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Criterion, unsurprisingly to wails of Guns N' Roses, unveiled Paradise City to the world - a free-roaming playground of destruction the likes-of which had never been seen before. This all lay within the somewhat archaic different countries, different environments jet-set deal that seems to have been with every racing game or fighter since Street Fighter II though, so Burnout Paradise re-threw the dice.
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The continued post-release development of Burnout Paradise on console is fascinating, and seeing as we'll be getting it all in a great big lump, with snazzier (yet eminently scalable) graphics, keyboard control above and beyond that of a bog-standard port, and all manner of community features - a little bit of dabbling in history is required.īurnouts first four iterations were fabulous on console - focussing on a remarkable sense of speed, hilarious crashes, pile-up-centric game modes and, increasingly as the series went on, takedowns of your opponents -ramming all and sundry off roads, into walls and off cliffs. We've never come across them before, since Burnout and Black never ventured to the PC - but as I sat on a casually discarded tyre in the gentle hubbub of their studio watching community members, who had been invited in, controlling the PC version of Burnout Paradise with a Rock Band guitar plugged into the machine's USB port (a raised guitar neck providing boost) everything just felt a bit special. This was our first sign that Criterion (a subsidiary of industry megalith EA let's not forget) are something different from your usual development house.
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