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Burnout Paradise | 
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| From: Electronic Arts
Category: Video Games
List Price: $59.99
Buy New: $37.00
You Save: $22.99 (38%)
New (44) Used (13) from $31.75
Avg. Customer Rating:  69 reviews
Sales Rank: 392
Format: Ntsc
Platform: Xbox 360
ESRB: Everyone 10+
Media: Video Game
Autographed: No
Memorabilia: No
Batteries Included: No
Operating System: Microsoft Xbox 360
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2
Dimensions (in): 7.5 x 5.4 x 0.6
MPN: 15639
Model: 014633156393
UPC: 014633156393
EAN: 0014633156393
ASIN: B000MUXLOK
Release Date: January 22, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Features:
| • | Rock Paradise City—Shred your way across more than 250 miles of open road discovering jumps, stunts, and shortcuts. | | • | Infinite Possibilities—Blaze your path to glory in 120 unique events, using your knowledge of the city to find the fastest routes and get the drop on rivals. | | • | Team Up or Takedown—Battle friends online and grab their mugshots, or join forces to complete more than 300 online challenges. | | • | Showtime: Crash Anywhere, Any Time—Send your car wrecking, spinning and scraping down the road, smashing through traffic and leaving a trail of expensive wreckage in your wake. | | • | Road Rules—Make and break the rules of each road by setting speed and destruction records all over town. Track how many you own against your friends! |
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
Make action your middle name, as you control what happens when and where in Burnout Paradise. Welcome to Paradise City. Immerse yourself in the open roads of Paradise City from the downtown streets through the hectic freeways to the sweeping mountain roads; the world is waiting to be explored. Slam, Shunt and Wreck opponents in cross-town race events, where you decide the fastest route to the finish line. Hit the jumps and find shortcuts, smash through barriers and get to the places that other racers can't reach to get that competitive edge. Meet your friends online with the revolutionary EasyDrive system that smashes through the tedium of lobbies and servers and cuts straight to the chase. Burnout Paradise provides the ultimate driving playground for you and your friends to play online on the Xbox 360. Mugshots - Track the length and breadth of up to 2,500 online rivalries Speed, Speed and Even More Speed - The rebuilt, race-tuned Burnout game engine delivers intense speed boost gameplay at a super-smooth and super-fast 60 frames-per-second Crash Deformation - Burnout Paradise features an all-new deformation technology that gives players an astounding close-up and slow-motion view of super-real destruction
Amazon.com
In Burnout Paradise players are treated to a rarity in the video games universe: a complete reinvention of an established franchise that equals, if not betters any of the previous games in the series. Yes, this is a large claim, but one that can be explained in a single phrase: Next-Gen Freedom.
Driver's heaven is a wide open world |
In Paradise City even cars can fly. View larger. | 
Go for broke in 'Marked Man' Mode. View larger. | 
Nothing is off limits, even head-on crashes. View larger. | 
Start a race any time with 'Easy Drive.' View larger. |
Although the Burnout series' over the top mobile action has been its calling card since it ignited audiences on the PS2 in 2001, and later on the first generation Xbox console, Burnout Paradise is the first game in the series that has been designed specifically for play on Next Generation consoles. This has allowed game developer Criterion to rip the training wheels off the game and rebuild it from scratch. The result is a new, expansive world that players can roll through at will. And what a world it is.Enter Paradise City
Heaven on Earth, at least to road-raging, crash-causing Burnout fanatics, Paradise City is your domain and ultimate proving ground in Burnout Paradise. This expansive driver's playground stretches across 250 miles and encompasses all sorts of road driving conditions, from fun-in-the-sun seaside cruising boulevards, to mountain roads and downtown gridlock. But regardless of what stretch of asphalt you find yourself on, the beauty of this place is that nothing is blocked off and your wits are at least as important as the horsepower under your hood when it comes to racing here. Check out Paradise City's five sub areas (click the links for sample images):- Downtown Paradise City
- Harbor Town
- Palm Bay Heights
- Silver Lake
- White Mountain
Burnout Your Way
Unlike in previous Burnout games, Burnout Paradise not only puts the keys to your ride in your hands, but places you squarely in the driver's seat when it comes to where you can go and what you can do.Along with wide avenues and crowded highways, the open game design of Paradise City is also jammed full of hidden side streets, back roads and alley ways. These can be used as short cuts in races, that is, if you know where they are. As you explore, commit these potential short cuts to memory because they will definitely come in handy in a tight race. And since we are talking Burnout here, players should not expect uneventful, genteel contests of speed and precision driving. In Paradise City players are always free to slam, shunt and wreck opponents in their bids for supremacy and they will. Also, new to the Burnout series, races can now start anywhere, anytime. Just pull up to a stoplight and spin your wheels to start one in one of five different event classes:- Classic Race
- Road Rage
- Burning Route
- Stunt Run (new)
- Marked Man (new)
Instant Online
Burnout Paradise also keeps the mobile carnage coming while simultaneously setting the new standard in online social gameplay. With the new `Easy Drive' feature you can find friends online and with the click of a button invite them to a race. Once they've accepted the race will start immediately. That's right, no more annoying wait times at online lobbies and servers. And keeping in touch with friends is easier than ever.Team up or Takedown
In the winner-take-all universe of Burnout teaming up usually isn't the first option that comes to mind, but on these rough and tumble streets it's a good option to keep in mind. With more than 300 FreeBurn Challenges packed into the game, players always have the choice of going it alone against the field as a whole or joining forces with up to seven of your buddies in user-created race routes. Either way, if you are victorious in your takedown you'll get the chance to talk some trash as you exchange Mugshots with your victim via an optional camera hooked to your gaming system or your gamertag/PSN avatar if you prefer to keep your identity on the down-low.Showtime: Crash Anywhere, Any Time
And finally since a new Burnout release wouldn't be complete without a little something special in the wreckage department, Burnout Paradise continues the carnage with an update of its familiar 'Crash Mode.' Renamed 'Showtime Mode,' players can now crash, bounce and scatter their ride in any location and replay the wreckage over and over in slow motion. One of the most addictive and down right fun features of the game, players activate the mode by simply pulling both triggers on their controller and if they are good enough can also immortalize their Showtime moments on the leaderboards for all to see.Driving fans this is Next-Gen at its best and definitely the Burnout title you have been waiting for.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 64 more reviews...
 Sweet, sweet, crashing action May 1, 2008
Finally, I own this game. After years of exclusive PC gaming, I got my hands on the Burnout series.
Instead of a long pontification, I'll get right to the pros and cons
+Open world can rock - Driving around a giant city is great and searching for hidden passages is a lot of fun
+Showtime is a great diversion when you want to mix things up
+The graphics are phenomenal
+Crash physics are great
+Multiplayer is fun and easy to sign onto
-Open world can suck - Nothing is more frustrating than missing a turn (or not knowing there is one without reading the map or pausing mid-race) and losing a race because of an unexpected turn
-The use of the xbox camera for mugshots is kind of pointless. Not a negative really, but doesn't add anything
-It'd be nice if they mixed up crashes and had some in real-time. It can be distracting and take me out of the game
-NO SPLIT-SCREEN TWO PLAYER??? That's just stupid. The whole point of Burnout is to unlock the cool cars in single player so that your buddies can come over, have a couple drinks and crash each other into smithereens. I learned this after buying the game and was REALLY disappointed.
Other than not having two player, the negatives are really just nit-picky things. This is a great game and one of the first games I bought when I picked up my xbox. I recommend it to all arcade racing junkies and good game lovers. Get it!
 EA takes a gamble for once. April 20, 2008
Innovation is not one of EA's strong suits, and Criterion has basically built the same game over and over. Paradise, on the other hand, does things a little differently, incorporating a big, open world along the lines of a Grand Theft Auto. While the sandbox elements are light, there are a ton of different races to participate in, and once the taste is acquired, it is a good one.
However, it won't do anything to convert those who don't care much for racing games--Mario Kart doesn't count!--, and it may alienate those expecting more of the same, which is what EA normally tends to deliver.
The on-line play is excellent, smooth, and well-integrated.
 [Scream of Rage] April 17, 2008
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
I hate this game. I cannot express in words the degree to which I hate this game. If this game were a person, I could run it down with my car and not feel the slightest twinge of ethical concern. I hate it so much it leads me to forget things that I've been trained to know are right and good and simply shout expletives in its general direction for the next few hundred words. Fortunately for this game, I'm not quite that much of a jerk.
Imagine that you took Test Drive: Unlimited and the last decent Burnout title, smashed them together, and then carefully excised everything even remotely fun from the mangled monstrosity that resulted. There, my friend, you have found Burnout Paradise. Everything about Revenge that entertained me enough to keep from snapping the disc in half and tossing it into traffic has been removed from this game, and I can't in good conscience recommend it to anybody.
One thing that I can't fault the game for is its appearance, which is certainly a step up. The game is definitely beautiful. Driving through Paradise City, you get to see a lot of different environments, and every single one springs off the screen and directly into your face like some kind of carnivorous monster. When it comes to useful visuals for the gameplay, however, there's some problems with the level of detail included in the game's environments - specifically, I have a hard time figuring out where the bloody road turns in some locations. This is worst in the downtown areas and best on the outskirts of town, but ANY time I miss my turn because it doesn't look like there's a road there at all, somebody needs to yell at the graphical designer.
The game sound is mostly unremarkable, so let's not. It won't make you physically angry, and I guess that you might like the soundtrack (I personally loathed roughly 80% of the included music, but that's not atypical for me with an EA title), but it's not going to pleasure you sexually or make you reevaluate your life.
My problems with the game all have to do with the gameplay, or, rather, the lack thereof. If you've played Revenge, you might remember fun modes like Traffic Attack or Crash Mode. Those were pretty terrific, right? Well, they're gone. Not only are they gone, but some of the fundamental rules that you would have learned from prior games in the series have been utterly invalidated. The big one is the rules on What Kind of Traffic Causes Crashes. In Revenge, they had a simple rule - if you could see headlights or it was a truck, you would wreck into it. Otherwise, you knock it to the side. I don't know what they replaced that with, but I DO know that in the first hour I played, I wrecked against no fewer than ten cars stopped at intersections, smaller than me, facing away from me.
Of greater concern is the bald stupidity that comes from building an open world street racing game in a world that nobody has ever been to. If this game were set in San Marcos, TX, I'd be all over it because I KNOW WHERE THOSE STREETS ARE. I don't know where anything is in this game and the game doesn't do anything at all to help you learn. I'm faced, as a newcomer, with the choice between spending ten hours losing hard just to learn where everything is (not fun) and just plain losing because I don't know where anything is (also not fun). Closed tracks are fun because it's hard to get lost. I got lost in three of my first ten events in this game and ended up on practically the wrong side of town. That's bad.
I could go on for a thousand more words, but I won't belabor my point too heavily. The game has been well received, and maybe it's just me. Maybe people who like "open world" style games will find something to enjoy here. I didn't. I found Test Drive to be a better implementation of the idea. With limited modes that mostly feel identical, no Crash mode (seriously - Crash mode was a puzzle game and that was FUN; Showtime is entirely random), undirected gameplay, poor layout, and any number of other problems, this game would have to come with chocolate cake and my own personal supermodel before I would even consider recommending it. There's a lot of potential for an open world Burnout game, but this isn't the game to realize that dream.
Fantastic Graphics and a Lot of Fun April 17, 2008
Our family has been having a blast playing this game. Besides the adults, our children (7 and 10) have been using it a lot.
This is a single player video game. The graphics of the city are fantastic. You can see detailed buildings in the distance and as you get closer to them they appear--it is very realistic. It takes a little work to get used to the driving the car in a way that has some semblance of control so my first few attempts were a bit of a complete mess (crashing into things and so on). When you crash it switches to a sideways view as if a bystander was watching it and it goes to slow motion for the crash.
You can drive around wherever you want through the city (a small map is in the corner). When you are ready you can start a street race.
As you play the game more and get driving experience you move up levels that allows you to get a better car.
My boys really enjoy this game.
In case you are wondering about blood or gore, you can't see the drivers in the cars and when you crash there are no bodies, no blood or anything like that.
I can't figure out why this is rated for 10+, I've found nothing offensive in it so far to make me want to stop my 7 year old from playing it.
My kids laugh hysterically when they play this--they like to watch each other play and make comments and laugh as the game progresses.
Video games have sure come a long way from the Atari we had in my teen years--the sound and graphics on this are unbelievable!
 Nice Graphics - but gets boring quickly April 16, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
The graphics in this game were stunning. And there is definately a "fun factor" to tearing up a city, taking massive jumps off of bridges and smashing up other cars.
But the fun on this game wore off within about 1 hour. It just seemed like it was doing more of the same thing over and over again.
I'm not a big fan of racing games. So I would imagine that someone who likes racing games might find this much better than I do. But, even so, I found some of the previous Burnout games and other racing games (Midtown Madness, Project Gotham) to be more engaging because they made it possible to play multi-player on the same console - when I can play it with my kids, it tends to have much more value for me.
So, if you're only moderately interested in racing games, and especially if you like to play them multi-player (without having to go online), then you're probably not going to enjoy this one for very long.
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