Two words: Ski. Jump. If you do only one thing in the latest Burnout Paradise City DLC from EA, do that. Fly through the air, camera flashes explode, whitening the screen as your car flies across the gap where only birds and hang gliders dare. As pristine as the leap of faith in Assassin’s Creed, the Ski Jump mega jump alone is worth your money.
My 17 year old nephew was visiting me this past week. I haven’t seen him since, well, way the hell back from before he was a teenager. We needed to bond. What better way to bond, then, than playing some new video game that I got. Burnout Paradise: Big Surf Island was that game. It’s slick, it’s a game that he actually owns (on the 360; our copy is on the PS3), and it shows just how freaking cool I am. Not just some old guy he can barely remember from 8 to 10 years ago.
So, I download the add-on — a sweet, painless process on the PS3, let me tell you — and log in to Paradise City. Only this is a new Paradise City. That’s the first thing we noticed – it’s like a whole new game! The colors are bright, shiny, and orange. Lots of palm tree silhouettes emerge across the splash screen icon. As Im new to the Burnout Paradise world, this is my first indication that it’s more than a game, it’s actually a platform. This is some great stuff.
If you’ve read any of my writing before now, you know I’m not going to recite the facts to you. I might use the words “gameplay mechanics,” or “frame rate” or even “fun factor,” but not to tell you about the game. Most of all, I’m not going to score your damn game, alright? I’m not going to tell you how they manage to make pixels on a screen feel like a vehicle screaming across streets and over hills at high speed is so damn real. I will help you feel it, just a little bit, so you can decide if that feeling is for you.
Thing is, you can already find all that. Just head over to metacritic.com. There’s SO MANY REVIEW scores out there that there’s a website, and many imitators, that actually averages the review scores. It’s helpful, it’s useful; hell, I check out metacritic when I want to know whether to buy the game or not. But I’ll tell you what, it isn’t until I’ve read an actual review, written by someone who loves gaming, that I actually KNOW what a game is about. In fact, several such reviews. Otherwise, I’m just reading to confirm what I’m already going to do: buy the game.
So, Big Surf Island. It does more than add 15 new megajumps (what they call super jumps nowadays), a ton more races and cars (including some really fun dune buggies) and more DJ Atomica dialogue. It really revitalizes the game. It makes me want to DRIVE. And that, my friends, is what Burnout Paradise City does, in all it’s silliness and photo-realism.
We spent the next couple of days looking for all the new billboards to smash through, all the mega jumps (again — SKI JUMP FTW!), and all the races and road rage we could handle. We grabbed cars from the original Paradise City game and used them to great effect on all the new stunt runs and marked man events, while putting our dune buggies to the test in speed, stunt, and mega jump activities. The controls became second nature again, my love for the platform and the way things work in this game returned.
Really, how can I talk about a Paradise City DLC pack without returning to spread some love around for the original game. When I got my PS3 at a bargain price, it came with two games: Metal Gear Solid (still haven’t played it long enough to like it, let alone love it) and Burnout: Paradise City. Look, folks, I don’t do racing games. I tried one back in t he PS1 days (probably one of the Need For Speed ones), and found it to be silly and just plain odd. My favorite racing game is Mario Kart because of the total silliness and social aspects of the game. So, a full-on, committed to the faux-reality racing game on the PS3? Not something I’d ever buy on purpose.
I was bored one day, though. Kinda not into a huge RPG like Oblivion, or the commitment to aggression represented by Gears 2 or Halo3. So I popped in Paradise City. What the hell, right?
Three hours later, I emerged a true believer. I could e-brake with the best of them, race around and even win a few races, takedown a few cars to add to my junkyard. The feel of speed in the game was unparalleled to anything I’d ever played before. I knew what boost was, what the name of my favorite stunt class car was, the whole bit.
Let me stop you here and say what the review boils down to, for me: Big Surf Island is, through and through, a return to the love of that first session of Paradise City. And I repeat. The first trip, as with any hallucinogenic substance, is always the best. Turns out that the new acid is as good as the first one, or at least as close to it to keep me coming back for more.
It has issues, sure. There aren’t THAT many mega jumps that your average 17 year old can’t find them and ruin them for you in about thirty minutes. The game plays the same as it used to. There are no new moves, the new cars are cool but they still move and handle like cars. There’s no rocket jet cars, for example. Or hydro cars, that could take you out into the pretty pretty water. That would be so sweet. Wait. Um…
OK, back to the review. What this game does have is better than the sum of all those original parts. It has the feel and joy of the original, without just repeating the original. It feels new, and it is SO COOL to be able to drive across the bridge back to Paradise city with no freaking loading screen. The bridge even has a new mega jump. Seriously cool. There’s also a ton of people playing this online, which makes for some hilarious moments when you suddenly beat some poor player on a road you weren’t even racing on.
Why do you want to pay for this game? It’s $10 of pure, hit you in the eyeballs and fingers, unabashedly speedy joy. Really, do you need more than that? How about the ski jump? Shit, man, I’d buy it just for that alone.
Here’s why:
We scream around the corner and SLAM! into. a. wall. Slow-motion car crunch, windows bursting from the force of the collision, all of us on the couch (me, my 17 year old nephew, and my 6 year old son) tense in horrific delight as our car (our CAR, man, we LOVED that car!) smashes, no CAREENS, into the wall that we’d all missed seeing due to the speed, the distraction of “we’re in 2nd place!” and “which way do we go – that freakin map is TOO SMALL!” and “hurry hurry hurry, there’s the checkpoint!” We rigidly wait the nanoseconds that it takes to get the car back from wrecked to accelerating, we all lean forward, my hands on the control, we boost beyond all safety and sanity around a much-too-tight corner; sparks fly as our bumper scrapes the guard rail. We slam past the first place car, seconds before the red checkpoint that signals the finish line. We all drop back to the couch, spent and satisfied. I look at my nephew. He looks at me. No words need be spoken. We’re men, and we drive fast around Big Surf Island.
The old man is pretty damn cool, after all, isn’t he? Yes, yes he is. So listen to him and buy the damn DLC already.
(NO SCORE HERE! DO YOU KNOW ENOUGH ABOUT THE GAME OR NOT!?)
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