Burnout Paradise loses its sparkle.

It is with a heavy heart that I write this posting. I loved previous versions of 'Burnout', and pre-ordered Criterion's 'Burnout Paradise' for the Sony PS3, and it has been one of the most enjoyable purchases that I've made. I say this despite some niggling little annoyances from Criterion over the last year:

- there's the audio podcast that I used to listen to, which then went video-only, and got dumbed down into little more than pure marketing of a product that changed from a stated policy of free updates and down-loadable content to one that includes bits that are slightly less than free.
- there's the online availability from day one of detailed statistics on exactly what progress you have made in the games, so incredibly detailed that when they finally added trophy support, there was no way of using all that information to update the trophies. Starting again was the only option... Ouch!

And now, there's today's '1.60' update. Now, dumbed-down IS fashionable, and I applaud Criterion for following a potentially profitable trend in a time of financial uncertainty, but the cost has been considerable:

- there's the selection of bikes or cars, which used to be via selecting one or the other in a garage, but which now has been moved to the (slower feeling) start-up sequence so that now you have to quit the game and re-start to change from bikes to cars or vice-versa. Just a minor negative improvement there.
- choosing the car or bike used to have that subtle highlighting that any PS3 owner is familiar with, but this has now been replaced with the selected car being rather unsubtly highlighted. Maybe it was just me who didn't have any problem with knowing which car I had chosen?
- then there's the night mode. Previously the night was... dark, and it made high-speed driving a considerable challenge because you couldn't see much beyond your headlights. Rather like when it is dark in the real world. But now we have that wierd 'blue=night' effect that you see in some films, where it isn't really dark, but there's this blue version of sunlight instead. Suddenly, what was a challenge becomes just a colour change. So, a slightly more negative improvement there...
- the game features some 'find these items' challenges, and finding billboards, closed-off areas, and places offering big jumps has required a keen eye and long periods of exploration. Until now, that is. The billboards now flash with a bright saturated red so that you can't really miss them (oh, and the early cars have been made easier to control so that driving them is easier anyway!), the smash-thrus now have bright-yellow flashing signs, and the big jumps now have actinic blue lights attracting your attention. Careful searching has given way to a desperate need for sunglasses.
- the game has also changed its look. It now has the greys with the odd burst of important colour look of 'Mirror's Edge', but the greys are washed out and the colours bloom because the saturation is set too high. Cars with bright green paint now glow in the sun-light because the colour is set so high, whilst the backgrounds look dull and samey. All in all, it looks like a child's toy: bright, vibrant primary colours for a young mind. But hey, you can now see all those things that you are supposed to because they are the bits in colour! Duh! So there's more negative improvement there too.
- oh, and the rather attractive orange colour that featured in all of the menus and title has been replaced with a slightly washed-out royal blue. Just a bit dull for my taste, and not quite the bold colours of 'Burnouts' of old.
- I won't even mention the 'No Retry' policy which has been U-turned. That would be cruel.

So there we have it. A great game turned into a very different game at a stroke. There doesn't seem to be a 'No Thank You' option for the update, so I'm stuck. This is yet another 'downgrade as upgrade'! I notice that Criterion have turned off their forums, but there are other forums still open, and the posts have a tense mixture of shock and dismay, contrasted with enthusiastic welcomes. I'm one of the former, and for me, today was the day that 'Burnout Paradise' lost a lot of its sparkle. A sad day.

The ability to update games online has been an interesting ride since the PS3 came out. 'Burnout Paradise' had been leading the curve up until now, but this feels like a step too far to me. I can only hope that lessons will be learned from this. It seems that updatability has advantages and disadvantages...

Drive-thru billboards...

I pre-ordered Criterion Games' 'Burnout Paradise' for the PS3 on the strength of previous versions of the game, plus the excellent down-loadable demo. Since then I've enjoyed many a happy hour driving extremely badly around a gorgeously detailed, non-existent place, bumping into other virtual cars, doing stunts that in reality I'd never attempt, and generally messing about in cars (and on motorbikes) in ways that you only normally see at the movies. Enormous fun!

You might have detected from my blog posts that I'm a bit of a completist, a perfectionist, a collector... Now those smart people at Criterion cater for many tastes in their video games, and they have got me sussed very well. Amongst several other 'collect these' challenges, is one where you have to drive through advertising billboards, or hoardings, as they are called in the UK. Note here that Burnout's Americanization is so complete that I now call them billboards, and that 'ization' crept in too. Not bad for a team of programmers from Guildford in Surrey in the UK: a county town more normally regarded as one place where stockbrokers live when they aren't working in the City of London.

There are 120 billboards to drive thru, and they vary from obvious, in plain sight, and easy to demolish, through to deviously hidden and virtually (!) impossible to reach. But I've managed to find them all and driven thru every one of them. I hasten to add that in the real world I've never done this, nor have I ever felt any need to do this, and I'm definitely not encouraging anyone to do it.

So you've got a game where people cruise around a city and its surrounding environs, looking for billboards... Sounds like a cue for adverts to me. And this is indeed true, because there are adverts for a number of well-known brands in the game. This is not that unusual these days, and I had more or less dismissed it as a way of making the virtual environment look more like the real world without descending to the fake adverts that you sometimes see that are funny at first, but soon start to pale.

So I was more than a little intrigued when I read that one of the contenders in the US presidential election had bought advertising space inside Burnout Paradise on the X-Box 360 in specific states in the US. In a delicious twist, you have something that shows very eloquently just how clever some people can be:

In a game where you drive around looking for billboards to drive through (thru), you don't/can't ignore the billboards!

Luckily for symbolism, the advertising billboards in Burnout aren't the same as the ones you can drive thru, but this doesn't change the brilliance of the concept. In most games with in-game advertising, you ignore the adverts in just the same way you ignore banner ads on web pages. But in Burnout Paradise, the game-play itself forces you to look at them. If I was speaking, I'd be lost for words in awe at this point, but luckily, I'm only typing.

I'm now wondering just where this leads next. Just how many ways can you weave adverts into the actual fabric of the game-play of the video game itself?