COD 5 invading 'new theater' next 007 COD 4-powered

Earlier today, Activision made known its dominance in the gaming industry, triumphantly proclaiming it had secured the top publisher slot in the US in terms of console and handheld software dollars. One of the crucial titles driving Activision's $2.9 billion windfall of annual revenue during its 2008 fiscal year was Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, the first contemporary installment in Infinity Ward's long-running first-person shooter series.

It goes without saying that Activision plans a new installment in the Call of Duty franchise during its 2009 fiscal year, which ends March 31, 2009. The publisher has released a new installment in the series every fourth quarter since the series launched in 2003. In today's earnings follow-up with analysts and investors, the publisher dished more details on the fifth Call of Duty game, first revealed in December.

"We'll launch on all four platforms we've participated on in fiscal [year] 2008," Activision Publishing CEO Mike Griffith referring to Call of Duty 4, which sold over 7 million units worldwide on the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PC, and Nintendo DS in 2007. Griffiths then reconfirmed that "we'll [also] launch on the PS2 and the Wii," marking the series' return to the PS2 and Wii after a two-year hiatus.

In addition to announcing new platforms, Activision also revealed that Call of Duty 5 would again shift the setting of the series. "We'll bring the intensity of the recent Call of Duty: Modern Warfare title to a new military theater to engage our significantly larger user base which nearly doubled last year as new users came into the franchise," said Griffiths. (Emphasis added.) Recent unconfirmed rumors had the series returning to World War II, the conflict in which all games prior to COD4 were set in. The publisher did not say if series creator Infinity Ward or Treyarch (Call of Duty 3, Spider-Man 3) was developing the project.

Speaking of Call of Duty 4, Activision also revealed today that the shooter's powerful game engine will power the new James Bond game. The yet untitled project, which is being developed by Treyarch, is set for release this fall around the same time as the next 007 film, The Quantum of Solace. Its use of the COD4 engine almost assures the game is in development for the PlayStation 3 and 360, and leaves the possibility of a PC version open.

Project Gotham Racing: Review

With the launch of every new gaming console, certain titles define the technological capacity of that platform and usher in the next generation in style. For the Nintendo 64, it was Mario 64; for the original Xbox, it was Halo. Just days before the launch of the Xbox 360, we have a new candidate for that honor: Bizarre Creations' Project Gotham Racing 3, a gripping and intense racing game that is a welcome addition to the 360's launch lineup.

What could be better than driving the car of your dreams in race locales that look this good?

One of the hallmarks of the PGR series has always been its volume--the large numbers of tracks set in a variety of exotic locales, and a list of drivable cars that, based on sheer numbers alone, set the mouths of car aficionados agape. That number has been pared down considerably in PGR 3, to around 80 vehicles. But what an 80 it is. Instead of starting you out in a modest VW Corrado or Honda CRX, right off the bat in PGR 3 you'll have access to some of the hottest high-performance rides in the world. Models from elite makers such as Ferrari, TVR, RUFs, Mercedes, Lotus, and Shelby are available to you from the get-go--provided you have the credits to pay for them, of course.

Luckily, money comes quick in PGR 3, thanks to the game's centerpiece, the career mode. The mode's been split into two subsections--a solo career that has you take on artificial intelligence-controlled drivers, and an online career mode that pits you against real-life drivers in a number of online events. By completing events over a variety of difficulty levels (like in PGR 2, difficulty is noted by medals ranging from tin to platinum), you earn credits that pile up quickly and let you fill your garages (yes, note the plural) with the coolest collection of performance autos imaginable.

When it comes to mission variety, PGR 3's solo career mode will feel very familiar to anyone who's played the PGR series before. You'll have your straight-ahead street races, of course, which will pit you against one or more other opponents in a fight to the checkered flag, and elimination races--multilap sprints in which the last driver over the finish line is eliminated on each successive lap. There's more to do than simply drive fast--in the PGR world, driving with style is just as important as stomping on the accelerator and pointing your nose at the finish line. So the kudos system is back, serving as a measure of your ability to feather your car around corners, maintain awesome drifts around tight turns, and avoid the ever-present walls and other barriers.

Like the cash in PGR 3, kudos seem to be easier to earn this time around--though that could be a function of the incredible power of the cars in the game, which are at once very agreeable to drift-style driving, and fairly easy to control in the process. If you've got some touch behind the virtual wheel, for example, you can slalom your way down long straights, spinning your back wheels practically the entire time, racking up massive kudos along the way. In some timed runs, earning kudos will temporarily pause the countdown clock that you're running against; thus, these kudos versus time races are challenges that require a fine balance of race speed and skillful touch. As easy as kudos are to earn, however, you won't just breeze your way through the kudo-centric cone challenges. At the hardest difficulty level, these races require not only improvisation on the course, to ensure your combo chain isn't broken, but a sniper's accuracy behind the wheel, to navigate the tough placement of the cones. It can be frustrating or invigorating, depending on your mindset.

Motion blur effects and solid frame rate contributes to the game's thrilling sense of speed.

There's just enough variety to keep things moving forward, and it won't take you much time to get through either solo mode or the online career mode. We wrapped up the solo career mode with all silver medals in approximately eight hours of play. Obviously, there's an incentive to earn even better medals, as well as more credits, achievements, and badges; but with only 23 trophies available in solo career mode, it won't be long before you begin to explore other options in the game.

The other half of your career in PGR 3 will take place online in the appropriately named online career. Unlike playtime matches, racing in your online career is for keeps, as these are ranked matches. A complex system of player matching ensures that you're racing against opponents who not only share an agreeable network connection with you, but also are of like skill on the track. Unlike the solo career mode, your online career never really ends in PGR 3--you are simply on a quest to win as often as possible and improve your online ranking in the process. The challenge of running against unpredictable real life opponents adds value to a game whose single player game ends quicker than you might hope.

And that's as it should be. The real meat of any competitive Xbox 360 game is (or at least, should be) taking on real-life opponents from all over the world and enjoying the sounds of them choking on your exhaust. Just as in PGR 2, Project Gotham Racing 3's long-term appeal comes in its online features, which include the aforementioned online career mode, as well as the kind of quick-race and optimatch features that you've come to expect in online racing games.

The crowds gathered to watch you race will run to get out of your way should you crash into a wall.

When creating matches from scratch, you have three modes to choose from: street race, eliminator, and capture the track (along with team versions of street race and eliminator). Online street races and eliminator modes play exactly as they do in PGR 3's single-player game. In capture the track, your goal is to "own" as much of a particular course as you can by posting the fastest sector teams in specific sections of a track. The quicker you are over the course, the more of the track you'll own. Online performance was silky smooth in our test sessions with the game--we didn't notice any sort of lag or warping of vehicles. And, because it's been a while since we've played the last PGR game online, it's nice to see that beating loudmouths on Xbox Live is still as satisfying a simple pleasure as online gaming can provide.
Summing up Project Gotham's feel behind the wheel is best served with one term: forgiving. We've never driven a TVR Cerbera Speed Twelve, but we suspect it's a lot more difficult to nimbly drift the rear end of that 8000-brake horsepower monstrosity around tight corners of London's Trafalgar Tour than it is in the game. And that's a good thing. Project Gotham driving ethos has always straddled the line between realistic driving physics and friendly controls; to the game's credit, this approach is in full effect here. This isn't to say that the cars don't feel authentic in terms of acceleration and raw speed--the rollicking kinetic roller coaster of navigating the Nürburgring in a Ferrari F50 GT is as thrilling an experience as you can have on the Xbox 360. At the same time, though, PGR 3's physics seemed designed to give you as much an opportunity to succeed as possible.

Gotham TV lets you watch your stored replays, or check out the hottest online races happening at any given moment on Xbox Live.

Just as in previous games, there's no real penalty for crashing into walls and obstacles, other than losing momentum. Damage is once again only cosmetic, and not even that is impressively modeled. A high-speed collision will usually only result in a cracked windshield or a busted side-view mirror, and running into an opponent ahead of you will usually do little more than bend their spoiler. Therefore, you don't feel that guilty for driving aggressively and aren't really surprised when the game's AI-controlled cars do the same. They aren't exactly blind to your presence on the road--they just don't care that much.

The game makes no concessions in authenticity, however, in the car models and race environments that populate the game; these are among the most impressive sights we've seen on the 360. Actually, let's qualify that statement. PGR 3's car models, when viewed from the exterior camera angles, are certainly impressive. Bright colors, sleek contours, and striking lighting effects all make for attractive models that will make your right foot twitch in anticipation. That said, the car models, whether from a lack of complex reflections or just relatively simple lighting techniques, also have a vaguely plastic appearance to them, which doesn't always mesh with the striking visuals that comprise the backgrounds. Those environments, modeled on real-life locales such as Tokyo, Las Vegas, and New York City, are impressive both in scope and quality. Hit the Big Apple and you'll rocket down both spans of the Brooklyn Bridge; attack the Shinjuku district of Tokyo at night and you'll run smack-dab into the fireworks display of neon signage lining the streets.

These are merely visual appetizers for the game's graphical main course, though. The in-car camera view is PGR 3's single most impressive aspect. Each of the game's 80 cars features a stunningly authentic interior that places you directly in the driver's seat. Driving in a McLaren F1 LM, for example, will place you in the car's unique center-seat setup, with rearview mirrors at both corners of the cockpit. The F1 style paddle gearshifts you'd find in a real Ferrari 355 GTS are also in the game. Look down at your feet in the McLaren F1 and you'll see your virtual driver's feet working the gas and brake as you drive along. It's great stuff.

The in-car camera view is PGR 3's best, and most impressive, feature.

It's no exaggeration to call the sense of speed and kinetic energy generated by this viewpoint a visceral thrill unlike practically anything we've ever played. Off the line, your car shudders under the forces of its massive acceleration; in high-speed turns, you'll watch as your car struggles under the forces acting upon it, while your "driver" viewpoint jostles independently because your virtual head is struck by those same energies. The windshields alone are a wonder--multifaceted reflection effects combine with the grime that gathers on the windows to really put you "in" the car. This stunning marriage of obsessive modeling, gorgeous lighting, and attention to detail conveys a sense of immersion that is still rare in gaming today, and it is PGR 3's visual hallmark.

Of course, these gorgeous graphics require an HD setup to get the most out of them, though we were pleasantly surprised to see that even on a normal television, the game still retained a good deal of its visual splendor. If you've got a newer TV set capable of playing in widescreen ratio, be sure to enable it, as this setup greatly enhances the game's visuals.

And as good as it looks, PGR 3's audio package is even better. The soundtrack alone is nearly worth the price of admission--it's an eclectic mixture that mixes bubbly J-Pop with sultry bhangra and elegant classical (along with the requisite electronica, hip-hop, and rock tracks). The soundtrack is a welcome addition to the vanilla playlists of most racing games, and it just might be the cure for what ails on you on the track. Pop Verdi's awesome and ominous "Requiem, Dies Irae" in your car's virtual CD changer, for example, and watch your lap times fall. The music isn't the only aural treat, however--the intricately modeled car engines have a sweet melody all their own. The hollow roar of the Ferraris, the whining protest of the Aston Martins, the sheer menace of the McLaren F1 LM--without exception, each entry in PGR 3's car lineup sounds as good as they look, especially when enjoyed through a Dolby 5.1 setup with a nice, beefy subwoofer.

You can't tell from this screen, but PGR 3 sounds even better than it looks.

Project Gotham Racing 3 gets so many other, smaller things right: The Gotham TV feature that lets you access your saved-race replays and pictures of your cars taken in the game's new photo mode, as well as watch the world's best racers run live on the Internet; the seven garages you can earn in the game (complete with two playable versions of Geometry Wars, the arcade shooter that appropriately has you fighting geometry); the custom-route feature that lets you build unique courses on any of PGR 3's racing locales; the Nürburgring, this time featuring a behemoth version of the legendary German course, which combines the full 13-mile Nordschliefe with the modern-day F1 circuit; the insane level of stat tracking in the game, in which total kudos earned by pulling off moves such as braking power overs, power feints, and braking feints are all saved to your profile, as are the total number of times you've pulled off a particular stunt.

Project Gotham Racing 3 isn't the longest game in the world; indeed, the majority of its long-term value will be via Xbox Live play. Still, for pure style, speed, and immersion, grabbing a seat in any of PGR 3's intricately modeled high-speed rigs and tearing through the streets is what the next generation of gaming is all about. All that's missing is the smell of burnt rubber and the feel of the wind whipping through your hair.

Source:Gamespot

Halo 3 review

Regardless of how you felt about its cliffhanger ending, there's no denying that Halo 2 was a gigantic success that raised the bar for what we, as a game-playing society, expect out of a good console-based first-person shooter. In the years that followed, plenty of games attempted to duplicate the Halo formula, with varying degrees of success. But there's still nothing quite like the genuine item. Luckily for all involved, Halo 3 is a positively amazing package that offers extreme satisfaction across all of its different parts. Maybe now you can finally retire your Halo 2 disc and really move into the next generation of games.

Halo 3 manages to feel familiar while also packing in a good amount of new material.

Halo 3 is an interesting mix of established protocol and intriguing new stuff. For example, the gameplay doesn't stray too far from Halo 2, which, in turn, didn't exactly reinvent the original Halo. Don't take that as a negative, because it means that Halo 3 plays extremely well, with the same types of light tactical considerations that have made the series stand apart from other, faster-paced shooters. The balance between your guns, your grenades, and your melee attack has always given Halo a unique feel in the genre, and those same considerations apply today, both in the campaign mode and in multiplayer. You'll also have new weapons and items to consider, such as a host of Brute weapons. One example is the spiker, which is an exciting automatic pistol that fires quickly and decimates opponents, especially if you're holding a pair of them. Another is the mauler, which is a one-handed shotgun that can level enemies up close. You'll even find weapons so huge that your movement speed slows when you carry them. When you use these weapons, the camera pulls out to a third-person perspective so you can see your missile pod, plasma cannon, or flamethrower as it fires. And then there's the gravity hammer. Originally shown in Halo 2 (where it wasn't usable by the player), the gravity hammer is a large melee weapon that will wipe out most regular enemies in one swipe. Needless to say, it can be especially fun in multiplayer settings. The end result is gameplay that feels wholly familiar without retreading the same ground too heavily.

The campaign is structured in much the same way as past Halo games, with multiple chapters and effective streaming that ensures you'll see load times only between chapters. There are also lengthy vehicle sequences to break up the on-foot action. You'll pilot the classic Halo vehicles, such as the Ghost, a hovering one-person craft that's fast and deadly, and the Warthog, a dune buggy with a turret mounted in the back. You'll also see new vehicles, such as the Brute Prowler, which is a two-person vehicle with turrets. Like in previous games, the vehicles are fun to use. Also similar to previous games, the artificial intelligence can't drive very well, so if you're playing alone, you'll usually want to grab the steering wheel rather than the weapons.

The concept of "equipment" is new to the series. These deployable special items have a variety of effects. The most obvious example is the bubble shield: You (and your enemies) can walk through it, but bullets and explosions bounce right off. It's especially entertaining when your enemies use it, given that you can just walk through and bash them with the butt of your gun. You'll also find items that make your shields regenerate more quickly, and others that drain enemy shields and stop their vehicles dead in their tracks. These items also show up in multiplayer, where they're a little more interesting.

Halo 2's ending was widely criticized for being too much of a cliffhanger and leaving you with no sense of progress or resolution whatsoever. It's good news, then, that Halo 3's story doesn't suffer from that problem at all. It opens immediately following the events of Halo 2: The Covenant is on its way to Earth, continuing its religious zealotry and attempting to activate the floating space weapons known as Halos, which could destroy civilization as we know it. The Master Chief and the other Earth forces of the UNSC are in hot pursuit to stop them, with newfound allies such as the Arbiter coming along for the ride. We'll spare you the specifics because they're quite compelling and should be seen firsthand. All you really need to know if you're on the fence about Halo 3's campaign is that it's a delicate balancing act that manages to provide satisfying closure for the trilogy, make perfect sense of all the cryptic events in Halo 2, and leave you filled with anticipation for more adventures set in the Halo universe. Not bad for a game that will take most players between 10 and 15 hours to finish on one of four difficulty settings.

But you'll probably go through the campaign more than once, thanks to the inclusion of a strong co-op mode. Previous Halo games have let two players go through the campaign; Halo 3 ups that number to four players and lets you do the whole thing over Xbox Live, if you so choose. This is a really fun way to experience the campaign's nine chapters, and you can choose to go through them in any order, provided you've already played through it alone. Furthermore, this method of play (which you can also do alone) lets you turn on scoring in campaign mode, in which you earn points for kills and lose them for dying. This adds a sense of competition to the co-op, and there are also achievements associated with finishing chapters with high point totals. You can also customize the experience a bit by turning on a series of unlockable modifiers that open up as you collect hidden skulls. The skulls are stashed around the game, and some of them do things such as increase the amount of damage you'll need to deal to take an enemy down, remove the heads-up display and make your weapon invisible, and so on. This gives the story-driven section of the game some more replay value, although it doesn't get significantly more difficult as you scale up the number of players. Consequently, finishing the game on legendary difficulty is a breeze if you're rolling through with three experienced fellow triggermen.

You can earn the campaign achievements in co-op mode, which makes the legendary difficulty a lot easier to manage.

In addition to the four-player co-op action, you can also play competitive solo and team-based multiplayer matches with up to 16 players on 11 different maps. There's a lot of depth to the multiplayer modes, ranging from simple stuff such as deathmatch and team deathmatch (still referred to as slayer and team slayer here), to more objective-based gameplay such as capture the flag. Another similar mode is called territories, in which the two teams fight to defend or attack various control points around the map. You'll also find a mode called infection, where a percentage of the players start as sword-wielding zombies and must convert the members of the other team by killing them, until only one non-zombie remains. Each of the maps can handle any of these game modes.

Like in Halo 2, you can customize these game types, and there's more to customize this time around. You can change things like starting weapons, the weapons that appear on the map, whether the motion sensor is active, the force of gravity, the game speed, whether the players all have active camouflage or not, and much, much more. The multiplayer is as strong as it has ever been thanks to the addition of new weapons and tweaks to old ones. Swords have been made much more interesting this time around: If two players run at one another with energy swords and attack at the same time, the swords clash and the players bounce off one another. This makes all-swords matches totally wild. The gravity hammer is also big fun in multiplayer matches, both because it crushes enemies that are foolish enough to get too close, and because you can smack incoming rockets to bat them away, which makes for an interesting game of baseball.

The weird thing about this last concept is that, with the addition of the Forge, you'll actually be able to build some sort of crude baseball variant if you want. Forge mode is a map editor, but not in the 3D modeling sense that you're used to seeing in PC shooters. You can't edit level geometry with Forge, but you can spawn, remove, and move objects and items around the level. All of the editing is done in real time, and you can pop in and out of edit mode by pushing up on the D pad. You can also play this mode with other players, letting everyone run around in edit mode to spawn Warthogs, rocket launchers, and whatever else is already on the map. On the surface, that doesn't sound so exciting. But in practice, it's a weird and potential-rich addition to the game because there are a ton of little secrets and tricks you can use to manipulate the objects in ways the developers may not have intended.

The Forge might not sound like much at first, but when you figure out how to play with it, it becomes one of the game's most impressive features.

For example, take the fusion core. It's Halo's version of the exploding barrel, and by default, it blows up when you shoot it or drop it from a significant height. It also takes 30 seconds to respawn. You can modify it to respawn every 10 seconds and, with help from another player's rifle fire, you can coax it into respawning in midair, where it tumbles to the ground and explodes every 10 seconds. Naturally, if you surround that spot with more stuff that explodes, you'll have a fun little physics-based bomb that respawns and explodes every 10 seconds. If you've ever messed around with Garry's Mod, a similar physics-based toolbox for Half-Life 2, then you'll recognize this as a simplified take on that idea when you start using it for more than simply adding a few weapons to a map or moving spawn points around. Though many players probably won't get hooked on Forge tinkering, it's an extremely powerful addition that may just take over your life.

You'll be able to easily share your Forge creations with other players via a handy file-sharing system that lets you quickly send map configurations and gameplay types to your friends. You can also set a certain number of items as publicly shared, and users can go to Bungie's Web site to browse and rate the shared items. Additionally, you can flag items for download on that Web page, and the next time you fire up Halo 3, it'll download the items you've marked. It's a very slick interface that makes moving stuff around very easy.

You can also use the file-sharing options to send screenshots and saved films. Saved films are replays of action from any of the modes in the game, from campaign to multiplayer to Forge sessions. The game automatically stores the last 25 or so sessions, and you can choose to save them more permanently from there. Once you've got them, you can edit them down to key kills, weird single-player behavior, or the strangest Forge stuff you can come up with, and then save them for sharing, just as you would with a map or game mode. Much like Forge, the saved-films feature doesn't really sound like much, but Halo 3 is a very replay-worthy game, and you'll probably run into plenty of little moments that you'll want to save for posterity. Another nice touch is that the films aren't locked to one perspective. You can detach the camera from your player and fly anywhere on the map, or change it to any other player's view, as well. The only real issue is that rewinding and fast-forwarding are a little clunky. So if you've got something you want to save that's at the end of a 45-minute session, you'll have to hold down the fast-forward button for a long time to get to that moment, and if you miss it, rewinding can be a real pain, too. Once you've figured out the little idiosyncrasies of footage manipulation, it's not so bad.

Halo has always had a very strong artistic vision, and the graphics have always been just good enough to convey the necessary imagery without becoming huge technical powerhouses. That's not to say that the game isn't technically impressive, because it maintains a smooth frame rate throughout, and looks very sharp overall with plenty of great lighting and other nice effects. But the visual design overpowers its technical side and really stands out. Given that the game takes place in a wider range of locales than the previous two games, you'll see a lot of different, colorful environments, including deserts, snow, jungle settings, great-looking building interiors, and more. The enemies, many of which are returning from past games, also look great.

The audiovisual portion of Halo 3 is definitely impressive, with great art, sharp effects, and terrific music.

The sound in Halo 3 is a good mix of old and new, much like the rest of the game. You'll hear the familiar Halo theme music and variants thereof. You'll also hear plenty of great new music, including one suspenseful track with a heartbeat-like sound that manages to get your heart pounding as well. Most of the voice cast from Halo 2 returns to voice their respective characters, and they again turn in terrific and believable performances. You'll also hear a ton of combat dialogue, both from the marines that fight by your side as well as the enemies you're fighting, who don't seem to appreciate it when you kill one of their comrades. Our favorite line from the Covenant was probably "You've killed my brother for the last time," which is pretty hilarious.

As games start to consider user-generated content, it's becoming clear that more and more games will be ready to give you back just as much as you're willing to put into them. On the surface, Halo 3 is every bit the sequel you would expect it to be, in that it delivers meaningful upgrades to both the story-driven and competitive sides of the package. However, it's the addition of the Forge level editor and the saved films that give the game an even longer set of legs, legs that will probably keep you running at full speed until Bungie figures out where, exactly, to go from here.

Source: Gamespot

Gears of War 2 'Assault Analysis' HD

Burnout Paradise: Review

Is there any developer buzz term more meaningless these days than "open-world gameplay"? Let's face it, it's kind of been done to death at this point, so you have to look on with a bit of skepticism when a developer touts the concept as the next big thing for its franchise. It's understandable, then, if Burnout Paradise's concept freaks you out a little bit. Burnout has, by tradition, been a fairly structured arcade racing game up to this point, and one would have to wonder exactly how well an open environment would serve the series' crash-happy gameplay methodology. Evidently, the answer is quite well. Developer Criterion has invented a world wonderfully suited to Burnout's nature, a city built exclusively to cater to your destructive whims. And while a few design hitches here and there get in the way now and again, by and large Burnout Paradise delivers an experience that is both true to the Burnout name and wonderfully fresh-feeling all at once.

It might be in an open world, but Paradise is still a Burnout game through and through.

The star of the show is Paradise City itself. Coming complete with the titular Guns 'N Roses song (because Burnout: Night Train or Burnout: Mr. Brownstone probably wouldn't have been as catchy), Paradise City is, at first blush, a pretty standard racing game city, complete with all the usual landmark locations and boring background traffic. But it quickly becomes evident that Paradise City is meant for a greater purpose than just being a simple city to race around in. In effect, the city is a blank slate, a pristine canvas on which to paint your own obliterative masterpiece. The simple act of driving aimlessly around the city constantly presents new roads, shortcuts, and destructible objects for you to experience and, often, destroy. Nearly every intersection of road hosts a new event of some kind, and even after you've worked your way through the game's progression of driver's licenses (the only specifically linear portion of the game design), you'll still be finding new things you didn't even know were there.

That might sound a little overwhelming, especially if you've grown accustomed to the rather specific brand of racing that Burnout has always subscribed to. And at first, it most definitely is. Though the in-game tutorials do a decent job of explaining the event types and basic mechanics, you're initially left to your own devices and only have the small minimap to guide you through the many twists and turns of the city as you race--unless of course you want to hit the pause button regularly and use the larger map, which is a bit annoying to do. Those well accustomed to Burnout's previously track-based racing model might find having to explore to find the best route to the finish a bit frightening, but the good news is that it doesn't take a great deal of time to get a feel for the city's various ins and outs.

Until that time, you will experience some trial and error (with a heavier focus on the error), but the funny thing about that is that while you may initially find yourself failing races, it's not often you have to just go back and keep doing that same race again and again. The focus of Burnout Paradise isn't on doing specific events so much as it is about doing whatever you feel like. If you fail a race, odds are that there are roughly a dozen starting points for other races near the finish line of that previous race, and unless you've done them all, you can just hit up any one of them to get another notch on your license. Toward the very end of the game, when you've bested the bulk of the game's events, you may find yourself lamenting the lack of a quick return feature to get back to a race's starting point. But for the majority of the game, it's not really an issue.

It's a strange design to get used to initially, but once you do, it becomes incredibly rewarding. You can spend hours at a time just dawdling around the city and still make forward progress within the game. Don't feel like racing? Just go break through shortcut gates or bust up billboards, which are tallied up as you break each one. Or, track down one of the cars you unlocked on the road and take it down to add it to your collection. Or, you can opt to pick a road and attempt to "own" it. There are two types of events associated with each of the major roads in the game. Time trials are as you'd expect--you simply start at one end of the road and start driving down it, attempting to get the fastest time you can. Secondly, there are showtime events, which are the game's effective replacement for the crash mode found in previous installments of the series. Whereas crash mode was sort of like a puzzle mode in the way it made you create elaborate car crashes out of painstakingly built traffic designs, showtime is the polar opposite. These are elaborate car crashes born from little more than a bunch of nearby cars and your ability to control what is, in essence, a sentient car wreck.

In a word, showtime mode is absurd. The goal is similar to crash mode in that you're aiming to create as much damage as humanly possible, with various types of cars offering up different cash bonuses that feed into your final score. All the while, you can move your busted husk of a car around by pressing the boost button, which causes you to bounce around like a rubber ball. Again, totally absurd, but also totally awesome. It might lack the puzzling nature of the crash mode, but for pure visceral thrill and laughs-a-minute wrecking, showtime mode delivers in spades. It would have been nice if Criterion had found a way to have both the crash mode and showtime mode coexisting, as neither would make a particularly good replacement for the other; but on its own, showtime is a great deal of fun.

This game contains some of the most downright erotic car crashes not featured in a J.G. Ballard novel.

A number of other elements from previous Burnouts are also missing or altered here. The lack of aftertouch (the mechanic that let you steer your wreck into opponents during races and take them out) is a real bummer, as it makes wrecking during races a pure nuisance rather than an opportunity for more destructive glee. Traffic checking is absent as well, though it isn't sorely missed. The racing artificial intelligence has seen a bit of tweaking here and there. You still get the sense of rubber banding that the series has always employed, but as the game goes on and the racers get tougher, your opponents become more aggressive and don't just tank right before the finish line. By and large, the game is actually a bit easier than the last couple of Burnout games, but the challenge toward the later stages of the game definitely ramps up significantly.

The racing itself is as exciting as it's ever been. Standard races are intense and thrilling, road rage events are full of wreckful delights, stunt runs have you jumping, barrel rolling, and flat spinning all over the place, marked man races are tense fights to the finish line as multiple enemy cars bop you around trying to wreck you beyond repair, and burning routes have you taking on challenging time trials to earn new cars. If there's any flaw to be noted with the core game design, it's maybe that there aren't enough event types. There's no shortage of events and random stuff to do, but running the same event types, and even some of the same specific events again and again, can grow a bit tiresome after a while. After each license upgrade, all the events you've raced (except for burning routes) reset, so you end up doing a lot of them over and over again. This wouldn't even be an issue if there were a greater variety of event types, but as it stands, there are only those few, and you may wear out on doing races and marked man events again and again.

If you do get a bit bored with the single-player action, you can always hop online and race against others. Doing so is quite seamless. Simply press right on the D pad to bring up the online menu, and then decide if you want to join up with other existing games or create your own. Online in Burnout Paradise is quite a different animal than that of previous Burnout games. You don't just hop into a lobby menu and pick races to engage in. Instead, the city itself is the lobby, and while the host decides what he wants to unleash upon you, you can just mess around and do whatever you like.

When hosting, you have the ability to both race and take on challenges. Races are of your own design, with you setting the beginning and ending points anywhere in the city. Challenges are set, and there are literally hundreds of them. The trick is that there are a limited number of challenges depending on how many players are in a group. There are 50 challenges for two players, 50 for eight players, and 50 for each denomination in between. This means that once you've exhausted all the challenges for two players, you'll have to get three, then four, and so on and so on if you want to complete them all. That might prove unwieldy for those who don't have a lot of friends online to play the game, but at least the challenges themselves are creative and fun. The challenges range from competitive bouts of drifting, crashing, and jumping to cooperative versions of all the same stuff. It's an inventive mode to be sure and an exceptionally fun one when you've got a good crew of friends to play with.

It also bears mention that while online, you can use the PlayStation Eye or Xbox Live Vision Camera to take shots of your rivals online. When you take down a rival player that has a camera hooked up, the cam will take a mugshot of that player's reaction. It's kind of a neat feature that, unfortunately, will probably be abused by all manner of nudity over the course of the game's lifespan, but that's inevitably what happens when you let people do things with cameras.

Paradise's visual presentation is precisely the kind of top-notch work you've come to expect from the series. Once again, the game sets a standard for how a sense of speed should feel in an arcade racer. This game is lightning fast, and the frame rate in both the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions of the game holds up regardless of the chaos onscreen. The car crashes in this game are absolutely fantastic, thanks to some dynamite particle effects and camera work in each and every mangled wreck. Cars deform to wonderful effect, scrunching up like an accordion in head-on collisions and bending and twisting nicely in other situations. The only thing that continues to look a little weird is the total lack of drivers in all the cars around the city. It's understandable that Criterion would leave out mangled corpses or what have you for the sake of an E 10+ rating, but it still looks strange seeing all these disembodied cars driving around like a society of Turbo Teens.

It's also worth noting that Burnout Paradise is a game that commands an HD display, and not just for full graphical effect. On the standard-definition TVs we tried, we found the minimap to be borderline useless unless we squinted like crazy. On an HD set, the minimap is detailed and blown up enough to rely on, but when playing in standard definition, it simply became a hassle to use.

Showtime mode won't make you forget about crash mode, but it's a lot of goofy fun in its own right.

If you're looking for differences between the two versions, you won't find many. The PlayStation 3 version looks maybe a hair crisper than the 360 version, but that's about the only visual difference to speak of. On the flipside, the 360 version has a slight edge in that you can use custom soundtracks to drown out the miserable collection of songs EA has amassed for the game. There are a few highlights that fit well with the theme of high-energy racing, but the vast bulk of the music consists of irritating modern rock that's about as ill-fitting as humanly possible. Avril Lavigne's "Girlfriend" might, itself, be a car wreck of a song, but it doesn't fit the vibe of the game at all. Add in the collection of original Criterion-produced guitar rock tracks from previous Burnout games that sound like they were culled from Joe Satriani's nightmares, and you have a pretty unpleasant musical experience all around. The annoying radio DJ who pops up now and again to give hints, mock you obnoxiously when you fail, and make one glib comment or another about something going on in the city doesn't help matters. He's merely an annoyance that probably wouldn't even be worth mentioning save for the fact that you cannot turn him off. At least the sound effects are still top-flight in every regard. Crashes thunder, engines roar, and tires screech with terrific clarity all throughout the game. If you've got a surround-speaker setup, it's all the better.

It's entirely possible that some people might not enjoy Burnout Paradise's significant shift in direction, specifically those who simply wanted another incremental Burnout sequel. Indeed, Paradise is anything but incremental, and while it might prove a polarizing experience for some, most will likely appreciate what a radical overhaul this game really is. The open-world design isn't just a lazy gimmick--it's a wonderfully executed concept that doesn't rob the game of the series' most beloved tenet: the act of driving fast and wrecking hard. If you're one of the people who tried the Burnout Paradise demo and formed a rather negative opinion of the game, you're not alone. But if you have any affection for the series, you really owe it to yourself to give the full game a look. The demo did little to truly represent what a superbly fun racer this game can be.

Source: Gamespot

Burnout Paradise 'Guns 'N Roses' HD