So I was listening to this week's Giant Bombcast, and while I'm not going to touch the issue of the RA3 "Viral" Videos on Youtube, when the Giant Bomb crew were discussing Burnout, they touched upon another topic that related to my media studies research: the use of real brands in driving games. Everyone on the podcast was talking about how EA & Criterion needed to get real cars into Burnout to make it a breakout hit. Which is... what's the word? Oh, yeah - impossible. At least with the deals that most car companies make with driving game developers.
Here's the thing. Most car companies are very protective of their brands, particularly in the context of video games. What this leads to are contracts which state that their cars can't crash or be wrecked or damaged or exploded in the context of a particular game (NB: Unless you pay the company a giant heap of money). Whereas the entire point of Burnout is having the cars you drive crash in a spectacular manner. (Can you see the problem here?) The brand value of Burnout is diametrically opposed to the brand value being pursued by most car companies and their licensing arms, and as such, the probability of seeing real cars in a Burnout game is nil (at least for the foreseeable future).
Sigh. More evidence for games 'journalism' not being worthy of the name worthy of the name, I suppose. (Not that 'real' journalism often is either, these days, but I digress.)
So it took me about 5-6 of gameplay to figure out how you entered Showtime mode, which lets you turn any car crash into something like a Crash event from Revenge. Which in and of itself made Burnout Paradise like eight times more enjoyable.
Note that I was only able to do this because I remembered the Showtime command from several hours before and decided to try it out because I was bored. As of last Friday, my lead designer was sufficiently confused by the Showtime related UI that he was just ignoring it.
Pick up & play is great and all, but Criterion really needs to get better at teaching people how to play their games. Offhand comments by an in-game radio DJ just don't cut it.
Okay. So my prior issues with Burnout Paradise were largely based on the fact that the designers took out a lot of the best parts of Burnout Revenge. Several of those parts (like a somewhat more sane version of traffic checking) are actually still in the game - they're just non-obvious, and the game isn't very good about telling you about them.
Essentially, Burnout Paradise is an enjoyable game with a savage, several-hour learning curve and a menu system that lets you have horrible accidents in between choosing your missions. It also subverts some of the franchise's core expectations, such as the expectation that you should be boosting every second of every race that you can - in Paradise, boosting through streets you don't know makes you crash nearly 100% of the time. Also, the visual feedback on what's coming up and what's going on around you isn't very good, despite being all over the screen - the game tells you you're supposed to be focused on the road by making you crash all the time, but then forces you to read your map and pay attention to feedback that isn't on the road by making you lose races when you don't. While the open-world gameplay improves on Revenge in a number of ways, there are a lot of minor steps back from some of the things that Revenge did well, and those steps back look a lot larger before you start unlocking heavy Aggression-type cars; I only stopped wishing that I was playing Revenge instead when I unlocked a huge SUV that knocks other cars off the road, and that was several hours into the game.
I understand that there are people who hate hand-holding tutorials, but there's a middle path between forcing a tutorial down your player's throat and having radio comments that only teach you how to play the game after you've screwed up horribly. I guess when it comes down to it, I'm a much more tutorial-tolerant player than the audience that Criterion anticipated.
Picked up two new games today. It should've been Advance Wars & Burnout Paradise, but the Gamestop two blocks from my apartment failed to get their shipment of Advance Wars in today, and against all odds, they had a copy of the PSP version of Riveria, so I picked that up instead as a part of my attempt to keep current on the cream of the niche RPGs that Atlus has brought over to the US. This may be a difficult proposition, as I tried to pre-order Rondo of Swords and it wasn't even on their list of upcoming games (though that may be a side effect of it having been announced, um, last week).
I got Burnout Paradise from the store at work, and... yeah. Still not convinced about the "World as menu" thing. There are upsides and downsides to the new scheme, but the biggest downside from my perspective is the decision to take out Burnout: Revenge's cartoonish (but completely *awesome*) traffic checking system, which let you send cars that were going the same direction as you flying, and make you crash every time your car touches pretty much anything. Because, y'know, Revenge only went Greatest Hits on PS2, Xbox, and 360, which clearly meant that the next major installment in the series needed to be harder, more hardcore, and less fun.
On the upside, the AI seems to cheat less. Though it could be that I'm too busy screaming "Bullshit!" at my car crashing because I brushed a wall or ran over a pebble to notice the cars it controls running into walls head-first and not getting totalled.
I don't want to overstate my annoyance with Burnout Paradise - despite what I perceive as its flaws, it still manages to be a fair amount of fun (ironically, I think the part of the game I enjoy the most aside from the Road Rage missions is exploring the open world). It's just that every time I drive past a row of parked cars in Paradise City, I think how awesome it would be to smash through them in Traffic Attack, and then have to force myself not to ram my junker into them at full speed.
Riveria is an odd duck of a game, and while I'm guardedly optimistic about it so far, it's got some odd design choices, like the system where you earn exploration points by doing well in combat, which you then have to use to, well, explore. Like, at all. The game gives you plenty of opportunities to screw yourself, too, either by expending points on trivial side conversations or by falling into traps that permanently mess with your stats. The in-game English voice acting is actually fairly decent, though, and I think the main character's familiar is voiced by the actress who voiced Etna in the original Disgaea, which is a definite plus. And the core combat is weird and interesting enough that I'll stick with it for a while longer, just to see where the designers go with it.
