’t have a choice until now. Too bad they missed the holiday season on this one or it would have been a bigger draw.
PS- you CAN get a securom remover program, just google it. It’s just that you won’t be able to play any installed securom enabled games afterwards. You can also get punkbuster removers as well.
1 Star Limited Activations DRM
This game comes with Securom, requires online activation, and limits the number of times you can install it.
It’s basically a rental because the game will stop to function in the future because of its DRM.
If you value your money, then skip this game.
5 Stars Go PC!
Securom or not, they did a good job on this game. It is highly optimized, runs great on my dual core amd w/midrange ati HD 2600 PRO 1440×900 res. I am buying this and dont care about all the DRM controversy. I would like to see more quality titles coming to PC and that is why I am supporting this with a purchase! GO PC! Cant wait for SF IV…in june!
