Posted by Bob Mackey
I gotta hand it to the charitable folks over at Criterion; since last January's release of Burnout: Paradise, they've released quite a few substantial DLC updates at absolutely no cost to the consumer. Where companies like Namco-Bandai are content to find ridiculous ways to get their hands on your hard-earned money, Criterion doesn't seem to mind playing Santa three times a year to support one of the greatest racing games we've seen this generation. And even though they plan on charging for their upcoming pack of downloadable cars that absolutely don't infringe on any copyrights whatsoever, the creators of Burnout have at least one more free update coming out on February 6.
While the last free Burnout updates were largely content-related, this new one appears to be a complete under-the-hood overhaul; and the addition of one hugely-missed option is definitely going to bring me back to a game I should have honestly played a lot longer. The big announcement?
You ask – we deliver. Restart is in! You can now quit or fail an event and choose to restart it. You’ll be transferred to the start location ready for action. We’ve always enjoyed the feeling of freedom that Paradise City’s open world delivers, but we appreciate that as you run low on events towards the end of the game, you can spend a little too long in transit.
While I certainly thought the open-world nature of Paradise was a nice change of pace, the annoyance of having to drive back to the starting point of failed events made the game much more tedious than it needed to be. It's true that the streets of Paradise City are literally littered with tons of challenges, but it was always a pain getting stuck out in the boonies after failing a race--and I couldn't say I enjoyed wasting minutes of driving time manually restarting a car-specific mission. If anything, it's just nice to see a developer admit to a glaring flaw in an otherwise great game. Had Kaz Hirai done PR for Criterion, I'm sure we'd be hearing the lack of a restart in Burnout ensures that gamers will have to trade in their precious free time to "unlock the fun." Then he'd start dancing around for reasons only known to clinical psychologists.
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About Bob Mackey
For a brief period of time I was Bull from TV's
Night Court, but some of you may know me from the humor column I wrote for Youngstown State University's The Jambar, Kent State University's The Stater, and Youngstown's alternative newspaper, The Walruss. I'm perhaps most well-known for my bi-weekly pieces on Something Awful. I've also blogged for Valley24.com and have written articles for EGM, 1UP, GameSpite and Cracked. For all of my writing over the years, I have made a total of twenty American dollars. It's also said that I draw cartoons, which people have described with words such as "legible." I kidnapped the Lindbergh Baby and am looking to do so again in the future.
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