Take me down to the Paradise City
Where the grass is green and the girls are pretty (take me home)
Oh, won't you please take me home?
Take me down to the Paradise City
Where the grass is green and the girls are pretty (take me home)
Oh, won't you please take me home?
Just an urchin living under the street, I'm a
Hard case that's tough to beat
I'm your charity case so buy me somethin' to eat
I'll pay you at another time
Take it to the end of the line
Rags and riches, or so they say, you gotta
Keep pushing for the fortune and fame
You know it's, it's all a gamble when it's just a game
You treat it like a capital crime
Everybody's doing their time
Take me down to the Paradise City
Where the grass is green and the girls are pretty
Oh, won't you please take me home? Yeah-yeah
Take me down to the Paradise City
Where the grass is green and the girls are pretty
Take me home
Strapped in the chair of the city's gas chamber
Why I'm here, I can't quite remember
The surgeon general says it's hazardous to breathe
I'd have another cigarette but I can't see
Tell me, who you're gonna believe?
Take me down to the Paradise City
Where the grass is green and the girls are pretty
Take me home, yeah-yeah
Take me down to the Paradise City
Where the grass is green and the girls are pretty
Oh, won't you please take me home?
Yeah
So far away
So far away
So far away
So far away
Captain America's been torn apart, now
He's a court jester with a broken heart
He said, "Turn me around and take me back to the start"
I must be losin' my mind, "Are you blind?"
"I've seen it all a million times"
Take me down to the Paradise City
Where the grass is green and the girls are pretty
Take me home, yeah-yeah
Take me down to the Paradise City
Where the grass is green and the girls are pretty
Oh, won't you please take me home?
Take me down to the Paradise City
Where the grass is green and the girls are pretty
Take me home, yeah-yeah
Take me down to the Paradise City
Where the grass is green and the girls are pretty
Oh, won't you please take me home?
Home
I wanna go, I wanna know
Oh, won't you please take me home?
I wanna see, how good it can be
Oh, won't you please take me home?
Take me down to the Paradise City
Where the grass is green and the girls are pretty
Take me home (oh, won't you please take me home?)
Take me down to the Paradise City
Where the grass is green and the girls are pretty
Oh, won't you please take me home?
Take me down (oh yeah), spin me 'round
Oh, won't you please take me home?
I wanna see, how good it can be
Oh, won't you please take me home?
I wanna see, how good it can be
Oh, oh, take me home
Take me down to the Paradise City
Where the grass is green and the girls are pretty
Oh, won't you please take me home? (I want you, I want you take me home)
I wanna go, I wanna know
Oh, won't you please take me home?
Baby, yeah

I was never fond of racing games. Most of the time, I find them either too hardcore, boring or even too slow paced. Only two licences manage to make my heart goes boom : Vigilant8 and Burnout.

Although I always loved Burnout, I wasn't able to play it for a while because I didn't had the games. I had demos and some of my friends had the games, but I never purchased a Burnout game. In my 20s I purchased Burnout 3, which is great but my cd is scratched. Then I purchased Burnout Paradise on switch, perfectly knowing it was a strange Burnout game, but thinking it'll certainly lead to great multiplayer racing couch games.

Well, it is written at the back of the game's box, but Burnout Paradise doesn't allow local multiplayer. That's disappointing (and let's be honest that's kind of a shame too). Alright then, let's play the game solo.

It is Burnout. If you know you like Burnout, you won't be lost. Basic principles were great in the early 2000s, they're still great nowadays. In Burnout, you have to win the race. By any means necessary. Destroying your opponent isn't only allowed, it is encouraged. It gives you way more boost, that is among the most satisfying boost of all racing games of all times. This boost allows you to do 3 things :
- Destroying more opponents, which gives you more boost
- Doing stunts, really really impressive, dumb, unrealistic and spectacular stunts, which gives you more boost
- Going faster, which eventually lead to you winning the race.
This is wonderful design-wise because it is based on a very simple yet efficient gameplay loop, thriving in good level design, encouraging high risk moves (attacking your opponents) and rewarding your success with high rewards (boost).

Then, burnout paradise comes with its novelty : open world.
- Is it a good Idea ? I don't know.
- Does it make sens ? I don't know.
- Is it correctly executed ? I don't know.
Yet, I understand what Criterion tried with this open world. The equation is simple : open worlds, by essence, rely on navigation. Burnout has a unique gampelay core, which is fun navigation. Let's make the game a constant and giant open world, that forces the player to drive because this is what we want because our driving system is fun. Besides, let's take the benefit from open world by giving the player a total freedom when it comes to shortcuts and itinerary.

This. This above has been done in the most all-in way. This is what burnout PARADISE is. This is its intention.

This comes with a lot of qualities. You learn paradise city. You make it your own true driving playground, with your favourite itinerary you tend to take a lot. Your encouraged to explore hidden spots to find shortcuts or even secrets and collectibles. You drive smartly : you have to keep attention to the actual act of driving as well as the organization of your intinerary. This organization relies on a sign systems, that blink on top of the screen when you must take a road. Then, when you fail, you have to improvise, which is very stimulating.

Yet, this hardcoreness can be very frustrating. I lost a ton of races because I missed a road because I simply didn't saw the blinking sings at the top of the screen. That is to say I wasn't bad at driving (wich is the core of the game), I was bad at reading the map (which, in my opinion, isn't supposed to be the core of a racing game). There is no restart button : if a race is lost, you better stop your engine to quit the race and launch another race. That is to say you cannot easily retry something you've failed, because between each tries your supposed to reach the begining of the race. There is no menu at all : if you want to start a race or change your vehicle, you have to reach a specific point that allows you to do so.

As I said earlier, I don't know if all of this is a good idea. I think it is not. Yet, I am forced, as a designer, to highlight the great execution of this idea. Criterion believe in it and formalized it seriously. This is highly respectable, this was very surprising at first. This might be very challenging. This might be very frustrating. But at the end of the day, I'm sure I'll remember it. That's certainly the mark of a good videogame, and that's what make me love playing videogame.
Hopefully, Burnout paradise is still a Burnout, and knocking a car on a wall is fun on its own. Paradise is simply another taste of the Burnout formula, which I am glad it exists.

The perfect game to dip in and out of for some mindless fun. The soundtrack is so nostalgic to me now, I can't hear Paradise City without thinking about this game.

Tons of short tasks to do all over the map, constantly finding cars you need to takedown, jumps you need to go over, gates that need to be smashed or secret areas you need to explore. In terms of the proper activities, I usually gravitated towards the Road Rages, nothing more satisfying than just smashing into other cars. The Stunt Runs are pretty fun too, but I feel like they need a little more planning and thought to do well and I usually just wanted to switch my brain off, smash into things and go fast.

I'm not so sure that the Burnout formula works in an open world map. The biggest problem is that half of the time you're looking at the minimap instead the road so you can navigate correctly. The speed feeling is great, but in this case it's detrimental to the game since you will be crashing a lot due to looking at the minimap. The best strategy actually is to stay behind your rivals just so you can see where you're going and accelerate in the last miles.
Another problem is that basic stuff like changing your car is tiresome. You have to go to the junkyards (which are only a few) and even there waiting the game to load so you can see a pointless animation of said car dropping from the sky.
Just let me change cars on the go, it's an arcade racer who cares?
You also have specific car races but you need to go back to the junkyard to change car and drive back to where they are to enable them. Too much busywork.
Another major problem is that you can't deactivate the slo-mo crashes. They don't add anything, just more annoyance.
Last but not least the game is a perfect representation of its era... it's ugly. Everything looks grey and miserable. They should call it Burnout Siberia instead of Paradise.

Now having said all that it's time for the good stuff.
It controls great. Even at insane speeds you always feel that you control your car.
There are many secrets to discover and it's really fun to just drive around.

Burnout games are phenomenal, Legends for the PSP was way up there for me as a kid. Easily one of the best handheld games ever made. This on the other hand just doesn't work. I played Paradise when it first came out around 2008 and remember dropping it pretty early on. Revisiting it in 2023 I could barely play an hour. The driving is great, the soundtrack is solid (tho not as good as Legends), but the open world stuff is abysmal. Driving from race to race feels so much worse than selecting the next thing you want to do from a menu. The scale of the city makes the challenges annoying. I'm spending more time looking at the map to make sure I'm going the right way than I am looking at the road.

I'm reminded a lot of my disappointment playing Elden Ring earlier this year. I liked DS3 but the open world stuff in Elden Ring just ruined it. Instead of going through meticulously designed dungeons I was fighting the same copy pasted mini bosses over and over in between long walks across empty spaces with a few enemies scattered around. Burnout Paradise is like the racing game version of that experience. It stinks.