I owe @Mikey 500 words for this game he gave me but with interest it’s probably going to be more like…
wildly slams numbers on a calculator until the buttons fly off
646. That sounds right.
Let’s get straight to the tortured thesis statement: Burnout Paradise is a game about infinitely destroying your own body for pleasure.
BP really made me feel like a car. There’s this whole city that exists only to support car racing and destruction - sure, there are music shops and drive through fast food chains and ads for razors, but I’m pretty sure that was all just there to justify people’s paychecks. Only the barest hand-waves are made towards this being a real, inhabited city. There are strictly no humans in the entirety of Paradise City (unless you’re riding a motorcycle, but even then the body disappears as soon as you crash). No pedestrians, no crosswalks, only roads, buildings, and a single snarky DJ’s voice to guide me through the night.
So that leaves the cars. I started the game with a junker car that I now want to own more than any car I’ve ever seen in real life. Revving it makes a sound like the voice of god telling me to buy Nitrous. I want to repair this car with my own hands. I love it.
The very first thing I do is go to first-person mode and, surprise, there’s no dashboard, there’s no steering wheel, no cool radio system prime for jacking. It’s just pure road. It’s like having a single, rectangular eye staring directly at the wall that I’m about to crash into.
Burnout encourages me to crash, by the way. Sure, it penalizes me a little bit, but there’s no question that crashing is the entire reason for driving these cars. Right before the crash, the camera will pop out of the car to lovingly watch as my nose (bumper) slams directly into the wall, as my face (grill) collapses backwards into my chest (engine). It’s almost sexual, with its slow motion zooms on the damage and utter destruction of my body (body).
And then I miraculously appear in the road, chugging merrily along at 60 MPH, not a scratch or scuff to be seen. Ready to get destroyed again. I’m already planning my next wreck, picking up speed and watching for big trucks. Veering into oncoming traffic, my heart races and whatever you call those good-feeling chemicals rush through my brain.
Endorphines? Whatever.
You might think I’m exaggerating but I’m not. I feel every impact in the same way that I feel getting hit with a hammer directly to the sternum in Dark Souls or getting punched in the face in Teleroboxer. It’s a sensation that my body is getting crushed, collapsed, ruined, and reborn. It’s somebody walking on my grave, then burying a stick of dynamite in my coffin and detonating it. It’s lovely.
Besides the camera’s pornographic fixation on destruction, there is an intense sense of speed. Hitting a burnout and boosting on a straightaway is about as exciting as my life will ever get, outside of driving 60 in a residential area in my Pontiac Vibe (the bumper is held on by duct tape and the windows don’t roll up anymore). The only thing more pleasant than the speed is the abrupt loss of speed.
I could talk about how this game feels like SSX3, but weirdly soulless. I could talk about how crash mode is buried beneath a zillion layers of weird multiplayer abstraction. I could talk about how the DLC is constantly advertised but no longer available, or why Guns n Roses is now dead to me, or how the rest of the Soundtrack is weirdly abysmal 00’s rock mixed with classical music. But none of that really matters.
In Paradise City, you can choose the lighting conditions under which your body is obliterated.
In Paradise City, there is only going very fast, and stopping very suddenly.
Burnout Paradise is where good cars go when they die. (***1/2)
